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Hah, so I wasn't the first to discover it! Yes, that warp is handy, as you can get the flippers before you even set foot in the water.
If your game still works, maybe you can try some of the secrets I found, and see if you can find any more. I recall so far I've found 4 secret candy caches in Linus Spacehead (and a total of 55 candies in the whole game), 15 secret passages in Super Robin Hood (though one is required to finish the game, and another is more of a trap door you want to avoid), 6 level warps in Boomerang Kid, and 3 secret warps in Treasure Island Dizzy in addition to the "warp" you get with the magic pebble.
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Somebody told me that was an NTSC/PAL compatibility switch... Did you ever try the other position and see if the game acted any differently? Anyway thanks for commenting!
Oh, I should upload that Treasure Island Dizzy map I finished, shouldn't I? Here: http://www.box.net/shared/l6hybysq20 I revealed all the hidden traps and labeled everything, but box.net's online viewer makes it too blurry to read, so you'll want to just download it. Will spelling everything out help anyone plan the fastest solution?
I'm not sure if I mentioned this yet, but I discovered you can't finish Super Robin Hood with negative treasure counts; apparently the ladder generator does an "equals zero" check on the treasures. Fortunately you can remedy this by simply entering the secret warp passage again. Sometime I need to analyze which parts of that game you can skip exactly, but I've been too busy making Dizzy maps...
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I haven't used Mupen64 in a while, but does it give you the option to "Save as..." when you make a savestate? What I like to do is make a "milestone savestate", right before or after some major segment of the game, and give it a special name so it doesn't get mixed in with the numbers. Make one of those every 5 minutes, and you'll never have to fast-forward more than 5 minutes, because you can just load your milestone state in read-only mode. Yeah, you have to go through the file selection to get to it if it's specially named, but it's not a big deal when you don't have to load it so often.
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Well, I tried that "hook jump" idea, and it didn't really work. Even if I started jumping the frame before the backwards walking would have worn off, the backward jumping wouldn't wear off until halfway through the jump, so Dizzy only boomerangs back to where he started. Could have been useful in a game with a collectible floating just over the edge of a cliff... I think there's a little more application in places where you need to fall from a great height, but you don't want to fall in the same direction for quite so long. With that idea, I was able to maneuver Dizzy onto a normally unreachable platform!
Hey, shopkeep, where's your empty bucket this time?
Unfortunately I didn't find any more secret warps there, or anywhere else in the game even after I mashed B on every single spot. You could argue that I should try dropping every item on every spot, in case there's an alternate use (thinking of how trying to use the grave-digger's spade on Hookjaw's grave pops up a message telling you he safeguarded against that), but I'm not up for B-mashing every piece of ground another ten times, or A-mashing with the pogo or whatever, and I doubt anything will come of it. Now I'm not surprised that the secret warp from over the blasting area to the area past the other grave wasn't found by that guide writer, since there's only one spot you can stand on to trigger it, while the other two warps have a range of eight steps that will work. It's not hard to position yourself though, since it's on the edge, so you can just tap right on the screen to the left.
I did find a spot where Dizzy perpetually snaps between two screens until you move him to one side! Yeah...
The flippers could be a valuable item for sequence breaks. The only thing you actually need the flippers for is escaping with the coin at the very bottom of the ocean. You can get to the dynamite from the left, and into the whole smugglers' cave without digging up the grave, if you float over the killer fish. (As far as I can tell a regular jump won't work.) You can get up onto the right beach without the help of the bubble-fish, which means you can leave that whole crowbar business behind unless you're going for the coins underneath the rock or you want to leave your flippers behind at some point. The flippers are also one way to get the coin on the mast of the sunken ship, the other way being to jump off the island in the sky to the left. Flippers also generally save you from time-consuming underwater jumps and waits for other sea creatures. But I think you still need to pogo to the island in the sky anyway, since I haven't found a way to squeeze past the last torch in the smugglers' cave unprotected. And warps and flippers don't change the fact that there are three things you need to take out of the smugglers' cave through water, the second requiring you to bring in a brass key and the third requiring you to bring in a fireproof suit, and the only way to save a trip by bringing out two items at once is to leave your flippers behind, sadly. Flippers also won't help in the mission to retrieve Hookjaw's treasure because you need to save a slot for the bible. So their value to a no-coins run is especially limited.
I noticed that when you blow up the big rock, only the lower piece of shrapnel can kill Dizzy, not the higher one. You can stand on top of the block and stay safe, or you can even stand just far enough away to jump that lower piece.
I was playing around with the boat that takes you to the end of the game, and I noticed a few funny things. First, while you probably already know you'll get the same boat parts from the merchant in the same order no matter which order you hand him the treasures, it also doesn't matter in what order you drop the boat parts into the water; you'll still assemble the boat correctly. So you could drop an ignition key into the water and see it turn into a boat, drop a gallon of petrol on there to turn it into a motor, drop another outboard motor onto it to weigh the boat down with gas, and drop another boat onto the boat to start it up. (And no, I'm pretty sure you can't rehydrate the boat anywhere else.)
And I noticed that the boat doesn't really travel across screens. It's more like there's a second boat that's generated on the next screen as soon as you start up the first boat. Their positions are independent of each other, but a cautious player would wait until each boat reaches the edge of the screen, maintaining the illusion that a single boat crosses over the edge. But you don't need to wait for either boat to move to make the final jump.
I also played in the "sound effects only" mode for a while. Music mode has almost all of the sound effects anyway, though; sound-effects-only only adds a "fut fut" noise when Dizzy walks or jumps. The walking noise is different inside the big fish. There you're actually forced into sound-effects mode for that one screen if you were already in music mode. If you switch back to music mode inside the fish, it doesn't disable the special walking noise, and the music restarts when you exit the fish. Speaking of music, why does the NSF file for this game contain 6 songs that are never heard in the game? Did the composer get ambitious and start programming music for events that were never added? And why is it so easy to glitch up the music in Super Robin Hood?
