Submission #6145: EZGames69 & Memory's PCE Bonk's Revenge in 17:18.24

Bonk’s Revenge is the 2nd game in the Bonk series. Bonk was the Mario and Sonic to the TurboGrapx-16 (or PC Engine), with 3 different games released and one spin off. Bonk can spin in the air to hover and can damage enemies with his head, and can eat meat to become insane bonk.

Comparison:

EZGames69: After watching the published TAS a bunch, I noticed some very small mistakes here and there and thought that it could be improved. After working hard on this game, me and Memory managed to save a total of 4261 frames, about 1:11. Not sure how much that is when removing emulation differences though. This game involves preserving as much speed as possible from the meat powers, which increases bonk’s speed when eaten (even more if he is invincible).

Memory: I joined the project after EZGames69 finished his second iteration of the TAS. I had finished with PCE Bonk's Adventure at that point (waiting to get a response on something before I submit) and noticed some things that could be potentially improved and ended up TASing yet another Bonk game. That doesn't mean I'm going to get tricked into TASing anymore, I want a break from this series for now. (I'll do the rest of my comments later)

Normally your speed would have a value of 386, but if you have any meat upgrade it increases to 512, and if you’re invincible, it goes to 640. When you’re invincible, you can preserve that same speed after invincibility wears out by jumping in the air and continue to spin. However you also can let go of the directional pad which will allow you to preserve that speed without having to consistently spin. Meat power-ups eventually wear out, so after a few seconds you’ll drop a level. And for some reason when you drop down to normal bonk, there’s a few frames where his speed gets faster before going back to 386, when this happens, you can jump as soon as that speed is at the max and do the same thing when invincibility runs out.

First level involves having the shortest distance to climb up waterfalls. On the waterfalls on the left, you can walk up a bit before having to jump, this makes your climbing time much shorter. You then have to spin on red flowers to make them yellow, yellow flowers bounce you upwards.

Memory: Optimizing the waterfalls is fairly tricky, if you are too close to the edge, you will not be able to jump out of it.

The orange flowers provide meat for you. If you land on them with great downward speed, you receive a big meat which will make you instantly go to max meat power. If you don’t then you get a small meat, which just gives you one level of meat powerups. For the minibosses in some stages, I may look like I’m missing the trigger to the next stage, but you actually finish the stage when bonk touches the very edge of the screen, I can manipulate Bonk’s position to instantly hit the edge once the mini boss is defeated.

there’s a wall blocking our way, we can go through it by breaking the blocks, but it’s slower than just going to the higher level. We also skip a meat because it doesn’t really save time in the level.

we grab the other piece of meat because we can get some extra distance after the invincibility ends.

Memory: In hindsight, I think the first piece of meat would have been faster to grab due to the ability to maintain speed through bunnyhopping.

A glitch found by greatjhon where the boss can take damage when you hit your head on the ground. Taking damage when this happens will softlock the game.

Memory: It's important to be as close to the right edge of the screen as possible for most bosses so Bonk has less distance to travel when the boss is defeated.

Memory fell through a log

Memory: The water here can allow you to get up to a speed of 572 which is significantly faster than what is otherwise possible with the forms available. This is why we fall through the log, to get up to this 572 speed. Also climbing the wall is a pain to optimize.

This stage is the only one with poles you can swing on. There’s also a piece of meat we can get that will last long enough to use on the boss.

Memory: I think a shortcut might be possible here by bouncing off the first enemy on the blocks that split in half but I'm not sure.

This boss has 2 different places you can hit it, on the head and on the body, we do a hit on the head then immidiatly go for the body to do a quick kill.

Just a meat grab and a boss

We can walk on the ice to keep us going at max speed (640) and jump while letting go of the directional pad to carry it on past the pond.

Same thing here with the ice. The speed also doesn’t decrease when we go to regular bonk. At the end, we can manage to make it to the boss elevator by doing a bunnyhop. Basically to keep our speed, we land then immediately jump, but keeping our directional button down when were on the ground otherwise we lose speed immediately.

With meat powerup, we can kill the boss in 2 hits. We also want to take damage to not only manipulate her to move to the right on the next cycle, but also because of something that happens in the next stage.

So when you go to regular bonk while walking on the ground, your speed will increase for a few frames before going back to 384, we can jump right before this happens and let go of the directional pad to keep us at that faster speed, making this stage much faster.

