Jawohl! (or so AngerFist said)
Megaman X Zero 5 8-Boss TAS by Angerfist & Atma.
Goals:
- Make things explode
- Never wound something with a gunshot
- Prevent a Colony Drop
- Beat all stages
- Plays hardest difficulty
Plugins used:
- TAS Soft Graphics Plugin 0.2
- TAS Sound Plugin 0.2/Pete's MIDAS Audio Driver 1.7
- N-Rage Plugin 0.95 (seriously, why isn't this bundled with pcsx? the default one bundled now is shit!)
- TAS ISO Plugin 0.2/TAS CD-ROM Plugin 0.2
This is a TAS of Megaman X Zero 5 on XTREME difficulty, that defeats all 8 mavericks at some point in the game. Now, with that out of the way, let's get down to some stage by stage commentary!
Intro Stage
This is pretty much identical to the version used in the low% run, since it came from this to begin with. The only real difference is that the boss fight is faster, as is the followup text as the cannon isn't fired immediately afterwards.
Mattrex
There are quite a few waiting points in the first half of this stage, which all have to do with the lava flows that destroy the walls. In the second half of this stage, the lower route through the lava is faster than the upper route above it, partially because there are a few waiting portions, a boss type door, and a miniboss to kill that way. The ride armor attacks cause the same type of delay as zero's jump slashes/3rd hit combo slashes, so damage is taken where the knockback and followup invulnerability is faster than the alternative of killing everything in the way.
Grizzly Slash
A fairly straight forward stage. The newly gained move of Quake Blazer from defeating Mattrex makes ridiculously short work of the trucks. At the ladder after the last truck destroyed, doing the down stab is just as fast in terms of downward movement as regularly dropping, so it was done instead. Not much else to say
Dynamo
Time for the comic relief boss. He goes down horribly fast. After this battle, but before Zero teleports out, the final text advance is delayed by a short amount of time (something like 15 frames, it's been a while since I checked) in order to manipulate the following event.
Cannon Firing Time!
Yeah, this was fun. We were lucky enough to have such a minor delay as mentioned above in order to make it successfully destroy the colony on the first attempt. This opens up access to the virus stages, and also removes any further cutscenes from the stage menu (there's at least one cutscene skipped, which details Zero being declared a danger as the virus doesn't affect him).
Duff McWhalen Duffman
Hooray for the longest stage in the game being an autoscroller!. We tried to make this entertaining, but you're kinda limited when you've only got so much available and such a long stage. The second miniboss has 3 parts which actually take damage, and 2 of which can be hit with a SDC, which is why it went down so fast. The section that follows up on this has a single frame after the text disappears in which gravity/whatever is still set to being underwater, which allows zero to jump all the way across and up the wall in a single leap. Not much else to say about this one, apart from "Duffman can't breathe! OH NO!"
Axel the Red
Prior to this stage, we equip the hyper dash part, which speeds up movement considerably, and also forms the basis of the new form of movement used regularly from this point onwards. A fair portion of the run was redone when it was found out that this form of movement was actually faster than a hyperdash or a hyperdashjump, and conveniently provides invulnerability to most things aswell. Gripping on each vine is faster than jumping past multiple vines at once, as you get the maximum jump velocity from each one. At the longer vines, the airdash is used a couple of times to avoid damage, and reduce the amount of time required to proceed along them. That's about it really for this one.
Squid Adler
This was probably the (second?) most annoying stage in the game to do. I'd estimate that it was almost completely redone about 7 times (the bike part only twice). By using the newly acquired move from Axel, Twin Dream, most instances of killing things and causing damage are now hitlag free, since Twin Dream doesn't cause it. The switches are almost exclusively hit with Twin Dream to stop hit lag (with the exception of one that's in a bad position), and as a result, there's a lot less lag than there initially was. Squid goes down relatively fast, but he has a phase where you stays in the air until a certain amount of damage has been dealt.