Oh yeah, I played a little Super Robin Hood on one of the compilation ROMs for Pegasus I found. Pegasus 4-in-1 is a mix of the Quattro cartridges for NES, containing Soccer Simulator from Quattro Sports, Go Dizzy Go from Quattro Arcade, and Boomerang Kid and Super Robin Hood from Quattro Adventure. These ROMs don't seem to have great emulator compatibility, as I had to try Nestopia to get them to start at all, and even that wouldn't load Go Dizzy Go or Boomerang Kid. Super Robin Hood worked just fine, though, and I even opened the supersecret passage again! Pegasus 5-in-1 is quite amazing, as it contains BigNose Freaks Out, MicroMachines, The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, Ultimate Stuntman, and BigNose the Caveman--which had all been released as stand-alone NES cartridges! But why is the second BigNose game first and the first BigNose game last?
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Oh, I didn't think about that, I was just thinking about how you might lose time hitting the bee in the first place because you'd just ricochet back. But maybe if you can time it so you collide right at the edge of the platform, that might not waste time at all, or you could hit it when it was going to be in your way for a second anyway. Yeah, I'll look out for any places where a ledge is directly over another ledge, or where there wouldn't be enough room for Dizzy to reach the peak of his jump before hitting the underside of a ledge, so Dizzy could do a "hooked jump" exactly when the backwards fever wears off like you're imagining, though I can't think of any now.
I did start to think about all the places where the ground doesn't line up across screens. When Dizzy enters a screen with lower ground, he'll fall for a moment first. When he enters one with higher ground, he'll float up through the ground. So I'll want to look out for any exploits involving walking inside the ground for a moment, or involving jumping off the air when Dizzy enters the screen, the way I found those blank screens by jumping off the air from the pebble warp.
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Here's a map of Treasure Island Dizzy too.
Right now I've just got everything mapped in its initial state, but later I'll want to add the hidden coins and label everything.
What annoys me about the map is how it makes possible jumps look impossible, due to the way screen transitions work. Like here:
Or here:
hello broken trees
Or heck, remember the beginning of the game?
Would you have guessed it's the FIRST jump where you need a boost?
It also annoys me that it looks like you should be able to squeeze through this gap but you can't.
Couldn't they have just closed it up?
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Here's the map with labels! Numbers are next to keys, while letters are the approximate locations of "secret" keys. Black-on-white is for causes, while white-on-black is placed on effects. I also added a few objects that De Vol left out, but I didn't change the really minor stuff. Please let me know if you have heard of any secrets that I haven't found, because I know they can be hard to come across sometimes and I don't want to miss anything! Like in this room:
I thought I remembered I once made that top ladder reach down into the room somehow, but maybe I remember wrong and I'm actually remembering wanting to climb that ladder the first time I visited, or I'm remembering using a savestate to get back up when I fell off it later.
I played a little Treasure Island Dizzy today, and I found a warp that I didn't see mentioned on the old topic or the online guides I checked!
Just press B here...
...and you'll be sent over here!
If you take the magic pebble with you, this will allow you to bring items over to either side of the island without ever stepping in the water. Could be useful!
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That could be, maybe they were going to give out fewer hearts or have extra lives cost more too.
But I'm posting now because the mystery is solved! I may still not understand 6502 assembly very well, but using a debugger checkpoint while playing around turned out to be a great idea.
What you have to do is jam Robin's face squarely into this gargoyle's.
That's all it takes to skip the first three sets of treasures! I must have tested jumping off that chain very thoroughly the first time I explored there. I was able to run straight over there and open that passage from a fresh new game, too.
So now I can stop worrying about that, and I'm now over halfway through labeling the map, and then it will be easier to plan routes. After that I should find out what the effects of negative treasure counts are on the ladder to Maid Marion, just for fun!
Oh and that "unavoidable mystery key" did turn out to open just one door, which was placed after the key, but I was able to confirm which door thanks to the big shortcut. So that was pretty pointless since you won't run into the door closed unless you know about that shortcut, but it is mapped closed on the vgmaps.com map, so I wonder if the mapper was cheating to skip ahead or just said "Oops, I must have forgotten to record this door closed; I'll just grab tiles from the other closed doors to fix it!"
Also, before I forget, I want to mention another technique: When there's a ladder in the floor, you should jump on it, and you'll fall straight through instead of having to climb down some first. I think Robin will grab on automatically if it's to go down to the next screen, though.
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Well, I don't think I'm much closer to finding the trigger for that super-shortcut, but I've come up with a few more ideas. First off, I noticed a few more memory addresses that may be useful to watch. While 0648, 0649, and 064A show the status of a bunch of secret passages by which bit flags are cleared, when I managed to get a cheat on one to stick, it actually made me unable to open the secret passage anymore. But then I remembered that the same secret passage that was linked to 0649 was also linked to 0661, and I found some more success with modifying 0660 and up, where setting bit flags is how the game keeps track of which secret passages or treasures or whatever you've already gotten. Cheating them doesn't do anything right away; you have to reload the area with the cheat already on, by leaving by ladder or dying, and then you'll see a change! So by setting 02 in address 0662 on the totals screen, I can make the super-shortcut open at the very beginning of the game! That's a nice way to skip to the last 3 sets of treasures.
But I hadn't been messing with cheats at all when I first opened that big secret. I was just testing things with savestates in order to fill in a map. So unless there was some rare minor savestate corruption going on, then I think there has to be a legitimate way to open that thing, and it's simply very obscure. I just wish I could pinpoint it. I've been messing around with FCEUX's debugger all evening, in hopes of working backwards from where the game calls for 064x and 066x to be rewritten and seeing what it might be checking for, but this code gets so confusing so fast! I only hope someone with more experience with this stuff happens to see this topic and will lend me a hand...
