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Still sad that the DDR sections are what turned us off of this game, the platforming sections are pretty cool. I like the squidward zips I knew they'd be useful.
Is that your video or someone else's? It's just a shame I can't hear the commentary at all because the volume of the game is like 500x louder than the commentator.
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Challenger wrote:
What's even happening to the bosses after all? This is such a great material.
Bosses take damage on a 2 frame rule, so every other frame their damage ticks down while the boomerang overlaps their hitbox. Pressing select halts the game for 1 frame but does not slow down their damage process, they still take damage every other frame. Their animation is delayed by the freeze from pressing select, that's the best way I can describe it.
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Hell yeah, I was hoping this would get submitted at some point. This was legitimately one of my favorite runs to watch on the site this year. Still surprised so much time was saved, but I have no actual experience with the game.
Obvious yes vote.
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That's pretty insane, I can see a lot of work and research went into that. Can't believe there's over 2 minutes of improvement from an already short TAS. This would probably be my personal Sega TAS of 2025 if it was ever submitted. I would love to see this optimization for the All levels run as well, but that's over twice as long currently so would probably be an undertaking, especially since it seems like he's been working on this one for well over a year now.
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The amiga game I was most interested in was Globdule. But I think the routing of that game would be a nightmare plus it's pretty long. But the movement is very interesting, graphics are nice and has a good soundtrack. Each stage requires you to collect a certain number of collectibles before reaching the end.
Link to video
Also I have a reverse request for WhiteHat94 if he's watching. There's also Quik The Thunder rabbit, I couldn't find any speedruns of the game I was curious what it would look like. (I don't really know anything about the game other than it's a platformer). If you could get it working that is.
Link to video
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Could you please update the file with this 10 frame improvement. Improved the final boss by using all of the wave attacks before the final punch of phase 1 instead of waiting til the end.
User file #638959206519369444
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There are other differences between the North American release and the Japanese one as was pointed out in the forums. We stuck with the (U) rom mostly because it was the original region it was released in, as well as the previous TAS using this version.
As far as differences, I didn't extensively check but I did notice there were slight differences in level 1-1, where there are significantly more tacks in one location compared to the (J) version. WhiteHat94 also pointed out the game refills your health between stages which is a more likely reason to choose the J version, but it would come down to very minor differences: some places could save time by not having to pick up an extra cheese for damage boosts, but we'd also lose time in 5-2 where we need to abuse a death.
These differences would only be a handful of frames, and with the massive 32 frame rule the game's bosses set, I'm not sure it would really make much of a difference.
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Nice second boss fight, getting the parts of the building to not move so far left saves a ton of time. But is that attributed to bosses having less HP?
TAStudio is a godsend, it makes work go by 1000x faster and is so much easier to correct mistakes. Since it was introduced I've never NOT used it.
I'm kinda sad that the any% route doesn't really have any room for using the boomerang damage glitch, which was the only real glitch I found in the game. (taking damage while your boomerang is out resets your lip ability) but I can't fault you for that. The WIP looks good to me
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Sorry for the double post but I was hoping someone could clarify something I've noticed. I saw in whitehat's posted run there are only 4 spiked thumb tack obstacles midway into 1-1, yet in the TAS I've experimented with there are 7. Does anyone know what determines this, as it could eliminate an extra lag frame encountered there as you have much more movement options with less tacks.
Also, I've noticed several instances of enemies just not spawning. I've seen runs where the enemy right after the second spider damage boost isnt there in 1-1, and the final enemy right before the exit of 1-2 is not there. I'm not really good at figuring out what causes this but I would assume positioning of the camera might have something to do with it. It seems like it might help lag reduction at some points, but not sure how controllable it is for most enemies.
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Link to video
34 frames saved in 1-1
Sorry, I shouldn't have posted until I had the proof, I wanted to make sure I was able to keep most of them until the end of the level.
First trick is before grabbing the bubble, throwing a projectile and then pressing A, -, A at a certain frame lowers your jump. Saved around 5 frames
Secondly, you can get a micro jump after canceling a bubble allowing you to travel horizontally without losing any height. This is of course at the cost of slowdown from switching to the bubble every now and then but only a frame each time.
You can also use the bubble to prevent fall damage by using it just before landing, which saves slightly more than using the projectile.
Since you can also grab ladders without losing any time, I used it near the end to jump up to a corner ceiling using the bubble-jump trick, followed by rapid jumping into the ceiling to get to the next ladder at a higher up point.
The only thing is I had to waste like 2 or 3 frames firing a projectile at a flying enemy somewhere in the middle of the stage because he was in an unfavorable position. Maybe better manipulation of him could save a few frames as well.
[edit]: Here's the userfile User file #638923194613380463
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Induviel wrote:
Not sure if it was known, but just found out that if after using an item, you press select the next frame to swap to another item, it decreases the amount of uses of the item you swap to, not the one you use, so power ups like the candy can be used whenever.
