Wonder Boy in Monster Land is a platform game released by SEGA in 1987. It is a sequel to the original 1986 title Wonder Boy. The protagonist, Bock Lee Temjin ("Tom-Tom", aka Wonder Boy), traverses 11 rounds on his quest to kill the MEKA Dragon.
Gold from enemies and hidden locations is used to buy upgrades: boots for speed, armor for damage reduction, and shields to block projectiles. Sword upgrades are a reward for killing certain bosses. The TAS foregoes armors and shields altogether, because they're unnecessary.
Game objectives
Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.9.1
any% - so technically the "bad" ending
Uses a glitch to clip through a tile to climb a wall, but is otherwise straightforward
(Unless you consider the "wiggle" trick to get big moneys a glitch)
Comments
There are two shoe (speed) upgrades that cost 460 gold total. The early focus is on acquiring that gold. Gold drops typically range from ~1-5, but if you change the direction Wonder Boy is facing 2 frames before a gold drop appears, the value will be ~65-67 instead. It's funny how this knowledge manifested back in the 80s in the arcades: we used to "wiggle" the joystick left and right furiously in an effort to get the big $$$.
nymx: Looks like solid effort. I never saw the original, so I don't know anything about the issues found. From my analysis, I saw many things that makes this run stand out. Damage boosting, HP management, clipping, precise jumping, etc.. As for the gold glitch, I find it an interesting outcome on how you obtained your upgrades. At the very beginning of your run, I did question your reason for stopping and getting gold...but know I understand. I also want to point out that this run is around 3 minutes faster than what a human can do...so this really has some fantastic strength. Great job!
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 308
Location: Stafford, NY
Couple of things:
1. Has anyone found out why the "wiggling" changes the money value? (Unintended memory corruption, perhaps?)
2. You start the final boss with a little more than two hearts you don't need to use - have you tested if it's faster to take chip damage in most rounds to skip the PERFECT bonuses and reduce the overall health bar you're taking along (and need to waste frames refilling at the end of each round)?
3. There's some areas that are obviously very laggy - would killing some enemies in those areas as you pass through help in that regard?
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
Couple of things:
1. Has anyone found out why the "wiggling" changes the money value? (Unintended memory corruption, perhaps?)
2. You start the final boss with a little more than two hearts you don't need to use - have you tested if it's faster to take chip damage in most rounds to skip the PERFECT bonuses and reduce the overall health bar you're taking along (and need to waste frames refilling at the end of each round)?
3. There's some areas that are obviously very laggy - would killing some enemies in those areas as you pass through help in that regard?
#1
Short answer: I have no idea. Longer answer: There's a few things I've learned about the gold values (but not really the wiggle glitch).
First, hidden gold drops are primarily a function of the value in 0xC82A. But I've never seen a number calculated this way. It splits the low & high bits out and... umm. Well, here's some examples: 0x00 = 0 gold; 0x0F = 15 gold; 0x10 = 10 gold; 0x1F = 25 gold. But then at 0x99, it wraps back to 0 rather than incrementing to 100+. Anyway, the point of all that is that 0xFF = 65 gold.
Second, if Wonder Boy switches horizontal direction 2 frames prior to a hidden gold drop appearing, 0xC82A is set to 0xFF. Otherwise it's set to 0x01 for a coin, 0x10 for a bag. Why? No idea. It's definitely tied to these hidden gold drops appearing though, because 0xC82A is not changing when Wonder Boy is otherwise flipping directions, nor when gold from monster drops appear. Gold from monster drops seems to be calculated separately.
Third, there's a gold coin 'decay' value at 0xC80D. It's set to 4 when a coin first appears, and slowly counts down to 0. Its value is added to the value in 0xC82A to get the total gold obtained.
#2
Not exhaustively. By the time of the boot upgrade, Wonder Boy is so fast that taking damage from enemies is (usually) a fairly big time loss, even when they boost him in the same direction. So getting his health down super low would take a fair chunk of time. That said, those screens between rounds sure are time sinks, so it's worth investigating.
#3
Again - not exhaustively. I did try in a couple of spots to kill enemies, but it ended up being faster to just keep moving. As with #2 though, it's probably worth looking into some more.
A classic tas with fast 2D platforming action. Looks great!
The highlight is when the player is bouncing on the enemies to hit the flying boss. Stunning performance!
Ok... I vastly underestimated how much time the Round transition screens take. (My thanks to GJTASer2018 for the suggestion.) Went back and took deliberate damage to keep health as low as possible throughout most of the run, and the result is a substantial improvement: User movie #638491354432209448
In this updated version, I stop deliberately taking damage from Round 8 onward, because a lot of health is needed for the final Round, and because enemy damage is so high from that point on that even one hit generally kills Wonder Boy. It's still possible there's more time to save via health manipulation -- but Round 11's RNG is fairly volatile, so I'm not sure.
I've updated the submission with the new encode embed link, and removed the no longer relevant round by round comments. (Is this appropriate? If not please let me know!)