By the way, a couple more observations about the general gameplay: I only recently noticed that while you can't seem to do anything about Robin Hood's speed during a jump, if you simply step off a ledge rather than jumping off, you can steer Robin left or right throughout his descent. So you can do a hooked drop from a higher alcove to a lower alcove in the same wall. Additionally, when you fall off a ledge and hold A as you pass a ladder, Robin will jump from the ladder and keep his current speed. Could be useful somewhere, I dunno. Finally...
The glitch-jump isn't just useful for getting through walls and ceilings; by snagging the corner of a raised floor, you can walk around a little bit inside it!
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Oh, is that Mysterious Black Dude? I would still like to know the context of his saying "Remember me?" without having to play the game myself!
Also pictures of baby Ridley would be nice.
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All right, this "jump into a wall" glitch is turning out to be useful.
At least, when it's a thin wall, and there's room to run and jump and fall through, and it's on your left. For some reason it never works for me on walls to the right; I imagine they did the collision detection on left edges better, since most of the locked doors have to block you from the right. And don't jump through the wall shown in the picture before grabbing the treasure, because you won't be able to get back to it afterwards!
Oh, but I found an even bigger secret while labeling the map that's starting to drive me crazy. See, I was trying to find out the purpose of that one key that's directly in your path so you can't avoid collecting it. It seems silly to me if it activates something up ahead, since there would be no way not to activate it and you would never see the thing unactivated and never know what the key did. So I backtracked all the way back to the beginning, looking for any new open doors, since the key made the door opening noise. And at the very beginning, I found this!
It's a flippin' WARP ZONE! You walk through the passage there, but you suddenly end up on the ladder here!
What's more, you are automatically given all the treasures up to that point, so you can continue on and still finish the game!
You don't gain any score, though, and in fact, all the previous treasures and barriers are still in place. They really should have put a wall or something to keep you from backtracking from the warp destination, because if you fall down, you can't get back up, the door you haven't opened prevents you from going further back, and if you collect the heart or the diamond, you set your respawn point in that same trap, and the diamond gives you a glitched negative total of diamonds. However, there IS a way back up, just barely by using the glitch jump to get into the wall and jump through it back on top, and then you can use the platform the key starts to get back some more.
So I kept going from there, passing through more doors from the wrong side by glitch-jumping, and seeing the tiles the negative diamonds gave me. In-game, they first show a blank space, then the letters of PAUSE in reverse, then an arrow, then a piece of Robin's boot. On the totals screen, they go from a blank space to some punctuation to the last couple of letters of the alphabet. But when I got to my first negative crown, I ran into a problem.
I cannot get Robin to pass through this wall. When he gets far enough in that he would normally be able to exit on the left side, he gets stuck with no way out. If I make him duck, he never stops ducking, no matter which way he's facing. So the crazy fun ended there.
Oh, but did I mention? It wasn't actually that mystery key that triggered the secret passage. See, I tried loading some earlier savestates, and it turns out that I had somehow opened that passage much sooner. Savestate 3 was the earliest one where I had already opened the passage, while savestate 2 was the latest one where it wasn't open, so I uploaded both for anyone to play with.
http://www.box.net/shared/uuaq6z8252http://www.box.net/shared/y1vecvczvk
Savestate 2 must have been when I first climbed the first ladder down, and savestate 3 must have been when I was about to test how far down the chain I had to climb to activate the next regular secret passage. At that point I had collected the previous treasure chests, defeated the guard, and blocked the mace ball with the secret spot from the other chain, but I hadn't yet grabbed the key underneath. This was when I was jumping all over the place to try to find more secret spots, so that must have been how I accidentally activated the warp-zone secret passage, but I tried doing all that stuff from savestate 2, and I haven't been able to open the passage again! So now I'm thinking I must have hit something REALLY secret that's almost impossible to find, maybe just a way for testers to skip half the game. Could it require touching a secret spot I forgot to try agin? Getting wedged in a certain wall? Shooting something with an arrow? Riding a ball somewhere or messing with its entrance area? Waiting some amount of time in some spot? Revisiting certain areas? Collecting certain items in a certain order or timeframe? Taking damage from a certain enemy, or not taking any damage for a certain amount of time? Doing any of those actions a certain number of times in a row? A secret button code? Oh good grief I hope I didn't enter a button code by accident...
That's why I call on all NES experts to help with this! I did some RAM searching, and I think 064A corresponds to the state of the secret passage. In states where it wasn't open, 064A was -1 (FF); in states where it was open, 064A was -65 (BF); and when I loaded a state from very late into the game, 064A was 127 (7F), which probably means "Keep the passage sealed, you won't need it anymore." (On another version of the ROM, I had savestates where 064A was -33 (DF), though that was when I was going for least treasure possible.) When I cheated to set 064A to BF, however, the passage didn't open, and it went back to FF as soon as I turned the cheat off, so it may be an expression of the secret being unlocked rather than what decides whether it is. But if it works right, it may save you the trouble of having to run all the way back to the beginning whenever you want to check to see if you've done it!
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This weekend I dedicated to (Super) Robin Hood (Legend Quest)!
One thing I did was find out how little treasure I could collect before seeing Maid Marion!
KISS MY BUTT, RUBIES
The only problem is the ladder won't appear if I don't have all the treasures. There's a sort of Metroid gateway-to-Tourian check going on here. I found that each of the first 6 segments of the ladder is activated by collecting all 8 of a certain kind of treasure. Then I believe the final segment, the one that takes you on top, only appears if the other 6 did. So you could collect 42 treasures, leaving behind only 1 of each kind, and still see no ladder at all. Or you could collect just the 8 goblets and see a couple of rungs floating in mid-air.
