Jumpin' Kid: Jack to Mame no Ki Monogatari (ジャンピン・キッド ジャックと豆の木ものがたり, "Jumping Kid: The Tale of Jack and the Beanstalk") is a variation of the famous fairy tale, Jack and the Beanstalk. It is a challenging platform game that plays somehow similar to Mega Man but lays heavy stress on vertically platforming.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: FCEUX 2.2.2
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Takes samage to save time
  • Abuses programming errors in the game
  • Manipulates luck
The game has warps to skip or lead to whole alternate routes of some levels by beating certain bonus stages. Some levels also have small alternate paths in them. However, none of these could save time as it would take too much time to use any of them. So I just take the "default route", which happens to be "warpless".

Comments

The game is known to be very frustrating in normal gameplay. Jack's jumping is slow, inflexible and easy to miss the platforms, despite his large collision box. Enemies are hard to dodge as they can't be killed without some time-limited power-ups but only temporarily stunned, and respawn very quickly. The non-time-limited power-ups, Beans that improve Jack's attack and Springs that improve his jumping height are easily fully lost as a result of getting hurt by anything (except the weird "yoyo" obstacles hanging from the ceilings of the castle). In addition, they require to kill certain different groups of enemies in different stages to be dropped at all.
Most stages in the game are vertical scrollers. For some reasons, both of Jack's Y position related to the screen and that of the vertical scrolling can vary within some ranges even when Jack has landed on the same platforms, which can affect how long it takes between Jack's jumps and sometimes whether Jack can make a jump up to the higher platform or not.
The jumping/falling mechanism is somehow weird on its own as when Jack falls down past the height of his previous foothold, his horizontal speed will immediately be clamped into some small value. Plus how the game handles the subpixels in a strange way, it is usually slower to make jumps when going left or right, but there are rare cases where jumps can be faster.
The attack mechanism is even weirder in a way that Jack can only fire "the second bullet" if he has collected and been holding (not lost due to getting hit) 1 or more Beans, which is the only bullet of the maximum two that can be aimed diagonally up at Bean Power Level 2 (max). This makes it difficult to attack enemies coming from above and requires careful planning for the bullets' usage that sometimes "the first bullet" has to be fired at air in order to let "the second bullet" be rapid-fire-able.
The annoyances above are all handled and optimized carefully in the run.

Other comments

Special thanks to mtvf1 for the Nicovideo encode.

Memory: Judging
Memory: Optimization seems good despite the weird mechanics.
The TAS felt fairly generic to me. It had a decent pace but there was nothing really unique about it. Although there was some positive reception, there was also some fairly negative reception and one person I asked to take a look told me they outright zoned out after a minute. It feels fairly in line with Vault entertainment standards so that is where it should go.
Accepting to Vault.
feos: Pub.

TASVideoAgent
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mklip2001
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Neat game I never heard of before! And the music rocks... it reminds me of Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu. I'm impressed by how much variety the stage design has for such a short game, even if the controls are clunky. I also don't know why blue winged demons hang out in the giant's castle. Yes vote.
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.
EZGames69
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So I guess this is a stupid question, but can the Y position values be manipulated every time to have the shortest possible height or is it all the same even if you move in different directions?
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't 12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!" Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish [Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing
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EZGames69 wrote:
So I guess this is a stupid question, but can the Y position values be manipulated every time to have the shortest possible height or is it all the same even if you move in different directions?
For jumping on the normal thick stationary platforms in most stages, one frame can be saved every two jumps by manipulating the Y position. For the thin (eg. "lines") or moving platforms, it depends on the situation but yes the Y position affects the time. I compared various solutions of every section and chose the fastest one each time.
<klmz> it reminds me of that people used to keep quoting adelikat's IRC statements in the old good days <adelikat> no doubt <adelikat> klmz, they still do
Memory
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Looks decently paced but gameplay doesn't seem to be anything thrilling otherwise. Meh vote.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
EZGames69
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klmz wrote:
EZGames69 wrote:
So I guess this is a stupid question, but can the Y position values be manipulated every time to have the shortest possible height or is it all the same even if you move in different directions?
For jumping on the normal thick stationary platforms in most stages, one frame can be saved every two jumps by manipulating the Y position. For the thin (eg. "lines") or moving platforms, it depends on the situation but yes the Y position affects the time. I compared various solutions of every section and chose the fastest one each time.
Ok thanks for clearing that up. unfortunately the run doesn't offer much, so I'm voting meh. good work on optimizing the jumps as much as you could though.
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't 12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!" Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish [Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing
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EZGames69 wrote:
unfortunately the run doesn't offer much, so I'm voting meh.
Memory wrote:
Although there was some positive reception, there was also some fairly negative reception and one person I asked to take a look told me they outright zoned out after a minute.
True that this game is Vault material mainly due to its level design. I said to myself "what still a cliimbing stage again?!" and laughed as I realized that I shouldn't have been surprised during watching the run weeks after it was finished. XD
<klmz> it reminds me of that people used to keep quoting adelikat's IRC statements in the old good days <adelikat> no doubt <adelikat> klmz, they still do
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. ---- [3851] NES Jumpin' Kid: Jack to Mame no Ki Monogatari by klmz in 05:32.45
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There is an out of bounds technique that can save time in the final castle if anyone wants to ever improve this Link to video