EDIT: Please could someone help me optimise this? I'm struggling with the RNG manipulation and it's driving me mental.
About the Game:
A Nightmare on Elm Street: Son of a Hundred Maniacs is an NES homebrew horror game based on the 1984 film A Nightmare on Elm Street, created by
FistaGames. It was originally made for PC in 1999, with a demake for the NES releasing in 2022 along with his other horror games. You play as Freddy Krueger, who has to play through a short version of the movie as well as a bonus nightmare level.
About the TAS:
This TAS aims for fastest completion, which means completing both the and bonus levels as fast as possible. This TAS was a recommendation from the developer himself, FistaGames, and is an improvement of 27.32 seconds over his 2nd rejected submission.
Main Level
The main level is made to look a bit like a short movie, with Freddy Krueger being playable in some parts. In this level, I'll only be highlighting the parts where input is required.
The game allows us to press start on frame 372, after a short developer logo plays. We also press start on frame 459, the first frame where the level's opening quote appears.
Shortly after Josh's dream starts, we head left to keep up with him. Then we drop a barrel off of our platform and turn around. The barrel misses Josh, but it's all part of the game, more or less. By holding R at the right time, we can get the next cutscene to load 1 frame earlier, on frame 3058 instead of 3059.
After the plot thickens a bit, we have to scale a wall as leftmost as possible. This action is interrupted for several seconds by a textbox. Once we scale said wall, we run - or should I say - float after Josh as a massive head.
Then, after Josh falls, we have to chase after him and kill him. This is once again interrupted by text, but this time there are 2 textboxes, so this takes quite a while.
After this, we don't have to do anything for nearly a minute. We just watch the movie pan out. But then, on frames 10275-10376, we have to briefly chase Amanda and Mike. And just like that, we've disappeared again.
After the teacher swears, gets partially possessed by us and probably gets sacked from her job, all this while Amanda runs away from the classroom, we chase Mike out of said classroom as well.
Then Mike runs through a couple of corridors, leading to our massive head with a robotic claw. We slice him with our claw on the first frame of the cutscene.
Mike - expectedly - dies as a result, and Amanda runs away to her college dorm. We follow her to this room and get into contact with her as soon as possible. A quick thing to note in this part is that attacking Amanda from as far away as we can is 2 frames faster than just running to her.
After Amanda goes down stairs that are "like quicksand", we chase after her and don't get slowed down by them at all. Then we have to attack Amanda using our powers. In this part, I discovered that by pressing A and B at the same time, we can kill Amanda on the first frame of the cutscene. For refrence, the RTA record performed by JoePulito does this in about a second.
Then us and Amanda split ways, and while that happens, we shapeshift into Mike. The next cutscene is a pick-your-dialogue section with 4 options per part. Now, it's time to use another one of my micro-optimisation findings. I found that by pressing 0-3 of the direction buttons as well as A all at the same time, we can select any option on the first frame possible. After this section, we enter the next cutscene, where we have to mash A and B as fast as possible in order to resist Amanda's love for Josh. 60 button presses can be done per second with this - 30 As a second and 30 Bs a second. Then we just have to hold right for 2 more screens as we chase Amanda down the path.
Now it's time for the final chase of the main level. On the first 2 screens of this chase, we have to climb down 3 ladders. Then we have to head south-east as everyone else but Amanda falls down either a drain or a bottomless pit. In the next section, we have to make a bridge in order to keep up with Amanda. This has to be done on quite a specific frame, otherwise we get 9 or 10 lag frames instead of the ideal 8. Then we chase Amanda through a hole in a brick wall, break a hanging light and kill Amanda. And that's the end of that.
But don't go anywhere yet, because it's time for...
The Bonus Nightmare Level!
Our first stop is Dream 1, which is a pool party with 4 girls attending it. We have to kill all 4 as fast as we can. Using a bit of RNG manipulation, I was able to kill the first 2 victims with one attack.
Then we go back to where we started - Dream 2. This room is themed after the famous 1980 arcade game Pac-Man, with Pac-Man himself being our massive head. We have to munch all 4 of the ghosts as fast as possible. No power pellets required here.
After that we have to head past several screens to get to Dream 6, which is the entrance to a graveyard with 3 worms outside it. We kill the 3 worms as fast as possible and move on.
Then we backtrack to Dream 5, which is a back garden with 4 boys. We kill them all as fast as we can with our massive claw.
Last up is Dream 4. This is the room where a woman called Nancy Thompson is lurking. We kill her as quickly as possible, despite her (terrible) attempted escape.
Input ends on frame 23085 when we kill Nancy. And before you ask, no, there isn't a Dream 3.
And That's It!
Thanks for reading. If you find any improvements, please e-mail me on the TASVideos website.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: Replacing with improvement.
nymx: Finally, after all these submissions...a version that is optimized well enough for acceptance. Let me clarify this situation....
The submissions made earlier this year were made by recording inputs via a controller. Because of that, a lot of frames were missed. Now, they don't exist...because they were crafted through the "TAS Editor".
Accepting.
