Kid Niki 3 TAS by TaoTao
This is my first submission.
Essentials
- Emulator used: FCEU 0.98.28
- Aims for fastest time.
- Takes damage to save time.
- Manipulates luck.
- No death.
About the game
Kid Niki 3 (aka. Kaiketsu Yanchamaru 3 - Taiketsu! Zouringen) is the sequel to "Kid Niki", "Kid Niki 2". But it looks quite different from previous productions. You are a ninja who is a master of Bo-jutsu (stick art), and, you defeat enemies and get over obstacles with your staff.
To complete the game, you must clear 7 levels. You meet a boss at the end of each level.
This game was never released outside Japan.
About the run
To save time, it is important to use sliding and Bo-jutsu action well. The ninja moves fastest when he slide. And you must use Bo-jutsu action (mainly, somersault and bounce) to get over obstacles.
I discovered a technique (glitch?) named "forward somersault", and I achieved significant improvement with this technique. The ninja usually can do a somersault only backward, but you can let him do a forward somersault by quick turning before doing a somersault. Furthermore, you can climb a vertical wall using forward somersault one after another.
The enemy drops an item which is determined randomly when you beat 5 enemies. A scroll makes the ninja invincible for a while, and it is very useful for TASing. I manipulated luck to obtain scrolls by watching internal random number. But it is not easy to predict the random number for a long period, because the random number is affected by the timing which enemies appear.
Researches not useful (for now) for TASing
Invisible walls at the edge of screen
There are invisible walls outside of screen. For example, in the left picture, it seems as if you could go through from right to left on the left wall. Like the right picture, you can climb over the left wall using forward somersault, all right, but actually you can't go through the boundary of left side.
It seems that these invisible walls have infinite height. I tried to climb over some invisible walls using forward somersault, but it failed. I put a
movie attempting to do it.
Screen scrolling seems a little buggy. In the picture above, the ninja have gone out of screen from right side. It is caused when scrolling doesn't works, but for now I have not discovered the strict way to cause it. I have encountered this bug only in stage 2, and could not clear the stage after this bug occurred. I put a
movie reproducing this bug.
Others
Because I could found few resources about this game, I had to analyze the game almost by myself. But, I don't have great confidence in my analysis. So, there may be several rooms for improvement. But, anyway, I did my best.
Enjoy!
mmbossman: A colorful and short game, with a fair amount of variety, and it looks pretty well done. Accepting for publication.
