Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose is a SNES Konami title based on the.......oh wait, wrong buster.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.10
- Takes damage/death to save time
- Heavy luck manipulation
- Only use the X Buster
This is a Buster Only run of Mega Man X, which is a category I’m surprised hasn’t been done yet on the site. Buster Only means using the base weapon you have at the start of the game without switching to subweapons.
This category is pretty challenging for RTA runners. Since you don’t have main weapon weaknesses to bosses, you have to deal with enemy behavior. 4 of 8 mavericks have a weakness to buster in that green and blue shots will deal 2 and 3 damage values of health, but the other bosses do not have such weaknesses.
There is a trick up our sleeves, however. In this game when you perform a dash, your first lemon shot will have a damage value of 2 hits when normally lemons only do 1 hit. This works on enemies that normally would be immune to a green charged shot, which would only do 1 hit of damage. But with the dash lemon, it can cut down the time in half.
The provided encode lists each author to show who worked on what parts of the run.
My comments only apply to the run at the point when I joined the project (starting at Bospider). Comments are mainly about bosses and their RNG. For more information about boss RNG, see the
this page.
Would you believe that I'd never played this game before joining this project? When EZ reached out to me, I had to play a couple levels before diving into the wall jumps. In addition to the direct contributions below, I did some Lua scripting, which can be found here, here, and here <coming soon>
Version Choice
warmCabin: There is an extra textbox skip you can do on Vile in Sigma 1. It requires Rolling Shield on JP (because magic), but it can be done Buster Only on US. Even without this skip, JP is still 6 seconds faster from shorter textboxes, in traditional speedrun fashion.
RNG
Quick note on RNG, There is unfortunately not a whole lot you can do to manipulate RNG in this game. The most you can do at any given time is from generating dust sprites from sliding down a wall.
Opening Stage
Opening stage doesn't have much going on. A small hop is done at the start to set X's speed to max walking. We get over the big bee mid bosses so we avoid having to do the wall kick stuff. I do take damage on one of the bees since we need low health to trigger a cutscene faster.
Near the end I get the two red cars to follow me so I can use them for faster movement to the end of the stage. This is done in the other publications. For Vile, I need to manipulate him to lunge straight at me and then shoot the electric orb as soon as possible, while also forcing him to be next to me as the cutscene is about to play.
Chill Penguin
So we start off with this stage due to the speed boots powerup, which lets us go through the game much faster. While we don't have the boots right now, we can get a little speed by using slopes that set X's speeds from a value of 2, to 3 and 4 respectively (depending on the steepness of the slopes). This speed can be preserved if you jump in the air, and is why when we go UP slopes we jump backwards for one frame. It also weirdly enough makes X jump higher than on flat ground which is strange.
Also once we get the boots, you'll notice we do some backwards wall kicks. This can only be done if X is doing a wall kick on the right side of the screen, but basically if you do a L+R input on the right frame, the game will get confused which way X is facing and do a wall kick in the air, this is useful when jumping up walls to get instant movement to the right.
Anyways For Chill Penguin he is one of 4 bosses in this game that is weak to the Mega Buster, so we try to get 4 or 6 blue shots on each boss. We can minimize charging time by keeping distance from the bosses after we shoot a lemon, this is known as a CFO in the RTA community (named after CF-0 in Mega Man X)
warmCabin: I saved a few lag frames on the snowthrower guys by taking advantage of blessed sprite slots, but we decided it wasn't worth it to go back and resync.
Boomer Kuwanger
While it's not technically faster to do this stage directly after Penguin, I wanted to do this stage as soon as possible since I knew it would be the biggest hurdle for me and wanted to make sure I was comfortable doing this game. If I were to redo this category I'd probably save this stage for later.
Anyways, Wall kicking up ladders is weird since sometimes you don't always jump through the floors unless you have the right subpixel positioning. you sometimes will fail to jump up a ladder gap because you are one subpixel off.
For the spiked wall section, we can save time by wall kicking all the way to the top, reach the checkpoint, then take a death to skip half of the autoscroller section.
warmCabin: This is the first thing I TASed after joining this project.
warmCabin: For whatever reason, when you do a glitchy wall jump against these spikes, you take a hit but don't lose health. The most important thing is to cancel the knockback as quickly as possible, which means doing the GWJ with maximal X pixels. You have to muddle your subpixels with dashes to optimize this; despite all that, I couldn't quite keep pace with Zam (7 frames lost).
