Submission #8507: EZGames69's DS Spider-Man 2 in 13:25.60

Spider-Man 2 on the DS was a launch title for the Nintendo DS in North America. Developed by Vicarious Visions and published by Activision, this 2.5D side scroller loosely follows the plot points from the Sam Raimi films, as it sometimes deviates from the movie plot to fill in missions with other spider man villains such as Mysterio and Vulture.

This is roughly a 3973 frame improvement over the current published run: https://tasvideos.org/1638M . It is the only speedrun for this game I could find as there is no RTA runs from what I could find anywhere on the internet. But luckily this run was enough to base my efforts on this TAS here. The previous TAS's author, adelikat, provided many useful tips and addresses in his submission, which if the judge needs to use for this run, they can be found in the first link at the top of the submission: https://tasvideos.org/2832S . Just make sure the domain you use for these addresses are the ARM9 System Bus.

Also on the note of memory addresses, this game uses pointers for things like speed, meaning the addresses for speed will change in each room/level, so I asked RetroEdit to help make a lua script that could always display these values regardless of where the pointer points to, which was a huge help and I highly appreciate it. Here's the link to that: https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/638272722548828309

Anyways, back to the run. This run improves on not only movement speed, but also in the combat. I slowly figured out that this game has an ISG type glitch (ISG is for "Infinite Sword Glitch" from Ocarina of Time, but here it's the Infinite Spider Glitch). If spiderman shoots a web-line (either direction) then does a web swing, he will be in a state where touching an enemy will do damage on every frame. This ends when Spiderman touches the ground, and can't be performed in areas where you can't shoot a web-line.

Basically the tutorial area of the game, Spiderman has to save some people from a burning building while on a pizza drive.

1.1

Doing forward swings provides a value of 500 for speed, and you loose a bit of that when performing another swing, so it's best to limit the amount of swings as possible, usually I try to swing as close to the ground as possible, also holding the up button while swinging makes spiderman gain a bit extra height.

The web-line can actually make spiderman move at 512 speed, but it has a shorter acceleration. These can be faster in areas where I can web-line for a long period of time, usually in rooms with a high ceiling or something, it would only safe a couple frames at a time. Also if you web-line at the edge of a ceiling, sometimes spiderman will just go flying and not stick to the ceiling, which can be good for some areas, but can be tricky to perform.

First screen saves 3 frames from published run.

1.2

Lots of movement here. Web-lines allow you to go through fire. There's also a weird issue with the web-line in levels like this where doing a diagonal one will cause the camera to pan up rapidly, only to correct itself later. I tried what I could to prevent this from happening throughout the run but some areas like here are just unavoidable.

saved 35 frames here.

1.3

not much to say about this room, 3 frames saved

This is where the run starts to really get ahead of the published TAS.

I take the right side first as it's faster to deal with the enemy on the left later. You'll see me utilize an early version of the ISG before I started to understand it a bit better. But the main benifit to it is that I can start my swings away from the enemies early while killing them in the process. Also worth mentioning is kicking the enemies can deal different values of damage depending on the timing. It seems that kicking them on the first possible frame doesn't deal as much damage as kicking them a few frames later.

Also when climbing up some walls, I may do a short web swing at the top just so I can get spiderman to land on the ground quicker, this isn't done all the time but usually when I can't get high enough jump height to immediately start swinging.

Saved 429 frames

Here we also have to kill enemies and save the hostages, just like the last level I do a combination of kicks and the ISG, although the enemies in this level have more health, so not every one is a quick kill.

I also saved a bit extra time in the final area of this stage by making sure the message that I defeated all enemies and saved all people shows up before I approach the stage exit, since the exit won't activate unless that message appears.

Saved 406 frames

This is the first of 3 stages with touch-screen minigames, which honestly I kinda struggled with even with the better tools at my disposal. It seems the knob doesn't have a consistent speed when dragged on the screen, and can have some delayed reaction from the touch inputs. I wouldn't be surprised if some frames could be shaved off from these sections, but I did what I feel is my best efforts here.

Saved 53 frames in this stage.

Now we are in a history museum where Mysterio has taken hostages. I can't swing normally in the vents so I have to do a bunch of web-lines through them.

saved 114 frames here.

Mysterio has a pretty long invincibility timer. I discoverd that doing the split kick instead of normal kicks is faster overall as it does 50 damage instead of 45, which adds up and can reduce the number of hits I need to do by 2.

Also worth mentioning is each boss has a touch screen minigame attack, the one for Mysterio is unavoidable, but once it's over, I can immidiately do an attack and that causes Mysterio to not spawn, but his hitbox is still active, so we can whale on him for the rest of the fight.

I was also able to squeeze in an extra hit (compared to the previous TAS) before the touchscreen minigame started, which saved some time.

overall saved 319 frames

ground robots have more health than the enemies in stage 3, but we actually utilize ISG way more in this stage. There are some flying enemies that can be instantly destroyed if ISG is active, and sometimes I try to just kick the enemies off buildings if ISG is unavailable.

542 frames saved here

First Doc Ock fight. Since he doesn't have any invincibility frames, doing normal kicks is faster than the split kick since you can do more in a short time. I have to get behind him to avoid taking damage and try to do 3 kicks per jump I make.

32 frames saved

The next touchscreen level thingy. Not much to say about this level.

saved 328 frames here

This is the Vulture fight, I do as many split kicks as I can to reduce the total amount of hits I need to perform, although since it's a special move that uses the blue meter, I have to resort to normal kicks after awhile, although at that point it probably wouldn't make a whole lot of a difference.

I want to avoid the tornados that Vulture sends out as it puts me into a touchscreen minigame, which doesn't serve a benefit to the fight. I was able to avoid it going in the left direction, which I guess the game does not expect you to be able to do, as by continuing to hit Vulture will lock him in place, which is great because this boss would be really frustrating to figure out due to how often he goes back and forth.

saved 607 frames here

The ISG is really overpowered in this stage, as you only have to touch them once to instantly kill them, so long as I don't touch the ground while in the ISG state, I will occasionally go backwards or do a web-line just to activate ISG, sometimes I have to do it anyways just to get enough height just to touch the floating robots.

saved 597 frames

2nd Doc Ock fight, nothing that different about this one compared to the last fight.

Saved 7 frames.

By far the longest stage in the game, mostly consists of better movement optimization.

saved 412 frames

Once again we got the same Doc Ock fight. This one however he actually turns around at the end, I can still get in 3 more hits before I have to swing away from him to avoid triggering a touchscreen minigame, by swinging away I can get him to start moving again.

Saved 86 frames

Would like to thank a couple of people:

RetroEdit for helping make a lua script for speed values, after I gave them some speed values to determine where the pointers were. That made doing this game very less tedious

Adelikat, for the previous TAS of this game, and for providing all the memory addresses I needed for some of the stages. His TAS was a very good effort for the time, and it helped me to know where I needed to go in some stages.

arandomgameTASer and Natetheman223 for being consistent Spider-Man game TASers.

And that's about it, Pizza Time.

Darkman425: Judging senses tingling.

Darkman425: More split kicks than the average Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, I gotta say. Also nice improvements with new optimizations and new combat strategies compared to the old publication.

Accepting to Standard as an improvement to [1638] DS Spider-Man 2 by adelikat in 14:20.21.

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