Submission #9261: alexheights1's GG Surf Ninjas in 07:57.48

GG Surf Ninjas beat 'em up.

I wanted to do another beat 'em up like Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, because the game was fun. Surf Ninjas looked similar in essence, and it is, so here we go.

Attack damage:
punch 3
kick 7
crouch kick 7
dagger/shuriken/sai 7
throw 12
jump punch 12
jump kick 12
fire 15 -- Best to save these for the bosses.
Zatch 42 -- This is a special move that can be activated from the inventory, but it wastes a lot of time, so it is only usable as the final hit on the final boss, but even then it is unlikely to save time. (Spoiler alert: It does.)

If you can manipulate enemies so that they shoot fire at you just when you are near a ledge, then a nice speed boost can happen because the character does not stop knockback until he hits the ground, but there was no opportunity to use this trick in the TAS, because there was never a good level layout or enemy position for it.

You can use the frame counts for comparison if you try to beat the run.

Only 1 enemy can be on screen at once. We need to add some delay to the movement so that the green ninja stays on screen. This makes the next enemy disappear. Then we make the green ninja disappear so that the boss can appear. We have 15 fire spells in the beginning. We get 5 fire in the first level. Boss has 60 HP. We use 4 fire. We have 16 fire left.

The player can change direction in the air which makes for a nice U-turn jump. We get 2 x 5 fire, so we now have 26 fire. It is impossible to predict how much fire we need since in addition to bosses some normal enemies may be killed by fire to save time, or not. Since this is the first version I play it safe and take all fire spells that are directly on the route on account of it taking only 2 in-game frames to pick them up.

Got 5 fire, so we now have 31 fire. Lots of enemies get on the way, so we need to try different moves to pass them quickly. We make a long floating jump over the large pit. Boss has 90 HP, so we use 6 fire. We now have 25 fire left.

There is a lock screen that changes the way the screen can move. Some waiting is needed to make it unfreeze. In the climbing section there is a shorter route, but the lock screen will not allow it. This time the variable entrance code for the secret tomb is: kick, crouch kick.

We get 5 fire, we now have 30 fire. Boss has 100 HP, we use 5 fire + 2 kicks + 1 punch, because his pattern retaliated so we could not use all fire, but it does not matter since we are traveling to the right anyway. We now have 25 fire. The 4 somersaults under the dragon statue are a scripted cutscene. We get KWANTZU which is a special sword that is needed for the final boss.

The changing screen lock prevents big jumps on some parts of the level. It is the arrow in the upper left corner which says the direction we should be going. The game is quirky! We need to wait for the black ninja to follow us so that two other ninjas do not appear in the narrow wood corridor. We get 5 fire, so now we have 30 fire. Before the boss we throw a ninja away to make another ninja disappear and to make the boss appear faster. The boss has 90 HP, so we use 6 fire. We now have 24 fire.

Before the final boss there are two tiger ninjas, or tigers that turn into ninjas. If they are not on screen when they transform, then they reset to full health, so some delay is needed to not kill them too fast outside the screen. The tiger form has 30 HP and ninja form has 50 HP. That means a total of 160 HP, so we need to use 12 fire. After the fight we have 12 fire left.

The boss is invulnerable unless we use KWANTZU to deflect the bullets. It is a cutscene with no input allowed. I redid the final boss fight three times. The boss has 120 HP, so we use 8 fire. We are left with 4 useless fire spells, but on account of the fire pickups always giving 5 units this means we actually never stopped to pick up any useless fire. Actually, no, we can use Zatch to end input early by 6 frames. Thanks, game! Zatch does 42 damage, so now we need to use only 6 fire. So now we have 6 useless fire in the end, and now we actually DID waste about 2 in-game frames somewhere while picking up fire that was never needed. LOL. I would like to redo it to save a few frames, but the game is just too quirky for me, so no thanks, never again...

RAM:
035A Player HP
0380 Enemy HP

CoolHandMike: Claiming for judging.

CoolHandMike: The only issue I see here is that in the beginning you could start the game faster by holding start on that "Surf Ninjas Tm" logo to make it finish earlier that allows an earlier "start" to bypass it. The tas optimization looks good for this very finicky game that has enemy randomness and a lot of lag. Liked the trick with the long jumping by using Left to kind of interrupt the fall in order to kind of hover.

Accepting to Standard.

Congrats!

despoa: Processing...