Details

  • Visual Boy Advance 1.7.2 re-recording v20
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Collects all items
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Abuses programming errors in the game
  • Manipulates luck

About the run

This is an improvement of 2142 frames, or just under 36 seconds, over Dragonfangs currently published movie. The improvements comes mainly from greater optimization in movement, and some from better ammo management. Some also comes from aiming for realtime instead of ingame time, this essentially means that I sometimes have to optimize door transitions to scroll less, avoid some lag, and taking a Super Missile and a missile earlier in Norfair to avoid two extra door transitions during the cleanup. I had hoped to improve the run more, but Dragonfangs run turned out to be very solid, especially as far as room strategies goes.

Notes copy-pasted from the old run

  • Exiting a spin jump will still keep your vertical momentum unless you shoot.
  • If exiting a spin jump without shooting and while rising, you'll still rise for a frame regardless if you hold jump or not, if you then press jump again you'll start spinning again and still rise. I can't actually remember ever using this for time saving purposes.
  • Exiting a spin jump positioned the right way under a ledge, you'll get pushed down a bit, and since you don't lose any vertical momentum by exiting a spin jump you can save a bit of time.
  • Doing the "corner boost" at a certain place in Chozodia made a part of the room load incorrectly. But it's just a visual glitch and can't be used for anything.
  • The horizontal movement of all of Samus's projectiles are related to Samus's movement, so if you move in the same direction of a missile it will move faster to keep itself away from Samus, avoiding a doppler effect. This same technique can be used to "curve" shots by shooting diagonally and then moving sideways.
  • If multiple projectiles hits an enemy, all of them will do damage. This is only really useful against the Brinstar Worm/Charge Beamst/Boss right after missiles that drop the charge beam.
  • Shooting while turning around cancels the entire turnaround animation, speeding up a turn by quite a bit.
  • Starting a spin and shooting at the same time makes the shot appear at the bottom of Samus's sprite instead of at the arm cannon.
  • Morphing and shooting at the same time fires the projectile at the back of the Morph ball sprite.
  • After the Chozo ghost battle it usually locks you in place before transforming you to your full suit. But if you turn around during a certain time frame of about 4 frames you can move freely again and the rest of that scene still plays out the same. If there happens to be any stun pistol shots left on the screen when the you've got the suit for real, they'll turn into garbled plasma sprites.
  • Power Grip is usually way faster than other forms of vertical movement(shinespark excluded) because there is only a single frame without upwards movement.
  • There is a "sticky walls" effect when spin jumping. In other words, if you touch a wall while spinjumping and then try to move away from it, you accelerate way slower than you would if you haven't touched anything. Most likely there to make wall jumping easier.
  • Space Jump removes the ability to Wall jump, which would've been faster if there's a wall nearby. But at the same time, Space Jump removes the sticky walls effect.
  • Ingame time still runs during the "Item get!" popup.
  • Mother Brain will usually only take 5 missiles or a super before closing its eye to charge a beam. But there is a short amount of time right after a beam is fired where she'll accept damage anyway.
  • Bosses in this game die too fast :P
  • The frame you start spinning will always be the same velocity as the frame right before it. This can be used to maintain running velocity for an extra frame when you run of an edge. In addition to this, releasing the direction you're running at the right time will cause Samus to slowly decelerate instead of immediately slowing down to normal aerial velocity. These two can be used in conjunction. To produce the best result, you should release the direction right when you leave the edge then hold nothing for 2 or 3 frames, then spin.
  • During the first frame of the aerial turnaround animation, Samus will continue to rise regardless if you're holding the jump button or not. This can be used to go from a straight jump to a spinning jump without stopping in midair.

Thanks to

Huge thanks to Dragonfangs for his previous submissions, which helped greatly in the making of the run, as well as pointing out that it would be faster in realtime to pick up the stuff in the "scroll-glitch room" before the cleanup after getting your suit back. Thanks to P.JBoy for helping me to get the GBA memory watcher to work on my computer (there was some weird error I couldn't figure out). And thanks to various people for poking me to get the run done :p

Baxter: Very good optimizations, accepted as an improvement to the published movie.
OmnipotentEntity: Encoding.


TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #2436: Cpadolf's GBA Metroid: Zero Mission "100%" in 1:01:08.00
fsvgm777
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Joined: 5/28/2009
Posts: 1213
Location: Luxembourg
Awesome improvements. Yes vote from me. By the way, the run syncs on VBA v21.
Steam Community page - Bluesky profile Oh, I'm just a concerned observer.
Active player (377)
Joined: 6/5/2006
Posts: 188
Location: Malmö, Sweden
So you're finally done :P. I don't really have the time to check it out now, I'll have to watch it sometime tomorrow, I'm sure it'll be great :D.
Even the best player is limited by the speed of his fingers, or his mind's ability to control them. But what happens when speed is not a factor, when theory becomes reality?
Skilled player (1443)
Joined: 7/15/2007
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Dragonfangs wrote:
So you're finally done :P
Yeah, I put the run aside sometime in May, and after I picked it up again it took a week to finish :P
Agare Bagare Kopparslagare
sgrunt
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The Metroid games are amongst the runs I enjoy the most here, and an improvement is always welcome, especially to the 100% runs. :) Yes vote.
Skilled player (1443)
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Location: Sweden
Ok, I've tried twice to upload the run to youtube, but have gotten an unknown error message both times. So I'll let it be for now and try again tomorrow.
Agare Bagare Kopparslagare
gocha
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Joined: 6/21/2006
Posts: 401
Location: Japan, Nagoya
I enjoyed the run all the time. Yes, it was very entertaining. Awesome job, Cpadolf.
I am usually available on Discord server or Twitter.
Former player
Joined: 6/3/2008
Posts: 136
Location: US
Awesome run Cp, you retain your rep as king of entertainment, enjoyed it a lot.
Trained by Cpadolf. Mission: To Perfect. Hero says: Yeah bro, I almost went super saiyan once My SM-RBO Current Project(s): 1)I don't TAS anymore! Pay me!
P.JBoy
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Location: stuck in Pandora's box HELLPP!!!
Man, I've not seen not seen a GBA Metroid game TAS'd in a good while, which just made watching this just that much better. My highlights were every boss battle, but especially Imago when you get its Super Missile tank; just plain walking through those frozen pirates; and the clean-up after Kraid, every part of that seemed to get me off guard, I've not played this in too long. It's just a damned shame you missed sub-1-hour, as well as the 220000 frame barrier Couple of suggest screenshots: 1, 2 So are you gonna be working on another Metroid run?
Skilled player (1443)
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P.JBoy wrote:
So are you gonna be working on another Metroid run?
I don't have anything planned right now, but there is always a possibility for it to happen in the future.
Agare Bagare Kopparslagare
Skilled player (1325)
Joined: 9/7/2007
Posts: 1354
Location: U.S.
Wow, this was....unexpected. I will watch later!
Joined: 4/8/2009
Posts: 4
Location: Ontario, Canada
Very nice, I enjoyed the new optimizations in this run. Definite yes vote.
Joined: 8/7/2006
Posts: 344
Voted yes, loved the Imago speedbooster trick and the Kraid crumbleblock missilepack trick.
Joined: 5/2/2008
Posts: 65
Great run, yes vote.
Cpadolf wrote:
P.JBoy wrote:
So are you gonna be working on another Metroid run?
I don't have anything planned right now, but there is always a possibility for it to happen in the future.
May I suggest a 9% Hard run? I've always been wondering why that hasn't been done yet.
Joined: 7/16/2006
Posts: 635
The comments mention this aims for real time. Out of curiosity, how does it compare to the previous run in terms of ingame time?
Skilled player (1443)
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I don't remember the exact amount of frames, but the old movie had a final time of 42:28, and this finishes in 42:07.
Agare Bagare Kopparslagare
P.JBoy
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Serris wrote:
May I suggest a 9% Hard run? I've always been wondering why that hasn't been done yet.
Well, it'd have to be done on the European version, with SRAM from a ready-completed. Also, the Zebetites are the most daunting task I can think of with only 2 missiles, even in TASes; it was there that I quit when making my 9% TAS on normal (with 5 missiles), and that was after Kraid, Ridley, the Metroids, Imago, the Rio Room, and trying to make it optimal and entertaining at the same time. However, looking back at the run, it's one of the most entertaining runs I've ever seen, so many highlights in it, namely those ones I said above, they're bad-ass man