Sting Chameleon
This stage has some hazards like in the cave that slow us down, which also can cause lag. I had to make sure to avoid those while also ensuring any of the big rocks that were falling were not delayed on their cycle.
Sting Chameleon is not weak to the buster, however he can be hit with 2 hits of damage from a dash lemon, normally he doesn't even take more than 1 hit from a green shot. It wasn't until the refight in Sigma 3 that I found out from FractalFusion that you can avoid his phase out animation. Unfortunately we are unable to go back and fix the mistake without redoing the rest of the run.
warmCabin: I tried doing the swamp without the mech. It's like half a second slower.
Launch Octopus
Underwater stage can be lag heaven, but I managed to reduce it as much as possible from jumping and also shooting the buster at certain points. Not sure WHY this works but it does.
Anyways the two submarines I need to take out the scope at the top as soon as possible since it can generate a heck of lag from the light that comes out. For the water dragon thingy I have to wall kick while it's underground to prevent lag from showing up. Since I can't use subweapons, I can't use Storm Eagle's tornado attack to kill it instantly, so I have to shoot it as it exits out and get the lag galore from the fight.
Launch Octopus's boss fight sucks. No not because an octopus has suction cups, but because since we are underwater, dust sprites do not exist to manipulate RNG, so I have to be lucky enough that he'll just cooporate enough.
WarmCabin: I saved a few lag frames on the first batch of pufferfish, but we decided it wasn't worth it to go back and resync.
Armored Armadillo
This stage also can generate some lag. The moving platform is used to quickly get through most of the stage, especially since it is alot faster than dashing through. You can however combine a dash with the platform movement to get a huge speed boost.
On the last moving platform, some birds can appear that cause lag, but only if X is standing on a surface in these spots. If X is in the air during these triggers, they will not spawn and won't produce lag.
Here is a graph that was made by OhTrials in the MMX RTA comminity that shows where they are.
Anyways for the Boss fight we want Armadillo to immediately stop doing the DVD logo attack. He normally will block every buster attack you throw at him, but he will sometimes leave himself open. It was only later did we figure out how to manipulate him to be vulnerable the most optimally, you will see that in the refight later.
Flame Mammoth (warmCabin)
This is the one stage that I actually, like, did. Probably the most interesting tradeoff is sticking to the backwards conveyor belt so I can get a minizip from the falling robot head.
I tried going above the stage in what I'm calling the warp zone strat (which I discovered from
this random YouTube video), but it would be like a second slower even without the five extra wall jumps.
My wall jump movement here managed to save a frame or two over Any%.
Walking into the boss door wastes no time. I consider this to be a Mega Man 2 reference :)
The boss fight is... yeah. He might be feelin' a burnin' sensation in his noumanders. We can improve this by ending the fight with Mr. Noumander off screen to reduce lag, but we decided it wasn't worth it to go back and resync.
Storm Eagle
warmCabin: I took like 70% of this stage, leaving the intro section and boss fight to EZ.
We absolutely do not want Storm Eagle going into the air, there is a wall on the right side that we can use to get dust sprites for RNG manipulation. To reduce lag after the fight, we do the final hit with Eagle off screen.
Spark Mandrill
This stage is affected by the Storm Eagle stage. If you didn't know, stages can be affected depending on which order you do bosses in. That is why the flame Mammoth Stage seemed to be lacking in fire and lava, since doing Penguin first freezes the stage. For this stage, if you do Storm Eagle, it causes not just the ground to stop producing electricity, but also causes the lights to flicker. It additionally affects the midboss where it can't shoot lightnight strikes.
For the midboss, I have to do two things. First, make sure no lag is produced from the slime orbs that shoot out, and make sure he falls the instant he unplugs from the ceiling. Both are pretty hard to do, which is why you might see me not shooting him as much while wall kicking. His behavior is by far one of the most frustrating bosses to deal with in the game.
