Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1978
Location: Making an escape
You should go play it.
Anyway, thanks to Nitsuja's efforts, I have recently taken an interest in running this. There are plenty of bugs to abuse that can make Mia fly across the screen and skip large portions of the game. Some of my research...
There's no need to grab the familiar from the merchant at all. You can skip into the trial and get the max level familiar immediately.
Mojak glitching can take you straight to the final area. Combined with getting the highest level familiar, you can skip nearly half the game.
Can't grab the scroll in the forest pond all that early. I doubt it'd be worth it, really.
Charge shots seem to attack through certain invincibility times. Combined with rapid fire charges, many bosses will go down quite quickly.
I still need to watch through that "fun run" on youtube to pick up some more tips.
Also, the game has an introduction that is automatically played the first time you load the game. To get it to play again, you can delete the file intro.dat and start the game up. It also spends some time loading up saved games. Just to be sure, I'll be taking these things into account to help sync the game up. It'll cost a few frames, but it'll make it more user friendly.
Anyone have any thoughts they want to share about it?
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.
<_<
I suppose if I post at ALL on these forums, I should post here. The game is definitely a very good game. I'm the one who did that "fun run" of it. I've gotten away from the game for other console games, but I'd probably go back to it in the distant future...
I'd love to see a TAS run of this, at least to see frame-perfect backdash-speed running and enemy dodging.
The rapid fire charged shots would definitely be a mainstay in the run. I stink at the timing it takes to keep it going (dash + shoot simultaneously), but a TAS would blow away bosses.
That scroll in the forest pond isn't worth it in my opinion as well as (for now) you need enough health to make it out of the water alive.
I don't know for sure if you can avoid Baphomet's powerful "spell" attack without the charge helm. Hopefully you can. It'll have to be tested.
I'd like to know how you're going to get around the game's sound bug (If you haven't experienced it you most definitely will soon). The game will inexplicably (maybe a it could be prevented) slow down and loop sounds and you'd have to reset.
If you have any questions, just ask.
In other news,
Woo -- first post!
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1978
Location: Making an escape
tjp7154 wrote:
<_<
I suppose if I post at ALL on these forums, I should post here. The game is definitely a very good game. I'm the one who did that "fun run" of it. I've gotten away from the game for other console games, but I'd probably go back to it in the distant future...
Why, hey there! Fancy seeing you show up. Pleasure to meet you.
tjp7154 wrote:
The rapid fire charged shots would definitely be a mainstay in the run. I stink at the timing it takes to keep it going (dash + shoot simultaneously), but a TAS would blow away bosses.
It's actually a lot simpler to pull off. Press and hold the jump and attack buttons at the same time, then when you're charged up, let go of both. After that, as long as you don't get hit or jump, pressing both attack and jump at once will let go a charged shot. The timing can be a touch persnickety, but there's no need to dash.
tjp7154 wrote:
I don't know for sure if you can avoid Baphomet's powerful "spell" attack without the charge helm. Hopefully you can. It'll have to be tested.
I'm not concerned about Baph's Beam o' Death for this run. I'll be applying pressure to his spine constantly, which should keep him from doing much of anything, but if push comes to shove I can just luck manip him from doing it. I'm honestly concerned more about Rajoman and the old man's crystal cage than Baphomet.
tjp7154 wrote:
I'd like to know how you're going to get around the game's sound bug (If you haven't experienced it you most definitely will soon). The game will inexplicably (maybe a it could be prevented) slow down and loop sounds and you'd have to reset.
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you talking about the less-than-functional music looping causing a pause at the end of the song? I think Hourglass handles that, even if the music isn't handled perfectly.
tjp7154 wrote:
If you have any questions, just ask.
In other news,
Woo -- first post!
Can do. Please impart any other wisdom you may have that I might have missed. And please enjoy your stay!
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.
Heh. Thanks. Sometimes that's what it takes to take a lurker out of hiding. I suppose some SMB3/DKC questions would have, but --naaaw!
I've always had a hard time pressing both buttons at the same times for more than 2 or 3 presses.
As for Baphomet, I think you're right. He stops his magic attack when he's attacked. Yeah, it should be easy enough.
As for the sound loop glitch, There are times when the game gets stuck on a sound-effect loop and everything freezes and the game loop doesn't advance unless you press keys. No one understands (yet) what in the game causes the bug and the only way I know of fixing it is to quit the program and restart. It's possible this bug won't even manifest in Hourglass, though...
My Hume fight in my old video can be greatly improved upon. I use to have a better fight video, but I think I deleted it. Anyway, the pattern should be easy enough to figure out, though.
When attacking enemies that take multiple hits, most of the time you don't want to hit them right up close, but at a certain distance -- about the length of Mia's "stroke" length. At this distance, you can hit enemies at a higher frequency. It's hard to explain, but it somehow lowers the time the enemy can't be hurt between hits.
