Genesis Iron Man in 06:33.59 by Noxxa

Game objectives

• Emulator used: BizHawk 1.11.6
• Aims for fastest time
• Manipulates luck
• Takes damage to save time

About the game

Notes

Overall notes

• Iron Man has 2 hit points, and a few stages have heart symbols that can be used to replenish one hit point. This provides some opportunities to take damage to save time, but also limits it.
• Iron Man can shoot a dinky little laser by pressing B. This can only be done while standing, leaves Iron Man standing still for about 20 frames, and it takes 4 shots to kill an enemy (far too long to be usable for this purpose). It does allow Iron Man to bypass enemies unharmed during their invincibility period, so it's still useful for that purpose, but only if it would take a long time (or be impossible) to pass them another way.
• Generally, taking damage is 3 frames faster than shooting an enemy, but is of course limited by the hearts spread throughout the game.
• There are two types of enemies throughout the game.
  • Hazmat suit guys. These walk left and right in a fixed pattern, and cannot be manipulated (except shooting them briefly stops them, and allows me to pass them for a few seconds while they're invincible). They can be jumped over without taking damage, but only if they're going opposite to Iron Man's direction.
  • Turrets. These are pretty interesting - they fire a shot as soon as the screen is loaded, and then randomly delay 60 to 90 frames before shooting again, and repeat. This random luck is manipulatable by random input. This means that their first shot is instantaneous, their second shot time is determined when the stage is entered, and the third (and on) shot is determined and can be manipulated mid-stage. This is very interesting for a TAS, of course, as it means I can manipulate their shots out of the way, such that I can almost always pass them without stopping. Do not try the strategies I'm using in real time, as the turrets will kill you very fast.
• There are many gear pickups around the stages. Collecting 200 of them gives Iron Man a 1-up. As a side goal, I pick up as many of these as possible without compromising any time to do so.
• The game music is pretty jammin'.

Run notes

• For the first part, before I reach the first available heart, there are a few different areas where I can take damage to save time, but I have only one opportunity to do so. All of them ended up taking the same amount of time, so I just ended up taking the last one for no particular reason.
• The second part (dividing by heart accessibility) had several parts where taking damage would save a particular amount of time, which meant a lot of testing and redoing to see which area was optimal to take damage on. It ended up being a room with a single Hazmat, which was particularly tricky to bypass because he would walk in the same direction I go to, which means that even just taking damage wouldn't allow me to get past him and I'd still need to way for some time before bumping into him.
• From the second half of the run on, hearts get increasingly more out of the way. Typically they save less time than it's worth to collect them if they're out of the way, so I only end up collecting hearts that are directly in the way.
• There's one forked path at about 5:25 in the run. I take the top route because it gives me sufficient room to jump over the turret, unlike the bottom route.
• Most of the rest of the run is pretty straightforward. Just hopping (and occasionally shooting/taking damage) by every obstacle, screen by screen, for 120 screens.

Final comments