I'm trying to tasing the PC engine port of klax.
If you don't mind, could you tell me the techniques and glitches you used in this movie?
I thought maybe I could use a PC engine port.
(The text was translated by Google Translate, so it may be difficult to understand or unnatural.)
I'm the TAS-author of the NES-version of this game. I was aware of there being a GB-version, but I haven't played it before (or watched any gameplay). It turns out the two versions are quite similar in terms of level layout, but with several minor differences. I also noticed some minor differences in the game mechanics. Overall, the two versions are incomparable (also due to the fact that the NES-version is very, very laggy). Small sections of the game can still be compared between the two versions.
While the manipulations done in the NES TAS are documented, I don't remember the finer details of them and didn't take the time to brush up my memory either (some of them starting several screens away to set up a particular enemy pattern and require a bit of time to get up to speed with). The game was still engrained enough in my memory to give this GB TAS a critical watch. Every time I noticed something that looked odd or didn't recognize from my NES TAS, I did a (fairly quick) check to see if it was due to a routing mistake or version differences.
In the end, I'm left with the following question marks:
* Were you aware of the possibility shown at https://youtu.be/hx9YxoNqBfA?t=399 ? I tried to get it to work with the submitted movie file, but the enemies were not aligned properly. A manipulation of the enemy spawns would have to be set up in advance for a chance to get it to work. I'm not going to do it, but would like to know if you already considered it and tried to include it?
* The rest of tower 5 didn't look optimal in my eyes. There were fairly long stops before several enemies near the end. I remember facing the same problems in the NES TAS and it required a manipulation to start further down the tower to get the enemies aligned and minimize the stops towards the end. I'm not saying there is a faster solution, just that it looks in my eyes like there should be one and I would again be interested to know how hard you tried to optimize this section?
* Why do you mention "Left+Right/Up+Down - off" in the run comments? Those combinations are generally forbidden for RTA leaderboards, but they are allowed on tasvideos. Do those combinations do anything special and would it have saved any time?
While it's not the purpose of this thread, I should also mention that there were a few route choices/tricks that looked like they could save time in the NES TAS. All of the ones I could identify were however due to version differences, so there are no improvements to the NES TAS that could be easily implemented (as far as I can tell).
I personally don't care about the entertainment criteria here, but I appreciate this version being TASed. I still assume this is pretty obvious vault material. As for the technical aspect, I would like to get some feedback on my questions above before giving it a thumbs up.
The text was translated by Google Translate, so it may be difficult to understand or unnatural.
"Were you aware of the possibility shown at https://youtu.be/hx9YxoNqBfA?t=399 ? "
Yes, but it was faster to wait for the elevator to come down.
"The rest of tower 5 didn't look optimal in my eyes. There were fairly long stops before several enemies near the end. I remember facing the same problems in the NES TAS and it required a manipulation to start further down the tower to get the enemies aligned and minimize the stops towards the end. I'm not saying there is a faster solution, just that it looks in my eyes like there should be one and I would again be interested to know how hard you tried to optimize this section?"
Maybe I'm lacking in research, but the main character's position where enemies spawn is different from the NES version, so enemy manipulation like NES TAS won't work.
"Why do you mention "Left+Right/Up+Down - off" in the run comments? Those combinations are generally forbidden for RTA leaderboards, but they are allowed on tasvideos. Do those combinations do anything special and would it have saved any time?"
Because I had nothing else to comment on. There is nothing special about it.