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Whoa, I just found something strange while playing around. It seems that when I let Dizzy drown, he drowns half as fast the next time. What I mean is, normally water starts to damage Dizzy by 1 pixel every 4 frames without the aqualung. But if the water kills him and I take him into water without the aqualung again, he only gets a pixel of damage every 8 frames. If he dies twice by drowning, then next time the water will only damage him by a pixel every 16 frames. After three times it'll only drain him a pixel every 32 frames. (You can tell how slow this is as by this point the damage actually sounds like the "whooshasha" sound effect repeated rather than just buzzing.)
So I got my end-of-game savestate with the perfect 9 lives and starting drowning Dizzy to see how slow it could go, only to find that it stayed at 1pixel/32frames for the next 4 lives. Then after I lost 8 lives, it went back to 1pixel/4frames for some reason. But that just goes to show that if you can spare the lives, you may be able to explore more of the water without the aqualung than you thought. I also wonder if there's some effect on the rates of other things that hurt or heal Dizzy.
Oh, and this also happens in version 2... Intentional? But in that version it's possible to reach the island with the aqualung with a simple jump, so dying to breathe longer is more likely to be pointless in that one. But again, your higher speed would let you make better use of it...
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I just wanted to say, I like how this movie is going. Plenty of breezy story battling, plenty of glitches, and seeing all the Pokemon will make this very fun to watch, even if I've fallen too far behind on learning routes and new techniques for this game to offer any advice.
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I read that the bubble-jumping mini-game was designed as part of The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy from the beginning, and then they decided it was fun enough to sell as its own game, just like Dizzy Down the Rapids. Only, productions delays caused Bubble Dizzy to come out before The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, so players of the old computer games tend to think that Fantastic Dizzy was just incorporating Bubble Dizzy into itself to make it longer.
I was thinking earlier, if someone does finish a TAS of this game, there should be a note to the encoders that it's not an A/V desync that makes the music start so late, but rather it's delayed on purpose in case you end up moving back and forth through a screen transition rapidly so you don't hear each song starting over so many times.
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Yeah, the butterflies reverse your left and right controls for a while in the 8-bit versions, just like the red bee from Treasure Island Dizzy. (I'm told this game is mostly a mash-up of puzzles from previous Dizzy games, but at this point I'm only familiar with the NES releases, so I just recognize a lot of Treasure Island Dizzy puzzles and a couple of Dizzy the Adventurer puzzles.) But the butterflies were a bigger nuisance in the clouds of the 16-bit versions. I wonder if the knock-back from the butterflies could be a useful boost in any of them.
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So I went left and mapped the area around the waterfall! And since that place is pretty short, not having anything directly above or below it, I decided to also map that river rapids mini-game whose final destination is that waterfall. Only that ended up taking longer than anywhere else to map, because I wanted to carefully edit out the random sparkles on the water. See, I guess they thought it wasn't bad enough to put animations like the torches, waterfall, and water waves on a global timer so I have trouble figuring out what the initial state would be, and it still wasn't bad enough to load in the next frame of animation to the same tile rather than switching tiles so I can't just go by what comes first in the PPU Viewer. No, for the river water the programmers got really fancy and found a way to drop pixels onto five tiles and move them around randomly. The pixels always stay in the same rows, but at any time they can jump to another column without affecting anything else. This creates a nice "sparkling" effect of bits of light moving about the water, and by only allowing one pixel per row per tile, it makes it much more likely to see pixels lined up vertically than horizontally, giving the water a downward flowing appearance. But it means I'll never see those tiles in the same pattern twice, and choosing any pattern they're in would be very arbitrary because they're so random, so I just blanked out all the random tiles! That takes so long, for the red version map I just compared each screenshot to the blue version's map and only changed what was different aside from the random sparkles. There's a whopping 10 stars added, which makes me wonder where they were all moved to for the "16-bit" ports. The only other change was taking out a hunk of rocks near the second exit, I think because you can get stuck forever there if you approach it from the top. But then why couldn't they have fixed this other "stuck forever" spot?
Also annoying about the vertical scrollers is that the bottom-left tile of the playing area is always the same tile, no matter what it's really supposed to be, so you only see what's really there when you scroll down enough. But I don't know how to properly scroll past the end of the mini-game, so until I get better ROM peeking skills, that last corner is going to look wrong.