Great to see a TAS of the Arcade version of this game submitted here!
This version is more difficult to beat than the SMS version, and you did a great job on this game. I especially liked the initial version of the "Blue Death" boss (bouncing on the flying enemies was neat).
Thanks for explaining about the gold glitch, the damage route, and the lag (I didn't realize some areas are laggy when I played this game before).
About the wall glitch on the Round 2: Great discovery! That wall is the only one the glitch works? I wonder if this glitch could work with some walls of the last round (for instance, around 9:53 and 10:07 of the encode video).
About the damage route: On Round 8, I noticed you waited a bit to take damage on the room before the main boss room. Couldn't be faster taking damage from one of Death enemies on Round 9 instead? Or they do high damage enough to kill the player?
Also, I noticed something at the end of the first room of Round 10 (around 7:48 of the video): Falling down directly is faster than doing a jump earlier to this point?
Watched this run on the same day you've submitted it, but I didn't comment before because I decided to test this game when I had free time: actually the "start" button has one more function: it speeds up messages, even the unavoidable ones (the "quiz" boss from Round 6 and the ending message after you defeat the last boss).
Meanwhile, yes vote...
And fun fact: the ending message on the SMS version can advance without needing input at all. I don't remember if the behavior applies with the Arcade version too.
My homepage
--Currently not much motived for TASing as before...--
But I'm still working.
Thanks, Challenger - those are all great suggestions. I can't believe I didn't know about the start button functionality, that's a big time save. Interestingly, it also changes the point of final input, because the UFO's message just before the credits is fast-forwardable. I suppose that changes what's considered the final time for the TAS?
I've incorporated the start button functionality and the RND10 jump into the updated version, and I've updated the encode embed link in the submission: User movie #638493990861075742
I haven't found anywhere else the wall glitch works, including the places you noted. The vertical section in RND3 seems like a good candidate for it too, but so far I've only managed to get it to work in that one RND2 location. Strange though... in principle it seems like if it works there, it should work elsewhere.
I haven't managed to save time using the RND8/9 alternative damage suggestion. There's a similarly frustrating part in RND10: because of damage taken in the underwater section, an enemy needs to be killed to get some health later or Wonder Boy dies. In principle it should be faster to avoid the damage from the underwater enemy and then skip past the later enemy - but I haven't been able to get that to work without it messing up RND10/11's RNG, which currently works quite well (at least, as of right now!).
Joined: 11/14/2014
Posts: 933
Location: South Pole, True Land Down Under
I think I'm going to wait a few more days before looking into this TAS. Seems that improvements could still be a possibility.
I recently discovered that if you haven't reached a level of frustration with TASing any game, then you haven't done your due diligence.
----
SOYZA: Are you playing a game?
NYMX: I'm not playing a game, I'm TASing.
SOYZA: Oh...so its not a game...Its for real?
----
Anybody got a Quantum computer I can borrow for 20 minutes?
Nevermind...eien's 64 core machine will do. :)
----
BOTing will be the end of all games. --NYMX
Joined: 11/14/2014
Posts: 933
Location: South Pole, True Land Down Under
Checking back in to make sure that the improvements have all been explored and finalized. If so, I'll continue with judgement.
I recently discovered that if you haven't reached a level of frustration with TASing any game, then you haven't done your due diligence.
----
SOYZA: Are you playing a game?
NYMX: I'm not playing a game, I'm TASing.
SOYZA: Oh...so its not a game...Its for real?
----
Anybody got a Quantum computer I can borrow for 20 minutes?
Nevermind...eien's 64 core machine will do. :)
----
BOTing will be the end of all games. --NYMX
Checking back in to make sure that the improvements have all been explored and finalized. If so, I'll continue with judgement.
I made one more improvement. Changed the RND11 Minotaur fight to beat it closer to the elevator that spawns. Haven't been able to get the other suggestions to work - it always ends up with a death in RND11.
Encode embed link is updated and here's the revised .bk2: User movie #638500824710515904
Joined: 11/14/2014
Posts: 933
Location: South Pole, True Land Down Under
ninespaces wrote:
nymx wrote:
Checking back in to make sure that the improvements have all been explored and finalized. If so, I'll continue with judgement.
I made one more improvement. Changed the RND11 Minotaur fight to beat it closer to the elevator that spawns. Haven't been able to get the other suggestions to work - it always ends up with a death in RND11.
Encode embed link is updated and here's the revised .bk2: User movie #638500824710515904
Thanks. I'll be starting my review tonight
I recently discovered that if you haven't reached a level of frustration with TASing any game, then you haven't done your due diligence.
----
SOYZA: Are you playing a game?
NYMX: I'm not playing a game, I'm TASing.
SOYZA: Oh...so its not a game...Its for real?
----
Anybody got a Quantum computer I can borrow for 20 minutes?
Nevermind...eien's 64 core machine will do. :)
----
BOTing will be the end of all games. --NYMX