Spark Mandrill is pretty big for a boss that's weak to Buster. I had the idea to optimize CFO time by shooting a lemon slightly above him so it hits him at the very edge of his hitbox when he jumps in the air.
Sigma 1
There is one time save done in this stage that is not done in the other publications. It was discovered awhile back that the cut-scene skip before the Vile section can be skipped without doing wall kicks at all. It requires keeping the camera low enough so X can slide on the ground long enough to do a leap of faith to the door. This is even possible to do in RTA as well.
warmCabin: We need to take one hit in this stage in anticipation of the controllable helplessness in the Vile fight. EZ does it out in the open, which means the knockback isn't canceled. I tried to find another place for the hit, but everything is either too far from a wall or doesn't deal enough damage. Even though I am the wall jump guy, EZ did the wall jump section here. That said, I did find a small timesave at the very end c:
- Vile
EZGames69: For the Vile fight, he jumps alot, I used a green shot for the 2nd jump he does to prevent frame loss. I also have to position myself to enter the Zero cutscene without triggering it too early to force the camera to do a long pan.
- Boomer Kuwanger
Since I don't have enough time entering the room to charge a buster, I instead shoot it on the 2nd attempt. It is possible to avoid losing a charge while still firing a lemon on the first frame of the fight. Which is good since that makes some of the refights later a little less annoying to deal with.
- Bospider
FractalFusion: Bospider is manipulated like previous submissions. It is not possible to get 0 crossing patterns all the time, but I managed to get just 0 or 1 crossing patterns for all 11 hits.
warmCabin: I added some random dancing to Fractal's Bospider inputs. I tried to add more but it kept desyncing... So, there you go.
Sigma 2
This stage we use some older strats from
this movie, with the only different being that we can do the reverse wall kick to have some forward momentum.
- Chill Penguin
FractalFusion: I remember spending a while with this boss. The strategy is to hit Penguin with 6 charged (blue) shots and 7 dash lemons, so many of the hits need to alternate the two, and the dash lemons are shot as soon as possible to gain charge.
FractalFusion: Normally Chill Penguin's action after being stunned is shooting ice cubes only with 1/16 probability, but if Penguin is manipulated to create ice penguins a second time to the right, one of the penguins will still exist in memory and cause Penguin to shoot ice cubes in place of penguins; this raises the probability to 5/16.
- Hall before Storm Eagle
warmCabin: You're not going to believe this, but I did some wall jumps in this stage! I was surprised to find that taking hits from the wheel guys was faster than any attempts at killing them.
- Storm Eagle
FractalFusion: It is a little bit easier to manipulate Storm Eagle than I first thought. Storm Eagle always starts with wind, and even at the shortest wind duration, there is enough time to get over to the right edge and drag on it for dust sprites to manipulate Eagle into not leaving the ground.
- Rangda Bangda
FractalFusion: The other fortress boss which is hard to manipulate. Since 5 dash lemons are required to destroy an eye, the best manipulation is to get the first eye to be a left red eye shooting 3 or 4 waves of triple shots. Combined with needing to manipulate two or more eye actions before closing the walls, the probability of that happening is (13/16)*(1/16)*(1/2)*(2/4) = 13/1024, or about 1.27%
FractalFusion: I was able to get the ideal manipulation by modifying the end of the Eagle fight to use up more RNG values. When the first eye is destroyed, the second eye is always red, so not as much manipulation is required for the second eye.
EZGames69: I did have to delay the final hit on the first eye by one frame in order to get the 2nd red eye to stay in place, otherwise it will move and give us less vulnerability time.
Sigma 3
(Note, This is mostly FractalFusion talking for this stage)
- Armored Armadillo
This boss is not skipped in the buster-only category, so you get to see this fight. Normally Armadillo has a 3/4 chance to block your shots (RNG again), but it turns out that Armadillo "unblocks" for one frame after blocking a lemon, allowing Armadillo to get hit in this frame. I abuse this to get hits on Armadillo. Also the blocking animation delays all other Armadillo actions, effectively acting as a stunlock and preventing him from rolling again.
- Sting Chameleon
It is possible to prevent Chameleon from using camouflage (during which he cannot be hit). It requires manipulating Chameleon into using his tail attack, then manipulating him to drop down.