Seeing how it's usually harder to avoid the treasure than to collect it, I like to think that it's mainly a way to railroad the player, you know, to make you feel good and secure for progressing along the intended path, while making any huge sequence break worthless. ...Unless that sequence break includes a trick jump from the 8 rubies piece of the ladder! It is cool how you can run all the way from the end of the game back to the beginning of the game if you missed something, though.
So I did some research by watching every Super Robin Hood video on YouTube, and I learned that it's a popular game for a Famiclone called the Pegasus. Also, there's already a partial TAS, but unfortunately TheSwordUser must not have known of any of the "invisible keys", because they would have saved a lot of time. "Invisible keys" are certain spots you can touch to open a secret passage, extend a ladder, or block an enemy--so they're like the regular keys, only you can't see them and there's no indication that you've grabbed them but your own recognition that something in the level's changed. They usually involve touching a corner of the ceiling, sneaking behind where a guard stood, or hanging from the bottom of a chain over lava. I think only one invisible key is required to beat the game. But I bet most of them will make great shortcuts for any speedrun. (And how did TheSwordUser get sent to the wrong room? That could be helpful too!)
I was first introduced to the invisible keys in this walkthrough, which is a nice guide for beginners who are starting to get stumped. (Took me a while to notice that not only do the guards differ in starting HP and firing pattern, but also whether they fire from the waist or from the shoulder, affecting whether you can duck or jump their arrows shot. They have differing sprites for this, sheesh!) Then I found a few more invisible keys on my own by chance, and I started to feel proud of myself, ready to take pictures for you all... until I noticed that more than oneplayer on YouTube has found even more! They even found a way to make the impossible jump!
There are ways to avoid collecting a few keys that will make it so some of the shortcuts aren't necessary, though. The thing that makes it difficult for route planning is just remembering which key does what, since most times you don't see what a key does while grabbing it. Maybe I should deface another map with labels for all the visible and invisible keys and what they correspond to. But first we have to make sure we've found every invisible key, so I suppose that calls for a "touch every tile" crusade!
Life heart/damage management will be another tricky part of planning the game. One thing to bear in mind about the guards with the crossbows is that if you crash into one directly while you're not experiencing prior damage invulnerability, you'll kill him instantly, but you'll lose 3 hearts in the process, which is fatal unless you happen to have the maximum of 4 hearts. (It's 5 hearts that makes you trade in 3 for an extra life, not 6 like the manual says.) So it's probably not economical to do that unless it's something where you have to pass through the guard again with no room to shoot. If you were willing to die doing that, you would waste the fewest hearts by doing it with just 1 heart remaining. But I think in most situations it'll be better to just get hit by an arrow or something first before running through, or jump over, or try a little rapid-fire action... All those other enemies you can't destroy are the ones we should be giving thought to taking damage from first.
If you do plan on dying, I have found that continue points are based on the last treasure you grabbed, the last heart you grabbed, or the ladder you last climbed to enter the current area--whichever came last. Not keys though.
In case anyone cares how to get a high score, here's a breakdown of the scoring system:
10 points for destroying a bat (not necessarily by Robin!)
20 points for delivering a non-fatal hit to a guard (so ones with higher HP are worth more)
50 points for destroying a guard
80 points for collecting an extra heart
150 points for collecting a visible key
200 points for collecting stolen treasure of any kind
10000 points for reaching Maid Marion, thereby ending the game
Since bats respawn infinitely, you can farm them for unlimited points... 10 at a time. Or you can take advantage of the fact that guards regain all their life when you leave the floor they're on, and farm one with multiple hit points near an exit ladder for 20 points per hit as long as you're careful not to shoot when he's red.
One more dumb mystery: Does anyone know why the lives counter on the totals screen maxes out at 6, even though you can actually have up to 11? I can understand if they can't have that many icons on the head-up display, and I can understand if they don't want to bother programming double digits (Linus Spacehead is the same way), but I know the digits up through 9 exist, so why doesn't it use them?!
Whoever finishes a run should remember to do a bunch of extra jumps during the ending to be funny. Robin can keep jumping anytime he's not kneeling until the message screen pops up, and if he's in the middle of a jump when that happens, he'll be stuck up there, blocking the second E in "The End", leaving Marion to stare at his feet! You can also jump from the top of the ladder in order to perform a higher jump once during the ending or even to shoot Marion, but that would delay the ending: It starts when Robin stands on the top platform, resetting his position to above the ladder.
Oh and hey, if anyone does finish a TAS of Super Robin Hood, it would be a great candidate for one of those "game in a map" things that AndyDick makes.
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All right, I finished No Man's Causeway last night, as it was as annoying to record as it usually is to play. I had to wait for all but the first and last lily-tongue things, as well as the first and last bomber-tube-fly-bird things, but I pretended I was waiting for the last lily-tongue thing because I was going to have to wait before jumping over the last bomber-tube-fly-bird thing anyway, and to best manipulate the semi-random pattern of explosion orbs it throws, I needed to change how I moved while it was still far off screen, and standing in one spot until I needed to jump made it easier to change the timing precisely. That isn't too confusing, is it? I also tried jumping to some of the invisible footholds on the right sides of the tall platforms from the left, but Linus would never quite reach them. I decided to use those waiting spots to make Linus duck a lot more than usual to show how scared he must be.
So when I finish Linoville, I think I'll stop and retry all the parts that I had any doubts about, then see if I can upload the first 15 minutes to YouTube in case having a video there attracts more interest in the game.
