Clock Tower is a survival/horror point and click game in which protagonist and orphan Jennifer Simpson attempts to uncover the secrets of the Barrows mansion where she and her fellow orphans have been trapped.
However, in this run Jennifer gets freaked out by the appearance of the antagonist, Scissorman, and decides to book an escape ASAP by crashing through the mansion's walls in a car.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 1.11.9
- Achieves bad (worst) ending to save time
- Glitch abuse
First and second room
Just hit left.
Third room ("lag hallway")
There is a brief scene in this hallway where Jennifer stops and utters a line of dialogue that is skipped with frame-perfect inputs of selecting
the door in the middle of the room and cancelling it exactly around the window in which said dialogue would occur.
Fourth room ("Scissorman")
There is an infamous trick used in the RTA runs where selecting the stairway after Bobby (the Scissorman) clips his scissors once allows you to run past him without getting hurt (and then you cancel the action before you actually go up the stairs). However, you can start moving left earlier than that, and I end up moving early enough that I can't perform the cancellation early enough to avoid the stairs without getting hit by Bobby). Thankfully, I can avoid this by pausing the game for a few frames as I'm about to pass Bobby to change his movement pattern)
Fifth room
Again, just heading left.
Sixth room (Garage)
Where all the interesting stuff happens. Bobby is manipulated to leave the room almost immediately after he enters (note that he only shows up after you've started running toward the ladder), which saves a lot of lag frames. After that, I have Jennifer pick up the car keys from the box just to the right of the car; this is a significant improvement over what is possible in an RTA, as Jennifer will start walking as soon you select the box. Therefore, I have her run to the left and wait until the last possible frame before I actually select the box to pick up the keys.
A similar trick is also used with running to the car. In addition, when I do select the car, I open my inventory on the same frame, which allows me to skip Jennifer's monologue in the car on both the second and third entries by constantly switching between the cursor and key (preventing the game from loading her text since it has the load the description for the two items on every frame).
_EDIT Thanks to Soppanaama for telling me about a useful trick which saves ~45 frames; when selecting the car keys, it is quicker to stop later so that the camera scrolls left during the cutscene, so that the cursor ends up on the car door immediately.
EDIT I completely take back what I said about this being a straightforward TAS. There is so much going on in terms of lag/RNG manipulation, movement optimization, and minor routing differences, that I don't see this being any less challenging to do than a traditional SNES platformer.
Fog: Replaced movie file with file that is 45 frames faster.
GoddessMaria: Updated submission with final improvement from the author.
GoddessMaria: Alright. Having gotten around to checking everything out, I must say that this is technically well made. The optimization is indeed present in this latest update, which is good. The audience response was a somewhat lukewarm, but more close on the positive side. As for game choice, it's an interesting one. In any case...
Accepting for Moons.
Spikestuff: We're done right? No more war right?... right? Publishing.
