Haha! I didn't think it was possible, but such is the power of TASing that I did it anyway!
Stage 1 complete with 100% kills
Youtube
(View with Old PPU; New PPU apparently causes a desynch)
Odd...Microstorage says I start from reset; FCEUX says I start from power-on. Oh, well.
This isn't remotely submission-quality. There's a bunch of missed shots and questionable style decisions; the bossfights are also entirely unoptimized (I just park in front of their weak points and hold the fire buttons down). Lag is also pretty absurd (over 25% of the frames are lag frames), but I'm not really going to worry about that; lag is directly proportional to how much stuff is going on, and the more stuff going on, the better, says I. Especially since I'm specifically TASing a mode that throws more stuff into the game.
Speaking of which, playing around with the bullets generated in Zanki mode is tricky, for several reasons. First off, the bullets flicker like crazy; they seem to get drawn at most half the frames. I don't know what kind of algorithm Recca uses to decide what to draw, but it's pretty inconsistent. Turning off the 8-sprites-per-scanline limit doesn't change this. Secondly, they're generated in random locations near the dying enemy, which means that sticking close to enemies gives me a good chance of having a bullet spawn on me, which isn't much fun. Thirdly, if I'm saving up for a bomb attack, which I have to do a
lot to get full screen coverage, then bullets that
don't spawn right on top of me have no chance of hitting me unless I back onto them; the bomb charge and the two options create a very effective shield. Hitboxes seem to be generous in the player's favor in general.
Unfortunately I didn't get as much of a chance to show off the different weapons as I would have liked. L is mandatory for killing off long strands of enemies: it can take out an arbitrary number of targets along a line, while V and B can at
best take out 5 and 4 respectively (and will tend to do worse); H and F aren't even worth considering. L is also useful for firing off-bore, since it has limited homing capability. I did get a chance to use all of the option modes in this WIP, though -- enough to make it clear how badly R and B suck compared to the others. For future levels I suspect S and F will get the most play; C might come in if I have some long-range aimed shots to make.
I tried to use RAM search to find the boss health, but was unsuccessful. My approach was to set the comparison operator to "less than" and then repeatedly search after shooting the boss, but nothing I got seemed to correspond to anything, regardless of the word size I tried. Any advice/assistance here?
Also, normally I'd use VLC to do the file conversion, but it's swapping RGB into BGR -- looks pretty cool, actually, but of course it's wrong. I used iMovie to make this encode; it works, but it has a very lengthy import process before it can start converting to a different format.
Also also, what's the proper procedure to handle 30Hz flickering sprites so that they remain basically visible on YouTube? I set the framerate to 59 FPS when exporting from iMovie.
