This is a 644 frame improvement over Aglar's published movie.
- Emulator used: FCEUX 2.2.3
- Takes damage to save time
- Uses death as shortcut
Improvements
The primary improvement in this TAS is from further use of a death as a shortcut. It was theorized a long while ago that killing yourself would be convenient to end some levels faster, so I made use of some different routing to pick up as many extra lives as possible. In general, if you can get a 1-up without losing over a second, it will wind up saving some time. There was already one instance of a time-saving suicide in the published movie, which I improved by "quitting" the level by pause instead of getting hit by an enemy.
Aside from that, there are a few movement optimizations in some levels. I found that certain stages don't require you to turn around to do the acceleration trick (related to the way the game loads your position to start). I also decided to aim for collecting more golden arches in this run, which, although irrelevant to time, adds some new style to the TAS, since most of Aglar's levels were very hard to improve and I didn't want them to look identical. Though I can't collect as many as I want because getting 100 forces you to play a boring bonus game.:p
Wtf? This isn't an All Levels improvement...
Well, funnily enough my first plan was to only improve the all levels movie, since it's quite out of date by now and I thought the current any% run was still pretty optimal enough. However, I realized a new any% movie would be a good starting point, since I could compare to my own work instead of having to refer to 2 runs at once. Also, my brief tests I did just now showed me this game is mostly pretty edit friendly, so this new movie will make doing that run easier. Look forward to it :)
Thanks
Aglar for the published movie, Brushy for his runs & "all levels" WIP, nitrogenesis and Schaaa for some new techniques, and Walker Boh and Sami for contributing to M.C. Kids tasing. And to you for reading this far :D
feos: While gameplay is a bit longer in a few rooms due to different routing, in some other rooms it's shorter due to optimization; in similar rooms the time is identical, and where death abuse was added, that still counts as an optimization technique, because levels fade out sooner, and the movie gradually gets shorter. I think a bit of time is only lost in one level, but the death abuse evens that out by the start of the next level.