Some of the enemies I was unsure how to place exactly at first. The crocodiles wobble around in some weird way before they truly start their regular patrol, so I decided to map them where they first faced left. But later I realized they sank down a pixel by the time they were fully onscreen. I only mapped two barrel troll spots. There's a point where each troll will be stopped from following you by an invisible barrier of some sort; I couldn't really show that, but that was my basis for having a second troll in the water, that you're forced to go water-troll-free for a while. Barrel trolls only appear when you're as far down on the screen as you can be, I've found. The second troll will only appear in pretty much that one area I mapped him at, but the first troll can keep coming back at any point before the invisible wall, so I had to take that part slowly, as having a troll on-screen will prevent other trolls (and I think one crocodile) from appearing. The land trolls that throw rocks also prevent other trolls from appearing, which makes it a little hard to find the middle of the "3-in-a-row" land trolls. One way to confirm them all is to go upward, and the land trolls will appear at their spots at the bottom of the screen, except when you scroll upward they appear 7 pixels too low. See how confusing this game gets? I hope that helps for speedrunning it...
I guess I don't want to go into too much more depth on the adventure areas yet, because I want to do one big "version differences analysis" when all the maps are done so I can say what items moved where. But feel free to see for yourself!
Blue Crystal FallsRed Crystal FallsBlue Crystal/Swift RiverRed Crystal/Swift River
Oh and one more version difference is that red version has a credits page after the characters list.
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Well, if the damage-taking stuff starts to seem too complicated, you could do what I always do for MegaMan games and make a cost/benefit table. In this case what this means is that you need to label all the troublesome enemies in a meaningful way, find the fastest way to get past them without taking damage, then compare the frame count to just running straight through the enemy and note down the difference in times for that enemy. Then also do frame count comparisons for going out of your way to collect each heart that happens to be near the main path. Make sure to find a way to note which hearts can be collected before which enemies you encounter. And of course note whenever you actually want to kill off Robin, because that would involve lowering your hearts enough by that point, and collecting a fifth heart would be one way to work toward that while gaining the option to kill yourself again. Otherwise, just subtract frames lost to collecting hearts from frames gained due to sacrificing them and see what the best combinations are, remembering you can't go over 4 hearts. Um... good luck?
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I was looking over your movie again, and I was wondering, where exactly were you planning to go next? I just wondered if there was a way to avoid that unnecessary elevator ride. Of course if you just use the board, grab the weed killer, and come back, you use your elevator key and kill the weed with your very next items, but I suppose you want to visit the mine area first to pick up Grand Dizzy's elevator key and the mushroom for his medicine. And since you're going for that key, you're probably also going for the wrench to start the mine elevators, right? I guess that's why you don't want the weed killer or the ground elevator key in the way when you're over there. I was thinking you could just leave the key next to the elevator and use it later, but if you're coming back with two items, then you'd waste more time getting that key back to the front. But then I think you're going to have similar problems with the weed killer or the mushroom anyway, so I'm not sure what to recommend at this point.
And yeah, stick with the damage-taking run, especially if it somehow relieves stress for you. Avoiding all damage would be impressive in real-time, but in a TAS you know you're never going to mess up, so it just results in a bunch of boring waits (or possibly still some mysterious luck manipulation to get enemies out of the way faster, ooooooh!). Whereas planning the optimal way to take damage and heal enough that you don't die from more damage later, or intending to die at a certain point to backtrack through one area faster, would seem to be the more exciting plans and a bigger challenge for the TASer.
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Hey, that's really nice! You did some things I never figured out, like jumping through walls under a low ceiling, or some kind of ladder-jump? I guess you won't need much more help from me to analyze the game. But you're right, deciding when it's really worth taking a hit may be one of the trickier parts.
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Sure! Go ahead and comment on any part of the run that looked interesting!
http://www.box.net/shared/x7n0g1x8qg
I just updated again with the asteroid section. It turned out to be more annoying than I expected. There are ways to change what new asteroids are generated: Pausing with the Start button at different times works, although I didn't end up doing that this time, and hitting an asteroid will change the upcoming asteroids too. But hitting enough asteroids is the whole goal, so I make the outcome more volatile by trying to accomplish it more quickly! Often what happens is it appears that I've just hit the last asteroid I need, but it's not over yet because another asteroid spawned moments before due to the next-to-last asteroid I hit.
