The Legendary Axe is about a man, his axe, an evil cult leader, and its human sacrifice. your goal in this game is to rescue your childhood friend Flare from the evil Jagu. In normal play this game requires careful strategy such as waiting for the right timing or jumping backwards over fireballs. But in this video its more about hacking relentlessly at the enemies.
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Abuses programming errors
  • Manipulates luck
  • Used mednafen-rerecording-138
In this game you move slightly faster when jumping then when walking so I tried to stay in the air when moving, of course that wasn't always possible. At the end of every level there is a health count down and charge. it takes 12 frames for each health bar to drain so I try and have it near empty at the end of the level. I can usually prevent the damage stun by being in an upward motion of my jump when getting hit. Also by jumping off vines with the right timing I could get a lot of speed and keep it by jumping on the frame I land.

Power ups

-Wings: These allow you to attack more frequently with the maximum of 2 you can attack about once every
14 frames.
-Crowns: These make your attacks more powerful after waiting for your axe power to charge up. You lose charge and have to wait again after every swing. If you miss one there will usually be an extra one sometime in the next zone.

Axe power levels

Waiting different amounts of time will make your attacks have varying strengths with the max depending on how many crowns you have. although I'm not sure about the exact damages and the time it takes might be off by a frame or two, these are the times it takes to charge and the amount of damage it does.
Empty bar, no crowns: 14 frames with two wings (with 0 its ~25-30 frames) Base damage. Quarter bar, 1 crown: 31 frames, 2x damage. Half bar, 2 crowns: 79 frames, 3x damage 3/4ths bar, 3 crowns 151 frames, 4x damage Full bar, 4 crowns 284 frames (including freeze time) 16x damage

Level comments

Zone 1 Nothing special, getting the wings and crown from the spider isn't worth the extra time it takes to kill him. I emptied my life on the bears. Could have been about 30 frames faster by avoiding some lengthy damage on the bears, but I couldn't get it to sync up. I have to wait for the level complete music to finish before the level loads out so not being as far to the right as possible didn't waste any time.
Zone 2 Man this level is laggy as hell, I try and kill a lot of enemies to avoid some lag, I think I may have overestimated the usefulness of killing enemies in later levels though as it seems simply swinging your axe causes a frame of lag I didn't realize this until just at the end of the game though. I let the first boulder hit me so that I can jump through it and attack the second one sooner. near the end of the level is the first time I use the vine swing glitch. I probably could have taken some more damage earlier in the level.
Zone 3 After grabbing my second set of wings the fastest way to kill enemies is to attack as fast as possible. The reason why I took the lower path was to avoid the rock enemies above. I think I could have taken a bit of damage from the birds in 3A. In 3B there is a very impressive use of swinging vines. I skip the lengthy scene that gives you a crown.
Zone 4 A Cavemen quickly defeated.
B I kill a moth waiting for my 3rd crown to spawn. I take so much damage here I have to carefully avoid damage at the end in order to not get killed. At one point the end was so laggy it was literally impossible to make it across a gap with out killing some enemies.
C I waste a bit of time to manipulate an idol into being a crown giving me full power. At 16 times the damage of an empty bar a full charge is very useful against bosses, but it causes a half second of freezetime so I have to avoid using it unnecesarily. I noticed destroying those three idols at the end caused the explosion to take longer. The walk to the end of the level is so long that the music ends before I get there so I have to be on the far right side of the screen.
Zone 5 This zone with its 23 levels of maze takes up about half the movie. I don't have to worry about having high health at the end of the zone, but I'm already out of health by the entrance and have to do lower jumps to avoid the bats in 5A. Jumping close to the doors means he doesn't have to walk as far for the door to start closing.
C I waste a few frames to manipulate a small health into a medium health, I could have made the next small health medium as well with a few more frames.
T I waste some health and about 30 frames to manipulate a large health in 5U.
Zone 6 I extended the input and deleyed the ending by about 3 frames for a victory dance and to make it to the right side of the screen.
the last hit is at frame 49349 and flare is cut down at frame 49985.

mmbossman: I'm going to go ahead and reject this. The voter opinion seems to be that this game/run is mediocre at best, and two months on the workbench has failed to garner a lot of interest. Better luck on your next run!

adelikat: Accepting for publication to the Vault

Ilari: Got a dump... This game blinks like heck...

