Game Objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.4.0
- Aims: Fastest possible completion
Brief Description:
Pink Panther - Pinkadelic Pursuit for the Game Boy Advance is a 2D Platformer.
At the beginning of the game you escape from various locations such as the moon or the bottom of a sea. After that you are in a medieval world in which you witness the abduction of a princess and have to rescue her.
Despite having the same name like the PS1 and PC Version this is an entirely different game.
This run uses the easiest difficulty, the differences to the highest difficulty are:
- Less aggressive enemies: Enemies take more time to attack when you are near them
- Enemies have less health: Every enemy except for bosses can be killed with one hit
- Under Water Boss has less health: Needs to be hit 6 times (14 times in highest difficulty)
- Slower jousting enemy: The enemy horse runs slower towards you
- Slower speed in flying level: The higher the difficulty the faster you fly
Fastest movement methods (Descending):
Normal:
- Sidewards jumping
- Running
Under Water:
- Swimming sidewards (going upwards is a lot slower though)
- Running
Further movement notes:
The transition between running and jumping is very slow.
Other notes:
Most levels contain collectible weapons or suits.
Weapons that you don't collect will be added to your inventory in the next level.
You can use L and R to select a weapon or suit but if one is selected the game will lag a bit (which costs frames).
Stage by stage comments:
Note: These are not the official level names, I just made them up.
Level 1: Moon
Using the gravity mechanism to pull you is a lot faster than running and jumping. So I get just close enough to trigger the gravity but try to stay in air as long as possible.
Level 2: Alien Base
When the firefighter is killed the fire extinguisher "jumps" out of him and lands on the ground. With the right distance to the platform on the right you can make it land in the platform which saves a little bit of time.
After picking up the fire extinguisher the selected item is instantly switched to "empty" to avoid lag.
Some time after that you will see Pink Panther falling between two platforms. It looks easy in this TAS but is pretty precise and hard to do in a speedrun.
Level 3: Under Water
Nothing to say about this level.
Level 4: Under Water Temple
There is a skip in this level that I somehow did in VisualBoyAdvance while testing some routes, but that I could never redo since.
At around 09:01 you can jump from the platform on the top right to the platform above (that you will see at 09:30).
I tried a lot of theories to figure that trick out, for example:
- Landing on fishes and jumping from them = No difference
- Trying to find the highest Y-Position to land on the lower platform = 217056
- Using a lua script to jump from every X-Position from the highest Y-Position = Didn't work
- Swimming to the left/right when touching the upper platform = No effect
The lowest height on the upper platform that I could stand on was 188228 (note that height is the distance to the top of the level), each jump has a maximum height of 28462.
So 366 height is missing to make the jump, my guess is that you can stand on the upper platform on a lower height under specific circumstances.
Using that skip in the TAS could save around 15 to 20 seconds.
I uploaded a few WIPs for this skip:
- Upper platform minimum height: userfiles/info/64938965908550975
- Lower platform maximum height: userfiles/info/64939107536255664
- Standing very low on a different platform: userfiles/info/64939292423904523
The following screenshot shows the result of the "standing very low on a different platform" WIP:
Level 5: Under Water Boss
Thanks to the difficulty setting this fight is 2174 frames (about 36 seconds) faster than with the highest difficulty.
However there is a WIP where the fight is done 24 frames faster.
Level 6: On Water
In my first WIP with the highest difficulty this level could be finished in a very clean way without ever waiting for any of the ducks. But due to the time save in the levels before the duck cycles are now different and force me to wait a lot for ducks to come back.
Losing 646 frames (about 10 seconds) to the old WIP.
The duck cycles may or may not be fixed by finding the skip in Level 4.
Level 7: Garden Maze
The first of two maze stages.
These mazes can not be solved by logic, you have to think of the paths that you can use as "portals" that can teleport you to any other path.
For example in the second maze stage there is one bottom path that teleports you to one of the top paths in the same "room".
I made complete maps of these mazes to find the quickest way.
At the end of the level you would have to hit the door 4 times, but you can skip a punch twice by pressing B again at the right moment before Pink Panther is ready to punch again.
Level 8: Castle
In this level you need to collect 100 coins to buy the armor that is required to finish the level.
There are more coins than needed scattered around the level.
At the end of the level there is a blue guy that you have to talk to while wearing the armor. He creates some messages with floating letters that make the game lag, so after talking to him I go to the right to avoid some lag.
Level 9: Jousting
You have to press B repeatedly to speed up and aim in the middle with the crosshair to win each round.
The enemy runs a little bit slower due to the easy difficulty, but overall only 116 frames (about 2 seconds) are lost because of this.
Level 10: Forest Maze
This maze is much easier than the first maze. There are only 9 rooms instead of 13 and you can reach the end of the level very quick when you know where to go.
Level 11: Giant
There is a cool skip in this level.
Normally you are supposed to climb the tree, push down a chest and collect a lock that you can then use to lock in a hedgehog and steal its fur/spikes.
Then you can safely run towards the giant which would squash you with its foot if you came close to him without the protection.
However there is only a limited range where he squashes you, and although there is an invisible barrier in the air above you can jump over the instant death zone by jumping really late when you are already in air but still in the "walking" state.
Level 12: Flying
This is an autoscroller, you fly the same speed all the time once you press A. Moving to the left is possible too.
You will die if you hit the clouds (lightning will struck you) or when you hit the ground.
At the end of the level you have to die in order to proceed, you do not have to reach the wall on the right side though.
Losing a lot of time compared to the highest difficulty because the flying speed is much slower.
1422 frames are lost here (about 23 seconds).
Level 13: Final Boss
I manipulate the locations in which the boss appears by the position of the catapult and the timing of the paint bucket shots.
Other comments
Special thanks to "redbaron1007" for their Let's Play of this game which helped me to understand what to do in the jousting level.
slamo: There were some questions about the optimization. For one, some posters were asking about how enemies were handled. I did some testing and it looks like jumping over enemies takes too much time, and weapons are also too cumbersome to use in most cases, so the way it's handled in the movie is fine. Another point of contention is the difficulty. There are some sections that are slower on Easy and faster on Hard, and it's not obvious how much time is traded off. The whole run would have to be redone to know for sure, so because of the uncertainty, Easy is acceptable here. Also, in the submission notes there were some other possible improvements mentioned. It's very likely that more time can be saved on this movie, but there is nothing obviously sloppy about it, so overall, the optimization is passable.
It should be noted that this game is completely different from the PSX game with the same name.
The feedback was not great, so I'm accepting to Vault.
Zinfidel Processing.