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Great, I got up the courage to record the bumper car race, on the "Get money and ticket at first opportunity" route. http://www.box.net/shared/x7n0g1x8qg This part I'm a little nervous to settle on, as I don't have any sort of standard for what the perfect time might be, whereas with the platformers I can just say "Keep the screen scrolling!" But with the racecars, I can't even be sure if I'm getting a faster time than on a previous try, except in certain spots on the left and right sides of the track where I can straighten out and line the car up with some part of the wall. So I welcome anyone familiar with racing games, especially top-down ones, to take a look at this mini-game, see if you can come up with any more tips, or try to beat my time. At least it should be easy enough to text-edit in a better race time later, as I haven't gotten desynchs editing anything else in this game.
One thing that's assuring is that unless there are major timesavers to be found in the first two laps that would make it faster to skip the shortcut the third time, then it doesn't really matter if they could have been a little bit better, since I'll still end up waiting for the shortcut to open on the third lap. Another thing that makes it simpler to TAS is that there seems to be no way to influence the other cars. While they can bump you around, they defy Newton's third law of motion and fail to be bumped back. They are also unaffected by holes, and you can even see the green and blue cars drive right through each other at around 30 seconds left and 20 seconds left. I suspect the reason they can't be bumped by anything but walls is that they don't really have AI, just prerecorded paths, as I always see them drive in the same places every time I play, at least in the same version of the game.
So I wasn't able to squeeze between green and blue at the start, but I did squeeze between blue and a hole after that, and I had to skate by each of the others once. I think green might have boosted me a little in the right direction once, actually. I find it funny that although green got the head start, it screws around so much that it's the only car that doesn't make a third lap within the 98 seconds.
Some stuff I noticed about the bumper car's abilities with frame advance is that it can't move more than one pixel per frame in any direction, but it can move one pixel in both of two directions per frame, so that's why diagonal driving looks a bit faster than horizontal or vertical. Obviously the direction you face only influences where the acceleration is applied when you hit A, but all three diagonals that combine the same two directions will max out at one pixel per frame in both directions. So down-down-right and down-right-right will eventually reach and maintain the same direction as down-right, only down-down-right will be slower at maxing out right, and down-right-right will be slower at maxing out down. One more cool thing I noticed is that the game only accepts input for turning once every 4 frames; from the time I started, I just had to remember "One more than a multiple of four is fair game." It's probably an easy way to make it so that if you hold the direction, it'll take your car a full second to turn all the way around. (It's similar to how I noticed that in the platforming stages, the D-pad only accelerates Linus every 2 frames, so every other frame whether you're still holding the button doesn't really matter.)
While hitting corners and walls head-on is generally a bad thing, in certain places I found that grazing a corner a certain way could save some frames by stopping Linus's car from drifting to the side so much, while not interrupting his forward momentum too much for it to help. One time when I was just testing I somehow got thrown inside of a wall, the small rock wall next to the long barrier on the left, but of course I bounced out by the time I managed to save at all, so I don't know what caused it. Probably there's some kind of "seam" to be found in the corners, but I doubt you can get in just by accelerating straight into one. On the other hand, I've also gotten stuck on the shortcut wall where the game won't let me pass through to the left for a while even though it's clearly in the down position. Then there's the usual finding of checkpoints you can touch in a certain order to trigger a lap without actually driving between all those checkpoints, but it really doesn't look as if it would save time to drive around walls extra times to do that.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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CtrlAltDestroy wrote:
I almost feel the need to vote No before even watching it.
I mean, really? A "proper" TAS of this game would have NO GAMEPLAY because you could theoretically start off each floor standing on the staircase, right? Yet somehow it's two hours long...
I've heard the randomness in this game can't be shifted very easily, yet the gameplay in the TAS is pretty blink-and-you'll-miss-it nonetheless. You'd be surprised how long the story actually takes! I would rather you vote no for the plagiarism, or for the things the real author admitted to doing poorly.
jlun2 wrote:
Sorry, Voted No
The reason is that the "blue" version is actually faster than the "red" version due to differences in lag. But good try though! Next time, use the blue version instead.
What makes you so sure of that, and why aren't any other version differences just as important? Can't we have speedruns of both versions?
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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Uh... I guess I should have started experimenting with sending Linus all the way over to his destination before rooting for items sooner, because that helped me save some more time on the first visit to the post office, about 30 frames in total. So you may as well watch http://www.box.net/shared/x7n0g1x8qg from the beginning again. I added the surfing segment and the screen after that, where I used a trick where clearing a message before using Pick Up let me move the cursor again right away instead of waiting for Linus to move. So Linus is doing the telekinetic pick-up again!
It might be a while before I make much progress again, because now I need to do some timing tests regarding Cape Carnival to figure out when to win the money for the camera, when to win the bus ticket, and when to stop and scroll the inventory, which is what those tasks will affect. The Bus Ticket shows up near the bottom, the Gold Lino Dollars are near the top, the missile parts all show up in an area in the middle, and the teleport keys are above those but below the money. So inserting either of those Cape Carnival stops anywhere has to cost some time in having to scroll the inventory one more time. One advantage to racing for the bus ticket at the very next visit to Cape Carnival is that Linus enters the Secret Tunnel from the middle, but he exits it a little to the right, so it saves a bit of running to go to the attendant before the hole. The next two trips through Cape Carnival are from the tunnel back to Old Lino Town to use its teleporter, so the hole positions become a disadvantage then. Also, using the Luk-E-Day machine before seeing the Attendant would make it so the Luk-E-Day's repositioning of the inventory wouldn't matter; I don't have to select any items to race, and it'll just get set to the Bus Ticket afterward anyway. So I feel there's a good chance that doing both before blasting the wall in Linograd will turn out to be the best way.
I'll also need to learn how to TAS-run the bumper car race, which has me a little worried as I've never done this for racing games before, unless Bomberman sliding on ice counts? It looks as if the trickiest part is just squeezing past everybody at the starting line, but I don't know. I wonder how random the cars' A.I. actually is... I haven't really had to deal with randomness at all yet; the Bangers' explosions go in random directions, but jumping over them lets Linus get away before he ever has to worry about it.
