Adventures of Lolo 3 is the final installment of the block pushing puzzle series for the NES. There are 100 levels this time and several bosses.
This is an improvement to the published run of a little more then 14 steps (or about 4 seconds.)
The improvements are:
6-3: better strategy by shooting the rocky through the trees, saving 6.5 steps.
11-4: more optimized block pushing saving 3 steps
17-2: optimized path saves almost 2 steps
17-3: optimized block pushing saves 3 steps
Unfortunately 4 frames were lost to desyncs. I don't know the exact cause. I compared frame by frame with the original run, and nothing changes until one enemy just decides to respawn 2 frames later. I didn't trace log out to check what changed or anything, and I don't know of any other actions I can take to manipulate spawn times.
I didn't know what to expect when I first started looking at Nitrodon's run, and it turned out that it was incredibly well optimized. Once again most of the optimal strategies I probably wouldn't have found on my own if I had started from scratch. Of course in 100 levels there are bound to be a few oversights here and there, and I probably missed something as well somewhere.
I think that is enough Adventures of Lolo for me though. It's a fun challenge to try and find optimal strategies, but >95% of the time I'm trying stuff that is totally wrong and has no chance of working, so it's not very productive.
As a final thought, It would be cool to see some type of bot work done with Lolo games some day. Whole levels probably aren't practical with a personal computer, but small sections of levels can be easily attacked with a bot, and all of the improvements in this run could have been found in a matter of seconds compared to the many hours it took me.
