- Aims for Fastest Completion
- Plays on Hardest Difficulty
Spider-Man 3 is loosely based off of the 2007 movie with the same name, featuring Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker, James Franco as Harry Osborn, Topher Grace as Eddie Brock, and Thomas Haden Church as Flint Marko.
Is this the best Spider-Man game? No. Is this the most optimized TAS? Also no, but since it's the only TAS of this game, it is the most optimized by default. I would probably rate the optimization of this TAS as an 7.5/10 or so - it's fast; it beats the record by about 18 minutes, but there are some decently obvious mistakes.
I mainly made this TAS because it's one of my favorite games of all time, despite its problems. Anyway, time for the analysis. We'll start with the technical stuff and why this was difficult to make, then a more mechanical analysis.
First off, Dolphin doesn't record motion inputs very well when combined with slow-mo. What I'm trying to say is that the TAS will desync if you use slow-mo, so I had to rapid fire frame advance for the entirety of the TAS since it records it just fine that way.
Secondly, this game has a memory leak. I don't know why or what causes it, but I do know it exists. If you play this game for more than an hour, the framerate will fall and dolphin will start throwing errors left and right before ultimately crashing entirely.
And lastly, assigning motion inputs to buttons is dumb, but it was my only option.
The Game Itself
In the movie, Spider-Man is temporarily infected with a symbiote. He is given the option to use its power, and he chooses not to when Doctor Connors analyzes it and explains the possible consequences... that is, until some things happen which cause him to put on the symbiote suit in a fit of rage. The game handles this a little differently...
The player is able to switch between the red suit and black suit. However, it's not like Web of Shadows where you can swap suits willy nilly, no - you wear the red suit by default and are expected to wear the black suit only when you need it, since wearing it for too long can cause you to game over... but man, it is so ridiculously powerful that it may just be worth it. Taking the black suit off requires the player to do a short quick time event to fight their way free, and the length of the quick time event gets longer as the game goes on. There is a 45 second cooldown after taking the black suit off before you can equip it again.
The black suit has a predetermined set of upgrades which, for the most part, can't be changed - not that it matters, it is absurdly strong and is likely even stronger than a fully upgraded red suit (the game actually knocks you if you try to access the upgrades while in the black suit: "Hero Upgrades are not available while in the black suit. What, is the black suit not good enough for you?").
Under your health bar is an adrenaline meter. As you fight, it fills up. When it is full and you are wearing the red suit, you will be able to perform a very strong adrenaline attack. When the adrenaline bar is full and you are in the black suit, you enter rage mode. In rage mode, you are basically unstoppable - you hit extremely hard, chunking down even bosses with ease, and can chain attacks infinitely. If you go for too long in rage mode without switching back to the red suit, you will pass out and game over ("Mission Failed"). I will be abusing rage mode to its full extent throughout the TAS, literally skipping full cycles with bosses simply because I can keep hitting them.
There is a small exploit that I like to call "adrenaline storage". Some missions will switch you back into the red suit when completed. This will sometimes store your black suit adrenaline and allow you to instantly be in rage mode when switching back to the black suit. So if you see my adrenaline bar fill up instantly after switching to the black suit, this is the case (except for the Sandman fight - you instantly start will full adrenaline no matter what).
I don't intend to make a full list of what I do in every mission because that would be boring, and since a lot of missions speak for themselves. However, there is one thing I should really mention since it was annoying when I was actually speedrunning this game: at 40:12 and 1:06:55 in the encode, I am required to go through Dragon Tail and Waste Tribe searches respectively. Normally the objective after them doesn't appear immediately; you would go through a number of them, taking 15+ minutes to complete them before eventually finding the right one. Obviously the TAS knows the correct one right off the bat and doesn't waste time.
Notes:
- During the swinging tutorial after the intro, there is a really badly scuffed webswing. This is intentional because hitting the marker too soon won't trigger it properly.
- A lot of glitches in this game also apply on real hardware, like black suit spidey's eyes not having any metallic glow and just being purely black.
- There are two types of pre-rendered cutscenes: those that are specifically for this version of the game, and some taken from the PC/PS3/X360 version of the game. You can see this at the very end of the game, with how the venom defeat cutscene is very... y'know, followed immediately by "Mission Complete" and then a cutscene that looks a lot better - it was taken directly from the other version.
- Spider-Man's quips are different based on which suit you are wearing.
- The longer you wear the black suit, the more desolate the city looks. The longer you wear the red suit, the more alive the city looks.
- Right when the game starts, I pause and switch to "Super Hero" (Hard) difficulty and start a new game. This is because the run is extremely boring to watch on Sidekick (Easy) and Hero (Normal) since the black suit pretty much kills everything in 1 hit. Hard difficulty was definitely the "Intended Experience".
EDIT: This can be improved by a decent bit. I am cancelling this so I can come back in an indefinite amount of time with a much better TAS and a much better description.