Using the tile viewer in the PPU Viewer shed some light on those changed graphics I mentioned before. I'm starting to wonder if the game was originally intended to only use the letters A through Z, the punctuation marks !?. , and the numerals 1 through 0, with no commas, apostrophes, or support for languages other than English. The Nearly Freezing Pool is the giveaway for this, I think, as it has only those characters, so I like to imagine the developers simply forgot to update that area later (or they were seriously set on making that whole plant fit in), and that's the reason for some apostrophe 'mistakes' like "Its too wet for that." But in addition, the big versions of those characters are all neatly in a row together, with the smaller versions all in a row a few lines down. The other characters are spread somewhat haphazardly between those two lines, each character having its small tile immediately after its big tile. The Camera Shop is interesting, because while it does have ,, ', Ç, Ä, Ö, and Ü, it's missing the ¡, ¿, É, and - that other areas have. Did it get an in-between character set, perhaps from before Spanish was added? I tend to think Cosmic Spacehead still could have squeezed in enough tiles for the sign, but oh well. It's funny how when those tiles between the text characters aren't needed, they're always the floor and upper wall tiles from the Post Office.
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Nach wrote:
Derakon wrote:
Because sometimes it causes undesirable flicker. It happens that in LoZ it was used to fake Z-occlusion, so it's desirable here.
Uh, I'm pretty certain Baxter pointed out that the hack is not desirable here. It makes Link look like he's jumping over walls instead of walking through passageways.
I think Derakon meant that the sprite limit was desirable, not the hack to remove it.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Hey, shopkeep, where's your empty bucket this time?
Unfortunately I didn't find any more secret warps there, or anywhere else in the game even after I mashed B on every single spot. You could argue that I should try dropping every item on every spot, in case there's an alternate use (thinking of how trying to use the grave-digger's spade on Hookjaw's grave pops up a message telling you he safeguarded against that), but I'm not up for B-mashing every piece of ground another ten times, or A-mashing with the pogo or whatever, and I doubt anything will come of it. Now I'm not surprised that the secret warp from over the blasting area to the area past the other grave wasn't found by that guide writer, since there's only one spot you can stand on to trigger it, while the other two warps have a range of eight steps that will work. It's not hard to position yourself though, since it's on the edge, so you can just tap right on the screen to the left.
I did find a spot where Dizzy perpetually snaps between two screens until you move him to one side! Yeah...
The flippers could be a valuable item for sequence breaks. The only thing you actually need the flippers for is escaping with the coin at the very bottom of the ocean. You can get to the dynamite from the left, and into the whole smugglers' cave without digging up the grave, if you float over the killer fish. (As far as I can tell a regular jump won't work.) You can get up onto the right beach without the help of the bubble-fish, which means you can leave that whole crowbar business behind unless you're going for the coins underneath the rock or you want to leave your flippers behind at some point. The flippers are also one way to get the coin on the mast of the sunken ship, the other way being to jump off the island in the sky to the left. Flippers also generally save you from time-consuming underwater jumps and waits for other sea creatures. But I think you still need to pogo to the island in the sky anyway, since I haven't found a way to squeeze past the last torch in the smugglers' cave unprotected. And warps and flippers don't change the fact that there are three things you need to take out of the smugglers' cave through water, the second requiring you to bring in a brass key and the third requiring you to bring in a fireproof suit, and the only way to save a trip by bringing out two items at once is to leave your flippers behind, sadly. Flippers also won't help in the mission to retrieve Hookjaw's treasure because you need to save a slot for the bible. So their value to a no-coins run is especially limited.
I noticed that when you blow up the big rock, only the lower piece of shrapnel can kill Dizzy, not the higher one. You can stand on top of the block and stay safe, or you can even stand just far enough away to jump that lower piece.
I was playing around with the boat that takes you to the end of the game, and I noticed a few funny things. First, while you probably already know you'll get the same boat parts from the merchant in the same order no matter which order you hand him the treasures, it also doesn't matter in what order you drop the boat parts into the water; you'll still assemble the boat correctly. So you could drop an ignition key into the water and see it turn into a boat, drop a gallon of petrol on there to turn it into a motor, drop another outboard motor onto it to weigh the boat down with gas, and drop another boat onto the boat to start it up. (And no, I'm pretty sure you can't rehydrate the boat anywhere else.)
And I noticed that the boat doesn't really travel across screens. It's more like there's a second boat that's generated on the next screen as soon as you start up the first boat. Their positions are independent of each other, but a cautious player would wait until each boat reaches the edge of the screen, maintaining the illusion that a single boat crosses over the edge. But you don't need to wait for either boat to move to make the final jump.
I also played in the "sound effects only" mode for a while. Music mode has almost all of the sound effects anyway, though; sound-effects-only only adds a "fut fut" noise when Dizzy walks or jumps. The walking noise is different inside the big fish. There you're actually forced into sound-effects mode for that one screen if you were already in music mode. If you switch back to music mode inside the fish, it doesn't disable the special walking noise, and the music restarts when you exit the fish. Speaking of music, why does the NSF file for this game contain 6 songs that are never heard in the game? Did the composer get ambitious and start programming music for events that were never added? And why is it so easy to glitch up the music in Super Robin Hood?
Oh yeah, I played a little Super Robin Hood on one of the compilation ROMs for Pegasus I found. Pegasus 4-in-1 is a mix of the Quattro cartridges for NES, containing Soccer Simulator from Quattro Sports, Go Dizzy Go from Quattro Arcade, and Boomerang Kid and Super Robin Hood from Quattro Adventure. These ROMs don't seem to have great emulator compatibility, as I had to try Nestopia to get them to start at all, and even that wouldn't load Go Dizzy Go or Boomerang Kid. Super Robin Hood worked just fine, though, and I even opened the supersecret passage again! Pegasus 5-in-1 is quite amazing, as it contains BigNose Freaks Out, MicroMachines, The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, Ultimate Stuntman, and BigNose the Caveman--which had all been released as stand-alone NES cartridges! But why is the second BigNose game first and the first BigNose game last?
