Complete tool-assisted speedrun. Took a good 3 days, though most of that time was spent sleeping and a lot of it was spent Q3Aing my stress away.
FCM:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/76cp13
AVI:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/gor8d7
(Yes, SendSpace sucks. I have no better place to put this at the moment, though, and the AVI is only 124 mb or so compressed as it is...)
Length: 00:17:28 (About 21 minutes with the ending cutscene as in the AVI)
Frames: 62886
Undo count: Lost... Somewhere around 1200, I'd say.
Recorded from: Power on, though the FCM was botched, which is why it says I recorded starting from a savestate and the undo count was reset multiple times. It contains a savestate for the first frame, yet resets to the intro/title anyway. Sorry.
Rom: Totally Rad (U)[!]
Emulator: FCEU 0.98.15
Basicly, Totally Rad is one of my favorite NES games, partly because of the now-laughable 70s (80s?) dialog in the cutscenes and partly because it inspired some of the leading characters and personalitys in
Kid Radd. But what's this? No tasvideo of it has yet been made/accepted? I figured that since noone else particularly cares, why not give it a shot myself?
For a first tool-assisted speedrun, I suppose I did fairly well, but I really should have spent more time on it to make it 'cleaner'... There's a bit of running away from minor enemys, shooting off extra shots (both for luck manipulation and from poor savestate use/not bothering to fix it), not quite doing everything as fast as possible, and obsoliting it before it was even finished (discovering a faster way to do things twards the end)...
However, there is one thing I set in my mind from the start, and that is really what kept it more of a "strategy game" then "boring work" for me: I do
not take damage to save time. Anywhere. At all. Some enemies and bosses have cheap attacks which almost never miss, and on the rare occasion that I can't dodge something (such as the first boss deciding to simply trample you) or got a little too lazy to go through the entire movie again to go backwards farther then my savestates were set (such as act 2's first miniboss), I abuse the game's two forms of invulnerability "magic"...
Most of the reason I made this thing is in hopes that
somebody with more skill and experience then I would make a far greater run of the game using the knowledge I've collected from my run through it. You know, an "Augh, this is terrible, I could totally do better" sort of thing. You can actually see me improving as it goes on and the point where I discover the "gladiator Jake" infinitive invulnerability "glitch"... The things I've learned? Oh, just a good sum, as follows...
- While jumping as normal Jake, you can switch directions and shoot in one frame and keep going in the other direction on the next frame. It will only slow you down by a pixel or two and your attack goes in the direction you wanted it to. Unfortunately, it takes two frames to shoot on the ground or while flying/swimming and you cannot charge while in the air. (Due to this, you automaticly shoot whatever you were charged to when you jump, and this takes one or two less frames then it would have if you shot normally.)
- Enemies which use more then one linear attack can be made to use a different attack or none at all by shooting extra, thus manipulating luck.
- Most enemies, especially those after the first level (Round 1-1), will take several hits to defeat. They flash invulnerably for a few milliseconds after each hit. Minor enemys generally let the extra attacks pass them, while bosses (and the more powerful of the minibosses) will simply block the extra attack with a cutesy clink sound (though it'll still pass through if it's a fully charged normal beam), but this is only due to your shot passing through their weak point and hitting the invulnerable part behind it. The trick is to time out your shots so they hit right when the invulnerability ends, a feat which I have yet to fully master.
- Most minibosses have a near-useless melee attack which you can trigger by staying close to them and then stepping just out of range when they use it. Unfortunately, such attacks are usually hard to predict, as it's just one frame and it's there, but that shouldn't matter much here.
- Avoid using magic whenever you can, and if you must use something, transform when applicable. The screen-clearing elemental attacks are especially lengthy, so if you're having trouble getting through an area, use gladiator Jake instead. I'm not sure if transforming into gladiator Jake to avoid an otherwise unavoidable boss attack (like the first boss running right through you) and then transforming back to continue your assault takes longer then using invulnerability or time stop, however.
- Walking off a cliff or getting hurt in the air (or while swimming) causes you to fall straight down, with only the ability to change which direction you're facing. You can charge and shoot while falling as normal Jake and it seems charging while falling goes twice as fast. It may be a good idea to jump off cliffs instead to get air control, but it also takes you that much longer to fall.
- Act 2's boss, whatever you would call that thing, cannot be defeated twice as fast by simply using the birdman transformation of Jake, unfortunately. It's leg must be destroied before you can attack the big eye. I don't know of the little eye in the back actually doing anything significant other then acting as a means for the boss to fire backwards if it jumps over you and giving you something to shoot at.
- The giant fish boss (Act 3's boss) can occasionally get stuck using an attack constantly, resetting the projectile as if a skipping record player. It still charges at you and back normally, though, and doing so fixes the skipping attack. Solid means of triggering this glitch is currently unknown, but seems to have to do with shooting it after it charged at you and is unmoving.
- Jumping again 3 frames before landing from a jump causes you to keep jumping without the game ever registering you as having landed, thus the orange gladiator transformation of Jake which is invincible by jumping can simply bounce through the entire map without ever slowing down for an enemy, though it seems jumping is a few frames slower then running, as in Megaman, so you may want to stay on the ground when it's safe and fight what you can kill in just one hit or when in an area with an extremely low ceiling which would take several jumps to get past that particular enemy. You'll probably need to transform to another form for a boss battle, though, as gladiator Jake only has a melee attack and cannot shoot while jumping. It may also be a good idea to jump early like this in other Jake forms unless you plan on staying on the ground, as this shaves off the frame of standing on the ground immediately after landing.
- The crocodiles in Act 4 can occasionally break through gladiator Jake's invincibility when they jump upwards into you because they also act as platforms, so you land on them as well. You can still jump through them while they're jumping. It is unlikely they can break through normal invulnerability as well, but you can probably jump off them before you land just as you would jump off immobile spike/flame beds.
- Gladiator Jake has the most powerful attack (about double the strength of a fully charged shot from normal Jake, according to the boss health bars), but it can only be used on the ground mere pixels from the target and he cannot attack in the air at all. The first two bosses require you to jump/fly to reach their weakpoints, the rest gladiator Jake makes short work of. (Unless that bad fish decides it wants to swim up too high for you to get it, which is usually the case. Just wait for it to charge you then jump through it and pound away before it goes back up, I suppose.)
- Unfortunately, no major event-skipping glitches are known at this time, though you can (thankfully) skip the cutscenes entirely aside from the act markers simply by hitting the start button the first frame they begin.
Worth submitting? Probably not.
Worth discussing? Only a little, I guess. The invulnerability stuff kinda makes doing a tool-assisted speed run seem a little pointless sometimes...
Worth a better speed run? I can only hope/wish/dream... In any case, I found no better place to post such a thing, I'm sure few people care.
