After finishing "all bosses" TAS, I decided to improve the
any% run, updating by 825 frames (actually ~870 frames by accounting emulation differences), by not picking a weapon, some new tricks, and better optimization. The boss battle strategy is completely different, and takes too long to finish (~1050 frames).
Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.2.1
- Skips directly to the lastest area (Major skip glitch)
Development of the run
First of all, back from 2012, Kyman
discovered a new strat for the final room (The Nasty Judge) which allows Gomez to reach and defeat the boss without additional input (~4 seconds compared to sword strategy), but delays the game ending for 15-20 seconds.
On the following post (game topic), he posted a WIP, which changes to ball weapon. But for unknown reasons, he didn't finished the improvement and after 6 years, no new news about the progress. But...
Since I acquired experience and knowledge during my work on "all bosses", I decided to improve the published any% run with better speed mechanics and new finds. Initially I used the
resynched BizHawk run by EZGames69 for comparision, but was quickly obsoleted when I implemented the input from "all bosses" (a.k.a those improvements).
Since the ball strategy wasn't finished at the time, I implemented it, but affected 2 things:
1 - For some reason, that "secret" door from the first chain room only can be opened with sword. So, the first 3 rooms were redone, costing frames.
2 - Ball moves so slower that you can't kill enemies directly, so, the whole cave were redone in order to resync, and trying to kill enemies/getting coins as many as possible without losing time.
At entering the boss room, I implemented that new strat and since ball falls when using (Gomez isn't supposed to appear "bottom"), it's possible to damage him (each ball can does until 3 damage) and beats even faster than sword strategy. Note that you can't see these balls this time.
Well, at the time when I still was working on "all bosses", I saw a map of this game on Gamefaqs showing even hidden rooms, and checked that there's a hidden room a bit after starting the cave room, which is "Golfer's Prize", and has a ball weapon. So, after picking speed shoes, go to "The Music Room" directly. With route change, ~90 frames were saved.
Later, I reimproved some rooms again I've forgot on the previous step, as well as the boss, gaining 40+ frames.
Finally, it's possible to beat this game without a weapon. It saves ~400 frames of input, but still loses to a longer battle. I tried to decide if I should submit or the step 3 (longer input but faster game ending) or without weapon (faster input but longer game ending).
Well, I found interesting beating this game without a weapon, feeling something much different than the previous steps and TASes.
First of all, actually I'm the only author who has worked with this project. I added EZGames69 because of certain things with this game.
Second, I copied input from "all bosses" for this last area, although was redone for not having a weapon.
- Speed optimization for timesavers as always.
- Route change after picking the second speed shoes.
- For some reason, the first chain room doesn't work exactly when zipping oob (compared with step 2), and since you can't spawn that "hidden" door without sword, we need to reach another "hidden" door.
- The third chain room includes a small timesaver which wasn't even checked before - keeping some speed to a lower jump after the lastest chain.
- The next 2 rooms uses the same input from all bosses.
- For some reason, the oob zip from the second cave room haven't worked exactly as the previous steps and I lost a frame, forcing me to lose 2 more frames on the next room not only for speed adjustment for the next oob zip but in order to work properly.
- Normally during the oob zip, you must avoid a certain bat by killing him, but with some level speed, I "entered" 1 more pixel on a certain "invisible" wall, enough to bypass successfully.
- These enemies at the start of "To the river" room are unavoidable without losing time.
- For some odd reason, the transition between "The Gondola" and "Addams' Vault" can be affected for 1 or 2 frames or not depending of timing.
- While this strat ends input earlier, the sword weapon is ~250 frames of difference while the ball weapon, is ~110 frames of difference (this one uses the zip glitch).
- I'd like to thanks Kyman, for the any% WIP, some tricks and glitches, and for the published run (along with Sonikkustar)
- EZGames69, for the resynched published run to BizHawk, which used as basis for this project.