Or here:
hello broken trees
Or heck, remember the beginning of the game?
Would you have guessed it's the FIRST jump where you need a boost?
It also annoys me that it looks like you should be able to squeeze through this gap but you can't.
Couldn't they have just closed it up?
I thought I remembered I once made that top ladder reach down into the room somehow, but maybe I remember wrong and I'm actually remembering wanting to climb that ladder the first time I visited, or I'm remembering using a savestate to get back up when I fell off it later.
I played a little Treasure Island Dizzy today, and I found a warp that I didn't see mentioned on the old topic or the online guides I checked!
Just press B here...
...and you'll be sent over here!
If you take the magic pebble with you, this will allow you to bring items over to either side of the island without ever stepping in the water. Could be useful!
That's all it takes to skip the first three sets of treasures! I must have tested jumping off that chain very thoroughly the first time I explored there. I was able to run straight over there and open that passage from a fresh new game, too.
So now I can stop worrying about that, and I'm now over halfway through labeling the map, and then it will be easier to plan routes. After that I should find out what the effects of negative treasure counts are on the ladder to Maid Marion, just for fun!
Oh and that "unavoidable mystery key" did turn out to open just one door, which was placed after the key, but I was able to confirm which door thanks to the big shortcut. So that was pretty pointless since you won't run into the door closed unless you know about that shortcut, but it is mapped closed on the vgmaps.com map, so I wonder if the mapper was cheating to skip ahead or just said "Oops, I must have forgotten to record this door closed; I'll just grab tiles from the other closed doors to fix it!"
Also, before I forget, I want to mention another technique: When there's a ladder in the floor, you should jump on it, and you'll fall straight through instead of having to climb down some first. I think Robin will grab on automatically if it's to go down to the next screen, though.
The glitch-jump isn't just useful for getting through walls and ceilings; by snagging the corner of a raised floor, you can walk around a little bit inside it!
At least, when it's a thin wall, and there's room to run and jump and fall through, and it's on your left. For some reason it never works for me on walls to the right; I imagine they did the collision detection on left edges better, since most of the locked doors have to block you from the right. And don't jump through the wall shown in the picture before grabbing the treasure, because you won't be able to get back to it afterwards!
Oh, but I found an even bigger secret while labeling the map that's starting to drive me crazy. See, I was trying to find out the purpose of that one key that's directly in your path so you can't avoid collecting it. It seems silly to me if it activates something up ahead, since there would be no way not to activate it and you would never see the thing unactivated and never know what the key did. So I backtracked all the way back to the beginning, looking for any new open doors, since the key made the door opening noise. And at the very beginning, I found this!
It's a flippin' WARP ZONE! You walk through the passage there, but you suddenly end up on the ladder here!
What's more, you are automatically given all the treasures up to that point, so you can continue on and still finish the game!
You don't gain any score, though, and in fact, all the previous treasures and barriers are still in place. They really should have put a wall or something to keep you from backtracking from the warp destination, because if you fall down, you can't get back up, the door you haven't opened prevents you from going further back, and if you collect the heart or the diamond, you set your respawn point in that same trap, and the diamond gives you a glitched negative total of diamonds. However, there IS a way back up, just barely by using the glitch jump to get into the wall and jump through it back on top, and then you can use the platform the key starts to get back some more.
So I kept going from there, passing through more doors from the wrong side by glitch-jumping, and seeing the tiles the negative diamonds gave me. In-game, they first show a blank space, then the letters of PAUSE in reverse, then an arrow, then a piece of Robin's boot. On the totals screen, they go from a blank space to some punctuation to the last couple of letters of the alphabet. But when I got to my first negative crown, I ran into a problem.
I cannot get Robin to pass through this wall. When he gets far enough in that he would normally be able to exit on the left side, he gets stuck with no way out. If I make him duck, he never stops ducking, no matter which way he's facing. So the crazy fun ended there.
Oh, but did I mention? It wasn't actually that mystery key that triggered the secret passage. See, I tried loading some earlier savestates, and it turns out that I had somehow opened that passage much sooner. Savestate 3 was the earliest one where I had already opened the passage, while savestate 2 was the latest one where it wasn't open, so I uploaded both for anyone to play with.
http://www.box.net/shared/uuaq6z8252
http://www.box.net/shared/y1vecvczvk
Savestate 2 must have been when I first climbed the first ladder down, and savestate 3 must have been when I was about to test how far down the chain I had to climb to activate the next regular secret passage. At that point I had collected the previous treasure chests, defeated the guard, and blocked the mace ball with the secret spot from the other chain, but I hadn't yet grabbed the key underneath. This was when I was jumping all over the place to try to find more secret spots, so that must have been how I accidentally activated the warp-zone secret passage, but I tried doing all that stuff from savestate 2, and I haven't been able to open the passage again! So now I'm thinking I must have hit something REALLY secret that's almost impossible to find, maybe just a way for testers to skip half the game. Could it require touching a secret spot I forgot to try agin? Getting wedged in a certain wall? Shooting something with an arrow? Riding a ball somewhere or messing with its entrance area? Waiting some amount of time in some spot? Revisiting certain areas? Collecting certain items in a certain order or timeframe? Taking damage from a certain enemy, or not taking any damage for a certain amount of time? Doing any of those actions a certain number of times in a row? A secret button code? Oh good grief I hope I didn't enter a button code by accident...