- Spark Mandrill
Like Penguin, the strategy is to hit with 6 charged and 7 uncharged shots. I did some creative manipulation by having Mandrill only do jumping and electric ball attacks. Using glitched right wall jumps allows for shooting a dash lemon a little sooner than usual.
- Launch Octopus
Again, the strategy is to hit with 6 charged and 7 uncharged shots. Unfortunately the fight is underwater, so dust sprites cannot be used to manipulate RNG. Fortunately, Octopus's next action is affected by the player's distance from Octopus left or right: either Near (0-79 pixels), Mid (80-127 pixels) or Far (128 or more pixels). Using this, it is possible to avoid Octopus using the whirlpool attack which would cause time loss.
If Octopus faces a direction while firing torpedoes on the ground, then does his jump/torpedo attack, he will jump in that direction even if the player is then on his other side. I take advantage of this to keep him on the left edge of the room.
- Corridor between Octopus and Mammoth
There is a lot of lag here. The best strategy here is to take out the first two turrets and then go through the rest of the room minimizing dash dust sprites and not shooting anything else except the last turret. (The dash at the end doesn't cost any lag.)
- Flame Mammoth
The room is so large that a lemon can be shot far in advance so that a charged blue shot can be used without losing time. Since Flame Mammoth is one of the bosses where charged blue shots do as much damage as dash lemons, this is only used to show off.
EZGames69: We also want to make sure the conveyor belt is moving to the right and that Mammoth is killed off screen, this reduces all lag that would be generated after the fight.
- D-Rex
Not much to say about this boss, other than he will close his mouth if you are under it.
Sigma 4
warmCabin: Even though I am the wall jump guy, Fractal is the one who ultimately saved 3 frames on this section. Here's how we did it:
warmCabin: I tried as hard as I could to keep pace with Zam's inputs, but I kept coming up slow. I reached out to him, and he sent me
this spreadsheet by Hetfield which shows that, surprisingly, there are
two relative maxima for walljump spacing: once every 13 frames, and once every 20 frames. But here's the thing: it's straight up
impossible to chain more than one 13-framer even with perfectly timed glitchy wall jumps, so you have to do a couple of 20-framers to set up the next 13-framer. Zam/Hetfield did a 13/20/20/20 pattern, but I thought, why not 13/20/20? When I tried that, it ended up more like 13/20/21, 13/20/22, which ended up being a frame tie. FractalFusion saw this and realized that we could use this strategy and still set up a ledge boost at the top, which does, in fact, save 3 frames.
FractalFusion: After doing a mathematical analysis on the shaft climb (see
this page for data on jump heights), warmCabin and I found that the optimal wall jumping pattern for this shaft is 13+20+21, with the 13 being a glitched wall jump on the right wall. However, this is not always possible due to horizontal subpixel position on the jump going from right to left. I found it was not possible to have less than 3 patterns of 13+20+22.
FractalFusion: The initial jump and the final approach (using a ledge boost to gain height) were carefully chosen to minimize the number of frames required. The final result gets to the top of the shaft 3 frames sooner than the published any% run.
A summary of shaft-jumping strategies is shown in the following table:
| Strategy | Comment | # Frames | Height gained in subpixels (1/256 pixel) | Average height gain per frame |
|---|
| All 20 | Earliest runs | 20 | 11300 | 565.00 |
| 13+20+20+21 | [3151] SNES Mega Man X by nrg_zam in 29:08.45 | 74 | 42180 | 570.00 |
| 13+20+21 | Ideal pattern | 54 | 30880 | 571.85 |
| 13+20+22 | Bad subpixel backup pattern | 55 | 31347 | 569.95 |
| 13+19+21 | Ideal but 1 less on 2nd jump | 53 | 30285 | 571.42 |
| 13+23 | Fastest two-jump pattern | 36 | 20450 | 568.06 |
| 13+11+20+21 | Nondash 11-jump on right wall | 65 | 36735 | 565.15 |
Note that the next cutscene is timed from when the camera locks onto the boss room, so there is no loss in time of walking to the cutscene spot.
- Velguader
The fight should end with the player on the right side - this gives a better horizontal position than ending on the left side. The next cutscene is timed from when Velguader is destroyed so again there is no loss in time of walking to the cutscene spot.
