While I was at work, the missed enemies in stage 1 started annoying me more and more...so when I got back, instead of carrying on with stage 2, I started over.
Microstorage /
YouTube
This is a
much better run, all told, than my previous effort. Which makes sense - the first time around, I was still figuring a lot of things out. And I'm by no means an expert now, but I'm also not a total newbie either, and that helps a lot. I've figured out how to branch a movie, I'm making regular backups (wiping out 1000 frames of work once was quite enough), and I'm thinking a little less like a traditional player. A few points:
* Does this one start from a savestate? How would I tell, anyway? I started up the emulator, paused, did a hard reset, and then started the movie recording; my hope is that that will make for a "clean" movie.
* Proper use of the subweapons is critical - they let you shoot where no other weapons will. I get good mileage out of every subweapon type except for F in this video, oddly enough. F is just too redundant with your normal weapons. I'll use it later.
* I
did have a point here on how the boss fight was a bit slower because I was using B instead of V, having concluded that I needed either B or L to get 100% kills because of the waves right before the boss (and L was slower than B - I checked). But let's hear it for doubting myself: I went back and cleared the last wave with V without missing any enemies, and improved my bossfight by 27 frames! V is ideal for bossfights because it fires 5 projectiles every other frame, and when they first appear they're practically stacked right on top of each other. B has a constant spread and L has a whole bunch of problems - slight spread, slow rate of fire, and the projectiles appear next to your ship instead of ahead of it. I'm thinking V is my bosskiller now, which is annoying because it makes killing waves much harder.
EDIT: correction, the boss fight is some 33 frames slower in the new version, despite identical loadouts. However, it starts 60 frames earlier due to less lag. I'll redo the bossfight tomorrow. I'm not sure what went wrong here.
* I stayed on speed level 3 (the starting speed) for most of the run, with a mad dash at speed level 5 (max) to grab the L weapon early on so I could 100%-kill some waves (level-2 V doesn't compare to level-1 L for killing tightly-packed waves) before downgrading again. I figure that later on, I'll be spending more time at max speed, which should let the TAS nicely escalate as I get deeper in. Alternatively, I'll have to stick at speed-5 for the rest of the run, in which case this section is just fooling people into thinking the game isn't all that fast. :)
* I tried to be more aggressive and risk-taking. There are limits to what can be done when I need to fire projectiles as early as possible so they can kill part of a wave while I fly over to the other side of the screen. Still, I spend more time closer in in this run, and I try to kill more enemies from unexpected angles.
* How close to submission-worthy do y'all think this is? Obviously it's a lot better than my previous attempt, but how much more does it need to improve?
* Edit: how do I tell what my rerecord count is? Presumably it's somewhere in the movie file, but is there an easier way short of doing a hex dump of the file?
