Out to Lunch is a platforming game where you play as Pierre the Chef trying to capture all your escaped veggies while avoiding the nefarious Chef Noir. In each level you must first collect your net and then find an efficient route to capture enough veggies to open the door to the next level. There are various power ups to help you as well, but they are little seen in the current run. There are also warps which take you directly to the next level if reached fast enough. The current run is a complete re-working of Nitsuja's original, saving over 1 minute.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 1.11.1
- Beats the game as fast as possible
The main improvement of this run is much tighter optimization, which allows for far more efficient veggie collection and even some slightly different routes in some levels. Overall the routing closely follows Nitsuja, but there is generally only one obviously best route anyway. As Nitsuja mentioned in his original submission, the mechanics of this game are a bit awkward, and it takes a fair bit of guess and check to get the result you want to happen. Collecting an item plays perhaps the most irritating sound effect I have ever heard from a game, maybe it's just me though.
Every stage is improved. Moreover, this game is a rare instance where better emulation actually saves a substantial chunk of time overall (several seconds are still lost to loading times though.) This is because the slot machine bonuses take much much longer in Nitsuja's run. I'm not entirely sure why but in the youtube encode they seem to be blinking every other frame, so something is going wrong there.
Well at first I thought this run would be quite a challenge but once I started working on it it was actually pretty easy and even a bit fun. There are many tricks throughout the run that come down to a single frame and overall I would say this run is much more fluid the Nitsuja's. While the run surely isn't perfect, it can at least be a new baseline on a current emulator. The music and sound effects can get a bit irritating very quickly though, so I recommend turning down the volume a bit.
Special thanks go to Spikestuff for the recently uploaded youtube encode which made it much easier for me to compare my work to Nitsuja as I went along.
ars4326: Hi again, Alyosha.
Much tighter, and
much better optimization here! I noticed that you're also starting to get more creative in "freestyle" movements during downtime. Really good work in shaving off over a minute on this one :)