The slow acceleration makes it pretty pointless to try to figure things out frame-by-frame, so what I ended up doing was recording a lot at full speed and keeping whatever made "That was a close one!" pop up the soonest. I noticed the asteroids can bounce you to the left, but not up or down, so it worked best to scoop up four or five asteroids in a column. When I decided I had come up with a good enough sequence, I redid it with frame advance to be more precise and look less random, only to find I was getting worse times with the same method. It turns out that the amount of time Linus spends automatically "rubberbanding" around to reach the center point before his speech is greatly affected by slight changes in velocity I made in the last moments I had control. So it was more trial-and-error to figure out the button sequence that improved on the rubberbanding the most rather than extending it.
When it was all over, I found the memory address that counts the asteroids hit, 05EC, to see what total I was really hitting during the recording. It does count up to 10 before it stops spawning asteroids, but I learned that some asteroids count double for no apparent reason, and I hit two such asteroids during the movie, so that's why I only needed to hit eight altogether that time. Is there a way to force more double-asteroids to appear? You can try to figure it out, but I've had enough of this for now!
Now I've updated the movie file one more time, up to collecting the anti-gravity slide. One annoying thing that becomes apparent with the low gravity is that Linus's jump height fluctuates with the moment you start a jump, so you see a substantial change in the height he reaches just by waiting 1 or 2 frames. And one stupid fuzzball near the end ruined what could have been another non-stop stage run. The first spring in the next action stage is holding me up just a bit because the springs' movements are random decisions, such as how far to jump and how long to stay compressed. In the "headwind" zone, jumping is significantly slower than running, but I may need to put in an unnecessary jump just to get that spring to move at the right time, and it won't work by the time an unnecessary jump could have collected a candy! :(
More updates: I recorded No. 5, but I didn't upload yet because I probably need to go back and redo a few things as I learn some new techniques. It was nice to return to "Ordinary" physics, where I could jump as much as I want. Without the headwind, Linus can now jump over a still spring! The springs don't seem to be as influenced by changes in jump timing there as in No. 2, though. For the last spring I had to try hitting Start to pause on a certain frame to keep it out of the way. Then I realized I could have used Start earlier, including at the beginning of No. 2, so for all that work I put into manipulating No. 2's springs I may have to do it all over again.
And I went back and played around with the asteroids with savestates while watching the counter. Whether I get 1 or 2 from an asteroid doesn't seem to depend on the asteroid itself, but the way in which I hit it. I think it helps to have a high vertical speed, as I mainly got 2 at a time when I was slamming down into asteroids from above. I suppose there's some sort of twin hitbox issue somewhere. But, ugh, this luck manipulation is getting to be more than I was prepared for. I might want to take another break from this.
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AdmiralJonB, if you're really still interested in this, I should direct your attention to this speedrun. You might learn a trick or two you didn't think of before! Like now I know you can just jump to the island with the aqualung in the Genesis version to start exploring the water early.
Don't forget that VGMaps.com now has a complete of maps for Fantastic Dizzy, so that should make planning your route a lot easier. Remember that you don't always have to grab stars at your first opportunity; if you cross an area more than once, it may be faster to wait to grab a star there on a later trip.
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Yeah, everyone needs to get used to musicless computer games if they want to see more DOS classics on this site. Sound cards weren't well-supported for quite a while, and songs made of single wave tones get annoying before long.
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Bisqwit wrote:
the global warming hoax
Wait, I've got it, the most depressing thing is that we won't get enough people to believe climate change is a real problem until it's too late to prevent most of the damage from it. Let's all be depressed about that rather than about silly online casinos!
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I don't know what's more depressing, that there's no easy way out of intrusive advertisements, or that Bisqwit has fallen in with the nutcases spewing garbage ideas like "End Times" and "Islamofacist" and "Christians are sooooooo persecuted!"
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Oh right, you did a couple of 1-minute movies of Fantastic Dizzy, didn't you? And somebody else did a 15-minute movie, right? What happened to that one?
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That turned out to be a quick tour of Detroitica. Two minutes later, Linus is already ready to leave!
http://www.box.net/shared/x7n0g1x8qg updated
What did you think of how I dodged the robots? I only noticed afterward that Linus's ground speed appears to be affected by whether Vork is moving forward or backward.
