Mega Man Xtreme for the gameboy color is a mashup of Mega Man X 1 & 2 for the SNES. The current run has some emulation issues I wanted to fix so I tried to improve it while working on GBHawk.
I improved the original run by FractalFusion by 7 seconds with a new route through the bosses. However, due to how poorly emulated timing was in the old run, this run looks significantly longer. I also don't start with control scheme switched, as I felt this was closer to a clean startup state even though extreme mode is still unlocked from a verification movie. this costs around 30 frames.
The idea of the new route is to get Zero Final first. You still need to go through eagle and stag first to get the helmet and fire to beat the mini-bosses:
Storm Eagle -> Flame Stag -> Magna Centipede -> Chill Penguin -> Spark Mandrill -> Wheel Gator -> Morph Moth -> Armored Armadillo
The order of the last 3 bosses is chosen only for RNG control over the Spider boss in Sigma 1. This spider was one of the hardest points in the run to get working, taking many failed hours of attempts and reroutes. I also changed the refight order to get good RNG, which is an additional time save over the published run.
Even though I changed the route, almost all the actual movement comes from FractalFusion's original run.
The final improvement is using charged shots on the shuriken boss in Sigma 1. This was speculated to be doable in the original run but not implemented.
This was probably the most difficult TAS I have worked on since Double Dragon. RNG was absolutely brutal for the entire run. The only reason I finished this run at all was because of the huge time sink it had become and I didn't want it all to go to waste. If I knew how much of a struggle this was going to be going in I would have done something else. At least it's timed properly and has correct emulation now.
ThunderAxe31: While the movie length looks longer due to emulation differences, it's actually shorter. Accepting as improvement over the
current publication.
