Submission #9640: scrimpeh's MSX Mon Mon Monster in 07:33.77

The Mon Mon Monster is a short and obscure platformer for the MSX2 released by HOT·B in 1989 in Japan and South Korea. You must defeat four increasingly maze-like stages to find the exit and gain your freedom. This TAS aims to beat the game as fast as possible.

That's right, scrimbly's back to TASing obscure rando MSX games that you haven't heard of before. Truly nature is healing. The Mon Mon Monster is a fairly typical screen-by-screen MSX maze game where you take control of a monster-like creature that you haven't seen before to fight your way to freedom. This game was originally suggested to me by Quibus at some point, and it seems promising at first: it runs at a (quite stable) 60 fps and you have free jumping control, which immediately puts it above many other MSX games in that regard. Unfortunately, the rest of the gameplay is so clunky that it's almost not worth bothering. Because of this, I initially wrote the game off. After finishing the most recent Vampire Killer TAS however, I decided to take a look at a couple more MSX games since I was already warmed up with openMSX again. After some searching, I settled on finally TASing this game after all, finishing it in 7 minutes and 33 seconds and punching everything in my way into oblivion.

The game has two major problems when it comes to gameplay. The first are ceilings, which are your worst enemy in this game. Whenever you jump, after you hit the apex of your jump, your character stretches out his head, which causes your hitbox to enlarge, which in turn makes you get stuck in the ceiling. There is often no way to avoid this, due to the monster's large hitbox and the often cramped level design. This also means that you can jump through gaps that are normally too narrow to walk through, which is sometimes necessary to do in the regular level design.

The other problem for TASing is your attack. You have a regular punch, which also fires a projectile when you use it. Your punch can break blocks, while the projectile doesn't. Your attack can be upgraded. When upgraded, both your fist and the projectile will one-shot any regular enemy. However, when you punch, you get stuck in place, even when in mid-air, which causes you to always lose 20 frames with every punch. Minimizing your attacks is therefore crucial to optimizing this run. Most enemies have several patterns when they come on screen, which is influenced by RNG. The TASing process for most of the game therefore becomes a question of finding some enemy pattern for a room that you can get by without having to attack. Sometimes, killing enemies is simply unavoidable.

There is also damage boosting in this game, which boosts you both horizontally and vertically away from the enemy that you took damage from. On flat ground, this saves around 14 frames each time. You can sometimes use a damage boost in order to avoid having to attack, which combines their respective savings. When taking damage, the attack animation finishes much more quickly, which can also come in handy sometimes. Finally, when you are forced to jump into a ceiling, you may want to use your attack at that particular time, since then the timeloss from the ceiling is absorbed by the punching animation.

Both of these factors combine to make TASing the game very asinine. If it looks like I am being sloppy in my movement, I assure you that I did my best to mitigate the worst of it. Your objective in every level is simply to reach the end and defeat a boss to move on to the next stage. As you progress, the levels increasingly become mazes though, which makes having a map very helpful for routing. Despite all of these issues, I think the game has some charm.

If your MSX machine supports it, this game supports FM audio, which is a neat feature. However, this is actually worse for the TAS for two reasons:

Both of these factors would actually make it faster to play on PSG audio by an estimated 5 - 10 seconds. I also actually prefer some of the PSG renditions of the tracks, which would make PSG audio seem like the obvious choice. However, despite this, I still opted for using FM audio for the following reasons:

So yeah, I sacrificed multiple seconds in this TAS purely for my own preference. The fact that item pickups are shorter on PSG is also potentially significant for routing, since the time penalty for grabbing some powerups would be reduced. If anyone wants to improve this run, this should be taken into consideration.

Ordinarily, your upgraded attack does 2 damage against bosses. However, when the boss moves into your fist's hitbox, they will take one additional damage for 3 total.

This trick is not always feasible because bosses won't always move as you need them to. However, it does come in handy sometimes for doing extra damage. In particular, when you approach a boss, you are essentially given one double hit for free, simply by attacking on the first frame possible.

Another trick to do more damage against bosses. If you attack, take damage from the boss, and attack immediately afterwards, every subsequent attack from this point will do one extra damage. I am not sure why exactly this happens. My best guess is that it happens when you are fast enough to hit the boss with your second attack before the projectile of the first attack hits. This is massively beneficial, as it allows doing much more damage to bosses, which drastically cuts down on the time spent killing them.

Hyper mode can also be combined with the double hit mentioned above to do 4 damage with one hit.

There's other tricks that are outlined in the stage-by-stage comments below.

Immediately at the start, we are subjected to the worst area in the game. At the start, I do not have any of the upgrades that would allow me to easily get past the enemies here, which forces me to take damage in a strategic location. The breaking blocks room immediately afterwards isn't much better, but I grab the attack upgrade that lets me one-shot enemies here at least.