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Cross-posting this from the WIP topic!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l-rPipDDy0http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbZ2Yx43olg
I updated the movie file one more time at the very beginning. I recently realized that the company logo can be cleared faster after a reset, even if that reset came before the company logo! And would you believe that I thought of this the day before I looked at the Dizzy the Adventurer submission text and saw that Alden came up with the same idea years ago? Unfortunately I wasn't clever enough to improve anything else yet, so I figured it was safe to throw it onto YouTube now.
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Oh, this is a little embarrassing... I didn't think to look for this soon enough, and forgot to tell everyone about this earlier, but somebody already made a map of Treasure Island Dizzy on NES! But they didn't make my cool labeled version, so there.
Their secrets page did remind me that we need to figure out those screens where there's some kind of limit on how many times you can press B. Some kind of item limit due to the number of sprites there, maybe?
And before I sent my maps off to vgmaps.com, I did a little hex-editing on Dizzy's next-screen values to see if there were any secret screens I had missed. It was mostly a lot of falling through black voids, because the programmers didn't put graphics in screens they never expected the player to reach. They did paint sky on a screen I don't think you can reach normally, above the two huts between the pier and the boat shop, so either they overestimated the ability to jump from that cloud to the left, or they removed another cloud there later on.
I was able to explore the message-less ending area and the three demo screens, which all worked normally, although the red fish in the demo doesn't kill Dizzy, even though the crab does. Maybe they had problems with the fish ending up in Dizzy's way in early tests of the demo. Between those places is an empty message box background. Screen FF basically freezes the game, as Dizzy fails to appear there.
But there was one cool place I found, directly over the warp exit above the pogo stick.
Some kind of testing area? Dumping ground? We have here a jellyfish, a dehydrated boat, a dozen random background tiles, and a group of six little fish that I don't remember seeing anywhere else in the NES game. Those little fish kill you if you touch them. What do you think is up with that?
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Dr. Morbis wrote:
I'd like to see a Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy run. If you do decide to do one, use the ROM of the Aladdin Deck Enhancer version. There are some in game alterations done by the programmers to make the game less cumbersome, which means it would probably save you some time (which, incidentally, is the only thing the people on this site/forum seem to care about)
Oh, yes, there were VERY many alterations to the game, so much so that it's as if the first version was more like this weird beta version, and you could treat one as a "second quest" to the other. More different than Cosmic Spacehead was from Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade, at any rate.
In version 2, Dizzy actually accelerates as he walks (as he does again in Dizzy the Adventurer), reaching a speed about twice as high as in version 1, where he appears stuck in the old 1 pixel/frame mode. This will probably be most people's argument for one version over another, as I think version 1 gets a little boring watching Dizzy wander the huge world at that one low speed. Version 2's speed also affects Dizzy's jump length, making some formerly impossible jumps possible. You can now reach the extra life game on the right-hand side of the treehouse complex without a rope swing, for example. A few gaps were widened to keep it so that you still can't jump across, like the spike pit on the ground floor, but sometimes it's not enough. They tried moving the logs holding up Dylan's elevator so you couldn't jump on top, but I still got over them and saw seizure-flashing from the constant screen transitions until Dizzy got far enough to the right to fall through! I also once made the jump in the graveyard you're supposed to need the bridge for in the Master System version, but I haven't tested that part on NES yet.
The higher speed can get you into trouble, though. It means you might end up rolling further after hitting uneven ground, sending you into a death trap. You also don't get as much time to react to enemies at the high speed, which is annoying on the right side of Dora's floor where the whole point is to react to the first spider and stop in time, but if you come in with too much speed it's impossible. (And I wonder if they intended this speed more for PAL systems, as releasing version 1 in PAL regions would have made the game intolerably slow.) Still, the higher speed lets you dodge and escape from enemies much more quickly, minimizing your damage, and the new layout tends to move enemies and traps further out of your way anyway. You might say this makes version 2 "the easy version", but I think viewers don't mind it being a little easier if it's a lot less boring. But version 1 has cool glitches involving backwards movement on impassible enemies! You may have already known you can get the tunnel guard's star without getting him to move first, but with the backwards butterfly, I got him to juggle Dizzy forever! Uh, yay?