I think this has more minor time savers than you might even know, the bubble is pretty strong. I looked at your WIP and I see a few tricks that can save a few frames in 1-1.
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Just noticed someone else interested in this game so I made a quick encode of the last WIP I (think) I did:
Link to video
Some things to note:
- I didn't have access to TAStudio when I last worked on this nearly 11 years ago, which would make this game considerably more tolerable to TAS
- hard mode requires more lips but also introduces a ton of new enemies into the game making routing even more tricky
- some things in NEVERDOORS WIP look faster at a glance (I didn't actually check) or at least give me ideas for improvements
- I was never able to find RAM addresses which was a serious demotivator for working on this game
- Subpixels or frame rules on the lip grab seemed to be a thing at the time as sometimes it would fail to make contact with a lip despite having the same exact inputs
So my question to NEVERDOORS, were you ever able to find any kind of relevant RAM addresses such as speed, position, or subpixels?
If I were to ever revive this game, I kind of considered switching to 100% lips. Hard mode requires more lips but it still doesn't require 100%. I'm not sure if you get a new ending or anything for doing 100% so I don't know if it's even worth it. But the routing could be fun.
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Love all of the new improvements. The one thing I did not like was turning off the sound. I wouldn't mind if the sound in the game was terrible but this has a Natsume soundtrack. How much time was saved just by doing this?
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Why does one stage appear darker in some of the team's movies? Is it a result of in-game technique or just some emulator differences?
EDIT: Nevermind I'm dumb I see they knocked the lights down
Anyway the game was short enough to keep your interest and once again shows you that even seemingly simple games can have varying techniques. I regret not joining but arcade was something I didn't feel comfortable with. Great contest though, results were close!
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I see genesis platformer I watch. I'm surprised there was so much time to be saved from this game, I've seen this run several times and it always looked pretty tight. I never did any investigating myself though.
Great improvement!
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As soon as I learned that this game ran in bizhawk, this was one of my most anticipated TAS games but I never thought anyone would do it.
Not gonna lie when I first saw this appear in the workbench I thought to myself "can't wait to see how bad this is and try to improve it!" This thought immediately disappeared about 20 seconds into the TAS, with the cool super dashes, and it only got better from there on.
You guys clearly put a lot of work into this. This game lends itself great to TASing and there were lots of unexpected glitches.
That was awesome. Yes vote!
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Yeah I noticed the water giving you extra speed as well, it adds nice variation to movement in otherwise sometimes boring stages.
For jungle gym, those pushable blocks dont float on water do they? Also, is that really the only way to reach that exit fast? it's a shame there is so much water below you could be boosting with
For oil wells stage, nice it seems like there's an easy extra life now which should help with death routing a lot, maybe even cut out a 1-up grab completely from somewhere else.
What is your speed while riding the giant sand snake? I assume it is worth it to ride all the way to the end, but it takes a while to start up, and there are a lot of water boosts. Did you test not riding the snake?
Also, I found this and I'm not sure how useful it is yet...
Link to video
So if you are in the right position you can boost off of leftward slopes pretty far off of the slope by punching. I was not able to get this to work on rightwards slopes at all for some reason. The punch when going to the right pretty much always slows you down and I don't know why.
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Denial140 wrote:
Falling or clipping to this platform would probably save 10 seconds or so over the clip in the video above.
So after this comment I went and started playing this stage casually. Are you aware you can apparently just jump off the surface of the water? I didn't know this, but I fell by accident while holding jump
Link to video
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denial140 wrote:
I found a few new things: firstly a particularly nice application of the floor clip.
Nice one! Are the walls in this level segmented? As in, can you not wall jump up the very left wall using the turn around trick?
Next, when you're fully clipped into the floor, getting hit by an enemy will push you down through it. This saves about 6 seconds in Brass Monkeys:
Also nice, glad to see this trick getting more use. Now you have to look at every place you can possibly get damaged. If the floor was thicker than 1 block would it still work?
Also I noticed with this flamethrower powerup, whenever you use the flame in midair your vertical speed gets reset to 0 when the animation ends. Unfortunately seems like the animation lasts too long to be able to spam it. If there was a way to cancel your flame really fast then maybe it could have been used for extended jumps or something, not sure.
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Denial140 wrote:
I've tried hard to get the puzzle piece without the balloon but to no success. In particular, it seems too far away from any of the platforms on the way down to jump to it, and I've been trying to clip through the floor at some of the slope boundaries with the new glitch but again no success.
Sorry I wasn't planning on making another post so soon but I was playing through cresta run casually when I ran into this interesting clip. It was possible on the narrower slope too but it seemed harder if not impossible to clip completely through. At least playing through it in real time anyway, and I didn't spend much time trying.
Link to video
You might not even need to cancel the powerup, I'm not sure why I cancelled it.
Could this be used to grab the puzzle piece without the balloon?
