Did a search and didn't see any mention of this game so I decided I'd start a speed run of it. It's based on an old Amiga game called Killing Game Show (why they changed the name I have no idea) that was one of my favorite platformers as a kid. I'm shooting for a hardest difficulty, no damage, speed run.
I turned off the music because the Genesis version of the music irritates me, and I'd prefer to layer the Amiga original over top of it. (you can hear it in the video) If this just strikes people as silly I'll take that out when I do the final version.
Current WIP video viewable here (10/06/06, 5 levels complete):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5568544930713355905
It's still pretty dirty, but that's why I'm calling it a rough draft. It's got some subtitles notes in it now, too.
GMVs are
here.
Things to note:
- Whoops, the bit about screen scrolling was wrong, it just makes it so you can't see, it doesn't affect enemy spawns at all.
- Enemies spawn when you touch a certain area, so jumping in the right spot can delay the spawn or avoid it entirely. This might count as luck manipulation.
- Jumping off the edge of a ledge is always faster than falling off since you fall straight down, unless you WANT to fall.
- Falling onto a weapon/tool (either straight down, or falling farther than you can jump) picks it up when you land.
- Most of the input is delayed by 1-2 frames, making timing a chore. It took me a bit to figure this out so there's a couple spots in the first two levels where I hold something longer than neccessary. I can probably shave about 15 frames off when I go back and redo it. The intro screens can probably be done about 5 frames faster as well.
- The diamonds in 2-2 are only there for bonus points. They stop showing up because they spawn in a chain, and since I'm going for speed I very quickly miss enough that they "backlog".
- Level 3-1 in general seems pretty bad as far as waiting, but some of it is unavoidable because of having to wait for chains to lower. I can probably shave some of the other waiting off by using the jump trick, but that will just require relentless experimentation.
- There's a bit of lag in 3-1 when I shoot rapidly to get rid of the Side Shot, and I didn't notice this until I'd already encoded the video. Easy enough to fix later, not sure how many frames it loses though.
- There are a LOT of stray shots in the movie. One of about a billion things I need to clean up.
- I need to find something interesting to do for times when I need to hold still. Alternating frame-wobble seems so cliche but I'm not sure what else could be done in this game.
- When I finish this rough draft I'll sit down and figure out how much time I lose by not taking damage and decide which one I want to redo first. I hope to eventually do it both ways. For the damage run I'll want to finish the level with zero health to make the end-of-level bonus go by as fast as possible.