mostly due to the train in the fourth room which takes little more than one minute just to spawn the last part...
At this stage I actually meet the most dangerous enemy so far into the run. That UFO is so nasty I have to use the Ice gun just to get rid of his projectiles, but at least I got rid of him quite quickly despite his 30 hp.
The barrels would probably help me out a bit, though I'm not sure how much of a difference it would've made anyway considering the sheer amount of enemies I'll be facing. It could very well make no difference at all short of visual effects, but do you feel it's unprofessional of me not to make use of every little timesaver? ...or actually it could even be faster to remove them since all elves are now nicely gathering around me for me to piledrive them, clearing up bigger groups much faster. I haven't tested with keeping the barrels around, though do you think it's worth trying? I might just end up saving time from minor optimization alone anyway. Just so I'll know for sure, I've been intending to do the Secret Santa stage in order to get the best ending since I feel a difficulty like this deserves that kind of ending. So I wish to check if people would approve of this detour for the best ending category?
This should save time since it'll take about 64 frames from grabbing to throwing and landing again. That's a total of 20 damage (12 for getting rid of the turret and 8 on the boss) which would've taken ~80 frames from just shooting them normally with Brick... not too much time saved when you consider it, but it's still cool! Stage 2 is finished now as well actually, with loads of piledrives when the situation starts to look grim and some fancy shooting in between. With this stage I also discovered there's actually a cap on how many enemies may be on screen at once. When the cap is reached, more enemies just won't spawn until I kill off some of them. You won't be able to see it here yet as this was something I just discovered when I was messing around. Here's the link to the latest .WTF file for anyone who wish to watch it. I'll really try to see if I can get a decent enough encode for everyone else to watch sometime soon. http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/11761786865506540
It works! You just grab one of the upper turrets, fly straight down and throw it at the boss doing 8 damage to him.
Aw, that's a shame you can't remove those projectiles. Oh well, I'll just have to find another way. The Ice shoots 1*0.5 the first two frames, then 2*0.5 the next three frames, not two. That should be 1.5 damage every 5 frames, which is 0.3 damage/frame. I guess I didn't explain it correctly. If I throw on the first possible frame, it'll take just as long as the piledriver would. Otherwise it'll take longer depending on when I throw them, though throwing them lets me reach enemies I wouldn't reach otherwise. Of course its preferable to piledrive them normally, though sometimes it doesn't really matter when enemies are still spawning after I've cleaned up the room. Speaking of the piledrives, I have to use it a HELLA LOT if I wish to survive at this difficulty, which makes me wonder how entertaining it would be to watch me do hundreds of piledrives over and over. Of course there'll be some variations to the best of my ability, but I believe most rooms will be watching me piledrive enemies for half the game. I've also almost cleared Stage 2. Just the last room before the boss, where I'll have to fight elves which spawns from four different exits for 25 seconds. Fun times!
Unless you know Japanese stars you probably wouldn’t know anyone I am about to list but they are pretty famous in Japan at least.
I'm actually trying to see if I can finish this game on "Reallyjoel's Mom difficulty," TASing it on my Windows XP laptop. And I've finished stage 1 already, with no "unlockable shutters" as yet. Although I have no idea if one might appear later on. I can also mention this difficulty is close to impossible to finish outside of TAS.
So you still need hit type prediction, right?
Once enemy is more than 114 pixels back from the screen, he gets scrolled out (>209 for helicopters from level 2). Here's our messy script:
I might take another stab at this, but I would need to have some things in Real Life settle down before I could convince myself to dedicate so much time/effort to such a time-consuming and mentally-wearying hobby. Also, honestly, with how atrociously long the autoscrollers are here, I would be tempted just to use the level-skip code to go past the worst of them. One thing that would really help with the project would be a LUA hitbox display that would allow you to see offscreen enemies/projectiles. I remember that aspect was one of the harder things to optimize when I made that WIP up there (for reference, it has over twice as many rerecords as my Bio Force Ape TAS, if that means anything).