Well, I haven't talked about Zelda 2 in a while. Time to do that.
Recently, I've been trying out crazy new ideas and what do you know? Some are working. Let's start with this little nugget:
Youtube
This began with an attempt to eliminate the JUMP spell. I was trying to find ways to get the game to let me into the room where we learn downstab. So I thought, well, why not push the screen scrolling glitch all the way, and try to fall onto the ledge with the door on it? Didn't work. Then it occured to me that it might be possible to make it to the final palace with the screen scrolling glitch pushed this far. And it is.
And since it is, this not only could eliminate JUMP, but also downstab. And the handy glove. And the hammer. Getting the raft and getting the hammer are pretty comporable in terms of time, so this could feasibly cut out a lot of that normal gameplay people seem to dislike about Zelda 2.
IF it is possible to fall to Dark Link's room and find solid ground.
This is where you come in, guy who is smarter than me and knows about stuff about scripting. When Link falls off the bottom of the screen, there are small 'zones' that all point to different places. Like in palace 4, for example, when you fall down the far left of the hole, you appear on the far left in the next room. When you fall down the far right, you appear at the far right. And everywhere in between. Same rules are applying here, only Link is outside of the rooms to the right when he is spawned, and the zones are all pointing to lord only knows what.
I think.
If it is possible to create some sort of script that finds a path through the great palace, then it's worth refining the setup for this (there are roughly 3 routes that make sense, so it's easy enough for me to work that out). But I am no compu-whiz so I'd have to defer this aspect the run to someone else who can, uh, do it. So yeah. Anyone wanna make a Zelda 2 run?
tl;dr does anyone who's smart at computers wanna help out
If not, there are other routes that have occurred to me through screwing around with the game that require the much more reasonably testable left-scrolling glitch. I realized there's a way to warp back from Bagu's hut to Mido, which opens back up the possibility of using the raft in stead of the warp near the hammer. It's also possible that using the scrolling glitch even earlier to get the trophy/Jump spell could be faster than what's used in the published run.
In any case, it's a lot of stuff to test, and using the falling glitch through the Great Palace seems like the best place to start.
