Resident Evil Gaiden is a Resident Evil spin-off for GBC, where our heroes Barry and Leon are searching a zombie lined cruise liner for an escaped Bio Organic Weapon which needs capturing. This is an improvement of 10421 frames over the previous TAS by IzumiChenmeiru, which provided an excellent foundation for any future runs of the game. Improvements came from using better ammo management, more lag reduction and tighter pathing through most rooms.

Shooting in this game is handled by manually holding down the aim button, which causes a cursor to appear on the current screen. This can then be freely moved around up to a given radius based on the currently equipped weapon. Upon successfully releasing it over an enemy, combat mode will then be started which involves a game of trying to time shots based on a quickly moving cursor at your enemies, whose proximity and thus size will be effected by your initial aim distance.

More damage is done at close range, not to mention that it takes less time to aim to set up combat mode in the first place, and thus all combat is started at minimal distance where possible, making sure to control RNG such that they don't instantly go for a bite and deplete our health in the process. The number of enemies involved in the combat will be all zombies currently visible on screen, within a certain tolerance of line-of-sight, varied by a bit of RNG to determine whether they all appear at once or in waves. The game may even try to spawn some temporary zombies when aiming, just for the purpose of increasing the on-screen zombie count, but these extra ones have limited functionality and cannot immediately grab you like regular ones.

Enemies which successfully grab you also trigger a combat phase as expected, which most of the run involves trying to avoid. The later zombies even start aggressively walking towards you as soon as you begin to aim your weapon, but often get exhausted after a few steps and become somewhat idle for a short while. This is used heavily in the second half of the TAS to help lure them out of the way in order to sneak past them.

The previous TAS by IzumiChenmeiru managed to complete the game with quite a bit of rifle ammo to spare, which was put to good use this time. Plus, an additional handgun magazine was looted for another 12 bullets (this is actually required to despawn the zombie who drops it). This provides us with far more opportunities to kill key zombies blocking our paths, where the previous run would have to lure them out of the way repeatedly. The excess ammo means that we also never need to use the weak Knife for slow combat, which means that the few existing fights where it would have been used have been improved upon too.

This game certainly isn't the smoothest to run on GBC, most notably the lag is most visible when there are too many enemies on screen, or when they start groaning. Thus, far more attention was paid this time to minimise these problems. This has been achieved by taking routes which focus on avoiding extra lunges from enemies if possible, even if it means taking a less efficient path. Killing enemies as soon as possible in crowded rooms is a far superior choice for lag management, which reduced over 2400 lag frames across the TAS.

There is the opportunity to run away from Combat mode, by pressing start and shooting the central target which spawns, which for some reason is bugged for the Gas Launcher. The Gas launcher is an aoe damage dealer, designed to clear the whole room (or at least, all zombies engaged in combat mode) by doing constant ticking damage. When trying to flee with the gas launcher, the weapon can be fired without depleting ammo, making it effectively unlimited.

Boss fights are also broken, in the sense that if we are attacked by another zombie after being attacked by the boss itself, the zombie fight will override the boss fight, and victory against the zombie will still count as a victory against the boss. Normally this would not happen as there are not any zombies near a boss fight, but it's possible to lure some away from the opposite side or from an adjacent room. Sadly, this only proves to be faster at the very final boss, where an adjacent zombie (who can't initiate combat?) just releases you and can be used for the final boss fight.

slamo: Claiming for judging.

slamo: Updated movie with fixed cycle count.

Excellent improvement! I never thought I would see something like this, but the lag reduction is actually tangible when playing the movies side-by-side. Great work overall with better enemy management as well. Accepting as an improvement to the current publication.

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