1-1-midboss has been redone, finally beating the human record. This took a whole week of work, figuring out the very complex route and creating by myself one much riskier TAS route. I can say with certainity that this is one of the most complex segments in the entire TAS..
https://youtu.be/EVlaMytJR1E
2834 frames, 5046 rerecords.
This gets 450 hits at the miniboss and 4 781 670 score, compared to the 442 hits and 4 71X XXX score of the world record; a large difference this early in the game.
The game starts with Ship-A and Exy as our doll. Ship A is chosen due to it being more expert-friendly (more narrow shot, but moves faster, which is crucial in scoring). For the doll, there are three dolls: Shotia, who has a stronger fast shot and the largest number of bombs; Leinyan, who has a stronger laser and a little less bombs and Exy, which has both a strong laser and fast shot but only one bomb. In this case, Exy (which is a worldplay on Expert) is obiviously chosen, due to her advantages, we won't be using any bombs in the game, due to them reducing score.
You might wonder: what is a fast shot? Fast shots are done by tapping the shot buttoon, while the laser is done by holding down the shot button. There's a glitch related to this, which I call hyper shooting; shooting every other frame will reproduce the first frame of the fast shot, which shoots a volley of missiles. This means you can shoot a volley every 2 frames! (Well, as much missiles as the game can handle on screen: at some point, you are forced to wait for the other missiles to disappear, which is why I get so close to enemies I want to kill.)
However, we only use hyper shooting against normal enemies. Why is that? This requires an explaination of the score system. You see, each enemy has a base point value, which is then multiplied by your hit count (the big number on the top left of the screen.) The reason why I chose the BL version of this game is because the hit counter can go over 9999, as well as some other major gameplay changes (the charge time of the hyper, most notably.) Keeping up this counter can be quite tight: the hit counter vanishes in 3/4 of a second, and the only way to freeze is to use the laser against an enemy (in which case the counter will be frozen until the enemy is killed.) You can see this bar on the top left of the screen.
The other main thing that matters is our hyper gauge. Hypers are a double edged sword: while they give you huge power and allow to grind hits massively, they increase the speed of bullets of 10% while active, and only decrease it by
5% once ended! The hyper speedup vanishes upon death, however. This is what I call the 'hyper rank', and I'll be tracking it with my WIPs to let you see what rank we're currently at. The hyper gauge, in pink at the up left corner of the screen, increases with enemy kills and bee collection.
The last item that needs explaination is the golden bees. Golden bees increase your hyper gauge by a set amount and give you hit counter * 100 points, and require a fast shot followed by a laser shot to reveal. My route, unlike the WR route, takes advantage of those bees even further to get extra points.
The route you're seeing has been redone several times. I chose to go with delaying the start of the hit counter to allow for a route with more points at the start.
To recapitulate, there are three objectives:
1. Keep up the hit counter.
2. Fill the hyper gauge to grind hits.
3. Maximise bee score.
Enjoy watching.
There is now an official way to see an duplicate Altaïr.
What's been happening these past weeks? A lot of research. Castle is like a giant taunt: until very recently, it had no methods to go out of bounds, and the one I've found recently seems to be near-impossible to execute. The reason I'm so keen on finding a method is because this would not allow me to break one, but two levels: in Castle, the two parts of the level are actuall stored in the same level! This means we can go out of bounds in the first section and get back in bounds again at the end of the second section, saving a little over two minutes.
The out of bounds I've found is theoritically doable; the last problem to get back in bounds is getting out of the area pictured above, which I've only managed to do with infinite health. However, getting to this area has one perk: it gets us to interact with Altaïr's model. What is it doing here? The reason is simple: when teleporting Altair in this particular level, the game needs an entity to use for the cutscene, so it simply uses a clone of Altaïr's model, then teleports him once the cutscene ends. Since he was never intended to be interacted with in a normal playthrough, he has a few interesting proprieties. First off, he is a peasant. A peasant has the particularity that it cannot be hurt: only walked over and pushed around. This means it also borrows the animations from peasants (which is quite amusing to see). There isn't much to do from that, but since there's a death barrier nearby, we can actually kill this peasant!
By pushing him repetadly with heavy blows, we are eventually able to get him into the death barrier. What happens from there? Strangely, the Altaïr clone does not die, but he gives Altaïr a red and blue orb, as within normal death procedures. My theory is that there are no death animations for peasants (they cannot be hurt in normal play) and as such, the game cannot pull out a death animation for the Altaïr clone and simply proceeds onto the next part, which is giving us orbs for the kill.
Is there something doable with this? Possibly. It is possible, once I find out a way to pass the death barrier, to skip not one but two levels, which would result in a huge timesave.
These are all speedruns of the same game. I'm interested in the point you're making: where to draw the line between legitimate gameplay and non-gameplay?
The pixels at the very right, while drawn by a 4x4 pen, go slightly 'off' the drawing, and are as such illegal. While this works while drawing your picture, this does not work in the game.