Dark Dizzy
This stage was weird. There's apparantely a black hole in the background or something that makes everything move slower and just makes it seem laggier than it actually is. The autoscoller-ish section of this level kinda sucks, so we tried to at least make it more entertaining than just standing still waiting for the platform to catch up. The second half of this level hsa Twin Dream make its first real battle appearance, as it decimates essentially everything that gets in the path of Zero. When it comes to dizzy himself, he just kinda sits there until he dies.
Dynamo
Time for another round of golf with Dynamo, but before this, two new parts were equipped. The W-Energy Saver, which doubles weapon capacity, and the Z-Saber Plus, which causes additional saber damage. The additional saber part allowed Dynamo to be dealt with in a timely manner, and had his final appearance for the game be a quick one.
Virus Blue
There isn't really much to say about this stage, it's pretty short, has laser beams of death, and a familiar blob at the end. At the request of Nach from way back, the pre-fight waiting period was made more entertaining to watch. The timestopper did nothing, it was just added to waste some time before.
Virus Purple
This stage was painful to do, but with the added arsenal of weapons and abilities, it was made short work of. It was interesting to find out that using the E-Blade to reach the vertical wire was faster than any of the alternatives, and also looked cooler too. The boss was a pain, and a slower kill than I had hoped, since it turned out that the C-Sword was the green eye weakness. Damage was avoided being taken here to lower rank, simply because it would've looked silly.
Izzy Glow
This stage was a pain in the ass. Combined with tight spaces, and oddly timed path blocking spike things, it took a few tries to get something that worked. In this stage, we encountered the first instance of a "slow down man, you're moving too fast for me!" situation. Delaying for a few frames allowed us to proceed in a timely manner. Izzy himself was a bit of a pain, as he warps all over the place. The MMH rank given by the previous stage also raises his HP a bit more than a PA rank, but instances of this happening were ignored, since it didn't really matter to us.
This stage could've been done sooner, but the attempts that were made to do it after Dark Dizzy were failed, as the timing for the path blocking spike things was considerably different and unworkable, so it was left where it is.
Virus Red
This was a fairly quick stage, and there isn't really much to say other than "damn spike pit, why must you cockblock us?" since we were a matter of pixels too short to make it over the pit successfully from a walljump without an airdash. Another MMH from the stage, since it's so short.
Skiver
Ah, Skiver. Why is your stage is 2/3rds autoscroller? Not much to say about the intro, or the end. In the bossfight, the giga attack is used instead of killing Skiver which costs 22 extra frames, simply to maintain a MMH for the final level (to give the best endgame rank). This was actually doable by killing significantly less during the autoscroller section, but given that explosions make for good entertainment in an autoscrolling segment, the proposal of reducing the amount of things killed and explosions that occur was rejected.
Final Stage
This stage was fairly straight forward. The boss refights were, however, not quite so much. Due to Skiver's newly obtained weapon, a new form of SDC had to be devised. A few iterations were tried, until a solution was reached. As it turned out, this solution was very slightly suboptimal, but still managed to beat 3 of the first 4 bosses faster than the optimal solution (Dark Dizzy was able to be beaten 4 frames faster, but that completely screwed up the Izzy Glow refight, and would have cost nearly 30 frames). Duffman, Grizzly, Axel, and Skiver all went down satisfyingly fast, which left only Sigma to go.
Unlike the low%, the energy refill wasn't required to be picked up prior to fighting Sigma, as he did as he was told on the first try. His second form took a satisfying beat down thanks to Twin Dream, which while being his weakness, only gave him the normal 30 frame invulnerability period. Needless to say he got a solid beatdown. Just like the low% run, this has a ridiculously skewed ingame timer result of 18:01, and ends with a B rank for X, and a MEH rank for Zero.
With that, we'd like to thank FractalFusion, for pointing out that a stupidly long alia message can be skipped if no orbs are collected on the bike portion of Squid's stage, and ShinyDoofy for providing an encode and uploading it for us.
Nach: Although a faster run for this game already exists, this one doesn't skip any stages. Highly entertaining. Accepting.
