This beats the published run by 2959 frames (49 seconds).
The improvement comes largely from movement optimization, which is important, as the llama moves like he's constantly on iceskates while dashing. In addition, a small amount of levels have new routes and the boss was shortened by using 2 rocks instead of 3. I don't think I have anything else to add, so, hope you enjoy this lousy game being 50 seconds shorter.
Wew, it's almost been 5 years since I posted about this game for the first time. Always nice to knock out a long overdue improvement even if the game is typical vault crap :p
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.4.2
- Takes damage to save time
- Aims for fastest possible time
Thanks
RachelB for the published movie, Spikestuff for his old run & improvement wip, Arc for catching some optimizations, and the realtime speedrunner Rayquaza911 for the improved strategy against the boss.
Samsara: Oh jeez, uh, pretend I said some fun movie quote that incorporates the word "judging" in it.
Samsara: File replaced with a 149 frame improvement that I definitely should have replaced earlier!
Samsara: Optimization looks good. I played around with the game a bit and found that it's surprisingly technical for a GBC game, lots of quirks with the controls and physics that make the game harder to optimize than it looks, so great job pushing it to its limit with this run!
The level of control also makes for a more entertaining watch, and the thread seems to agree with that, with only a small handful of Meh votes and quite a lot of Yes's backed up by posted explanations. Full disclosure: One of those Meh votes is in fact mine, but I'm discounting it since I feel the Judge's opinion of a game shouldn't affect its tier placement. Also, I'm an idiot, and my biggest reason for voting Meh was entirely avoidable and my fault: All my viewings of this run were done in BizHawk without Audio Throttle enabled, meaning there was some serious pitch bending all throughout the run. This pitch bending isn't present in the game, isn't present in the encode, and won't be present in the publication, so it shouldn't have impacted my opinion in the first place.
It was brought up in the thread that the published run may have been treated too harshly. It had a mostly positive response (19 Yes, 2 Meh, 4 No, lots of backed up Yes votes in the thread) but ended up being rejected for game choice, and later placed into Vault once it was established. While I don't have a strong opinion on the game even after knowing that the pitch bending I experienced wasn't the game's fault, I can definitely see the merits of it and why people are enjoying it... Also, that first song kinda slaps. The voting on the published run is, admittedly, not great, though in my experience that's pretty standard for Vault unrejections and shouldn't have too much of an impact on a tiering decision for a heavily improved run 8 years down the road.
The overall feedback across both this run and the published run is a lot more positive than negative, and the level of optimization is definitely on-point, so I'm accepting this run to Moons as an improvement to the published run. Excellent work!
Spikestuff, the OG of TASing this game, has claimed this for publication. Since the game has credits that need to be manually advanced through, I have provided an alternate input file that advances through them.
Spikestuff: Why do I have to be reminded of my past failures Samsara? :V