Quattro Adventure is a cartridge released by Camerica in 1991 packed with 4 games - one of them being Super Robin Hood, the very game present in the run. The game is a platformer that requires the player to find keys to advance further into the Nottingham Castle, all while collecting treasures that allow the player to complete the entire game.
Game details:
- The goal is to complete the game as fast as possible (any%)
- The run abuses warps, and several glitches
- Emulator + Version used: FCEUX 2.2.3
The game is now officially broken
Thought the game was already pretty broken? Well, things just got even crazier. Let's unpack all the things in this run that beat the game by almost 1 and a half minutes...
Beginning level up until the warp
The beginning level may seem pretty standard for the first few seconds until... oh. What happened? This might be the first time a technique is used that is impossible to do in an RTA run without some sort of specialized setup. I found this glitch in an old YouTube video called "Super Robin Hood - Moje Sposoby" which translates from Polish to "Super Robin Hood - My Methods".
I immediately started looking at what causes this glitch, and it turns out is it heavily reliant on:
- The velocity of the player, if it is even one unit off the whole glitch fails to work
- The subpixel position of the player - that's right, you can actually break the game on a molecular level now.
... But that's just for the actual clip into the block, what about the teleport? Uh, to be quite frank, I have no clue. The teleport ONLY seems to work in the first level, and nowhere else. Is it some arbitrary code execution, is it reliant on the current screen scroll? No clue. What I did realize, however, is that during the teleport Robin's X position jumps to an insanely far value and that the actual clip itself only happens on half blocks. Apart from that, got no clue what causes it.
Treasureless
As you can see, several important parts of levels are skipped throughout the run, simply thanks to a discovery that I made at the end of my previous TAS - by performing a hyperjump at the last level, we can trigger the end animation without needing to collect all the treasures to climb the ladder. Neat!
Things I missed
In the last TAS, I realized that I didn't talk about wall clips, despite them being pretty well known by now. If you let go of left a frame or two before you jump, Robin will be able to clip through a one-wide gap. Also, getting hit by an entity (e.g an arrow) and collecting a treasure on the same frame cancels out the hearts animation, which greatly reduces lag.
The rest of the run
There's honestly not too much to say. Now that we don't need to collect treasures, I tried taking the most efficient route that I could find, all whilst causing the least amount of lag.
What's next?
Since we're so close to a sub 3 minute time, we need to find a couple of extra microoptimizations to shave off just those extra 6 seconds. My bets are the final guard kill in the last level. Since his shot frequency is so high, it's impossible to squeeze in a hyperjump between his arrows which means I have to kill him first. If maybe I can enter the level with two hearts instead of one, we could potentially use up that last heart there without killing the guard.
Another thing we could do is find a way to clip through two rows of blocks at once. Right now it is only possible to clip through one row, even with a hyperjump straight into the blocks and even with extremely specific subpixel positions, none of them allow us to get through two.
Apart from all that, there you have it - the game absolutely smashed in 3 minutes and 6 seconds. I will gladly continue my search for more bugs and glitches, and I hope to spark the interest of maybe at least a few individuals to come and research with me! Also, the All Treasures run is coming out soon, so stay tuned!
