I'd like to apologize to the viewers in advance for the Nightcrawler stages. You’re welcome.
Game Objective
- Gets hurt to negate time lose
- Manipulates luck
- Abuses glitches
- Bamf%
New Improvements and Finds
- A quick way to run through enemies is to run, jump and attack in mid-air. The only downside to this is that your movement is stopped for 7 frames while hitting the enemy (you have to damage an enemy in order to run through them, aside from a few exceptions). But in a lot of cases it's faster to jump over the enemy in question, since you only need about six frames of holding jump to reach a high enough point to jump over the enemy, but you can also move forward somewhat freely while doing this as long as you are over the enemy's hit box (Which is a little shorter than their sprites). Meaning you only end up with about 3-4 frames where you aren't moving forward instead of 7.
There are circumstances where this isn't possible due to either an enemy’s current attack pattern, or a nearby ceiling, but doing this when possible saves around 2-3 frames on average per enemy this is done to. This obviously adds up over time and makes the platforming sections look much cleaner than before.
- The RNG for the enemies is a bit odd. For instance, what attack or movement they go into is triggered by what inputs you do. Simple enough, but they won't enter this attack until they've entered the screen fully. As such you can pace with them off-screen for a couple frames to trigger their RNG when you want it to be triggered, but also make it so when you trigger it the input that forces the optimal movement/attack is simply running forward.
This isn't always the case since there's only so much time you can spend manipulating the enemy's movement before it would just be faster to run, jump and attack like normal. This, like the last bullet point is only really applicable to the Wolverine stages.
- The energy route is a little different this time around. Given the new boss strats implemented here, the energy consumption is a lot more optimized. The RNG manipulation for the energy drops during the elevator stage took a lot of time to achieve, but ended up subtracting an unnecessary detour in the Comm Room stage for boost energy for Wolverine. I grab a bit of extra boost energy for Wolverine mostly just to show off. I don't lose any time for it since the elevator stage is an auto-scroller anyway.
In addition to this, Nightcrawler's boost energy is mostly obtained by hitting enemies with the bamf dust. He only needs enough energy to speed up the Sabretooth fight and for the Multiple Man fight, so as long as that's achieved, then Nightcrawler is set boost energy-wise.
There are a number of occasions when hitting an enemy is faster than avoiding them, even though you're stopped for a few frames by doing so. So as a result, like Wolverine, Nightcrawler obtains a bit more boost energy than needed.
- For the bosses, some manipulating pre-fight is possible by delaying skipping the cut scene just before the boss fight. This wasn't needed for this TAS, but it's a good thing to note all the same.
- The teleport glitch ("bamf glitch", if you prefer) is much more broken this time around. Glitching the teleport vertically is much easier to do now that I found a consistent method to do so. By allowing
Nightcrawler to end up in a specific falling/attack animation just before bamfing, you can glitch out the teleport in any direction you want. The input is basically jump (if you aren't already in the air) attack and hold a horizontal direction, wait a frame, and jump (triggering Nightcrawler's special). If you allow Nightcrawler to drop down two frames after reappearing from the bamf, you can do the input again to chain the teleport glitch vertically, either up or down.
As a result, the stages have gotten much more chaotic to watch. Sorry again.
- An area with a lot of mooks will make it harder for the bamf glitch to activate, as a result making it less dizzying (I.E. actually watchable). This is the case for the two Office stages, the first Lab stage and Stronghold.
- Skipping the final level, for the most part, and jumping straight to Master Mould took some doing seeing as this game pulls a Sonic CD and has the first and only bottomless pit at the beginning of the last level. A bottomless pit which also has a very wonky kill zone. Basically the only way to get past it is to bamf glitch up to the platform on the far left of the stage (just before Master Mould).
Attempting to teleport without glitching would cause Nightcrawler to fall too far into the pit's kill zone.
Other Comments
Fun fact: there are 5403 frames of saving and loading.
Oddly enough, there are only 865 bamfs in this run. :(
feos:
Rejecting for old emulator Accepting this improvement.
