Dr. Franken II involves our Frankenstein creation 'Franky' exploring 6 major areas for pieces of a golden tablet in order to pay off his massive debts.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: Bizhawk 1.6.0
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Skips optional items

Movement

Running is fastest method of transport, with the basic jump being slowest. Franky can glitch the jump though by turning around a few frames in, cutting the jump short and thus landing quicker. Since we want these jumps to be forward facing, this obviously requires turning around twice within the jump. This means the fastest way of doing a given room is to just run straight through all enemies, at the cost of our own HP. We have up to 3 lives, but going through the dying animation costs around 200 frames which is far more than the occasional damage shortcut would save. This means we use only our initial life, avoiding as much damage as possible, and eventually ending the run on 1hp. Sometimes jumps are done out of the way for the sake of killing enemies, who would otherwise cause significant slowdown. Quite often the frames saved from lag removal are more than the few extra ones created by doing a slow jump, and so as many enemies will get killed throughout. This needs to be done while jumping, as there's no run/shoot ability, you either need to be either standing or jumping while shooting.

Route Plan

Each major area cannot get completed independently, which means plenty of backtracking is needed between places. Thankfully a teleporter picked up in Village helps quite a bit, and when returning to places such as Forest and Garden, there's no immediate hurry. If the only thing left there was the tablet piece, then might as well grab that near the very end, when we need to go close to those areas anyway. Speaking of which, Egypt is the only place with a skip in the run. Grabbing a shield before entering gives just enough time to run across the deadly hot sand leading up to the pyramid. This skips entering the first building, plus searching all over the sky for a collection of coins to trigger the intentional carpet transport. Skipping that, plus an optional HP regeneration fuse gives a final completion of 93%.

feos: Accepting to Vault.
Guga: Processing...


TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #4223: Flip's GB Dr. Franken II in 13:41.90
Editor, Experienced player (570)
Joined: 11/8/2010
Posts: 4036
An encode has been added to the submission text. While I watched the entire run, I didn't find it that interesting, especially the swimming part. I'm voting No, but I don't see why it shouldn't get published to the Vault.
Player (12)
Joined: 11/23/2012
Posts: 94
With all of the music being in the same key and the instruments having the same timbre throughout, it took me a long time to realize this game has more than one music track. Vote Meh.
mklip2001
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Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 2227
Location: Georgia, USA
What an odd game. I like the idea of a complex open-ended map for a GB game. The room titles annoyed me at first, but they stopped being less of a problem later on. My favorite title was "Death Room". The way Franky runs, he's more like Maui Mallard than a traditional Frankenstein monster. He's pretty nimble. I have to say, though, that this isn't as interesting as the NES Addams Family run (even though that game is probably crappier). It's just much harder to tell what's going on in this one when you don't see an on-screen health bar or any completion indicator (like the cash in Addams Family). I saw that every so often, some meter would be filled when you teleport, but I couldn't figure the rest out. The run was definitely fast but tough to follow, and unfortunately it's tough to follow in a bad way. I voted Meh on the run. I think this could be much cooler, though, if there were subtitles or other supplements to indicate completion, major roles of items you pick up, and so forth.
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Joined: 6/4/2009
Posts: 893
suprisingly interesting game and the run looks solid yes vote
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [2560] GB Dr. Franken II by Flip in 13:41.90