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #2357: FuzZerd's PCE The Legendary Axe in 13:49.72
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Ok i voted yes to this, the game not super good, i think overall you made a good job, i prefer to be optimistic on this than pesimist But... Im pretty sure you could have do better with ram watch, well, assumptions :p Why does the game paused after you kill last boss ? i had to push run to un-pause (i looked your input and theres no run pressed near end...) Just a bug/shit on my side or the game realy pause itself after you beat boss? in that case you need to hex your movie and add unpause, else credits dont rolls
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I think the only thing ram watch would have helped for was knowing the exact health of the bosses and when exactly to jump off the vines. I meant to get ram watching working but I didn't really feel like learning how to use a 3rd party ram watcher. I don't know why it pauses for you, it doesn't do that on my end.
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Ok the pause was on my side then i guess Yeah for ram watch thats exactly what i meant, boss hp and damage given probably would have been an asset, im saying this coz ram watch is going to be in next release
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Encode: http://files.getdropbox.com/u/1665523/thelegendaryaxe-taspreview-fuzzerd.mkv Used pcejin ( http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8415&highlight= ) which worked very well, except not sure what happened at the end of the movie, where it froze or something after the last input. On the run, I thought it looked well played, but the game itself wasn't super exciting. Would probably be better if I were familiar with the game. Edit: And, oh yeah, adelikat pointed me to dropbox which is hosting this encode, if you'd like to join use this link and you'll get 250 MB more space than usual (and me too, of course :P ): https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTE2NjU1MjM5
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alden wrote:
Edit: And, oh yeah, adelikat pointed me to dropbox which is hosting this encode, if you'd like to join use this link and you'll get 250 MB more space than usual (and me too, of course :P ): https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTE2NjU1MjM5
I would love to sign up for a site that seems to have a ~20% chance of unknowingly downloading malware! e: Admittedly, this run strikes me as a poor, boring, autistic man's version of Astyanax. It was pretty blah, a few parts seemed really sloppy to watch (regardless of whether it was the fastest method or not), and the whole last area of the game was a mind killer. I would like to vote Meh, but I'm going to go with my gut on this. No vote.
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Thanks for the encode, Alden! In Zone 3 you grab a vine and then slide down it before jumping to the ground. You have plenty of clearance to make the jump as soon as you grab the vine; why not jump immediately? The point where you take damage in Zone 3b (not counting the boss) seems a bit awkward, since you attack but do not kill the guys that attack you. At around 6:04 (Zone 4c) you hit a bat while standing on the ground, which makes you stop for a bit. Couldn't this have been hit while in-air, or manipulated out of the way, or just jumped over? Getting hit by the Zone 4 boss pauses your charge timer. It seems like this should be avoidable. I'm not convinced that the second damage-taking was worthwhile -- you gain 12 frames of not watching the health bar tick down at the cost of having to suffer a get-hit animation and splitting up the bosses so they're on opposite sides of the screen. Can you hit both bosses with the same charged strike? That'd really speed things up. It seems like Zone 5t could have been handled better; you land very far from the door. If you're going to take damage from the enemies anyway, you may as well set it up so you can land closer and not have to walk as far. When fighting the final boss, it looks like your fastest attack speed is when crouching; is that just my imagination? Standing definitely feels slower. As it stands, even if this movie is played optimally, it doesn't look optimal, which is distressing. Little things like ending the level standing in the middle instead of on the right may not make an actual difference, but they look sloppy; generally I feel it's best to show the viewer at least once "hey, look, even if I do what should be optimal, the game doesn't care". And then there's the enemies you hit but do not kill, the situations where you pause a bit before taking damage, the axe swings in midair (to cancel the charge timer, I know), and so on. The fact that a well-played TAS looks sloppy points to poor game choice, in my opinion. Voting no.
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I had to wait for the vine to be going its fastest before jumping off so I would gain maximum speed, although I just sort of eyeballed this. as for hitting enemies when I had to take damage anyway, this may have been an oversight. I had to slow down in zone 4 to manipulate a crown (I didn't know I ever had to manipulate crowns before then) and I chose to stop myself by attacking a bat (I also delayed my first jump a few frames) I probably could have done this by delaying jumps but this was easier for me. I was actually trying to avoid getting hit the second time but I couldn't quite manage it, theres probably a way to avoid getting hit if you play earlier parts of the battle differently or something. the point of getting hit in 5t was to delay my exit so I could get a large health in the next level I ended up delaying it about 30 frames from optimal but it wasn't an exaustive search. getting hit may not have even done anything other then slow me down. on the final boss the amount of time it took between swings was the same. I think that it takes longer from the start of the swing for it to hit the boss which might be why it seemed like it took longer... I also wanted to mention that with pcejin for some reason it pauses and ends the movie about 5 seconds before I ended the input meaning this encode ends a bit early.
mklip2001