A pretty big skip that allows us to skip half of the screen. We can take damage on a spike which will push us high enough to wall kick then continue on with the level.

Basically wall kick up the walls and stuff

grab the meat then get past the guards. Some swimming technique here is to jump and flip whenever possible, as it makes us go 512 speed, as soon as we go to normal bonk, just let go of the d-pad to keep speed.

This boss is rng for where it spawns, but for the 2nd phase it depends on if you’re on the left or right side of the screen, we want him on the right side as that’s where we exit. We can take damage to get on his head early.

First damage boost is just to avoid the other lava things. We want to grab the meat at the end so we can be moving 640 speed throughout the next screen

Flippity flip flip flip

Hardest stage for RTA runners. Most of the enemies like the fish spawn when you’re at a certain position, we can manipulate it so we trigger them to be as high as possible. The sword bat enemies also will move if you’re slightly above it in y position. Right at the end we can get two flies to jump off of and take damage to hit the end trigger faster

Not much to say about this screen, just grab meat then float to the end

We can bonk on some of the enemies to jump higher on platforms

EZGames69: Hardest stage to optimize in my opinion

We can bonk on an enemy to get up a block early, then bounce on a fly to wall kick up to another platform then manipulate a bat sword to give us some height to get up to the wall and bounce off it to jump on another platform until we reach the end.

A quick kill on this boss requires hitting him, then taking damage in the air, then repeatedly bounce on him until he’s dead.

The legs can squish us right and turn us into a crab (yes), the crab is slow and cant spin with it, so we can avoid it by jumping before that happens. The boss is basically the same as the one in round 2

A strat was found by Memory where you can repeatedly stack speed on the conveyor belts to go super fast.

Some pause buffering was done to get meat drops from some of the boxes

Boss is almost the same as in round 4, but we can kill it faster because we have meat and are invincible

Memory: Skipping the second crusher is very precise, but is important for building up speed. Each conveyor belt adds an additional 256 speed when you jump off of them. The highest speed reached in this room was 1664 but not for very long as I had to slow down to properly navigate the boxes at the end of the second section.

It’s pretty much required to be a crab here to go fast. The crab also pauses our meat counter from dropping, so we can conserve it all the way to the boss

Memory found that you can conserve speed with some specific inputs.

The boss we want to take damage on to make us go to normal bonk faster, so we can speed up in the next stage.

Memory: If you are at 320 speed in crab form and you jump, you can reach up to 572 speed. However, normally the game will push you down to 320 speed the frame after. There are two ways to maintain this speed however. If you let go of the horizontal direction on the dpad the frame you hit 572, you will instead drop down to 556 speed instead. Holding right again will allow you to go back to 572 and rinse and repeat. The other way involves abusing landing mechanics. When you land on the ground, your speed is temporarily frozen. Therefore I intentionally land on the ground right when my speed hits 572 to have it stay at that value for a few extra frames. I then swim up off the platform and then land back on it when it hits 572 again and rinse and repeat.

I discovered on the boss here that it is optimal to end these fights at a y-height of 99 because that will place Bonk at a height of 70 after his jump, which is as close to the top of the screen as you can get. Unfortunately, I discovered this after the previous bosses were already completed so this was not taken advantage of there.

Basically bouncing and bunny hopping to the end Boss is also the same here, but since we don’t have meat we cant hit the ground and kill him

Same as with the round 6 boss.

As for king drool, we want him to shoot ice attacks first as that’s the shortest first attack he can do. Once he moves to us, we can repeatedly bonk on his head until he’s dead.

We’d like to thank a few people

LattMackey – he ran this game at SGDQ 2018 and made me (EZGames69) interested in this game and most Turbo Grapx games.

EvanGrill – who provided couch commentary for that GDQ run.

FuzZard – The author of the previous TAS who provided some good explanation in his submission that helped when understanding how to preserve speed.

And last, but not at all least:

MemoryTAS – Who decided to help shave off even more time on this run, she also provided some useful Memory Addresses (that pun wasn’t intentional but I’m going to make it intentional).

Memory: I would like to personally thank my girlfriend Hiyori who was consistently encouraging and not only listened to me ramble about this game, but also outright asked questions and genuinely showed interest in what I was doing. She helped keep me sane during all this.

We hope you enjoyed!

ThunderAxe31: Judging.

ThunderAxe31: Nicely done with the new strats! Accepting as improvement over the current publication.

feos: Pub.