The first any% TAS for de Blob 2, which is a level-based platformer for the Nintendo DS. The game mechanics are quite simple: left-right movement, jumps, homing attacks and a kind of ground pound. However, there's a lot of fun tricks you can do with a TAS (sometimes practically only with TAS). Current human WR is 1h 18m 54s, this TAS is 59m 56s.
Everything I do is optimized to the frame (55k rerecords), but since this is the first TAS, and the speedrunning community is not very big, it's very likely that there's more strats I just don't know. I tried my best though.
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.8 (no settings changed)
- ROM SHA1: BE1F88734EC613589E1289BB8B4FD50EBA7FBFDE
Explanation
The TAS is probably pretty understandable for people with platformer experience: I'm just racing through the levels as fast as possible, not collecting any extra items, and trying to skip segments when I can (which sadly doesn't happen that often).
The game has interesting movement: horizontal acceleration is sort of continuous. Starting from a standstill the acceleration is pretty high, but as you get closer to the maximum speed the acceleration gets lower and lower. In particular, you never quite get to the maximum speed, which makes TASing movement quite tricky, since every frame of extra acceleration is valuable. Also, if you're above the maximum speed, you slow down towards the maximum speed in a similar continuous way (it slows down really quickly when your speed is high).
This continuous acceleration works similarly when on the ground and in the air, except in the air the acceleration is always slightly lower, while the max speed is higher. This is why it's sometimes beneficial to randomly jump, but it's also sometimes slower.
So far I'd say it's pretty reasonable. However, the effect of jumping on horizontal speed is really strange. When you jump, the speed immediately gets capped to a linear function of the current speed (for example, if you're going at speed 47000, which is close to the maximum, you immediately slow down to around 40000). Then your speed remains capped on the upward part of the jump, and uncaps when you reach the peak. This allows for some interesting tricks, like slingshotting yourself diagonally into the floor and immediately jumping to preserve the high speed for a bit.
A main game mechanic the game is color. At any time you have a color, which is either red, yellow, blue, or a combination of these, or no color (white), or black. There's a few ways to change colors, some of them immediately make you a certain color, and some of them might combine with your current color. Black only happens when you get hit by certain types of enemies, and is supposed to be bad. You can only get rid of it by ground pounding. This can actually sometimes be beneficial, since there are segments where you're "forced" to be a certain color, and get blocked by walls which only exist if you're that color. If you go into that segment while black, it can't force you to get a new color, so the wall doesn't exist.
Another important strat is trying to do as much movement as possible during dialogue (since you don't have control). This can be achieved by jumping just before the dialogue starts, or in some lucky cases by getting on a slingshot during dialogue (since you do actually have control on those).
Apart from that I think everything sort of makes sense (let me know if I'm wrong though).
eien86: A colorful platform-puzzle game. The solution seems both pretty optimized and entertaining. Furthermore, this movie is significantly faster than the current
RTA WR. Accepting to Standard
