Kirby's Dreamland 3 hasn't been done yet, has it? I think a full run of that could be highly entertaining.
EDIT: whoops, you're looking for RPGs. Never mind.
Hm, it may be usable in boss fights after all.
A) It works with Navi.
B) Navi will talk about iron-barred doors.
Not that it'd still do us ang good, though... Bosses' stun is different from normal enemies. On the ones you can crouchstab repeatedly, though, it may well be faster, depending on how fast you can set it up and get through the dialogue.
Since it's activated with a crouchstab and you use no further attacks, the power is preserved from a deku jumpslash (I tested this). It does not persist across zone changes that reset your character state, however.
Can/will use be made of this glitch? I tried it out, and it seems to work with anything you can Check. It would seem to offer the advantage of being able to kill things without stopping, although I'm not sure what the tradeoff would be time-wise. There aren't any boss rooms with Checkable things, are there? It could make a boss fight really fast, I'd think, especially if you did a jumpslash first.
A slightly offtopic theoretical question: Is there any reason why it wouldn't be possible for someone to complete OoT without ever pressing the Z button? You'd miss out on a lot pf tricks and shortcuts, of course, but I can't think of anywhere the game itself requires you to press Z...
From my RAM-poking it looks like there's a single byte that stores your powerup state, so I'd rule the fire/cape thing out immediately... Only thing that might give you any unusual powers is having a powerup level of greater than 3, which seems unlikely to occur within the game's engine.
I passed SMB3-All Stars 1-1 and 1-2 and SMW Yoshi's Island 2 simultaneously without dying. That's as far as I got before things got awkward fast, though.
Also, playing two copies of SMB3 with a deliberate desync was rather interesting.
Yeah... 100% kills is rather meaningless/impossible in a game with nearly Megaman-X-like levels of offscreen respawning. In the SDA video, the player creates a fire-fire powerup by spitting a fire enemy into its respawned self.
Roger. After getting a bit more practice with the tools I'll scrap my current run and go for a 100% run instead. SDA has a 100% speedrun that I've watched, which I'll review carefully for route inspiration. It does a lot of revisiting level 1-1 to regain the fire-fire ability; I'm not sure how much time that saves or whether I want to do that. Certainly a 100% run will require much more planning to determine which powers are the best choice to have. No damage, because I haven't seen anywhere it's possible to save time by taking damage and any TAS that involves a game with damage should be in one of those two categories.
Is it possible to search/view memory contents in Mupen64? I may be looking in the wrong places, but I haven't seen this feature.
1. Don't swallow the fire guy, shoot him at the second fire guy you see. It eats frames to pull out the power, unless you pull it out directly on top of an enemy.
Yeah - in retrospect I think the single fire-boost there is not worth the frame cost in switching powers.
2. Always use flame as soon as possible, and at the earliest possible moment, unless it would end with you getting hurt somehow. It eats frames like chocolate to not keep moving. If you need to, just move frame by frame for trial and error until you can past the ledge at the earliest possible moment.
There were some spots in the first level I lost time on as far as this is concerned; I did much better with it in the second level.
3. Manipulate Waddle Dee to the far right side (easier said than done, I suppose). If you kill him on the right side, it takes less time for the crystal to pop up.
Wiith the tactic I was using, I figured that the time lost by him bouncing was irrelevant because of the delay for the fire to end. I realize now that I could have started on the far left when he's on the right, so I finish the attack sooner.
4. You don't lose speed in the air, but you lose speed from any action you take, including flying, pulling out a power, coughing up an enemy, etc... You still even move the same speed if you have something in your mouth or arms, and only get slowed down for a moment. Use this to your advantage whenever possible.
Yeah - I experimented with doing things in the air to maintain more momentum, but it's tricky to balance the time spent moving slowly in the air before I can run again with the time spent busy doing something.
5. The fire/fire is a great form of movement, but you have to be careful of a few rules about it. 1) It's the fastest form of horizontal movement; 2) it stops you slightly when it starts and ends, so be aware of how far your target distance is; 3) it automatically stops itself so you can enter a new area, but not when you hit a wall; 4) the wings at the start damage/destroy enemies, so use that to your advantage (pesky cannons get knocked down below your path if you time it right and get close enough).
Yeah - once again, look for some improvement with this in the second level.
A few observations about powers and situations. If I had to guess for vertical movement, I'd guess probably fire/bomb because you don't lose too much horizontal speed with it. (It turns you into a fireworks bomb and boosts you into the air. Chains to 3 blasts that can jump you up an extra chunk) There's also rock/ice for a horizontal boost, if you want to look into that. It starts you off faster than normal speed, but slows down on a straight slope. It looks like it could be useful if you need to go downhill. Maybe... try using it until you slow down to normal speed (n number of frames?) and toggling it off and on to keep speed. You keep speed while going in and out of it, so it may be useful once you can get it in the next level.
With the aerial gap after the ice guy, it seemed far better to keep the fire/fire. Also, I'm beginning to wonder about the monotony of a speedrun that uses fire/fire all the time - a 100% run would probably be more entertaining, and would showcase the use of more powers. Alternatively, a powerless run might be interesting (I think this is possible). Level 2 is added to the run - I left the first level as-is partly because this is a practice run rather than one intended to be publishable, and partly because I was sick of doing the first level over and over. Same download link as before.
Here is the first level done sensibly this time. The fire abilities seem definitely faster, although I lose more time than I think I should when gaining and combining powers.
Edit-before-posting: Ah, went through and did it again, improving by two seconds, though I'm still not happy with the time lost merging the fire powers. This is rather addictive.
Anyone done or working on a run of this game? I myself have no prior experience TASing, but I did a practice run of the first level just to see what it would be like, and it seems that it could be pretty fun. Not counting the frames lost to timing issues (dashing at the first available opportunity, hitting enemies as soon as possible) I think I did okay, except for the stupid bit about not grabbing a power so I could kill the midboss and boss faster (which cost me loads of time as far as the boss was concerned). I didn't bump into any walls at least, though I don't think I handled that deep water optimally. I'll need to do some comparisons to see what's the fastest mode of movement, and what attacks deal the most damage. Anyway, here's the m64 so you can laugh at the stupid n00b trying to TAS.
EDIT: Doh! Noob indeed! I accidentally recorded over my first attempt. Um, ignore that m64, I'll have something slightly closer to worthwhile posted in a bit.