Haunted Castle is a Castlevania game released on Arcade. The hero Simon Belmont embarks on a journey to save his wife Selena from clutches of Dracula.
This game has multiple versions, with the main version being M and 2 clones being K and E, and there are also 2 Japanese versions. In version M, the hero gets too much damage from enemy, which was not conducive to taking damage to save time, so I chosed version K.
If you insert more coins in the game, your HP will also increase. My goal is to complete the game with 1 coin.
I found a trick that If you continue to input attack in every 2 frames after an attack, the hero's attack animation will be shorter. If you do the same input with jump, the hero jumps lower. This make hero more flexible.
Comment by stage:
Stage 1: Not too much to say, beat boss by bomb. After passing a stage, the heart will be used to restore HP, so it is necessary to got a certain heart in order to have enough HP.
Stage 2: I got iron whip in the beginning and stopwatch later which will be very useful in the next stages. There are some stupid force screen-rolling in the game, so sometime I had to wait.
Stage 3: I used stopwatch to avoid birdman fight in a special space, got sword in the last which is the most powerful weapon.
Stage 4: For boss in the stage, there is a possibility of throwing mud before it appears, and you have a small chance of attacking the mud. With stopwatch you can kill the boss before it appears.
Stage 5: I took damage to save time in some places, and kept stopwatch to next stage.
Stage 6: I used stopwatch at a certain frame during the death of Dracula first form to avoid his second form trans animation.
Darkman425: Claiming for judging.
Darkman425: Input file replaced with a 116 frame improvement by the author.
Darkman425: So there's a second version of Haunted Castle known as version M. It's considered the harder version of the game due to the fact that everything does much more damage and item drop rates are much worse. However, the stopwatch still cheeses the game in that version as well so the only real difference between versions is simply the amount of damage boosting and heart management done. That's not really enough of a concern to warrant playing on the harder version so that's not a concern.
The heart and health management in this is super great. The only other TAS I could find is actually slower than the RTA record of version M simply by not implementing the harpy portrait skip in stage 3, the quick golem fight at the end of stage 4, and minor movement optimizations that save small amounts of time. This submission implements both of those skips and also includes a Dracula phase 2 skip that I didn't even know about until watching this. Of course there's also the more comparable RTA record on version K. This submission beats all those records regardless of version differences with tighter optimizations throughout.
Accepting to Standard.
fsvgm777: Processing.
Darkman425: Input file replaced with another 261 frame improvement by the author.