Samurai Warrior is a video game released in 1988. It is based on the comic book Usagi Yojimbo.

The most important thing is the attack bug. Jumping after attack locks the player to attack state dealing continuous damage while jumping. Once we start jumping it is best to never stop because otherwise we need to attack again to restart the bug. Sometimes a few steps are needed to adjust the player position so that the enemies line up with the jump cycle.

Screen scrolling is slow and will force the player to move slowly, but in the beginning and the end of level when screen is not scrolling it is faster to run with the sword.

Player starts with 0 karma. If we take sword out when the first monk is visible, then we lose 5 karma which causes harakiri. So we must put sword away and give a coin to the monk to get 10 karma. Now we can kill the monk to reduce lag and move fast with the sword out again. Since we use attack bug we don't need to worry about karma for the rest of the game. We kill everything because it is the fastest way, but we kill more ninjas than monks so total karma stays positive.

At the first crossroads the pathway up is about 1000 frames slower, so we continue forward. In the next fork later in the game the straight road is about 300 frames slower, so we go to the upward path.

Some ninjas teleport behind the player so we need to stop and kill them.

Enemies can be despawned to the left side when the screen is scrolling to the right. This is used in the final level to despawn the last 2 enemies which saves time when we don't need to make extra attack moves. The enemy positions lined up so that it was faster to take damage than avoid it. The movements look strange because there are invisible ninjas that need to be despawned.

If you are willing to spend 1000-10000 rerecords on the final level I think you may find some better enemy patterns to save some more frames. To improve the other levels you would probably need a new movement tech that somehow makes the screen scrolling faster.

The C64 version of Samurai Warrior is great, so I wish nymx or somebody does it.

Screenshot: 37327

nymx: Replaced movie file with an update, requested by the author.

nymx: Claiming for judging.

nymx: This is an interesting plat-former for this computer. I find it amazing that games, written for the ZX Spectum, seem to be ahead of its time.

The balance between executing the "Jump" strategy and walking seems to be right, although I think a lot more effort could probably expose some time cuts. I like the fact that alexheights1 went back to readjust the entire run, because of continued discoveries. For me, that is the kind of effort we need to see...as it shows the intent to leave no frames behind. Great work!

Accepting to standard.

despoa: Processing...