You know I'll never let you quit with only 4 frames to go! Let me take a look, though these later levels are harder for me to critique because their paths and essential strategies aren't as transparent.
The problem with always dragging Amy along wherever you go is that she will make the rest of your party level more slowly. On the other hand, she provides a significant damage buffer at the expense of wasted time. You will probably have to do lots of experimentation to determine what the best character strategy is.
I'm not really sure what you should do about leveling. I believe it is on the first floor of Roron castle where you can encounter lots of the most advanced form of the self-replicating jellies (I don't remember their names.) These guys are great because they give good XP and do crappy damage, and with luck you can make them keep replicating themselves. This is one possible place to stop and level.
Keep in mind there are only two reasons for you to level. One of them is to beat Neifirst, the other is to beat the game. Throughout the rest of the game you can simply avoid battles. With luck manipulation, you probably don't need to be very strong at all to beat Neifirst. Only her sword attack does a significant amount of damage, so you should try to manipulate her to keep her from ever using it.
As for Noah, you will probably have to level quite a bit to beat the Prime Evil and Mother Brain. You don't have to do the battles back to back, which is nice, so at least there's that. Probably the best way to level in Noah is to go to the spaceship, cast all your strongest magics until you run out, and warp back to Lutz to heal, rinse, and repeat. At least, that's what I always did. On a console I always just used Megid, but with luck you might be able to manipulate Hugh's and Kain's one hit kill spells into working every time.
Not to pick on you specifically, Kelly, but Rolf/Amy/Anna/Rudo is a particularly poor choice of characters. A healer is pretty unnecessary even in a console run due to the effectiveness of trimate and the fact that no battle should last long enough for anything to have a chance of killing you. Also, Anna just blows late game.
Rolf/Kain/Hugh/Rudo is as good as you can get for pure damage, which is probably what we are looking for. Incidentally, that is the group that I used to beat the game, and even the final spaceship was a cakewalk. Because you will be using Kain and Hugh only as spellcasters, you can and probably should render them virtually invulnerable by pimping them out in as much defensive gear as you can (Nei shield, lacon emel, lacon shield, etc. No man can wear the Nei emel.)
For an emulated run it might even be desirable to drop Rudo as soon as possible. He can't match the damage output of either of the other three's spells, even with the Neishot. Playing with only three people in your group will cause them to level faster, as well.
As far as I know nothing in the game is optional. It's been a while since I've played the game but I believe you have to complete every dungeon.
With respect to Nei, I don't think there is any way to keep her alive past the battle with Neifirst. If you were psycho obsessed with the game like I was (I have hand drawn maps of all the dungeons) you could have beaten Neifirst with Nei alone. (You have to level Nei until she is strong enough to only need to heal against Neifirst once every two attacks. That way you can attack-trimate-attack-trimate-attack-trimate until Neifirst dies. Also if you are lucky Neifirst doesn't sword you and you can attack twice in a row.) She stills dies after the battle because she and Neifirst are inextricably linked -- one cannot live without the other. (Well ... take that with a grain of salt. When Neifirst kills Nei you still have to fight Neifirst. Don't ask me why she can live through the death of her sister/double but Nei can't.)
I seriously doubt Shir will be of any use at all, I never used her other than to steal a visiphone, which you don't need, and any other items she might gank probably don't warrant the wasted time.
The biggest challenge in preparing this run will probably be figuring out where and when to level, and I suspect you will have to do a lot of it.
Fro Jackson:
It is true that naseous has acquired, through extensive colloquial misuse, a secondary meaning. Nauseated is still clearly "more correct" simply because no one argues about its meaning. Merriam-Webster is also not the authority ... it's just one of them. There are other (more prestigious) sources that disagree with them.
Xerophyte:
You could quite correctly use perpetuate here, though that is not the meaning I wished to convey. Perpetrate has a negative connotation, and you hardly ever hear the word used outside of the phrase "to perpetrate a crime." Thus the myth is a crime which the author of the test has perpetrated (and incedentally perpetuated.) Please, suffer me being poetic, I'm passionate about language.