The additional 150 stars in the newer versions sounds like a big thing, but it mainly means you just encounter them more frequently. Either way they serve to force you to explore every location even if you find ways to skip some of the puzzles; version 2 will generally just make you travel a little further into a room or make an extra jump somewhere. For example, I found that even in version 1 I could successfully jump past the dragon's flames, so you can skip all the items for making GrandDizzy's medicine, but you still need to unlock his house for his stars.
Collecting stars also has different effects on other sprites depending on which version you're playing. I haven't worked out all the details, but in version 1 the star display seems to make most enemies vanish entirely. You can walk through where they were without taking damage, and when they return, they return in the same spot as when they disappeared. In version 2 the new star display style must have been tweaked to tax the PPU less or something, because it makes a lot of things flicker, but they still act as normal as far as I could tell.
The new item collection system is worthy to note, too. Version 1 uses the old Treasure Island Dizzy style, where once you pick an item up, it takes an extra two presses of B to get it to the front of the line before you can set it down. Everything in the queue moves up once with one press of B, so you need to spread your inventory out on the ground if you need to change the order of your items while still hanging onto them all or to get rid of a hole between two items.
Version 2 tries to make it more convenient by sending the first item you pick up straight to the front of the queue; a second item you pick up will go into the middle without pushing out the first; and a third item will go to the back, again without disrupting the other two. Only when your inventory is full or when there's nothing to pick up does it behave like version 1 and let you drop something while advancing the whole queue. So in version 2 it's impossible to pick up an object and drop one at the same time unless you've already got three items and you're picking up a fourth. That means that if you need to use an item in the back while hanging onto your other two, you need five presses of B altogether, while version 1 would only need three to accomplish the same thing. So it's not always more convenient! (The Master System version changes it so that all item collection and use is done on the big menu screen, like in Dizzy the Adventurer and some of the older home computer Dizzy games. The Yolkfolk sprites are from Dizzy the Adventurer too!)
There are a few item tricks that can be done to differing degrees in either version. A definite trick to remember for speedruns is that Dizzy can grab items in mid-air! So don't just hit B to pick up things; hit A and B if you can. I believe even a jump in place is faster than Dizzy's turn-around animation. You can also drop items in mid-air with this if you're picking one up at the same time: Just keep dropping at a slightly higher level than before, and eventually you'll get one at the peak of Dizzy's jump. Kinda silly, but could be important... There are some inventory glitches related to grabbing an item during a jump to a higher screen so that the game didn't finish sliding everything over yet, but I haven't investigated them completely.
I also noticed that you can drop items in mid-air if you're falling straight downward rather than at an angle. Dizzy even turns around to do this, so I think there must not be a huge distinction between standing and falling straight down (or zipping up through the floor). Version 2 gives you more opportunities to do this, as you can coast to a stop just as you slip off a ledge. (That may also help you drop down floors of the treehouses one at a time so you don't get dizzy.) Version 1 doesn't have deceleration, so I don't think that's possible, but you can still achieve straight falling by such methods as swinging from the rope until it goes slack, or dying after you enter a room by falling into it so you respawn by falling down. (Again I don't know how floating objects would be useful, but...)
Oh, and we should think about death-warping as a strategy, in case there's one long horizontal area you have to cross for one item and come straight back from. I think the extra life mini-game takes much longer than any area, though, so try to limit it to two good death-warps.
There's also a version 3, but I don't think it's ever been dumped, and from what I read, all it really added was three more languages, and the graphics had to be made worse in some places to accommodate them.
Fantastic Dizzy on other systems... Yeah I dunno, the 16-bit versions leave out the river rapids game, and I think they make some things even easier. And they changed all the music! Why do they keep changing music in ports of Dizzy games?!
FODA wrote:
i couldnt find a complete map of screenshots for this game, so when i get down to this i'll make one. unless someone do the favor of making it
Ah, did you ever get started on this? I started making my own maps of both NES versions last month, since I'm sure they'll be helpful, and just so I can say for sure what all the layout differences are, especially for items that swapped locations and puzzles that were replaced completely. I've seen some Dizzy players call version 1 "the blue version" and version 2 "the red version" because of the change in color of the title, so that's how I've been labeling my maps. I now have the treehouse complex done, both inside and outside!
