Pre-Scriptum: the encode of the entire screen can be watched
here. The attached one shows only the boundaries of the FreeJ2ME+ footage area.
Intro
Alien Shooter J2ME was made for post-soviet countries, where the original PC
game gained most popularity. It was released in 2006, a year before Alien Shooter 2 came out, and is pretty loyal to the original.
- Emulator used (internally): FreeJ2ME+ 1.5.2 (more on that below)
- Hardest difficulty
- Heavy luck manipulation
- Take damage to save time
Version choice
I vividly remember I came across an English version of the game in my childhood, but nowadays it seems to be lost. I can't find it anywhere! Not to mention, I also spent a lot of time looking for a good dump of a version for 240x320 screens.
All versions target 13-14 FPS.
Controls
- 2 or Up - jump in the direction you're facing. Regular jumps are enough to jump on top of a box or a small barrel/container. While on a lift, the player can perform a higher jump.
- 8 or Down - duck/crouch. If the player is at the door, the door opens and the player stays up.
- 4/6 or Left/Right - walk left or right.
- 5 or Action key (button "Enter" on the keyboard) - shoot, or choose the option.
- 0 - cycle weapons up. Not convenient when you have multiple weapons.
- Star (button "E" on the keyboard) - freeze the game and observe the entire level at its current state by moving the camera with arrows. Quite helpful!
Any button closes the message box once its text is fully printed.
You have only one speed of walking.
Lifts are platforms, which move up/down or left/right in a loop. The level data tells what is the initial direction for each lift.
To simplify the platforming, the player gets stuck to one if it walks or jumps into the area of its location.
Upon stepping away from a platform or lift, the player falls straight down. Most lifts don't catch the player.
Damage from falling
The higher you fall from, the more damage you take: 20, 40, 60, 80, or 100. This means, you can survive any fall, if you possess any armour.
Bestiary
The game features several monsters from its PC origin.
AI includes patrolling, shooting (if possible) and reacting to the player's projectiles. When a shooting alien detects the player, it switches to a battle mode.
Small alien (mutant frog)
The fastest monster on the bestiary. When it attacks, its hitbox enlarges, but there are moments when bullets miss it.
Tall alien (biped)
Walks slower than the small alien and has a prolonged attack animation.
Armed tall alien
Walks like a regular tall alien when patrolling. In battle mode, it walks slower. Sometimes it decides to shoot.
Giant alien (rhino)
Walks slowly, deals 25 damage. Its animation is very subtle and it has a long cooldown.
Giant alien with a turret (bullet, rocket or plasma)
Walks slowly, like a regular rhino.
In battle mode, it almost stops and uses its weapon instead. Bullet rhinos shoot automatically while the player is around. Rocket and plasma rhinos have charge animations before they shoot.
It switches to a melee attack, but only if you walk into the center of its hitbox, and it's still possible to take a position where its projectiles don't hit you. Melee attack deals the same amount of damage as regular rhinos do.
All three weapons have the same damage as the respective player's weapons, but firerates are slower.
Difficulty differences
The only aspect adjustable in the game is enemies' HP.
- Low difficulty: -20%
- High difficulty: +20%
With these conditions in mind, here is the listing of aliens' health:
- Low difficulty: 80% health
Small = 32, Tall = 48, Rhino = 200, Tall Armed = 60, Armed Rhino = 240
- Normal: 100% health
Small = 40, Tall = 60, Rhino = 250, Tall Armed = 75, Armed Rhino = 300
- High: 120% health
Small = 48, Tall = 72, Rhino = 300, Tall Armed = 90, Armed Rhino = 360
Armoury
Pistols
Direct hit damage = 10.
The default weapon with infinite ammo (traditionally styled with 9s). Each act of shooting performs a volley of 2 shots, unless you jump in the middle of your animation.
The bullets are affected by the gravity and it's used to shoot boxes, so I don't have to jump over them.
Also, it's the only weapon you can use while staying crouched.
Chaingun
Direct hit damage = 20.
Shooting cycle is ~16 frames.
Shooting animation is 10 frames.
A step-up from pistols, with better damage per a minute.
Flamethrower
Direct hit damage = 5.
If you attack a crowd, your firerate is a bit lower. Probably because it takes extra frames for calculations.
Flamethrower deals damage faster then by run-shooting from your chaingun. With walls, however, you need to keep a certain distance to deal 10 damage instead of 5 and often chaingun is still faster.
Bazooka
Direct hit damage = 25.
It takes around 10 frames to shoot, excluding the interruption of your walk cycle.
Also, when you switch weapon to it, you have around 10 frames of "cooldown" before you can move or shoot. This happens even if you switch weapons in the air.
Also, after you torch a barrel with a flamethrower and then switch to a bazooka, you can't shoot from it for about 30 frames. I think it relates to the flame effect being present on the screen.
