Emulator: Snes9x 1.43+ or Snes9x 1.43 WIP 1
Emulator settings: WIP timing ON, volume envelope height reading OFF, nothing else matters
- Controls 2 characters
- Aims for fastest time
I thought I'd take a quick try at running Super Bomberman, despite how bad a choice it seemed to be (random powerups, random level layouts, lots of repetitive levels, slow gameplay, hard to make due to being 2-player cooperative). Once the game got going it actually went pretty fast (only took a few hours to do), and it didn't turn out as bad as I thought it would. It ended up being shorter than my Super Bomberman 2 movie, although I still like that much more than this.
Super Bomberman is a game where you control a guy that has an infinite supply of bombs that explode in 4 directions (and are just as dangerous to you as they are to your enemies). In it, you either try to kill other bomber-guys in the battle mode, or you progress through an adventure mode possibly with another player's cooperation. Most people prefer the multiplayer battle mode, but that gets pretty boring if you have less than 3 people - for 1 or 2 people, the adventure mode tends to offer more fun. The goal of the adventure mode is to beat each level, which requires killing all the monsters, finding the exit under a block, and going into the exit (with at least one player).
Note that I had to be very careful never to hit the exit with an explosion, because that causes new and temporarily invincible monsters to spawn.
Because each level starts with a decently long period of invincibility, the optimal thing to do is the really cheap thing to do: lay down tons of bombs and walk around the level as a giant chain-reaction explosion before the invincibility runs out. While cheap, it works wonders and fills the screen with explosions, so I abused it as much as possible in every single level. When not invincible, a single hit from any explosion or contact with any monster means instant death AND loss of most powerups collected.
There was surprisingly little manipulation of randomness possible, with powerups or anything else in the game. Waiting a couple extra frames before pressing Start at the title screen was the only luck manipulation purposely done.
There are some awkward waits in the first few levels that are used to make sure both players get the right power-ups. For instance, one player really needs a fire power-up, but the other player is closer to it and has to stop what he's doing to prevent destroying the powerup until the other player gets there. That doesn't happen very much, though, and the main levels become really short once both players have a decent amount of powerups. The power-up distribution of some things are pretty uneven until I get far enough to find two of everything, so player 2 becomes much more powerful for a while, then Player 1 suddenly surpasses him, and they end up about even.
There wasn't much I could do with some of the boss fights, sorry about that.
About lag: The game is pretty good about not lagging, so I generally ignored it if explosions caused a little lag. Most of the time I avoided really excessive amounts of explosions to somewhat minimize lag, though.
Making the movie: I did this mostly at 100% speed with pauses and some sections of frame advance (like usual - I only rarely use slow-motion). I used a keyboard with both controllers crammed into the main keys. I used the emulator's auto-hold and auto-fire heavily, so I only directly controlled one character at a time (or sometimes neither).
I'll add more details if anyone has questions; right now I'm too tired to note all the specific things someone might wonder about...