- Sigma (first form)
All buster shots, including the most charged (pink/purple) shots and dash lemons, only do 1 damage.
Sigma is manipulated so that the final hit is done by a lemon shot as early as possible in charging for Wolf Sigma. This is done by manipulating the length of his dash and slash attack before he jumps on the walls. Damage is taken here to deliver a hit while Sigma is on the wall, while being high enough to get Sigma to go up for a third time before going down. A wall lemon shot very low to the ground is fired to get maximum charge and Sigma lands on it for the final hit.
In addition, being on the ground in a standing sprite allows charging for another 60 frames even after Sigma's last hit point is depleted. For some reason this does not work with any other player sprite.
- Wolf Sigma
In buster-only, Wolf Sigma can only be hit by pink/purple charged shots and it only does 1 damage. The fastest way to start the charge again is to neutralize all charged shots against Wolf Sigma's head.
The fire attack is most likely to cause lag, but there are circumstances where lag can be avoided. Indeed, the fire attack appears a few times in this TAS.
Misc. Tricks/Tidbits
- CFO
- For bosses that are vulnerable to charge shots, there's a trick to it: you want to do the previous hit (dash lemon) from as far away as possible so you start charging as soon as possible. The RTA community calls these CFOs, named after the CF-0 robots from MMX2.
- Wall jumps
- Wall jumps are fiddly in this game. There's a certain optimal spacing for them to gain maximal height, but you'll probably overshoot the ledge, so you’ll need to go back and find slightly suboptimal wall jumps that get you just high enough but a little bit faster.
- Glitchy wall jumps
- If you press L+R on the same frame, if you're close enough to the wall, you sort of wall jump off of nothing and get pushed straight into the wall. This can help you achieve better spacing, but takes a couple frames to set up, since it requires you to be a bit further into wall jump range than standard jumps.
This only works against right walls.
- Knockback cancelling
- If you're in a knockback state, entering a wall slide state cancels it instantly. You will see us do this all throughout the run, with one notable exception in Sigma 1.
- End of fight optimization
- After standard end-of-stage fights, X wants to end in the middle of the room. For wide arenas, it's the middle of the current room, not necessarily the leftmost or whatever. Viewing your position in hex really helps you detect this middle-of-room condition. How quickly can you detect if a number is 128 above a multiple of 256? In hex, it's just It's XX.80.XX.
In the refights, it doesn't matter at all. You have plenty of time to wait for the door to open.
- End of level sound glitch
- You can press start on a certain frame during the boss defeat cutscenes to save about a second off of the transition, but it permanently makes the music quieter for the rest of the run. We are aware of this glitch, but we decided against using it for entertainment purposes.
- Anti-Lag Lemons
- In most games, you want to keep fewer objects on screen to reduce lag. And while that is true for the most part in this game... there is an infuriating little trick where shooting an extra lemon during certain liminal sections can somehow reduce lag. My current theory is that it has to do with the sfx cancelling out part of the music.
Final Thoughts
EZGames69: I am overall very happy with how this run turned out. I've always wanted to try my hand at a Mega Man game in a TAS setting and it was an absolute blast to work on this. I wanna thank both warmCabin and FractalFusion for joining this project and the work they did. I did make some rookie mistakes throughout this run that I'm sure many in the MMX TASing scene may have spotted, but I will know what to do in the future in case I ever decide to do another TAS like this.
I also want to thank the RTA community, as they have provided feedback to my WIPs and have expressed excitement for this project.
I hope you all have a wonderful day!
Darkman425: Let me claim this for judging. I love Super Bust-A-Mo- I am being handed a note.
Darkman425: I've been looking forward to the finished product when progress was shown in the TASVideos Discord. Glad to see this finally finished, and in quite a polished and optimized state. While there's some early bosses that could've been done faster that would require having to wrangle the RNG to implement that there and everything after, which from experience I can say is a bit too much of a reasonable ask to fix for not a lot of time save. Regardless, nice work y'all!
Accepting to Alternate under the new branch "X-Buster only". Yes, the hyphen is part of the name from looking at Capcom official materials.
