This submission is for Untouchables, The for the NES. It tells the story of Elliot Ness and his special agents taking down Al Capone circa 1930. There's a lot of shooting. Pew pew.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.8
- Aims for fastest time
- Heavy RNG/pattern manipulations
- Al Capone gets Capwned
Untouchables, The is a game with a lot of shooty guns and an autostroller. The shooting sections are in a few parts: close quarters alley fights, a boss fight, a hostage situation, defending a baby carriage (the autostroller) gathering evidence at a warehouse, shooting bottles,and a 1v1 shootout with Capone's hitman on the roof of some building. It's got quite a lot packed into a 5 minute run.
There are like 4 versions of this game. I chose to run the Japanese version. Some things are faster, some are slower, but this version has the fastest bottle level/autostroller. In between there are numerous little variances but overall it is the fastest version by far.
Alley/Streets
For some reason, Ness decides to bring a gun that can only hold 2 rounds at a time. The premise is to peek out of cover, shoot your 2 shots, go back into cover to reload (which is automatic) similar to Time Crisis.
The gimmick in these stages is that each time you shoot an enemy, you change the future spawns based on what frame you shoot them on. This leads to numerous instances of burning a few frames to get better patterns. All frame delays are intentional. The final enemy you shoot will still affect the next level even if that level isn't an alley level.
Warehouse
Here we have to kill 5 enemies wearing grey hats to pick up 5 pieces of evidence. Seeing Ness skip around like a kindergartener is pretty amusing. There are minor delays baked in here as well and "missed" jumps are intentional. We end the level on a certain frame to set up the bottle stage pattern.
Bottle stage
Each bottle you shoot is worth 4% evidence. Ergo, we need to shoot 25 bottles. Yay math! The bottle spawns are frame based, so we force a very fast set of bottles by delaying frames appropriately and blast through the level in mere seconds.
Boss fight
After the second set of alley levels which are way longer than the first set, we fight a boss. He pops in and out of cover and fires a tommy gun. It's not particularly difficult.
Autostroller
The objective is to protect a baby carriage as it travels through what I think is a train station. If it takes too much damage, you fail. If you push it into a wall, you fail. If you let it run into a wall that's not angled, you fail. The goal is to get it to the bottom as quickly as possible while avoiding the aforementioned mishaps. You run faster than the carriage (unless it's going down stairs) so we push it downward ourselves when we can though we have to let up to avoid walls and enemies and such.
Hostage situation
There is a gunman holding someone hostage. You have to shoot the gunman in the head to pass the level; you have one chance and if you fail you get sent back a couple levels. The game offers a practice session which helps you learn the ropes. We obviously ignore that.
Rooftop Shootout
On the roof, you have to land 6 shots on Capone's hitman with the final shot making him fly off the roof and winning the game. This section follows the same manip idea as the alley sections. The frame you shoot him on dictates his pattern so we force fast patterns, keeping in mind that we can only successfully shoot him when he's running.
Re-record count is actually closer to 7000, I had to abandon the initial file I worked on.
Edit: Reworked/optimized to save over 10s.
slamo: Replaced movie with a 612 frame improvement, and judging!
slamo: Looks pretty good. The vast majority of the optimization is in RNG manipulation, and it looks like you get really lucky throughout the run, especially in the bottle level. Also, this is MUCH faster than any RTA effort out there. Accepting!