Blue treehouse complexRed treehouse complexBlue treehouse interiorsRed treehouse interiors
(I once tried pasting the treehouse interiors on top of their exteriors, but decided it was silly-looking and not very helpful and a bigger waste of space, so you just get a column of them instead. I did give the maps some "sprites on top" action and labeled the keys, though!)
I should note that you can't see the far left side of Dozy's floor without cheating, and you can't see the far left sides of many other floors in version 1 without cheating because you can't jump off with enough speed.
Yeah, the walkways get doubled up around vertical edge transitions. Not much I can do about it; that's how screen transitions work in Dizzy games. In this one Dizzy skips over about 24 pixels of space, so platforms that take him to the top of one screen will be more-or-less duplicated at the bottom of the next. I don't really want to move anything or cut anything off, as the treetops only look right if all rows are left in, and the changes in walkways can be important to note, so I'd be messing up the slopes that are actually there if I try to combine them. Now, in the castles, pretty much all 32 rows of pixels at the top of a lower screen are repeated at the bottom of a higher screen, so there I think it would be okay to consolidate them, although it does make it look as though Dizzy can jump a bit higher across the transition than he actually does.
Some enemies ended up in different places on each map even though they can appear in the same places in either version, because they may have variable spawn points. I tried figuring this out by watching enemy positions in the hex editor, and it turned out to be a little messy and inconsistent. Most enemies will keep their positions when you go to the next screen and come back, but some will snap back to one position every time you reload the screen, even if it's by hitting Select to check your inventory. (Remember that annoying rat on the right side of the trolls' castle that would keep ending up back in front of you after you jumped it?)
Some enemies will even share their position values with an enemy on another screen. A lot of those treehouse spiders seem to just take a value from a previous enemy as their own, whether that was a position value or a velocity value, and jump it down to their highest possible value if it was too high (low on the screen) or up to their lowest possible value if it was too low (high on the screen). So, whether that ant you last saw was moving to the left or to the right may affect whether the next spider is at the top of its thread or at the bottom. That's how crazy this game gets. I considered just mapping every spider at the bottom of its thread, to show how far they could drop, but I tend to prefer showing where the enemies should first appear. So that could lead to some variations in where they were placed in the two different versions of the map, due to the altered speed and terrain and item layouts.
Yeah, the ants and birds can start in a couple of different places too. Sometimes an ant would start out as far left as it could be, and other times it would start out on the far right of its track instead. The flying enemies' starting points can be influenced by other random stuff too, and I noticed that enemies seem to be able to move for one frame before they actually appear, so that made it confusing for me to map their starting spots. With the help of memory watching, I noticed the ants start moving when I reach their floor and stop when I'm about one screen length away. And I noticed Pogie is already on the move while I'm still trying to get out of Dizzy's house!
Mapping also helped me notice that there's a second spider sprite, one with a bigger body and six legs that appears on GrandDizzy's floor and in the graveyard. I think you could consider bird/bat and ant/mouse to be other instances of this "same enemy different look" pattern.
Maybe when I finish all the maps I'll combine all the ones connected by edge transitions to get a look at how wide the world really is, but I don't think I really want to submit a map with every single location crammed into it like the Genesis maps on vgmaps.com.
AdmiralJonB wrote:
I think the most intriging thing is that you have to complete all the mini-games and stuff to make sure you have every single star to unlock the final dungeon
That might not be quite true in the "blue version" (gold cartridge). On that version there are no stars in the mini-games; might have only occurred to the designers to put some in later, or maybe they were more focused on just getting the mini-games to work, and the old star display might have interfered with the game too much. Thus, I believe you can skip the "Bubble Trouble" part entirely: You can free Denzil much earlier for his flippers, swim to the island with the aqualung, and then you can breathe and swim underwater and explore the pirate ship without having to get kicked off. The "red version" (Aladdin/plug-thru) moves the match MUCH further away from your starting area, so this doesn't pay off as well (which was probably the purpose), and you eventually need the stars from the bubble trench, unless someone finds a way to trick the star counter or duplicate stars. Can't really have an "any% stars" run, since it'd be pretty sad to just end up standing in front of an electrified door as your ending.
