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Yeah, that's why I said once that some of the later games may rely on the starting folder a lot more. Or they may rely even more on a quickly-obtained "silver bullet" strategy like GutsShoot; I remember Atma was manipulating a jammed buster bug in the 5th game that he found both encouraging and discouraging for how much it speeds up battles.
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MegaMan has really gotten addicted to refilling Super Arrow, hasn't he?
I liked this run because:
Eddie helped!
You pulled off a successful Power Stone strategy against ChargeMan! That seems annoying to perfect.
Pre-emptive strike against a boss with the Super Arrow! When I saw that I thought, "Will that kill him? No, it only took 1 notch. But wait, if the weakness does 3 notches, then the Super Arrow already took care of the remainder after 9 shots do 27!"
This game could have used more dialog boxes, though.
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What, is it that little rising floor spike against the left wall? You can't jump onto just a little of the edge or jump off quickly enough or teleport in another way?
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Was it a bonus for never getting hit, or a bonus for ending the level with full health? Because if it's only full health you need, then you just have to remember to save a turkey or molecule for after you touch things like the bunnies.
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I wouldn't mind seeing the cameras and bricks get shot out. Fun little diversion.
I noticed someone in the IRC channel was complaining that we shouldn't publish runs of "demos" of games. I didn't check back in time to join the conversation, though. The way I understand it, each "episode" of an Apogee shareware game is its own executable, and the first part you can get for free is really no different from the first part you have once you register to get the other two parts. Thus parts 2 and 3 of Duke Nukem 1 should have separate runs too, unless you want some way to load multiple games in a row, but I don't see the point of that.
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Just going for highest possible score could be exciting! So you would collect every item and blast every enemy in reach, including those Acme signs you need perfect timing to shoot, except you want to touch Energizer bunnies for more points, and shoot colas and turkeys for more points. Collect the DUKE letters in order, and whatever else gets you an end-level bonus!
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Oh hey, I'm finally going to respond to the original post now! :D
FrostyTheDragon wrote:
Is it possible to get Cannon C from the Canodumb viruses in Den Area?
Yes, I know it's possible at Busting Level S anyway. If you can't get it at under 10, then I believe you would need to think up some multi-kill strategy.
However, a recent discovery shows that there's more to the chips dropped from viruses than just busting level. http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/genmessage.php?board=561218&topic=52365525 It seems that fighting a battle with lower HP will change what codes a virus can drop its chips in. I think I was able to win Cannon E from Canodumbs once because of this. But I imagine it would waste a lot of time to lower your HP before a battle if you were also trying to get a good Busting Level in it. Maybe you could do it with the vampires in the NetCastle Computers, or in individual battles in the same run-through such as the Chng.bat guardians or FreezeMan's ice. I was also thinking that, since a couple of the Chng.bat guardians send out TuffBunnies (unless you're playing Hard mode), one of those battles should be where you win the ZapRing2 B you need to give someone later.
FrostyTheDragon wrote:
I call this strategy "The Snake Pit". You need either a Geddon1 or Geddon2 chip (Geddon1 is slower as you need to break the panels yourself, but I'm not sure Geddon2 can be gotten in any Chip Traders even with TAS luck manipulation). Use that, then use a Snakeman chip boosted as high as possible. If you get lucky with the Chip Trader I believe the maximum boost this can get is +160 (four Wood +40s). Maybe if you also used an AreaGrab chip (I'm assuming the extra snakes can only come out of holes on your side), it'd have the potential to OHKO Gospel (11 snakes, plus the bite at the end. With the lowest Snakeman chip, that's (30+160)* 12, which equals 2280).
As far as I can tell, SnakeMan's snakes don't home in on enemies; they simply shoot straight down the same row they started from. So at best you could hit Gospel with 4 snakes.
Okay I just tested this, and it appears that the snakes can home in, but they're limited in the same way as GaterMagic's projectiles: If the target's not adjacent to the snake's starting point, it can only drift downward (plus forward, never straight vertically or backward). The snake will miss a far target in a higher row. (Seriously, downward? Why the asymmetry? Tell me this isn't an obscure emulator bug...) Since Gospel is in the middle row, that meant I could only attack with 2 snakes per column in the best of conditions. With an AreaSteal, Geddon2, and no flying junk in the way, I was able to do as much as 450 to Gospel with a single unboosted SnakeManV3, which means 9 hits including the bite. Close enough to what you were imagining, I suppose.