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Thanks for the encode Alden! I found this game pretty funny at first (the animations are amusing), but it dragged on. As Derakon points out, the game doesn't look like it's played as smoothly later on, though you can tell that the game is pretty hard. I don't know what the game designers were thinking with Stage 5. Meh vote leaning towards yes.
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Post subject: Please help by voting on this! Post has Dailymotion link
adelikat
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I'm on the fence with this one. I could use some more opinions/votes. I uploaded it to dailymotion for easy access: http://www.dailymotion.com/user/TASVideos/video/xajnt4_submission-pce-legendary-axe-in-134_videogames
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects
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Personally, i think this is the perfect choice to go *against* people choice, the tas is good, technically, the game is a bit suxy, thats true, but theres TONNES of worst NES games here on tasvideos.org, so first of all the shityness of the game shall not been taken into consideration, and again, to me it looked like good tas, definitly not doable by human at least
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arukAdo wrote:
theres TONNES of worst NES games here on tasvideos.org, so first of all the shityness of the game shall not been taken into consideration, and again, to me it looked like good tas, definitly not doable by human at least
You really should stop using this argument every time you think a borderline movie is barely worthwhile of publication. Not only is it horrible logic, it effectively is saying "well, we already have some shit, we should add some more shit", which hurts the site more than it helps. I'm definitely not saying this submission is shit, since I haven't been able to watch it since my Internet has been out for a week and the change over to a new ISP won't happen until Wednesday. YouTube works on my phone, though... Hint hint ;)
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Sorry bossman, your saying you couldnt see that movie because you dont have internet since a week, this sat in the bench since more than 50 days now Also, personnally like i sayd i dont think its shit, but its a 8bit game you know, you wont be amazed by its graphics or sound.... they are rather "poor" since its pretty old game... so its not surprising me people think its bad, thats all (obviously 20 years old game are not amazing nowaday) Edit: the movie is not borderline, i was meaning the game actually
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arukAdo wrote:
Sorry bossman, i cant let you go with that, your saying you couldnt see that movie because you dont have internet since a week, this sat in the bench since more than 50 days now
Yeah, I haven't watched it because Ive been really busy lately, and up until recently the only emulator that would play this only had a command line option, which I wasn't about to fuck around with. Don't try to make my inability to watch this movie a strawman argument to take away focus from the fact that your argument still sucks.
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Ah, so you want me to say that the release of pcejin is the same day than this movie ? (or maybe 1/2 days decal) You can check, im not saying bs I dont need to take anything away, i realy think this game have nothing superb to offert and is quite average, i still think that why people voted no, because they didnt like the game much, i still think on technical side its good (the movie...) and no human would do such a performance If you accept a game such as donkey kong on nes, this one is fine too i guess As for you been busy, yeah i cant help with that, you didnt used that argument at first tought
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The game may appear "sucky", or whatever, but it's actually a really fun game to play. It's just less fun to watch TAS style. And as I've played the game a lot, on hardware and emulated, I can say that this TAS is pretty good. It's not perfect, but it is well-thought and well-implemented, and I think this is a fine addition to the TAS collection here. I certainly hope it interests others to try and improve on it. Legendary Axe 2 might get more fans of the actual game, though, that's for sure.
mklip2001
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I figured I'd watch this again, if people are currently on the fence about this. I gotta admit I liked the game better the second time I saw this. This may also be because I wasn't really tired when I started watching this the second time. The game really isn't as bad as I thought originally. By the way, it seems like the video on Dailymotion pauses after the boss is beaten (thanks to adelikat for the upload there!).
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
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mklip2001 wrote:
By the way, it seems like the video on Dailymotion pauses after the boss is beaten (thanks to adelikat for the upload there!).
This is an issue from begin, my first message does mention it :p , it seem to be only on pcejin, i have no idea whats going on or whats the problem about it tought, the movie does NOT contain a start press after the fight, it just suddenly pause for no reasons, this is probably minor issue alltought
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the issue seems to be in converting the mcm to an mc2. when converted a small percentage of the input is cut off from the end of the file. this sudden ending to the input seems to cause random input for a frame, in this case pausing the game. this can be fixed by extending the input a bit before converting. if you accept this movie PLEASE don't leave this mistake in the final encode.
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Watched via the encode alden so graciously provided, and I'll give this a solid meh, leaning slightly towards no. It's very repetitious and lacks any semblance of depth. On the plus side, it's pretty short, but still... it's like a worse version of Golden Axe, minus a dimension, and without busty women and midgets. I wouldn't raise a stink if this were accepted, but I wouldn't cry if it were rejected either.
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Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [2223] PCE The Legendary Axe by FuzZerd in 13:49.72