The water pillars afterwards are very bothersome. While they are raised, they block your movement. They always rise up when entering the screen, after which they will oscillate between raising and lowering. The amount of time that they spend in each state is affected by RNG, which I manipulate to be as favorable as possible. I'm actually skipping a necessary item here. You're not ordinarily meant to walk on the water: when you stand on a pillar as it raises, you simply fall through. You're normally supposed to grab some boots that let you walk on the pillars, which I skip. Instead, by simply jumping on them with the right timing, you can jump off of them before they raise. The final water pillar doesn't rise as high as the others, which means you can jump onto it, but the vertical positioning to fit is incredibly precise.

In the following rooms, I grab a hidden health recharge and my second attack upgrade. This doesn't technically increase my damage, but it extends the vertical range that your attack spans, so I grabbed it to be safe. After this, there is a section where parts of the ceiling lower. Unlike how it may seem, the pillars do not crush you. If you get stuck inside them, you are simply unable to move until they raise again. The timing for the pillars is again manipulated so that they do not block me. In the final two rooms, I must take damage in order to fit through the closing pillars in time, which necessitated grabbing the health earlier in the level.

The boss has 16 HP. I deal with him using two double hits (one at the start and and one at the end) for 6 HP, and 5 regular attacks for 10 HP. Unfortunately, while the game mostly runs at 60 fps, the bosses easily slow the game down by 50% or more while they're on-screen. Best to remove them as fast as possible. You can manipulate the behaviour of any boss, which always involves determining what direction they face, and when they decide to shoot projectiles.

This is a very cryptic stage to play normally. It has an A side and B side with identical layouts, where the boss is only located in the B side. Since both sides look the same, it is impossible to tell what side you're in. What's more, the boss is hidden behind a breakable wall. This run showcases the fastest route through the level: walking left at the start immediately puts me in the B side, from which it's a straight shot to the boss.

The boss has 24 HP, but my attacks somehow do more damage against him than normal. I continuously run away from him and use double hits on him for 4 damage each hit. I need to move away from him to have enough space to finish him off before he shoots an undodgeable wall of projectiles at me, so the strategy works out well here.

Another very maze-like stage, but if you know the way to the boss, it can be completed very fast. Once again, I skip the item that lets me walk on the water and instead just jump over it to reach the boss quickly. Once at the boss, I enter hyper mode as soon as possible. The boss has 32 HP, but most of my attacks do 3 HP now, which allows me to make short work of him. I have another free point of damage that is used to skip an attack animation at one point. While invulnerable, I also jump into some of the boss's projectiles to reduce lag.

The long and winding final stage. This stage introduces elevators that you can ride up and down. While you are on an elevator, you cannot jump at all, and any other action just loses time. Do not worry about the lag that happens while you are riding the elevator. The developers' solution to slowing the elevator down was to slow the entire game down when you use it. There seems to be no way to avoid this. Many screens here involve fairly tricky finagling to make it past the enemies without having to punch anything.

A damage boost is used to skip half of an elevator ride. There is also a hidden passage in the area that lets me skip even more of the ride.

The ceiling bat guys normally swoop across the screen if you get too close to them. However, if you delay for a frame, they sometimes do not attack. I use this to my advantage to sneak past some of them undisturbed. Near the end of the level, there is a section where you need to jump across a gap under a low ceiling. If you attack while touching the ceiling, you may for some reason clip through and wind up at the beginning of the stage. I'm not sure if this was a deliberate trap by the designers. It also means that the rooms are linked together from the other way too. If it were possible to clip through the floor somehow, you could skip straight to the end of the level immediately.

At last we reach the final boss, the inexplicable dragon. He walks in a direction for a certain amount of frames, before firing a set of projectiles. He then will either turn around and walk in the other direction, or keep walking forward, which can be manipulated. He has 64 HP, but once again I enter hyper mode to drain his HP quickly. I also throw in a couple of double hits when convenient. Finally, after boxing a dragon senseless, he disappears, and the game is over.

liek dis if u cry every tim

This was The Mon Mon Monster. I'm overall happy with the strategies I've found for this game. I would've liked to find something more "flashy" as well, but not every game offers the same opportunities. Next time, perhaps. At least the enemies actually move this time around. I'm also sure that if you try hard enough, you can squeeze out more frames from this run through better optimization, but I am quite happy with where it stands right now.

Special shoutouts once again naturally go out to Quibus for suggesting this game to me at some point in the distant before-time. Despite the salt that may have peeked through at some points during these submission comments, I genuinely do quite like the game. Thanks also once again go out to msxsolutions.com for their helpful map of the game.

Finally, as usual, thank you for making it this far, and if you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer.

-scrm