Plasmagun
Direct hit damage = 33.
Technically, it's a more powerful variation of bazooka. Explosion can kill a tall armed alien, and it takes 3 shots to kill an armed rhino. However, it comes with some drawbacks.
It takes 1 sec of cooldown. You cannot duck (unless you stand dead on your track for about 20 frames) or shoot during this period, even if you switch to another weapon.
Projectiles mechanic
Before we haven't gone too far, I need to explain how projectiles work.
Flamethrower, bazooka and plasmagun shoot projectiles which turns into an explosion, which doesn't hurt the player.
Such an explosion deals its direct hit damage for 3 in-game frames by area (i.e. to all aliens being inside that area). This means, you can deal the following total damages to one target with one projectile:
- flamethrower - 20 damage (5 + 5*3),
- bazooka - 100 damage (25 + 25*3),
- plasmagun - 132 damage (33 + 33*3).
Also, flamethrower is the only weapon which projectiles are piercing. Any target hit by its projectile takes a direct hit damage. Maybe, its projectiles deal damage by area 4 times, instead of 3. Who knows.
Green and red armour
These items decrease all incoming damage. Green armour decreases damage by 60%, while red armour (or, as the game calls it "armour and helmet") decreases damage by 50%. It's probably a bug.
Objects
Switch
These objects unlock terminals (doors), activate lifts and open exits. You activate one just by touching it. Most of the time, you can't reach a terminal or reach a non-operating lift before activating the respective switch, so there is not much point for some of those to be in the game.
Wall
100 hp. Only its middle section is vulnerable to damage. Also, it's not sensitive to explosion damage, which makes bazooka, plasmagun and, partially, flamethrower not effective.
Following the original, walls explode like barrels on being destroyed.
Barrels and gas containers
20/40 hp. Well, they explode. You can jump onto a sideways grey barrel. Also, barrels have a touching animation if you shoot one with your flamethrower.
Acid containers
20/40 hp. Same as barrels, but they leave acid pools for 2-3 seconds. You can jump on a small container.
Acid pool
It drains 1 hp per a render frame while the player touches it. There are multiple spots on levels where acid is sprayed from the start (probably to make players jump over them), but, since these were ultimately attached to containers, they all disappear shortly.
Box
5 hp (presumably). Boxes are often put in stacks around levels and all the boxes above the destroyed one also explode. You can't push a box and walk past it. You have to jump and walk over it.
Money
These items don't give anything, but score in this port.
Teleports and holes
I will also call them "nests".
They spawn new monsters in. Each nest has a pre-defined queue of aliens for spawning. There are also empty entities in queues to simulate extended delays between spawns.
When a player is not around (camera rectangle area multiplied by 2), new aliens spawn at a random offset from the spawn point.
When a dynamite is planted, new monsters no longer spawn in. It takes 5.8 secs for the dynamite to detonate.
There is a bug which makes dynamites ignore message boxes, because only the global timer is checked for the passed time. In places where a switch is located in the range of dynamite explosion, you may end up blowing yourself up, if you read message for too long.
Mechanics
Common
- Lifts and aliens always start moving in the prescribed directions once a level starts.
- Actions mechanic is dualistic. If you hold the button, the animation is continuous, otherwise - you gotta tap the button precisely to make it continuous.
- If an alien performs a melee animation is started, you take damage unless the alien is dead prior to the end of it.
- Ducking and shooting is not consistent. You can pull it off once your walk cycle is finished.
Level 1
This level looks draft and there are two differences from the rest.
- Most of the aliens have default health (40 hp).
- The level is soft-lockable due to the lack of elevators in various spaces. If you skip an alien, you can't jump to a floor above you, so you gotta restart the level.
Level 2
Antes are going up. This level introduces tall aliens.
There are two holes to blow up:
- Bottom hole has a limit of 4 aliens.
- Top hole has a limit of 5 aliens.
This level appears to be not timing-lucky for a TAS.
The main lift in front of the bottom hole takes 460 frames to perform one travel loop.
Unfortunately, even if I break through to the lift, I lack about 25 frames to catch it, so I decided to perform safely. I damaged some small aliens in front of the bottom hole, so I don't spend much time finishing them off once the hole is set up for the blowing.
The same thing concerns my way back to the bottom hole once I collect the dynamite near the exit, so it was another pistol play with annoying scrolling. Otherwise I would blow up the top hole first.
On the other hand, I didn't have to collect the chaingun ammo because I assumed constant chaingun usage for the fastest time.
Level 3
Another round of antes. Now you have to fight tall aliens with battle suites, but the game gives you a better weapon to fight better: a flamethrower.
