This run beats the current published one by 4992 frames (1 minute and 39.84 seconds)

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: FCEUX 2.2.1
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Uses death as a shortcut
  • Abuses programming errors
  • Manipulates luck

Comments

If you're familar with the previous TAS, watch this new run before reading about it for surprises.
A while ago KennyMan666 found a way to skip the light switch by using Shades, this was first thought not to be usable in a TAS as Shades was skipped in the previous run and thus a detour to get him would be required. Some time after that I decided to time how long it would take to get Shades compared to bombing your way down to the lightswitch, and the result was a surprisingly big victory for the Shades detour, 1:18 compared to 1:54. So with this as a basis I started my TAS attempt of this game, thinking it would be a rather quick project but different factors resulted in a work span of over a month (the text under the next subtitle explains it).

The global timer

In this game the global timer has a much higher impact on different things than in most others. One purpose is to control some actions of most of the enemies in the game, for example the slimes do their jumps when the value is either 0 or 128. Luckily not all bosses acts upon the timer; of the bosses I face only the three friends and the armored cat are affected by it, which in the end didn't cause that much trouble. One nifty thing with this timer is that it still ticks down while the game is paused, and of course enemies can't move while paused so if you desperatly need an enemy to not do the move it normally would, just have the game paused while the timer ticks over the values that affects them.
Moreover the timer also has inpact on your own physics above ground. In air it affects you in such a way that if you have built up some horizontal speed and jump, then release the directional buttons your horizontal speed will decrease by one everytime the timer value modulo 8 = 0. Also when you descend with Shades, his vertical speed will increase by one when the value modulo 2 = 0. If you combine this with the pause trick mentioned earlier, and also using the select button, you can skip the values for when Shades' vertical speed would increase and thus make him capable of jumping huge distances, which sadly takes forever to execute (you'll move 3 pixels every 40th frame or so) and won't be useful for speedrunning purposes. The worst thing that the timer is controlling is Gil's physics while swimming. His horizontal speed can only change when the timer value modulo 8 = 0, which means that if you've found improvements earlier in the run and the difference between the current timer value and the old one is not a multiple of 8 then you basically need to find a completely different way of optimizing the underwater parts from last time.

Improvements

First Continue1143 frames saved
Second Continue127 frames saved
Third Continue325 frames saved
Fourth Continue2778 frames lost
Fifth Continue6166 frames saved
Sixth Continue9 frames saved

Comments for each section

First continue - up to getting the suction cup

Freeon is taken care of a little faster. The boring thing about the friend fights are that they have an 8-frame rule for when they can be completed (global timer anyone?). Using the speed boost in the ice cavern I gained some seconds there. In the next area I utilise a walljump and Freeon's "super swim". Then in the tree area came the biggest use of the wall jump in the game as it skips the whole upper left section. On the way back I cause an egg to not spawn to reduce lag. From there it's just minor things up til the game over.

Second continue - up to getting the red key

I paused two times to manipulate the third enemy to not get into the way too much. While pushing the rock I jumped more on the side of it which proved to be slightly faster. In the fight with Gil I had to pause at the beginning since he would've jumped and completely ruined it otherwise. When crossing the lake with the rock I found a way to keep the speed when switching to Gil by performing it on the rock itself.

Third continue - up to getting Gil's secret weapon

After the horizontal water tunnels you can keep higher speed coming out of them by holding either down or up. After some smaller improvements up til the water tap, I saved quite some time in the water labyrinth by keeping higher horizontal speed over the corners of some platforms. The boss strategy was changed after the first hit, by bounching the ball on the right wall I could jump on the boss right after his invinibility stops and I also didn't need to wait to throw the ball after getting it.

Fourth continue - up to getting the blue key

In the previous run this would've been the fifth continue, I needed to do this part now though as Shades was needed for the dark area. I take damage in the two best places I could found. I grabbed Shades and went to the blue key area. Here Shades came to great use as he can just sore over the lava pits and avoid losing time by taking damage. In the boss fight he saved even more time simply because his weapon is more effective. Also the lances that drop down depends on the global timer, so by pausing away some of them I could reduce a great amount of lag. A fun thing at the end was that I had to get hit by that lance to become invincible for some time, otherwise the next part of the boss would've killed me right away.

Fifth continue - up to getting the green key

Except for the huge amount of time saved by skipping the light switch, I reduced almost 300 frames of lag in the next room by killing the enemies right after the explosions as that leads to them not dropping any laggy item. I also took damage here for later as it didn't cost any time at all. On the boss I found a way to kill him just as fast with only Gil, saving two character switches. By ducking and jumping you'll reach a little further into the celing and are able to hit the smiley face at it's highest point. For the death abuse I didn't switch back to Bop as it's only a waste of time.

Sixth continue - up to beating the game

Not much to say here. The only way to speed up the final boss slightly was to hit his little buddy lower so that you could deliver the final blow a little earlier.