Here's a movie I made about a week ago while messing around: http://www.geocities.com/xebranick/xebra-s3comp.zip . Please note this was made with Sonic 3 (U), not S3&K.
It's a 15"73 on Azure Lake with Sonic, and also the first lap of Azure Lake with Knuckles in 2"81, highlighting the essential strategy that will make a sub 14 second run possible.
Since I appear to be the laziest and least motivated person on the planet, I figured I'd get this vid out there for anyone that was actually interested in completing a run through of all the competition maps.
Additionally, I have, without a doubt, the most intimate knowledge of those five competition maps of anyone in existence. If someone wants to work on a video, it will not be difficult for me to critique your handiwork and help you attain absolute perfection.
Google: 100/100
1 minute, 31 seconds.
I used Google on five questions, IMDB for one question, and knew the answers to four questions. For the curious, #5 took me the longest (probably close to 30 seconds), while #1 took virtually no time at all.
English: 100/100/93/94
I read over the English answer key, take her "rules" with a grain of salt. The author of the test made a number of errors, most notably in that she is inconsistent with her evaluation of the importance of expert opinion versus colloquial usage.
Specifically:
#17: Invaluable and priceless are technically synonymous, though colloquially they are never used interchangeably amongst native American speakers. Paintings are priceless, assistance is invaluable, and never vice versa. Here she has arbitrarily deemed that the technical definitions take precedence.
#22: Her assessment here is just blatantly incorrect. She provided context that shaded the meaning of the missing word, and the primary definition of criticize is not neutral.
#30: Her answer here is correct, however she commits an egregious error in her explanation of the answer. She comments that a period would have worked in place of the semicolon. This is incorrect. It is (technically) never permitted to begin a sentence with however, though 99.9% of Americans do so. It seems that here she prefers colloquial usage over technical accuracy.
#33: Answer a. is technically incorrect, because stay does not take on that meaning as a transitive verb. Answer a. is merely how Americans speak.
#34: Here is an example of a rule that even experts have abandoned due to hundreds of years of misuse. 300 years ago her analysis would have been technically correct, but not any more. Another interesting example of this phenomenon is the merging of the two future tenses in English into just one future tense. There are (were) technically two future tenses in English differentiated by whether you use will or shall in any particular point of view. Even experts acknowledge, however, that differentiating the two future tenses is nothing more than an anachronism.
#36: Nauseous and nauseated are simply not synonyms, and I'm sure Strunk is turning in his grave at her perpetration of this myth. Nauseous means nauseating, not nauseated. Almost all Americans misuse this word.
I'm glad to see you've been keeping up the good work. I've been gone for some time because I got readdicted to DotA. But Blizzard released 1.18 so so much of DotA is broken it's not even fun to play any more. Anyways, I guess I'll go back to bothering you.
Your video offers definitive proof that Sonic kicked Mario's ass; some of the frictionless material from Sonic's shoes seems to have rubbed off on Mario's butt.
To continue the discussion in the locked submission thread, I agree with Nitsuja's comment. When use of a glitch results in the run being materially different, it should be considered a "glitched run."
Also worth considering is how important to the video a particular glitch is. For example, though Giga's glitched Zelda II run is not "materially different" from a standard one (in that his aim is still to traverse all the levels and pick up all the items and complete the game in the normal fashion), his run is utterly suffused (and dependent upon) the left+right glitch, and therefore should be considered a "glitched run."
Also, it's not particularly easy to understand a strategy when you don't even explain it.
I apologize, I assumed my intentions (of jumping up all three ledges) were obvious. You seem to have some doubts as to the efficacy of doing so, so I will make a video showing you what I mean.
EDIT: http://www.geocities.com/xebranick/fix2.zip
This traversal of the three ledges is 47 frames faster than your original. You can probably improve upon it further.