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1978
Location: Making an escape
tjp7154 wrote:
When attacking enemies that take multiple hits, most of the time you don't want to hit them right up close, but at a certain distance -- about the length of Mia's "stroke" length. At this distance, you can hit enemies at a higher frequency. It's hard to explain, but it somehow lowers the time the enemy can't be hurt between hits.
This is how the programmers kept an enemy from being hit multiple times in a single attack, actually. If there is something hurtful to an opponent sitting somewhere within its hitbox, they will not take any more damage until all attacks leave the hitbox. However, it does mean that if you strike the edge of a moving hitbox, or attack and hit something at the apex of your jump, you can strike twice in one attack.
It also means proper use of charge spamming will require proper spacing. Otherwise, against a large object like the green crystal or Hume, you can keep a string of firebals going through them and only the first will actually do anything. But then you stand back far enough that the fireballs disappear upon hitting, and keeping in mind you can fire a shot every three frames... Yeah, it won't look pretty for most bosses.
Also, if you slip some input in before Hume begins talking at the beginning of the game, you can screw with how the cutscene behaves. It is possible to fly into and over the ceiling of Mia's hometown, but unfortunately, it doesn't seem helpful at all. I'll need to see if I can trigger it elswhere.
Right now I'm holding off on doing this run until a small issue related to the F2 button is resolved. Otherwise, I think I'm all set. Proposed route:
Defeat Gar and get out of town.
Go to and defeat frog boss; get password for mountain guard and pick up scroll 1.
Go straight to the shulin; pick up attack scroll 2 behind ice wall after talking to them.
Invade Dungagan city; Smirnol -> scroll 3 -> Hume/hammer; leave city.
Initiate hide-n-seek with Gideon. Pick up wall jump boots after finding her the second time. Finish the "game" and pick up anklet.
Go to ice cavern; get scroll 4 and talk to shulin again.
Proceed to Dungagan mining facility; pick up double jump* and go to grodol cave.
Go to grodol kingdom, destroy mass of worms, and return to shulin.
Invade tower, picking up scroll 5 and the mojak.
Return to mine. Mojak into the trial.
Go to grodol cave, and mojak into Baph's realm.
Work towards Baphomet and complete the game.
The only thing I'm undecided on is picking up any health upgrades. I don't see taking damage as being all that helpful, and before long things will be killing you in one hit anyway, so I don't see the point.
What you say?
*Kind of out of the way, yes, but it will help make navigating certain obstacles easier. The main reason, though, is for Baph 2; double jump will allow getting multiple hits in between stuns, drastically shortening the fight
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.
What's this "F2 button" issue that you're talking about?
As for health upgrades, I don't see any use to them either, honestly.
You're right about the double jump shortening the Baphomet fight.
That's all I can think of right now...
Ok, so Azurinel (elementsmoviemaker from YouTube) has been speedrunning ED lately (100%). In one of his attempts, he encountered a strange glitch with Baphomet's second form that amounts to a quick kill, where the head just falls off, as if it is acting like a hand. The game then ends because that's probably what triggers the end cutscenes.
Here's the Twitch video link: http://www.twitch.tv/azurinel/b/442815037
Check around 101:00 for the very start of the fight (first phase). At the second phase you can see the glitch in action. The thing is, we don't know as of yet what activated yet. It might have to do with the timing of the shots that open up his weak point (head) combined with how he accidentally "lured" the hand to go down, but a little bit to the left. I've tried to duplicate it, and I thought I had the right patterns, but it didn't work.
Also, for those who don't know, a work around was discovered that seems to prevent the game-ending glitch where animations and sounds loop forever and slow the game to a crawl. The solution was to set the affinity of the process "Eternal Daughter" while it's running to just one core. This is in the Task Manager, run as Administrator (Windows). Azurinel tells me he also set the priority of the program to high. I don't know if these attributed to the glitch or not, but that's basically the setup he used. He was also recording it w/ ffsplit.
Anyone with experience with the game, any ideas?? This "quick kill" saves about a minute and a half, according to Azurinel...
Also, for those who don't know, a work around was discovered that seems to prevent the game-ending glitch where animations and sounds loop forever and slow the game to a crawl. The solution was to set the affinity of the process "Eternal Daughter" while it's running to just one core.
Yes, that is it. The priority is not relevant. It's simply the matter that the ED code wasn't written for multicore processors (since they weren't prevalent back then).
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1978
Location: Making an escape
Huh. That's... Quite a thing. I wonder how much could be skipped in an any% by doing that?
Random brainstorming, either something made a call to the "head die" function, or a number overflowed into the head's health, setting it's value to negative.
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.
