Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.8
- Aims for fastest completion
- Takes damage to save time
Comments
First a little bit about the game before I can completely rant about how awful it is.
Batman has the ability to jump and punch. Great moveset. He moves at a constant speed both horizontally and vertically, no acceleration whatsoever, which doesn't make movement quite as interesting as it could be but it does make the game as a whole seem so much worse and I'm all up for that. When it comes to making it past enemies, the fastest thing to do is jump over them. However, they are capable of punching/kicking you if you happen to be in a certain radius so in order to successfully jump over them, we need to have at least some headroom to not be stunned. There thankfully is enough room in most cases but not everywhere and, especially in later stages, we get so close to enemies it's just not possible to simply jump over them. This is when we are forced to punch which ends up stopping Batman for a few frames before he can continue. This is annoying and all but it's still faster than taking damage. One thing I did notice that's certainly made worse if playing rta is that there seems to be a ~1-2 frame window where you can punch an enemy without taking damage yourself.
The first section of the game is set in Gotham City where Batman must platform through some very basic levels to end by collecting a gear. The latter half is spent in Christmas Land (that's what I'll call it from now on and you have no idea how many times I've kept spelling it 'christams') where he must first collect a key then go find a present or Santa in the last level which is initially locked behind bars.
Lag
Lag is especially prevalent in CL to the point where I wanted to cry every time I booted the game. The minority of the time, lag appears in TAStudio as red frames which is great, very helpful. But the majority of present lag is invisible so Batman can be floating downwards at the slowest of speeds and the only way I know this is lag is because I can see the game is running at 60fps. This hidden lag is something I've tried my best to reduce but it appears in almost every level, unfortunately. The large amount of studs on screen and just the levels themselves seem to produce almost all of it while time and certain inputs can generate visible lag.
Hidden lag tends to greatly slow down Batman's speed when he jumps so jumping is kept to a minimum for the entire movie which is also a problem because it means it's difficult to collect as many studs as possible to reduce lag to ultimately lose time. For every level, I had to test which studs could be collected to save time while also making sure I wasn't losing any time.
It is also possible to remove or add visible lag frames by holding a direction before the level loads in. This is used everywhere to eliminate almost all visible lag frames, at least at the start of each level. They tend to return in great numbers if the level drags on for long enough.
Potential Improvements
There is no doubt this can be improved perhaps through better platforming but mainly through lag reduction as you might expect. After making my first draft which only optimised movement, I went back to the very start and made sure to stay on every level for as long as I possibly could to optimise it as best I could. This was so that I could be somewhat confident I didn't need to go back and redo a level which would end up desyncing the entire rest of the movie. I remember there was one level that was really badly hit by improvements in earlier stages, so much I ended up losing about 50 frames to lag I just couldn't remove. There weren't many cases where I lost time to lag and only one I tied, I improved most levels in the end.
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Looks good to me, accepting.
despoa: Processing...