New tricks/glitches

Have the others keep Bop's max speed on land and in water with Freeon

Have Bop run at his max speed, jump and then switch to another character. Now hold down or up until two frames before you land, at that point hold "left", "right" and "down" at the same time for one frame and from there hold "down". To have Freeon keep Bop's speed in water you just need to hold down or up after switching from Bop in air. In some water containers this isn't possible though as when you land in the that particular kind of water you get instantly shifted to the closest position divisible by 8 on your left side and your horizontal speed resets to zero.

Horizontal speed boost on ice sloops

If you're within the same 16*16 square block as an ice sloop but not standing on it, with any character but Freeon, your horizontal speed will continiue to increase past the normal speed cap of 24 subpixels/frame. Apparently the only thing that stops you from getting this speed with those characters while walking on ice is the routine that tells the character to slip when the speed is > 23, so if you just skip being on the ground you can continue to accelerate up to another speed cap of 48 which for some reason was choosed as the max speed.

Wall jump

A classical glitch that also found its way into this game. In this game the edge pixels of a platform works differently from the others, they're fine to stand on but it's also fine to, while standing under that precise pixel of the platform, jump and not hit the ceiling but continue up inside that platform and if you've jumped high enough you'll stand inside the wall from where you can continue to jump upwards. This is actually only halfway true though, it works this way only if you try to jump up the right wall of a platform. In order to do a wall jump from the left wall, some very precise inputs are necessary since if you jump straigt up here, you'll get ejected out of the wall. To not get ejected you must move left, that is away from the platform - it also must be a platform that is four blocks above you. The exact way to do the left wall jump is to jump from some location close to the leftmost pixel under the wall, hold the a button and after 8 frames you must be 1 subpixel to the right of that edge pixel, then push left for 1 frame and hold the a button for 3 more frames while holding either up or down to ensure that the global timer doesn't reset your speed and ruins the trick, and when your vertical speed hits zero you'll land on the wall on the last subpixel which is possible to land on, then you have one frame to jump as landing there results in you getting ejected out of the wall.

Thanks...

My thanks goes to Adebis for the previous TAS and KennyMan666 for finding the light switch skip (along with other things) which was the only reason that I started this TAS, and for support while making the TAS. Also Blublu for finding many things for this game in the early days of TASing.

feos: Judging!
feos: Replaced the movie file with the same file where the Author fixed rerecord count (sent by PM).
feos: Accepting this amazing improvement to Moons.
Ilari: Processing... Can't get this to sync.

natt: Processing...

TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 14772
Location: 127.0.0.1
This topic is for the purpose of discussing #3997: Aglar's NES Ufouria: The Saga in 23:52.60
Expert player (3555)
Joined: 11/9/2007
Posts: 375
Location: Varberg, Sweden
Oops, I forgot to put all rerecord counts together as they are spread out over many files. I'll link to a run with the right amount of rerecords later for a moderator to replace it.
feos wrote:
Only Aglar can improve this now.
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
Requesting quick encode.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Expert player (3555)
Joined: 11/9/2007
Posts: 375
Location: Varberg, Sweden
RGamma wrote:
Requesting quick encode.
I was 2 seconds ahead of you, though a better encode wouldn't hurt.
feos wrote:
Only Aglar can improve this now.
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
When you're bombing through all those walls, you keep jumping down to the next level as soon as possible, which requires landing on a slime and doing a short bounce before you can start charging another bomb. Could you just throw the bombs from the upper level instead? Otherwise looked good! This is a very strange game.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Site Admin, Skilled player (1234)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11251
Location: RU
Aglar, any plans to improve Batman?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
KennyMan666
He/Him
Joined: 8/24/2005
Posts: 374
Location: Göteboj
Holy dickballs that green key guardian fight. That Unyo fight! So yeah this is pretty awesome right here. Now let's see a deathless 100%! :V Walljump is definitely not a thing that's going to be possible to do on console (note: this is what I said about the jump to skip Shades as well but I have done that on console now and I both love and hate Aglar for making me try it and do it because it is so insanely precise that I wish it wasn't possible for realtime), but I need to try out that ice boost.
Derakon wrote:
When you're bombing through all those walls, you keep jumping down to the next level as soon as possible, which requires landing on a slime and doing a short bounce before you can start charging another bomb. Could you just throw the bombs from the upper level instead?
No. Killing the enemies is deliberate as to reduce lag, and killing them while the explosion is around causes them to not drop an item, also to reduce lag. Additionally, the waiting period between explosion and being able to charge the next bomb is longer than you probably think.
Det man inte har i begåvning får man ta ut i energi. "I think I need to get to Snoop Dogg's level of high to be able to research this post." -Samsara Read my fanfic, One Piece: Pure Corruption
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
My thinking was that you would be able to drop a bomb from above and use it to both kill the enemy (thus not producing an item since the enemy is killed by the explosion) and break open the blocks. I'll grant that the delay before being able to charge a new bomb is pretty long though.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
KennyMan666
He/Him
Joined: 8/24/2005
Posts: 374
Location: Göteboj
That wouldn't work on account of how bombs don't actually damage enemies. They only destroy blocks. Edit: Also, for people who might be interested in some minor speed tricks that weren't explained in the submission text, here you go (and I have to update that page now...).
Det man inte har i begåvning får man ta ut i energi. "I think I need to get to Snoop Dogg's level of high to be able to research this post." -Samsara Read my fanfic, One Piece: Pure Corruption
Expert player (3555)
Joined: 11/9/2007
Posts: 375
Location: Varberg, Sweden
feos wrote:
Aglar, any plans to improve Batman?
Of course not, he's Batman! Well, not now at least - don't really feel ready to move to another global timer game right away. I plan to continue on a speedy sega game anyway.
feos wrote:
Only Aglar can improve this now.
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
KennyMan666 wrote:
That wouldn't work on account of how bombs don't actually damage enemies. They only destroy blocks.
What. And they describe it as his "secret weapon" and everything! Oh well.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
mklip2001
He/Him
Editor
Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 2224
Location: Georgia, USA
Nice job! I especially liked seeing how much more effective Shades was against the armored cat. By the way, I believe klmz also mentioned the light-switch skip in the discussion thread for the previous movie.
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.
KennyMan666
He/Him
Joined: 8/24/2005
Posts: 374
Location: Göteboj
mklip2001 wrote:
By the way, I believe klmz also mentioned the light-switch skip in the discussion thread for the previous movie.
I checked. He mentioned it in the vaguest possible sense: "IIRC, I beat the game without turning on the light. I didn't skip Shade, so it might be that I used him to cross the pit if the platforms weren't be there while the light was out." Not helpful at all, not giving any clues to how it might have been done, and worded in such a way that it was easy to dismiss because none of the speedrunner or TASers had figured out any way of pulling it off. It was eventually Blublu's swimming speed preservation thing that made me figure out the extended jump, but...
Det man inte har i begåvning får man ta ut i energi. "I think I need to get to Snoop Dogg's level of high to be able to research this post." -Samsara Read my fanfic, One Piece: Pure Corruption
Patashu
He/Him
Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 3999
After hearing of the light switch skip I was waiting for this TAS. Awesome, yes vote
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Joined: 1/31/2012
Posts: 15
Has this game always had a edge flicker issue or is that an emulation thing?
KennyMan666
He/Him
Joined: 8/24/2005
Posts: 374
Location: Göteboj
GigaWatt wrote:
Has this game always had a edge flicker issue or is that an emulation thing?
Yes. To the first part. It happens on console too.
Det man inte har i begåvning får man ta ut i energi. "I think I need to get to Snoop Dogg's level of high to be able to research this post." -Samsara Read my fanfic, One Piece: Pure Corruption
Active player (432)
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3516
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
I vote yes on the basis of watching a sperm character who is high on drugs. Well done ol' chap!
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
Editor, Emulator Coder, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
fceux 2.2.0
  File: U-four-ia - The Saga (E) [!].nes
CRC-32: 6453f65e
   MD4: 2836a3a77d7c28250d34941501046e77
   MD5: 2386571285995137ab5b2044818d8a80
 SHA-1: ad6f93b83bcc0454f0dcdd68b364ae3001e76c15
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 14772
Location: 127.0.0.1
This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [2414] NES Ufouria: The Saga by Aglar in 23:52.60
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
The description of the movie is inaccurate, as Shades is now used again.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Skilled player (1402)
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1976
Location: Making an escape
I'm sure it's been discussed and tried already, but is it at all possible to pick up Shades' weapon without Shades? If the weapon switching trick works with any weapon, I'd think that would save loads of time since you wouldn't have to get Gil's.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
Expert player (3555)
Joined: 11/9/2007
Posts: 375
Location: Varberg, Sweden
The description says the previous run was improved by 1:23.06, while it should be 1:39.84 due to PAL timing.
Ferret Warlord wrote:
I'm sure it's been discussed and tried already, but is it at all possible to pick up Shades' weapon without Shades? If the weapon switching trick works with any weapon, I'd think that would save loads of time since you wouldn't have to get Gil's.
The only problem is that after you've destroyed a set of blocks and go to the selection screen to change back to Shades the blocks that were destroyed will come back, thus making it impossible to break the lower of 2 vertically connectiong set of blocks.
feos wrote:
Only Aglar can improve this now.
Joined: 3/11/2012
Posts: 149
Location: WI
The description for this video says that the game was "never released in the United States". This is incorrect. It was released in the US for Wii Virtual Console on August 23rd 2010. I'm not sure if you want to make it clearer or not. I just checked, and the title is still available for 600 Wii Points.
Site Admin, Skilled player (1234)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11251
Location: RU
I dunno, VC is just an emulator playing old games, doesn't help with not existing in USA on cartridges.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
I guess it'd be more correct to say "it was never released in the US for the NES" or something like that, but it's not really a big deal IMO.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.