Active player (437)
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Location: Stockholm, Sweden
This was a nice treat! :) Thank you once again for providing us with an entertaining run. Yes vote and SM-GULD TILL AIK!!! ^_^
Nitrogenesis wrote:
Guys I come from the DidyKnogRacist communite, and you are all wrong, tihs is the run of the mileniun and everyone who says otherwise dosnt know any bater! I found this run vary ease to masturbate too!!!! Don't fuck with me, I know this game so that mean I'm always right!StupedfackincommunityTASVideoz!!!!!!
Arc wrote:
I enjoyed this movie in which hands firmly gripping a shaft lead to balls deep in multiple holes.
natt wrote:
I don't want to get involved in this discussion, but as a point of fact C# is literally the first goddamn thing on that fucking page you linked did you even fucking read it
Cooljay wrote:
Mayor Haggar and Cody are such nice people for the community. Metro City's hospitals reached an all time new record of incoming patients due to their great efforts :P
Joined: 2/12/2009
Posts: 27
Very good TAS Cpadolf. Vote YES!
"The life is like you create it"
mklip2001
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Location: Georgia, USA
PJ Boy, do you think there's a chance that you'd want to team up with someone like cpadolf to finish a 9% run? That kind of run would be amazing, even on Normal mode. As for this run, it's tough for me to spot specific improvements, but it's still a great run. The bossfighting is particularly amazing (everyone's been mentioning the insect-thing Imago, and I also agree that's a highlight of the run), and it was also amusing to see you randomly waste missiles through the last part of the run to run out of missiles with shots at the metal thing's eye. Yes vote. By the way, do you have any short comparisons you can put up about specifically where you saved the most time?
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Active player (377)
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Most entertaining as expected and I could see where you fixed some of the stupid shit I apparently did in my run :P. I still have mixed feelings about this situation and I've been dreading this moment as much as I've been looking forward to it, it's pretty sad to see your favorite run handed to another person *tear*. No but really, amazing run, 36 seconds sounds like such a long time and I'm amazed you managed to save much of that from movement optimizations. Though I must mention that the Norfair-Brinstar elevator room have screw attack blocks on the sides and could be about half a second faster when going to Tourian. I missed it myself in the previous run and then kinda forgot about it until now :P.
Even the best player is limited by the speed of his fingers, or his mind's ability to control them. But what happens when speed is not a factor, when theory becomes reality?
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Location: Sweden
Dragonfangs wrote:
Though I must mention that the Norfair-Brinstar elevator room have screw attack blocks on the sides and could be about half a second faster when going to Tourian.
;_;
mklip2001 wrote:
By the way, do you have any short comparisons you can put up about specifically where you saved the most time?
To be honest, I don't remember too much, since I made 90% of the movie half a year ago. But some examples I remember are getting more ammo refills throughout the beginning of the run (without wasting any time), which saved some time in Kraid, where Dragonfangs had to slow down in a few rooms. When getting the missile in Kraid where I have to do the bombcrawl across the crumble bridge I use a somewhat different way to place the bombs, which coupled with getting up there faster due to not having to refill saved some good time. I also noted that the time the bugs take to eat up the roadblock in that one room is luck based, and manipulating that saved a second or so. And I didn't pick up any of Ridleys refills, instead managing to get what I needed on the way to Tourian from enemies I passed by. But a lot of the improvements just comes from subpixel optimization, which saved very little time in very many rooms.
Agare Bagare Kopparslagare
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Good job. I guess I should get working on Fusion stuff again.
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I watched five parts out of seven. I was very entertained. A Yes vote for you good sir!
Joined: 7/1/2008
Posts: 272
Nicely done. Never a dull moment. Yes vote.