...Okay wait, now it doesn't seem to work for snakes to fly to a diagonally adjacent panel; I checked my PanelOut3 test on Bass again, and whenever I used SnakeMan on an entire empty column when Bass was at the top, it was only the bottom snake that flew upward. Something special about having a whole column in front of somebody? I dunno, I think I've had enough with testing this.
You also need to keep in mind that Battle Network 2 doesn't have the advantage in planning where a detour to an extra chip or power-up can be partially justified by its contributing to the arbitrary requirements the first game had. The total time you spend obtaining an extra item needs to be less than the time it saves in future battles. Because of this, I imagine that much of a TAS would be completed with mostly the starting folder, which I suppose could be interesting enough in itself.
Ah, but maybe you could get a few lucky drops from a chip trader for a Program Advance, once I figure out exactly what the traders are capable of producing in what circumstances! I know you can get 30 free Guard chips after beating ThunderMan and 20 more free Guard chips after beating MagnetMan, so that's like 5 free uses of a 10-chip trader right there! I discovered once that even with minimum completion, I could potentially win GateManV2 from the Netopia Town trader right off the bat, meaning a GaterMagic strategy for the last half of the game is conceivable!
Come to think of it, that could be another use of a dual-rerecording VBA: Obtain any of the 6 Retro Chips mid-game with a Retro Chip Trader! Have the other game be Battle Network 1, and let it collect a few chips and screw around until Battle Network 2 needs it to Network.
Zurreco wrote:
subanark wrote:
Do you think a hard mode run though would be more entertaining?
I can't see any reason to use SRAM just to make a movie longer.
I wouldn't be so sure. One issue with being able to avoid all random battles is that the speedrun turns into a lot of running around overworld maps with not much battling, which is supposed to be the real meat of the gameplay. Having to face tougher viruses in the forced battles could definitely make the battles longer, but that could be a good thing, especially as the player has to come up with better strategies to keep the battles fast overall.
Beergut wrote:
But it looks like that 5 star run looks like it will remain a pipe-dream.
It's still fun to think about. Imagine planning which Program Advance to form on which necessary battle.
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Ah, a reply! Sorry that I still haven't updated the MMBN1 run yet. I guess I had too much fun researching MMBN2, took too long of a break, and haven't been able to get back into the TAS groove. I still think I can finish one of these days if I put my mind to it, but if I give up for real, I'll let you know.
Now, MMBN2 planning: I never got around to posting about the rest of it until now, but I finished a "minimal" playthrough of the game once. It turns out the game does NOT have any library or level checkpoints like the first game. As far as end-game stats go, you can have as little as 8 MB regular memory, level 8 on the status screen, and 17/250 library entries. That's 6 new chips forced upon you: 4 that are actually given to you, and 2 that you're forced to find somewhere to give to somebody else. Level 8 is from a forced HPMemory worth 1 level and a forced Style Change worth 6 levels, and the RegUps are mainly from license exams. (I could give more details if you want, but my old computer won't start up anymore, so it'll take me a while to double-check everything.)
As for key items: The one ElBit that seems to be optional is ElBit232, since it only leads to a RegUp1. For the FreezeMan scenario, you need some way to get back into the Netopian Net, whether it's ONBACode, GateKeyC after using GateKeyA (or, long way, GateKeyB) ahead of time, or simply taking the FreePass from your e-mail and jacking into Millions' Bag and opening the cube or jacking into Raoul's Radio and breaking the red ice. Some shortcuts will allow you to bypass certain ice-cube battles, at the expense of whatever you fought to obtain the shortcuts. Otherwise, all GateKeys other than D are unnecessary, and RaulCode and MiliCode are forced upon you while the other Codes are unnecessary to obtain.
Oh, funny thing about the "robbed in Netopia" scenario: Even if you empty all your chips/money before boarding, you still get "robbed" of your nothing. Leave with 0 zenny, and Lan will still think he was pickpocketed and be able to fight the would-be pickpocket for no prize other than what the virus battle gives. (Either way the battle is optional though.) Give all your battle chips away to another cartridge, and your ride will still think he's stealing something from your Pack, Lan and MegaMan will still get mad at each other and have to fight ThunderMan and a HeelNavi to get their Passport back, and they'll still feel forced to confront Mrs. Millions and battle SnakeMan for chips she doesn't have before they can go to bed. So you can't bypass any story that way, sorry.
