This is a movie of a game based on a movie about movies. Neat.
Game Objectives
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Manipulates luck
  • Genre: Platform (a pretty bad one)
  • No damage
General Info
Most of what can be said about this run is better put in the soft subtitles, so I'll try and be brief here.
This game's main mechanic is collecting movie tickets to do various arbitrary and wholly unexplained things throughout the levels. All of this done by out hero, Jack Slater (woo).
Jack has two attacks: punches which deal 1 HP of damage, and roundhouse kicks which deal 2 HP damage. Guess which one I want to use. Regardless, the roundhouse kicks have an animation that puts Jack in a position to get hit easily. (Spoilers: getting hit NEVER saves time in this game, trust me.) I'll get into why this is important in a second.
There are two types of enemies in this game. Mullet thugs, which have 6 HP and have three different attacks (two of which they'll never be doing in this TAS). The second is these bat-wielding ushers (?) that have 1 HP. Believe it or not these guys are introduced much later than the mullet thugs. In the mullet thugs' case 3 roundhouse kicks are always optimal to use, but I have to manipulate their RNG to allow Jack to kick them 3 times without taking damage. This is a theme in Scenes 1 and 7 as you'll see.
A final bit of general movement info is Jack's jumping. Jumping must be kept to what is absolutely necessary. Running and jumping on its own has no penalty, but landing keeps Jack on the ground for 10 frames. Minimizing jumps was a huge priority in the platforming sections, obviously. There's also a point where once Jack reaches a certain distance in his jump, he'll fall straight down. This is a minor note but I figured I'd mention it.
Small Optimizations Throughout the Platforming Scenes
- If you have to jump and start running in the opposite direction you were running before, it's faster to turn while in mid-air than it is to turn on the ground.
- I make sure to run through barriers on the first frame they are taken down.
- Some tickets are out of range at first and I made sure to grab them the first frame that they are reachable.
- I manipulate the luck of enemies to allow Jack to attack them without taking damage.
Driving stages
- I aim to attain a booster that constantly boosts me 1 extra ppf (essentially a 50% movement boost) as soon as possible
- I manipulate object/ticket spawns to do this. This includes destroying cars that yield a ticket to not only obtain said ticket, but also manipulate the spawns.
Possible improvements
There are two thugs that kept giving me problems. One at the end of scene 1 and one in scene 7. I had to waste time dodging a punch in order to get three kicks in. Changing or delaying my attack or walking up to those enemies slower to change their patterns ended up being a few frames slower than what I ended up doing, or put me in a position to take damage. Ducking doesn't work for dodging a punch or the thugs' ground fireball attack (I don't let them do this at all in this TAS) and forcing them to use their gun and waiting for them to finish that attack, while dodgeable, would end up being much slower given how slow that attack his. So my best option was to run away from the punch slightly and kick them like I did. I actually restarted this TAS 3 times and redid scene 7 twice due to this being a problem in previous attempts.
As far as the driving stages, I think scene 6 is fine as it is (seeing as ticket drops were stupidly easy to get right at the beginning) but scene 3 I wish I could've destroyed less cars. Maybe there are possible improvements in the future as this game is examined more and RNG can be controlled more precisely. Given what I know now, though, the slight stops do justify themselves by getting the booster as soon as I do. The booster in scene 3 saves about 8.5 seconds and I lost a little less than 3 seconds to stops for destroying cars.
Other Comments
Since this is my first submission I want to say thank you to ForegoneMoose, nitsuja and Cpadolf. They were some of the first TASers I watched which ended up getting me into TASing in general.
I also have an .srt file for subtitles..

feos: Accepting to Moons.
RGamma: Publishing...

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #4420: TehBerral's GB Last Action Hero in 11:31.26
Joined: 9/1/2014
Posts: 58
I like the TAS itself and I think you did a great job for your first TAS, but sadly I did feel like I had to vote 'meh' just due to the entertainment of the game itself, the waiting around for tickets which are out of reach and the lift stage and pretty redundant helicopter and especially final boss fights did really drag the video's entertainment down. I like how you optimised the driving stages and the like though. so it is a good TAS for sure, and hopefully others feel like it deserves a moon regardless of my vote. I also really liked the commentary on the video, never played it myself so it is good to get that information on the reasons for taking actions etc.
Enjoys speedruns but hasn't actually tried making any yet.
ars4326
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Good job on this TAS. The final boss fight was a bit time-consuming, but the work you put into this run really showed. I also enjoyed reading the caption commentary.
"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." - 1 Corinthians 2:9
Editor, Experienced player (607)
Joined: 11/8/2010
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Good job, once again, on this run! I like the new final boss fight; those spitballs do look hard to dodge. Voting Yes!
Post subject: Re: #4420: TehBerral's GB Last Action Hero in 11:31.26
Ford
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This is a movie of a game based on a movie about movies. Neat.
Nifty. Now we just need a game made out of that. Well that was a pretty good movie IMO. I mean the movie of the video game of the movie about movies. The movie itself, IIRC, constantly lampshaded various action movie tropes. I guess that's to be expected, though.
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CoolKirby wrote:
Good job, once again, on this run! I like the new final boss fight; those spitballs do look hard to dodge. Voting Yes!
Thanks. Although you know what's funny is that the front of the spitballs are actually easy to dodge. You can get as close to the sprite as you want, and as long as you don't touch it, you're okay. Simple, obvious, stuff. The back of the spitballs are a different story. For some reason the hit box is huge behind the spitball, like the hit box is being dragged by a tether. So the 200+ rerecords added in that last segment were mostly on getting hit by nothing.
Somewhat damaged.
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Loved the movie as a kid, but I'm glad I never knew about this game... Looks like you did a great job optimizing a horrible game, and I like that attitude. Voting yes because it's short enough and it offers some variation to not get boring. Btw, TehBerral: If you want a worse GB-game than this, try that japanese Godzilla platformer ^^
Current project: Gex 3 any% Paused: Gex 64 any% There are no N64 emulators. Just SM64 emulators with hacky support for all the other games.
mklip2001
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The final boss fight was a snooze, but everything up until then was not bad. It was a little repetitive with all the ticket grabbing, especially in Stage 1, but all in all the action went ok. The game definitely has some design issues. Nice job with the precision for your first run!
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.
Warepire
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Quite entertaining, and look really well made. Final boss fight is kinda dull. I voted meh.
Personman
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Posts: 465
Really nice work on the subtitles - they kept me engaged the whole time. Silly, short game, decent music, good production values - I vote yes!
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
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Thank you so much for your comments.
Somewhat damaged.
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Looks better than the Genesis version of the game. Good run, too.
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [2686] GB Last Action Hero by TehBerral in 11:31.26