The instruction manual has "Gannon" 5 times and "Ganon" 15 times.
Upon further analysis I can only conclude that they are both valid spellings, but one has fallen out of favor, as the initial spelling of names and transliterated or invented words tends to be quite flexible before settling on one or two of the most common variants. (E.g. Rachmaninoff/Rachmaninov, Kasimdjanov/Qosimjanov, Mao Tse-tung/Mao Zedong, Al-Qaida/al Qaeda.)
I hereby declare all persons that have ever Gannon-banned another to be forever branded super secret double cross-bonded GANON#ANAL.
I'm not talking about jumping while rolling, I'm talking about walking up the side of the wall, which reverts me to walking in midair (or rolling in midair).
Jump up the wall.
By jumping up as little as possible, your feet can hit the ground earlier but there will be a SIGNIFICANT delay before you can actually spindash.
I have not been able to observe this phenomenon. Jumping up the walls is how I beat your times.
The following movie illustrates this effect. Right after I jump up the ledge with the fire-throwing dude at the top, you will notice that I take several steps to the right before I turn around, yet I was holding left the entire time.
Movies of irrelevant problems aside, are you going to fix the ledge clearances? Do you understand what strategy I used, or would you like me to make a video of it?
There's just one problem - y'see, there's some sort of bug in the game where if you land just barely on the edge of a platform from a running-up-the-wall jump, the game will completely lock your L/R controls for up to 30(!) frames once you land;
I have not been able to observe this phenomenon. Are you referring to the lack of control you have when jumping from a roll? The oft overlooked fix to this is to not jump from a roll (that is, get on your feet first.)
You truly are losing a lot of time in these cases. For example, in the first instance where you do this, the first frame in which you are ducked (for the upcoming spindash) is 8:19:09. Without bothering to determine if any of my alterations were being performed optimally, I was able to be ducked at 8:18:59. In the second instance, you are ducked at 8:24:57, I was able to be ducked by 8:24:37. In the third instance you are ducked at 8:26:43, I was able to be ducked by 8:26:31.
I did not string together those strategies in my testing (that is, each improvement is self contained), so in total that's 42 frames. Along with the 52 frame improvement from the strategies in your previous post, that's just 26 frames from 2 seconds total. Now consider:
1) I didn't optimize any of my strategies (I didn't even play them with frame advance.)
2) In prior levels you have shown a remarkable capacity to further improve upon my ideas, once shown a more effective strategy.
3) If you choose to fix the ledge clearances, you will be redoing pretty much the entire level, and will undoubtedly find a few frames here and there as you go through it again.
What I am trying to say is 120 frames are clearly there for the taking. I will be shocked and disappointed if you can't find them.
P.S. You once (correctly) chastized me for my inappropriate and condescending attitude. Take care not to be hoist by your own petard. I think all we both really want is for you to make the best movie possible.
In many of the instances where you are trying to just squeeze over the lip of a ledge, you lose a few frames. Try to lower your clearance. While it is true that in order to do that you will have to traverse the portion immediately prior a tad slower, that is not as damaging as the painfully slow rate at which you rise up and fall back down to the ground with excess clearance.
Additionally, it is faster to stick a spindash in at ~31.8 seconds (~8:45:48). Perhaps you left it out because you can't decelerate fast enough to start far enough back to clear the next ledge with a 6-dash. That problem is easily solved by simply doing a 5-dash. (You may try experimenting with a spindash as early as 31.0 (~8:44:50), I did not test this but it's worth a look.)
Lastly, though I did not try it in tandem with with any of the above, I was able to save a few frames by breaking the block and spindashing straight to the wall before the long fall, so that I landed on the platform closest to the purple dragon, as opposed to the one farther to the left. (It's probably not even necessary to break the block since you can undoubtedly land right next to it, I recall there being space to do that ... so you should save even more time if that is true.)
I believe at least 2 seconds can come off this time.