All right, so considering 5 stars? That sounds interesting, except you need to be able to link cartridges to earn the 10 secret chips, which are dropped randomly by fighting another player who also has at least 3 stars. If possible, I think the easiest way to set this up would be to duplicate the input file made up until you get the 4 stars, then continue both games at once so that one player wins all the secret chips from all the battles. That could be tedious both to record and to watch, especially if the luck manipulation is difficult. Not to mention, it might be more efficient for one input file to be redone so that it's much weaker than the other player by the time it achieves 3 stars so that its MegaMan can die faster, but that may take quite a bit more work. I don't even know how close VisualBoyAdvance is to being able to record linked games, so that may have to stay a dream for now, as would a run done in Hard mode which requires 5 stars to unlock in the first place.
Since the postgame is fairly interesting, how about just a green star run? Beating RealBass gives you a nice little "ending" where you see statistics on how you've battled throughout the game. However, there might be some high requirements to get to that point. I know that the door to the WWW Area asks for a library of at least 130/250, and I remember reading that the trigger to fighting NapalmMan is beating all the V3 Navis or getting all their chips or something like that. I think I also read that PlanetMan requires 200/250 library completion, but I think there's also an SSS License cube in the way of him, and didn't that license exam also have its own excessive requirements? Hmm...
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Okay, I'll be honest: I've taken a break from Battle Network 1 to play Battle Network 2 some more! So until I feel like tackling ElecMan's stage again, I'm going to try to put together some valuable research in case someone wants to make an EXE 2 TAS. Fortunately this topic is for both games, so I can report that stuff here too!
Now that I've beaten the game and seen most of what it has to offer, I'm going back through it with a "minimalist" philosophy to see how little the player has to do in order to beat Gospel. I'm also stopping to run the trader-trying bot as each trader opens so I can see which chips they can give you for the very first time.
I am avoiding random battles everywhere to keep Lan's inventory to a minimum, but unfortunately the second game has a lot more forced battles than the first game, so I'm starting to see what was taking dirk456 so long: The strings of 5 battles during the license exams, the HeelNavis you meet on certain mandatory missions, the guardians of Chng.bat, FreezeMan's ice cubes that are in your way, the forced rematches against 6 of the Navis... All those things add up, to the point that this game has over three times as many required battles as the first one, even though it doesn't really have any more Navis as part of the story.
Now, I finally decided to post here because I discovered something interesting: A speedrun WILL get a Style Change in the Mother Computer! Originally I had understood a guide about Style Changes to mean that only fighting 280 battles could give you a Change, so I thought a TAS would come nowhere near that number when there are only sixty or seventy required battles altogether. But it turns out that the trigger to getting your first Style Change in jacking into the first Mother Computer console; after that, your next battle will get you the Style for sure, even if you jack out and jack in somewhere else or fight a friendly Navi or something. Since MegaMan automatically equips a Style when he receives it, it would waste time to switch back to NormalStyle, so I think we should give serious thought to finding the best Style for speed and figure out how and when it's decided, to see if it can be influenced in a reasonable amount of time.
This sort of complexity is why I don't think I'm up to the challenge of TASing MMBN2, but I'll gladly help out someone who wants to with discoveries like this!
...
Oops, and I just found one other thing: The first Mother Computer stage has a forced random battle. That is, if you manage to reach a certain point in the room without having beaten any viruses, you WILL fight a virus battle there, even if you weren't "due" for another random battle yet. And although what you actually fight there is random, there's no way out of it; they even disabled the Escape chip! So I guess the programmers really didn't want you to avoid getting your first Style Change in that area, or otherwise a TAS would have gotten it from ShadowMan. So that's another thing to plan, which random battle to try to get there.
...Another update: I forgot to try opening the menu on the trigger line for that forced battle until now! It has some strange effects, but it does skip the battle just fine, and it probably won't mess up anything later on. So now I have confirmed you can get your very first Style Change from ShadowMan as I had thought.
Oh yeah, and you might already know this, but a special Style can charge up even if your Charge stat is 1. Or at least, Guts style can... Still have to test the others later.
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Oh wow, you really did warp out of the level just by touching some random corner. I was expecting you to have to fall through the floor first, where touching the bottom of the screen sends you out of the level anywhere. Maybe Tails' location zipped way down for a frame or two somehow?
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p0rtal_0f_rain wrote:
If it's the actual game cartridge they're talking about, yeah, I see that. But, would it be the same way if it was being dumped? I've seen ROM dumps where certain bugs were added, taken away, or both.
I think that sort of thing is pretty rare, except when the developers hide bugs in the game on purpose as a means of copy protection, so that an incomplete copy or flawed emulation could activate the bug and make the game a lot harder, or freeze up at a critical moment, or anything like that.
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I think the one way you can skip the Beat scene is to lose all your lives after collecting the last part...
only I'm sure that would take much longer. :/
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