ASSAULT SUITS VALKEN

Made with snes9x improvement v9; only wip timing enabled. Goals of this movie:

Assault Suits Valken (otherwise known as Cybernator) is a reasonably short game for the SNES. Its not too bad, and even has a bit of a story (albeit you wont be seeing none of that in this playthrough :P) to go along with it. Something about fighting over a lack of fossil fuels left on earth and for domination of the moon. I can't really recall. but anyways, here's a rundown:

Stage 1

The 'get to know the controls' stage, rather simple in layout. I didn't kill anything in this stage so I could obtain the Napalm, as it's quite a powerful weapon.

Stage 2

This one starts off with an autoscroller, then goes into a no gravity area. Should you happen to die in this stage when you get the Napalm, you lose it. I picked up the Missiles in this stage as they help out later on a bit (and add to entertainment value somewhat). The boss here takes 4 hits to kill as opposed to 3 in the US version of this game.

Stage 3

Again, Fairly straight forward, although I skipped an optional and somewhat pointless text part, which would've added around 30 seconds to the run. The engines outside are the main thing that need to be destroyed. The floating robot thats attacking you is optional, but killing it makes it easier to destroy the engines when playing in realtime.

Stage 4

This was a relatively simple stage, you just have to hold out until you hit the ground. every white enemy you kill in this stage nets you a power chip, of which I picked up enough to fully powerup the Vulcan and the Missiles. The stage ends when the orange enemy is offscreen, so him going off the top is the best way.

Stage 5

This was a pain, The level itself wasn't too bad, but the boss was weird. Firstly, unlike you may think, being at the highest point possible wasn't a timesaver when getting the rocket pod, ironically I saved about 30-60 frames by being on the lowest point of the stage possible at that time.

The boss itself is similar, I started with Missiles, but seemingly waste two of them. This is because unless i was to wait until even with the shuttle, they would've gone down anyway (homing missiles are weird like that). I switched to the napalm at a desirable time and proceeded to destroy the shuttle with a bit of difficulty. When the shuttle is offscreen is when the level ends, which is why I went up to the top. I had one missed shot on this stage that I didn't notice due to the weird way Missiles do damage ('did that hit? the enemy blew up, so I think it hit...').

Stage 6

I found a weird but kind of cool bug in this stage that saved about 700 frames: when you are forced into the autoscrolling part, the screen wont progress until its finished what it wanted to do (destroying the driller thingy). However, since I was as far right as possible at the time, I somehow managed to skip a small portion of the stage an jump right into the exit or something. As it turns out this isn't present in the US version either, so the version did time overall.

The boss of this stage is like a half dozen anti-air lasers and a weird flying this. I used Napalm to destroy all the lasers and Missiles on the flying thing because when napalm has to recharge between shots Missiles are slightly faster (they can do somewhere between 60~210 damage I think) due to splash damage and such from the explosion. I didn't destroy anything at the end of the stage bar those two containers because anything more would've caused extra fadeout lag.

Stage 7

This stage sucked. I actually had to resort to using the shield twice in this stage, as the enemies just refused to cooperate with me. Practically every enemy shot a projectile at me that sapped my health. Jumping could've altered the path of the projectile before launch, but the delay from jumping just wasn't worth it, so I guarded.

Also, it would seem there is a cutscene here not present in the US version, but I guess that's to be expected since a guy suicides in it (cant have the children seeing THAT now can we?). This cutscene pretty much cancelled out the entire saving I got from changing versions at the start (changing versions was about an 18 second saving before I even get control of the character), but since the amount saved and the amount lost more or less equal out, I stuck with this because it has less 'pauses' for text and has cool anime style pictures for the people.

After that is an autoscroller, I tried to be a little entertaining, but there's only so much you can do in an autoscroller. The miniboss in this section has a fixed amount of hp you can remove while you're scrolling, and the rest upon stopping (1/3rd + 2/3rds respectively).

For the final boss, you surprisingly only have to kill 3 parts: the gun, the 'chin', and the head, in that order. this was nice since it meant I didn't have to waste time killing the arm or booster.

And thats it (wow this was a long submission text).

Thanks on this one go to Truncated, for being the only person to actually make a comment on it (and pointing out something I overlooked even).

Enjoy!