The fastest route would be to blow the bottom nest, go the exit to pick up a dynamite, take the bottom eastern path and come back from the path above to the exit. Unfortunately, the aliens upstairs are too strong for a chaingun and there is no cover for me. Also, if you travel on a horizontal life and you shoot in the direction of movement, you end up injuring yourself.
Flamethrower's firerate is weird. By the code, it shoot fire at every game tic, but on practice each fire press has to be brute-forced to achieve the fastest firerate and sometimes you can shoot twice a tic duration (60/13=4.61 frames) or even thrice in 5 frames, which is weird.
You can destroy a wall with a flamethrower, but it takes a while, because you seem to deal half the damage and there is no area damage applied.
The top hole is sealed by a wall, but it produces up to 8 aliens. You can't simply run past them and plant a bomb and then back out.
Level 4
This level is straightforward. Only the execution matters.
An alien on the scene: rhino, and it takes a while to kill one with a flamethrower. What do you know? The game provides a bazooka at the very end of the level.
I had to wait for the lift to move down, so I don't take too much damage from falling.
The teleporter blow-up isn't lucky. Despite those rhinos being slow, they still manage to leave the explosion area in 6 secs.
Level 5
I had to forgo the flamethrower and the armour for the sake of lift timings. Surprisingly, all of them have gone my way.
The barrel lying next to the teleport on the lower floor cannot be jumped over. I was expecting it to act as a blocker, so the dynamite would do the work for me. Since it's possible to manipulate aliens' movements, I managed to make it to some degree, although I was expecting both rhinos upstairs to be down.
The final hallway is too complicated to run-plant both dynamites and somehow survive. Mainly because of the rhino by the last teleport, which would finish me.
That extra lift lap was taken to manipulate aliens' placements. It didn't help much, but it was enough for me to achieve my intension.
Level 6
Unfortunately, the teleport near the terminal 3 has quite a long patrolling area for aliens. I had to kill both tall armed aliens, but it didn't help much because the first alien in the queue for spawning is a tall alien, which moves relatively fast (then - two rhinos).
Also, the lift taking you to the room with two dynamites has quite uncomfortable timings. I would break through to catch it, I'm running out of health even if I replenish it as soon as enter terminal 3. So, I had to skip one lift loop.
Level 7
The timings of the lift duet above the pile of boxes is organised in such a way so I can't catch any of them after I plant the first dynamite. Anyway, I wish it was the main problem (=
Logistics is organised in such a clumsy way that I had to do health preservation on all my way up to the exit. This level doesn't forgive agressive tactics I have to use for the fastest completion. For this, I'd say it's the hardest level in the set.
I chose to run through a rhino and a small alien to blow up the 2nd nest faster, and I think it's the best option available. Otherwise, I would have to blow both small toxic flasks in between the door and the rhino, before planting a dynamite.
Plasmagun isn't quite helpful in a TAS, although I found cases where it's still operates better.
Level 8
Again, the timing of the lift in front of you is unlucky. One way or the other, you have to wait for one lift loop, because, when you collect a dynamite upstairs, you cannot jump across the pit. You have to wait for the lift.
The level is straightforward.
Verification movie
I don't know whether my plan will be taken as basis, but I thought it through and found it OK.
To begin with, you should install Windows 98 according to
this BizHawk guide. The resulting .hdd hashes must match the ones provided in the guide:
MD5: 799C395887E12B00DB1E15F9DF09FD98
SHA-1: 3A523B859054C68B7C6E60CBAD5BF1F0EE86862F
Now the preparation begins. I divided it into three parts.
- Part 1 is common for any preparation for J2ME TAS making/encoding.
- Part 2 is customizable, but it serves as preparatory to bring the emulator, the game and the launching .bat script in place, so the actual TAS doesn't spend time on the installation.
- Part 3 is TAS playback itself.
1. Install Windows installer (InstMsiA.exe) and Java Runtime Environment 6 Update 7. All information is described within this user file, including XML bundle sample and the .conf file.
UserFiles/Info/639163483683257131
For encoders
For a 1440p video, I used the following command to make a temp encode:
ffmpeg -ss 00:11:00 -i alien_tas_4.mp4 -c copy alien_tas_4-crop.mp4
ffmpeg -i alien_tas_4-crop.mp4 -vf "crop=718:958:448:130,scale=-4:1440:flags=lanczos" -c:v libx264 -crf 15 -preset slow -c:a copy output.mp4
Possible improvements
If we think it through hard enough, I think all levels are improvable. The first half of the levels is based around ammo carrying, which makes it hard to foresee optimal usage. Here are some points I see.
Level 3.
- The first tall armed alien on my way to terminal 1 should have been killed at once.
- Blow one of the walls with a flamethrower. It's enough napalm to reach the ammo on level 4.
Level 4.
- Burning the last 2 rhinos would be a bit faster. They split up afterwards, making bazooka not as effective.
