It's mating time in the land of armadillos and one horny red male armadillo looked for a female armadillo it could mate. It shall not be an easy task for the armadillo to find a partner to breed, because their species are threatened by extinction. The armadillo needs to travel, roll and swim though the US to find just one female armadillo somewhere captured in a zoo in New York. One rival male armadillo makes the life of the armadillo features in this game very hard, it's a giant, blue, masculine, genetic manipulated armadillo, why else would an armadillo that big and blue. Shockingly the blue armadillo even uses a self-built robot to try killing its rival, it can even talk. While the red armadillo only can talk, just a few words, but it is able to manipulate a extraterrestrial species for its porpuses. The armadillos might be genetic manipulated by those aliens. Not only makes the blue armadillo the life hard for the red armadillo to find a female armadillo to mate, but also it needs to fight natural enemies, which includes a pig, obviously pigs eat armadillo flesh. But most important is that all armadillos are wearing hats.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: FCEUX 2.2.1
  • Uses glitches

Comments

Tricks used in this run

Movement

There are two memory addresses for speed values in this game. One for speed in pixels, the other is the current speed pattern value. There are no subpixels in this game.
The maximum speed pattern is 8. Speed pattern greater than 3 decrease from time to time or by pressing left or right. Changing forms can prevent a speed drop.
If the armadillo hits a wall while in normal form, the speed will either be stored or it hits the the 16th pixels of a tile in this case the speed drops to 0. While in ball form the armadillo bounces of the wall, the speed pattern decreases afterwards.
Speed patterns greater than 4 let the armadillo stumble while in normal form.

Faster movement glitch

While the armadillo is in midair, when it changes to a ball on a very specific frame the speed pattern ticks to 4. This value can decrease, changing forms is necessary to keep the value.

Going trough breakable ground/walls

Normallly the armadillo bounces of a wall or the ground if it hits a breakable wall, but when changing from either normal or ball, the armadillo will keep its current direction.

Speed pattern table

MovementSpeed pattern
Walking2
Rolling<1
Jumping3
Glitch4
Rolling down slopesincreases to 8
Bouncing of slopes immideately 8

Jumping

The armadillo can jump in ball and in normal form. The jump in normal form can be varieted and is usually faster, but doesn't go very high. The jump while in ball form can go very high from standing still on the ground or it can start bouncing and increase height. When the armadillo changes the form from ball to normal after jumping it can get a boost in height.
There're walljumps in this game.

Skip bonus glitch

When pausing the game just before the hits one of the stakes in the end of each level, it'll skip the countdown of the bonus. To save even more frames pausing the game at specific frames saves time. The amount of pauses is random and depends mostly on speed.

Lag reduction

This game is very laggy. The ball form creates usually less lag.

Despawning enemies

All enemies which appear in groups, maximum number of enemies is four, can be despawned, if the last slot for the enemies has an enemy in it. If the next enemy belongs to the same enemy group, the next enemy will not spawn, otherwise the next enemy will spawn. Mostly enemies don't tend to appear in groups

Memory addresses


World by world comments

On each world, except the last, the objective is to hunt the yellow thing with sunglasses.
The yellow thing will try to escape the armadillo, so it is needed to trick it. It will move when the armadillo flips a tile. The armadillo can move on flipped tiles without making the yellow thing to move. It is possible to skip a gap with one unflipped tile. There's a boss fight in each world.

Desert

In the first world there're many movement techniques used to dash through the desert. The help of the UFO is used to quickly catch the yellow thing.
The lizard battle was not very hard to remove lag, because it doesn't move around.

Desert 2

From world two is getting hard to optimize.
There's a boat on the overworld which the armadillo can use.
The way to the chicken fight was kinda tough to optimize.

Las Vegas

One of many items is first used in this world, it's the only item in this run, to make the armadillo small. It can now crawl through small holes.
In the pig battle it was to possible to sync changing forms to the background music, it created lag.

San Francisco

In the robot battle the block in the air never breaks, to avoid lag frames and walking a long distance to the robot to attack it again.

Desert 3

In this world there are now bumbers which bumb the armadillo at high speed. It is also possible to get stuck in the bumbers.

River

A river which looks mostly like a forest.

Mountains

The mountains are mainly vertical, of course.

New York

In this world the yellow thing doesn't need to be catched, but all levels of this world need to be played.

feos: Accepting and publishing...

TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 14776
Location: 127.0.0.1
This topic is for the purpose of discussing #4339: TASeditor's NES Armadillo in 18:16.93
Active player (303)
Joined: 8/21/2012
Posts: 429
Location: France
I didn't know about that game until today, but it didn't stop me from enjoying many parts of this run, like all the wall jumps for example and some clever routes. The lag is very noticeable at some points, it must have been hard to optimize it... Please accept this yes vote for your work :)
Glitcher
He/Him
Joined: 3/24/2007
Posts: 216
Location: London, U.K.
This game looks unsettlingly familiar. I wonder if I played this as a kid....
Experienced player (670)
Joined: 11/23/2013
Posts: 2206
Location: Guatemala
Best plot for a Nintendo game.
Here, my YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/dekutony
Patashu
He/Him
Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 3999
Nice one! Pure movement optimization in a game with quirky physics leads to nice results.
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Experienced player (600)
Joined: 10/23/2004
Posts: 706
I really enjoyed this and I didn't know about this game. It has so many similarities to Sonic the Hedgehog but it came out within a couple months of the first Sonic game. I find that pretty amazing.
Current Project: - Mario Kart 64
sack_bot
He/Him
Player (110)
Joined: 11/27/2011
Posts: 394
Location: Massachusetts
Good TAS, but I feel like the game mechanics could use more explanation.
Message me here for my discord. Current Project: Psycho Waluigi Project on wait list: None?
Editor, Skilled player (1502)
Joined: 7/9/2010
Posts: 1317
sack_bot wrote:
Good TAS, but I feel like the game mechanics could use more explanation.
Well, I don't really know what I can add as an explanation. I already wrote everything about the game mechanics.
Favorite animal: STOCK Gt(ROSA)26Sortm1.1(rtTA,EGFP)Nagy Grm7Tg(SMN2)89Ahmb Smn1tm1Msd Tg(SMN2*delta7)4299Ahmb Tg(tetO-SMN2,-luc)#aAhmb/J YouTube Twitch
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 14776
Location: 127.0.0.1
This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [2622] NES Armadillo by TASeditor in 18:16.93