The other vertical scrollers are required in the blue version simply because they drop you off at a key item. If anyone can do some kind of trick jump that will reach those items, then it won't be necessary to play those sequences in the blue version. So that's another difference that could influence which versions we want published: Blue version skips more, but red version does more, faster!
Yeah, so, in the differing versions debate I want to say do both NES version 1 and one of the Genesis or PC versions so they'll have the most differences, but if that's not popular, I'd say do just NES version 2. You'll get the nice NES music, all the mini-games, and the shortest load times, after all!
I suppose I should end by asking some questions of anyone who knows this game better than I do:
Is there any way to reach the orange on the ceiling of Dora's house or the watermelon in the upper-left corner of Zaks's castle? Seems a little silly to waste precious memory space putting in things you can't reach, but whatever.
The cow and the coin are completely redundant, right? I think either item gets you the bean from the shopkeeper, and then there's nothing you can do with the other. Maybe they threw in the coin just in case "Jack and the Beanstalk" was too obscure for some people, but that gives speedrunners a choice of whether to help Dylan or save an item underwater. Although, I read that it was recently discovered that in the Genesis version, if you pay for the bean with the coin, you can give the cow to Prince Clumsy before you save Dora to receive an easter egg about Prince. It's not known to work in any other versions so far.
(Speaking of redundancies, I should point out that there are two tunnels connecting Bridge Street and Castle Street on either side of the shopkeeper, with no barriers between them on either street. You still need to enter both, though, since they both contain stars, so I think you should only use the far one once right before/after getting the bean, and get the star to the right of it on Bridge Street just before/after using the tunnel so they're not as far out of your way.)
The medicine recipe doesn't actually "do" anything, does it? Is it the one item you're just supposed to look at in the inventory to make use of it, and then it's useless after the first time you've played that part? I guess so, just as I think the second gold dragon egg is only to hint that you're supposed to leave the other egg with it.
There isn't a fourth large rock in the blue version, is there? Looks like there's room to raise the water even more so you don't have to take harder jumps with more risk of rolling, but then the blue version is full of ludicrously precise jumps like that.
There isn't a seventh extra life puzzle, is there? I noticed there were tiles to say "9 LIVES LEFT" in the PPU Viewer, but I can only get up to 9 lives, meaning the most I can see that message say when I lose a life is 8. Maybe the programmers just weren't sure if there would be 6 or 7 extra lives in the final game. They must have been sure there weren't 8, though, because I saw no tiles for 1 or 0!
I also wonder a bit about the places the mine cart ride drops you off at. The second exit leaves you stranded if you didn't clear the path through the leprechaun or have swimming gear handy, so when you kill yourself, you end up back at the mine cart... Except what if you did explore some more, would it eventually update your respawn point? Hm, I'll check into that more sometime. On other systems they let you enter through that exit to reappear at the cart, so that's nice that they don't make you lose a life. And the third and fourth exits would leave you stranded in the town and graveyard if you weren't able to go to the left and swim back again, or if you hadn't bribed the guard, except you can still get out through the river rapids game (which has at least one side exit to the town, too). The 16-bit versions don't have the river, so that must be why they added a second bag of coins somewhere. But then you could still get stranded if you didn't bring the meat to the rhino-thing yet, so you would have to go through the pirate ship and play the bubble game to get out. The barrel of rum you can get in town in the blue version, but in the red version you would also have to play the river game to get the barrel, so that must be why they moved the bag of coins to the left of the rhino! And I bet the first mine cart exit is so useless because if it were any deeper in the mine in the blue version, you could get stuck behind an inactive elevator.
Though I don't think there's any protection against just leaving your rope in a place you can only reach with the rope, so, unwinnability, hurrah!
While I'm thinking about the mine, I should point out that the diamonds there restore Dizzy's health without making him do the munching animation, so you could try to plan most of your healing there if you can, I don't know.
One more thing: When you play this in FCEUX, use Old PPU to make the opening story scroll less glitchy, and turn off that Allow More Than 8 Sprites deal during the minecart game so Dizzy passes under the overhang post things.
Blublu wrote:
It's Linus Spacehead, silly. And that game is impossible to complete. My record was reaching level 3 (on a real NES). Hmm, maybe that game would also make a good timeattack? Meh, I don't know..
