Well, I've been going by what seems to be faster to me. I think the double shot does 3 times the single shot's damage, while the triple shot does 7 times the single shot's damage. But the double shot can be charged up a lot faster than the triple shot, so I figure I can usually fire off three double shots in about the same time as it would take to get in a triple shot and thus do more damage that way. But then again, the triple shot does have the advantage of being able to hit multiple enemies because it doesn't get absorbed when it hits something. So there's a little room for variety there.
I thought I did a pretty good job on the first mini-boss, but I guess I could look into other ways of fighting him. What's funny about his barrels is that their hit detection is a bit low. If I fired a shot while standing, the shot would strike the barrel instead of the guy; while crouching, the shots went right past the barrel, so I eventually had to jump. I didn't think I could influence his movement so he wouldn't force me off the platform, but I could try the fight again. I suppose I could also try jumping over to his right to get more room, or using triple shots, or blasting more of the barrels out of his hands so I might not have to jump... We'll see.
Okay, now about magic spells: I don't think they'll be useful for a while. The first act boss takes more damage from the regular guy's shots than from any of the transformations' shots, so it would probably be wasteful to spend any time transforming in the first act, especially considering that I have to go through the menu AGAIN and transform BACK to the regular guy to use any other spells.
The damage spells are troublesome because they tend to have long animations that usually take more time to play out than I would have taken to fire shots at lightning speed. The fire spell is the most promising because its regular animation is just some short flashing. In an earlier run I did, I beat the first mini-boss with just two fire uses. But it looked to me as though the way I did it with regular shots was faster than going through the menu and using two fire spells.
Similarly, any damage spell takes one and a half units from the first big boss, so I could defeat it by first firing six shots and then spending all six of my magic units on fire. But I also thought that just jumping up and firing shots would be faster, though I should probably test it to make sure. I think the main problem I have with the spells is that it's less impressive to use them: Making every shot count is tough, but picking a spell and pressing Up+B doesn't take any skill at all. They tend to be better for helping a real-time player out of rough situations. But I'm pretty sure the transformations will be necessary later on, so I'll see how well I do in regular mode until then.
And finally, I don't want to use FCEUltra at this time because I'm not comfortable with the way I have to use it right now. Pausing often crashes the game, so the only solution I have now is to NEVER PAUSE. Combined with the fact that I can't use sound cues (as Bisqwit said, the "beats" heard at low speeds are very helpful for distinguishing frames) and the fact that I can only halve or double the speed so I'm often caught between too swift and too sluggish, I just don't think making a movie with FCEUltra will be a very pleasant experience. The only real trouble I have with Famtasia is that there's no frame counter, so to get an action in on a specific frame, I have to go to 3%, save a state, and load the state while chanting something like "One two three four five NOW!" so I can see what happens when I push a button on the sixth frame from the state or whatever. The problem comes in when I have a sequence of actions I want to do on the first frames possible that all depend on each other, which means I'll end up loading older savestates that invalidate newer ones, and I probably won't re-save the newer savestates at the exact same times, so I have to figure the times from the states to press the buttons all over again. I hope some of that made sense. :P Anyway, that's what I did for the entire boss fight, and I assure you it's the same result I would have gotten from "frame advance".
Now onto some issues I saw in the video that I probably didn't fully explore:
Those darn clowns. I want to hit their balloons right away because they cause major slowdown, and I think I was a little slow on that a couple of times. The first time I fought the first pair, I didn't kill the first clown, but I did get him to go past me and into the water, which causes a funny effect where he gets stuck under a platform and "wobbles" the rest of the time he's onscreen. But after I had done this, I decided to go back and redo that part where a balloon's flying up and I fire a triple shot at a rolly ball guy, since I remember I hadn't made sure to minimize the time it was onscreen because it also causes major slowdown. Well, after I had done that, the timing didn't work out when I fought the first pair of clowns again--I think the first clown jumped on me, leaving me no room to jump over him--and so I shot the first clown extra times to slow him down so he got scrolled off the screen. (The other time I shot an enemy without killing it was when I shot a rolly ball guy once so I could shoot THROUGH it to hit the flying wingding ahead of time. Nice, huh?) No funny wobbling from him. I've have to try harder next time to find a way to either kill him or get him into the water.
That whole vertical shaft was also a real pain, starting with the fact that I had to use frame advance (3% speed) just to make sure I jumped early enough. I remember I could jump for a number of frames so that I just barely got onto the platform and thus could start charging a shot at the earliest spot, but I could also jump for just one frame longer to get a little higher, which would keep my character from getting stuck against the edge of the platform as long as the first way would. I'll have to pay extra careful attention to the way acceleration works in jumping in my final run.
First big issue in the shaft besides jumping was that rocket-spewing lid. I was wondering if I should have waited to kill the first rocket it spit out to avoid its slowdown, but I decided it would be better to go kill the pod right away to get rid of the slowdown. (I hate how these games make you play "avoid the slowdown" to do a good time attack.) I was originally going to take damage from the next rocket-spewing lid to walk through the robosoldier's bullets, but then I realized I had enough time to kill the rocket and lid with single and double shots. That didn't help much, though, since the robosoldier was so goshdarn trigger-happy there. Now I start to wonder if MAYBE I could influence him to shoot at different times so I could kill him after the latest bullet but before his next, since I did see ways of influencing two of the other robosoldiers, but part of me really doubts it.
And that awful balloon at the top... I didn't want to make a time-wasting jump, but I saw no other way. It didn't go up fast enough for me to slip by it after the first jump. I can't take damage from it, because damage resets you to a standing position, and you can't move horizontally while falling from a standing position, and I wasn't over the platform when I hit the balloon. (By the way, the fact that you return to a standing position upon taking damage means that you can fire a double shot at the big boss right after bumping into it, but I tried that, and it didn't do any more damage than a single shot. Peh.) I didn't THINK I had enough time to shoot it, but now I have my doubts, though I would still need to take the extra jump to do it.
Then there was that clever fire jump. I tried that just for the heck of it, since I decided that taking damage there would be faster than waiting for the platform to be high enough, but then I figured out that pressing A again in the exact right frame caused an immediate second jump that left no frame in which I was counted as standing on the fire. Nice. But do you think I should have just jumped across the fire the whole way like that? I don't know. I thought it was cool to use the platforms normally at first to make it look like I needed them, then jump in right at the end to make the viewer think "Oh no, he messed up!", but then I surprise 'em.
There's just one other issue I'm concerned about. I've been going out of my way to kill as many enemies as possible as fast as possible to make the video more impressive, and to see what score/lives I'll achieve by doing that. But this requires making some extra jumps to kill those flying wingdings and some other enemies early. And here's something I noticed during frame-by-frame: The character doesn't seem to have any horizontal motion during the very first frame of a jump. So I would be losing a frame every time I make an unnecessary jump. I think there are also certain kinds of landings that lose a frame. So in the end, going for bonus kills might make the movie a second or two longer. But is it worth it to see me anticipate every enemy in my range? This sounds like another one of those heated "style versus speed" arguments...
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
