Flashback is a prince of Persia style platformer for the Sega Genesis. It has some major glitches which allow for large portions of this otherwise long game to be skipped. The present TAS implements a new version of the Walk through walls glitch along with improved routing to save over a minute over the published run.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 1.9.4
- Beats the game as fast as possible
- Heavy glitch abuse
Currently the longest non-obsoleted movie on this site, Flashback has been known to be improvable for some time. The current strats are all contained in an RTA run done
here. The game does not scroll at all, so every screen requires a transition ~1 second in length, so it's no wonder no one was eager to improve it.
The major improvements of the run come from a new way to walk through walls, which is faster in many (but not all) such circumstances. This also allows for some small route optimizations here and there along the way. Also a new route in the final level saves about 20 seconds.
There are two spots where I do lose time compared to the original run, right at the end of level 5 and right at the start of level 7. In fact in general, I was not able to recreate any of the strats employed in the previous run that involved the behavior of enemies. In most cases this wasn't a problem, I was able to find slightly better ones, but those 2 instances cost about 2 seconds combined. A final instance where I lose time is in fighting the boss on top of the tower in level 4. For some reason, his animation takes noticeably longer to perform between hits then in the original publication.
I'll forgo the stage by stage comments, there is nothing particularly new.
Overall this run was somewhat easy, but also a bit boring to make. The constant screen transitions do get tedious. It would be accurate to say I made this run purely for the sake of obsoleting another 2004 run. Also for those who are interested in statistics, only one run from 2004 remains assuming this run makes it to publication, Combatribes. Also, only 3 games are left in the 2xx series of publications (Umihara Kawase was the last of the 1xx series.)
There will always be a new 'longest non-obsoleted movie' of course, and when the last of the 2004 movies is done you can just replace it with 2006. When does this cease to be a relevant measure of anything? Was it ever? What represents the State-of-the-Art in TASing?
Anyway...I think this movie could be improved if a consistent way to manipulate enemies is found. So far all I can see is time (you might notice me stop for a couple to a couple dozen frames for this reason.) Of course a sequence break could also save significant time, but I'm not sure where such a thing might be found.
Enjoy!
Noxxa: It's an interesting game, and the new walk-through-wall glitches help to make the run a bit more interesting, but the majority of the run is plagued by repetitive, slow and somewhat boring gameplay. Accepting to the Vault as an improvement to the
published run.
