Flash back to late 2012. A
run of the Atari 2600 game Spider-Man was submitted to the site by NitroGenesis. It played through one stage, and slowly at that. Then
adelikat beat it. Then
I beat that. Then
TehSeven beat that. Then
I beat that again. Finally,
that run was published. (I won the framewar, woohoo.) We now had a run of the Atari 2600 game Spider-Man published on the site, which still played through one stage. And everything was happy forever and ever.
However, I recently found that the subsequent stages are not in fact "
it just repeat with different colors after the first level"
[1]. In fact, the subsequent stages are different - they are longer and harder, with more and faster moving Green Goblins, taller towers, and stricter time limits. The first thing that clued me into this was pressing select on the console, which displayed 6 similarly looking but, upon playing those, not quite identical venues. The second thing that clued me in was actually playing the game for once, and discovering that the game indeed actually has a variety of levels, that are not just different by color.
We're not quite sure how this game got published in this stage, but it's most likely due to the fact that not a single person involved actually played the game, because really, the game is just awful.
Anyhow, this submission aims to correct our former mistake, and clears all 6 stages. I made sure this time around that that is actually all there is to the game; after the sixth stage, the game will just repeat the same stage over again. This is shown by the fact that the stage color doesn't change at all after clearing the sixth stage, and its layout remains the same as well.
So...enjoy the run that expands less than 20 seconds of bad game to just over three minutes of bad game, I guess.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk v1.6.1
- Aims for fastest time
- Actually clears every stage in the game
Generally, each stage requires some fairly different strategies to go through them optimally. This is because the layout of each stage is different (even if it just consists of the same structures in similar patterns) and because of the Green Goblin(s) roaming the stages, which in each stage are in different positions, and have varying speeds. There's a lot of strategy involved with each route through each stage.
Stage 1
Copied from the
published run. I didn't find any way to improve it.
Stage 2
Astute observation, which basically nobody did last time around, would make clear that this building is several times taller than the last. However, nobody noticed.
Stage 3
Apparently the Green Goblin cloned himself repeatedly, as there are like 3 of them on this stage. As if Spidey's life didn't already suck enough with just one of them.
Stage 4
My favorite stage. It is white.
Stage 5
That red bar at the bottom right of the screen is a timer. If it runs out, Spidey automatically falls down to his doom. I'm saying it here because goddamn that thing runs out fast from this stage on. You can refill it slightly by picking up bombs and abducting people, but goddamn.
Stage 6
The fun thing is that the first part of this building is actually shorter than the first part in the first stage (and any other stage). It also has less Green Goblins than some of the previous stages. It's still hard though, with the rapidly dwindling timer and Green Goblins on jet-engine hoverboards or something.
Thanks
The people I frame-warred with. Even though that was kind of a long time ago. Can't think of anyone else to thank for this run.
Random fun fact: this run, after the final stage jingle, ends with 1981 lag frames. That's just one less than the year it was released in.
Bonus:
This alternate version of the run keeps on playing on through the game infinitely. (Also proves that after stage 6, the game keeps looping over stage 6 again). Requires BizHawk v1.4.1, or v1.7.0 and later.
Recommended screenshot:
feos:
Rejecting Judging... Accepting this improvement to Vault.
(The "3 fps" is due to using frame advance at this point. For the course of the run, it actually was turboed at a whopping ~170 fps. That's still pretty slow for experiments like this.)
It took exactly 1:03:50:18.70 (6005380 frames) to reach maximum score.
