Found some time over the weekend to try and redo the run... and I am damn glad the way it turns out! Found my first glitch... you can throw a paper plane over the cell boundaries if you jump over just in time before the plane turns around (see the first cell). Woot! It was only a minor time saver in this stage, but experimenting it later, I reckon it can save another 5 seconds for the rest of the game.
Respect to Zer0, manipulating the enemies in the first cell to bump the first guy out of the page took me quite a while... don't know how he actually figured it out. That is a very cool glitch actually; if you can bump the enemy deep enough into the page, you can instant KO him... Will probably use it in more often later in some fights!
For people who intend to do this run also, I figured that you can save a lot of life (which is super important for paper planes!) by not scissors kicking every enemy, but instead grapple kicking them. The damage dealt is the same, but Sketch doesn't lose life doing this. It may even be a few frames faster than scissors kicking... since you can grapple a fallen enemy approximately 3-4 frames before they are vulnerable to normal hits. I used this to kill Strigil fast before he could teleport even once in the sewer. I think that was the major time saver for this stage. The only problem is the way the game detects grapples. If I am not wrong, it must first detect the player walking against the enemy for 1 frame, before pushing forward punch. This means that it isn't the best attack to start off a fight, so i stick to scissors kicking as a lead-in.
The last thing I did differently was picking up a knife and not potion. This was because I would lose less life with this new fighting style, and the knife allows me to save time of puching the crate. Heck, this game suffers from lag when there is an explosion, but I doubt it will slow the run as much as NES game.
Here's the
WIP, done in 1:25 (& 42 frames) as when the screen first turns totally black. This compares with Zer0's run of 1:30 (& 18 frames).
Any comments? This is my first time doing a TAS and I ran most of it in frame advance... anything doesn't look good enough? Off to study now... hope the wait wouldn't be too long for the next WIP.
PS: By the way, if I intended to change just a portion in between the run, does it mean I need to redo everything after it?
EDIT: ARGH typo... Zer0's time was 1:30
It’s also possible to die after successful completion of the first boss, but I’m sure it’s widely known.