That used to be about how far I could get before I started using savestates--not just to cheat, but to practice on a single level until I had it all nailed down. Now I can beat the game without savestates at all, usually losing about four lives mainly because the last few levels are still too unpredictable for me, but I want to get a run where I collect every candy and don't die at all so I can show everyone how it's done!
A new TAS of it might be nice, too. I'd like to see what kind of result it would get in the "screenshot averaging" topic. (What little onscreen text there is would get smeared up and down from the bouncing.)
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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alden wrote:
Oh, no, sorry, each image is generated from an average of every screenshot from a system. So it's a bunch of games. Not just one.
Whoops, I didn't read this part until now. I read things out of order. Funny how Zero's life bar shows up so well, but then, he did get four games. I was debating whether the first one was Super Mario Land or a Legend of Zelda, but I guess they must both be in there, right? I want to see a Metroid in some of them, but I really don't know. The last one I'm starting to see a lot of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in. Did that one have a long frame war that produced a lot of screenshots for it? Then again, that's how those 3D games are, staring at someone's back and a skyline...
alden wrote:
Also, the game was meant to be played silently, to yourself.
But say it silently, to yourself.
But if we play it silently, to ourselves, how will we know if we won?
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I guess it's a game of "Find the head-up display!" Or checking screen resolutions, which narrows it down a lot for those custom handheld displays... I get this cool holographic-like effect looking at the pictures from different angles on a laptop.
The grids... Well, classic 2D game graphics are in grids, aren't they? It's probably considered safer to keep most of the edges of most of the background tiles dark in case they need to be placed on the surface, or to keep them from running together too much. That last one has to be from some new-fashioned 3D game.
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arflech wrote:
it reminds me of when a certain neko lover used similar terms to describe adelikat and that's partially why he's still not welcome here
Is that the one who saw a post praising a run, worried that it would be seen as a sockpuppet and discredited, and went all "NO, IT CAN'T BE TRUE, I AM DECEIVED BY MY ENEMIES, OF WHICH I HAVE MORE THAN A FEW"
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Well if I recall correctly, it wasn't the rule itself so much as Xebra pitching a fit that Bisqwit could submit a PC run--which I remember wasn't even accepted--because I guess Xebra considers emulating a PC on a PC to be the same as emulating an SMS on a GBA on a PC, even though it's not really the same number of levels of emulation, so that made Bisqwit some kind of double-standard hypocrite in Xebra's eyes or something like that?
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Also annoying about the vertical scrollers is that the bottom-left tile of the playing area is always the same tile, no matter what it's really supposed to be, so you only see what's really there when you scroll down enough. But I don't know how to properly scroll past the end of the mini-game, so until I get better ROM peeking skills, that last corner is going to look wrong.
Some of the enemies I was unsure how to place exactly at first. The crocodiles wobble around in some weird way before they truly start their regular patrol, so I decided to map them where they first faced left. But later I realized they sank down a pixel by the time they were fully onscreen. I only mapped two barrel troll spots. There's a point where each troll will be stopped from following you by an invisible barrier of some sort; I couldn't really show that, but that was my basis for having a second troll in the water, that you're forced to go water-troll-free for a while. Barrel trolls only appear when you're as far down on the screen as you can be, I've found. The second troll will only appear in pretty much that one area I mapped him at, but the first troll can keep coming back at any point before the invisible wall, so I had to take that part slowly, as having a troll on-screen will prevent other trolls (and I think one crocodile) from appearing. The land trolls that throw rocks also prevent other trolls from appearing, which makes it a little hard to find the middle of the "3-in-a-row" land trolls. One way to confirm them all is to go upward, and the land trolls will appear at their spots at the bottom of the screen, except when you scroll upward they appear 7 pixels too low. See how confusing this game gets? I hope that helps for speedrunning it...
I guess I don't want to go into too much more depth on the adventure areas yet, because I want to do one big "version differences analysis" when all the maps are done so I can say what items moved where. But feel free to see for yourself!
Blue Crystal Falls
Red Crystal Falls
Blue Crystal/Swift River
Red Crystal/Swift River
Oh and one more version difference is that red version has a credits page after the characters list.
Some kind of testing area? Dumping ground? We have here a jellyfish, a dehydrated boat, a dozen random background tiles, and a group of six little fish that I don't remember seeing anywhere else in the NES game. Those little fish kill you if you touch them. What do you think is up with that?