That's why I call on all NES experts to help with this! I did some RAM searching, and I think 064A corresponds to the state of the secret passage. In states where it wasn't open, 064A was -1 (FF); in states where it was open, 064A was -65 (BF); and when I loaded a state from very late into the game, 064A was 127 (7F), which probably means "Keep the passage sealed, you won't need it anymore." (On another version of the ROM, I had savestates where 064A was -33 (DF), though that was when I was going for least treasure possible.) When I cheated to set 064A to BF, however, the passage didn't open, and it went back to FF as soon as I turned the cheat off, so it may be an expression of the secret being unlocked rather than what decides whether it is. But if it works right, it may save you the trouble of having to run all the way back to the beginning whenever you want to check to see if you've done it!
KISS MY BUTT, RUBIES
The only problem is the ladder won't appear if I don't have all the treasures. There's a sort of Metroid gateway-to-Tourian check going on here. I found that each of the first 6 segments of the ladder is activated by collecting all 8 of a certain kind of treasure. Then I believe the final segment, the one that takes you on top, only appears if the other 6 did. So you could collect 42 treasures, leaving behind only 1 of each kind, and still see no ladder at all. Or you could collect just the 8 goblets and see a couple of rungs floating in mid-air.
Seeing how it's usually harder to avoid the treasure than to collect it, I like to think that it's mainly a way to railroad the player, you know, to make you feel good and secure for progressing along the intended path, while making any huge sequence break worthless. ...Unless that sequence break includes a trick jump from the 8 rubies piece of the ladder! It is cool how you can run all the way from the end of the game back to the beginning of the game if you missed something, though.
So I did some research by watching every Super Robin Hood video on YouTube, and I learned that it's a popular game for a Famiclone called the Pegasus. Also, there's already a partial TAS, but unfortunately TheSwordUser must not have known of any of the "invisible keys", because they would have saved a lot of time. "Invisible keys" are certain spots you can touch to open a secret passage, extend a ladder, or block an enemy--so they're like the regular keys, only you can't see them and there's no indication that you've grabbed them but your own recognition that something in the level's changed. They usually involve touching a corner of the ceiling, sneaking behind where a guard stood, or hanging from the bottom of a chain over lava. I think only one invisible key is required to beat the game. But I bet most of them will make great shortcuts for any speedrun. (And how did TheSwordUser get sent to the wrong room? That could be helpful too!)
I was first introduced to the invisible keys in this walkthrough, which is a nice guide for beginners who are starting to get stumped. (Took me a while to notice that not only do the guards differ in starting HP and firing pattern, but also whether they fire from the waist or from the shoulder, affecting whether you can duck or jump their arrows shot. They have differing sprites for this, sheesh!) Then I found a few more invisible keys on my own by chance, and I started to feel proud of myself, ready to take pictures for you all... until I noticed that more than one player on YouTube has found even more! They even found a way to make the impossible jump!
There are ways to avoid collecting a few keys that will make it so some of the shortcuts aren't necessary, though. The thing that makes it difficult for route planning is just remembering which key does what, since most times you don't see what a key does while grabbing it. Maybe I should deface another map with labels for all the visible and invisible keys and what they correspond to. But first we have to make sure we've found every invisible key, so I suppose that calls for a "touch every tile" crusade!
Life heart/damage management will be another tricky part of planning the game. One thing to bear in mind about the guards with the crossbows is that if you crash into one directly while you're not experiencing prior damage invulnerability, you'll kill him instantly, but you'll lose 3 hearts in the process, which is fatal unless you happen to have the maximum of 4 hearts. (It's 5 hearts that makes you trade in 3 for an extra life, not 6 like the manual says.) So it's probably not economical to do that unless it's something where you have to pass through the guard again with no room to shoot. If you were willing to die doing that, you would waste the fewest hearts by doing it with just 1 heart remaining. But I think in most situations it'll be better to just get hit by an arrow or something first before running through, or jump over, or try a little rapid-fire action... All those other enemies you can't destroy are the ones we should be giving thought to taking damage from first.
If you do plan on dying, I have found that continue points are based on the last treasure you grabbed, the last heart you grabbed, or the ladder you last climbed to enter the current area--whichever came last. Not keys though.
In case anyone cares how to get a high score, here's a breakdown of the scoring system:
10 points for destroying a bat (not necessarily by Robin!)
20 points for delivering a non-fatal hit to a guard (so ones with higher HP are worth more)
50 points for destroying a guard
80 points for collecting an extra heart
150 points for collecting a visible key
200 points for collecting stolen treasure of any kind
10000 points for reaching Maid Marion, thereby ending the game
Since bats respawn infinitely, you can farm them for unlimited points... 10 at a time. Or you can take advantage of the fact that guards regain all their life when you leave the floor they're on, and farm one with multiple hit points near an exit ladder for 20 points per hit as long as you're careful not to shoot when he's red.
One more dumb mystery: Does anyone know why the lives counter on the totals screen maxes out at 6, even though you can actually have up to 11? I can understand if they can't have that many icons on the head-up display, and I can understand if they don't want to bother programming double digits (Linus Spacehead is the same way), but I know the digits up through 9 exist, so why doesn't it use them?!
Whoever finishes a run should remember to do a bunch of extra jumps during the ending to be funny. Robin can keep jumping anytime he's not kneeling until the message screen pops up, and if he's in the middle of a jump when that happens, he'll be stuck up there, blocking the second E in "The End", leaving Marion to stare at his feet! You can also jump from the top of the ladder in order to perform a higher jump once during the ending or even to shoot Marion, but that would delay the ending: It starts when Robin stands on the top platform, resetting his position to above the ladder.
Oh and hey, if anyone does finish a TAS of Super Robin Hood, it would be a great candidate for one of those "game in a map" things that AndyDick makes.