Post subject: Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade (or Cosmic Spacehead)
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Linus Spacehead (Return to Linoleum) was a game only seen on the Quattro Adventure about a guy from another planet who crashed on Earth while joyriding through space and had to climb his way across the land and up through the atmosphere while collecting pieces of a radio so he could call for help to get back home. I came across a TAS of it on YouTube, and I was instantly drawn to the hero sprite that was probably the best on that cartridge. Just look at him! He stands there with that cute doughy face, he blinks, he looks at you, he shrugs, he yawns... When he crouches, he looks up nervously... He puts his arms out like wings when he jumps... And then he starts running, and he looks freakin DEVIOUS! And if you jump while running, he'll stay in his running animation during the jump like he's the Doki Doki Luigi or something! It was somewhat notorious for its clumsy controls: Outside of the levels where you ride bubbles or balloons, you can't change Linus's speed or direction anytime during a jump, and Linus slides a lot, presumably so you have a small window of time during his acceleration or deceleration to pick a medium jump speed. In addition, the input detection was programmed badly, so if you're still holding the A button when Linus lands from a jump, he'll immediately jump again--and probably right into danger, since you won't have changed his speed yet. Not to mention like many Nintendo Hard platformers from novice developers, the jump height was just BARELY enough to clear gaps and enemies on the floor. Linus had no hit points, so some enemies would instantly kill him with the slightest touch, while others would merely knock him backwards with no harm done. (The manual actually recommended turning your back on your destination and letting such enemies knock you forward. It also recommended tiptoeing up to the edge of a platform, jumping in place, then holding the forward direction and A so that Linus would jump off at full speed. Uh... Easier than learning how to program nicer gameplay mechanics, I guess?) Quite an ordeal, but I've completed the game without the help of savestates more than once before! A little later CodeMasters decided to come out with a standalone sequel to that game that was a little more involved. It was known as "Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade" in the USA, and it was supposed to combine point-and-click adventure gaming (where you guide Linus with a pointer arrow) with the original game's platforming (where you control Linus directly). Well, it was more like "Ya gotta do some of one to get to do more of the other." You could say it's a little like Simon's Quest where towns are separated by action zones, but the system is a little more like Guardian Legend where once you beat a platforming action section, you never have to beat it again, and instead of re-entering it when you backtrack you just see Linus run across a map of the world, so the platformers are like these one-time rites of passage. The story is that Linus gets back to his home planet of Linoleum, only to find that nobody believes his story of discovering another planet full of advanced life, so he's setting off to get a camera and a new spacecar to come back with proof and receive the accolades he deserves for his accidental discovery. (What, he couldn't even convince the person who gave him a ride home from the moon to go in for a closer look?) So, starting with nothing but his birth certificate, he eventually does that... But he gets caught up in a bunch of tangential quests, like crossing bodies of water, collecting missile parts to blast away a wall in another country, using teleporters with serious flaws, fighting off a robot revolution while visiting a factory planetoid, getting a driver's license so he can race bumper cars... (What, was the one he used to drive his old spacecar not good enough? Or did he lose it in the crash despite clinging to his birth certificate?) And so since this is set on an alien planet, the designers can just make up random monsters for Linus to face instead of the real animals in the first game. But the Linopeople are just like Earth people, only superhero costumes seem to be in fashion for them. The adventuring parts aren't too hard to work out, though a few solutions you may find unintuitive, like giving a big monster a balloon to get rid of it, using ICING sugar to turn a pool into ICE >_<, or stealing a bus stop sign to pry a fire extinguisher out of a car wreck later to put out a giant robot's power source. Oh, and you have to press Select in Formica City to control a second character there. Whew! So this is one of those games that has enough variety in its modes of play and possible routes that it could make a good speedrun, but before someone runs it, we should figure out which version is best. See, Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade was also released in Europe and ported to several other game systems as "Cosmic Spacehead", where the adventure zone graphics were given a total overhaul on the systems that could support it, and little Linus was given an even goonier-looking appearance. Personally I find the new art style with all the wild angles pretty garish, and the fact that even the "16-bit" ports like Genesis and Amiga couldn't change the proportions of anything in the action stages means that the use of the enormous Cosmic Spacehead sprite makes the enemies look smaller and less intimidating and causes a lot more Hitbox Dissonance overall, so I tend to prefer the original NES version, which also has some very expressive music for the NES. But if people prefer the graphics and sound from one of the ports, then we could start a topic for Cosmic Spacehead for another system instead. Now, so, even if we pick the NES version, we still have to decide which NES version, the US or the European. It turns out the European version made a lot of changes throughout the game, possibly either to keep up with the changes made to other ports, or maybe it made the changes first to play better, and then the ports were based on that, I'm not sure of the order of everything. Some alterations are minor and just make things more convenient; some greatly change the difficulty; and some I'm just not sure the point of. I've made a long list of all the changes I've caught so far: * Linus Spacehead's name has been changed to Cosmic Spacehead. No, that's not just the revised title of the game, that's the playable character's new name. He introduces himself as Cosmic, signs letters with that name, it's on his birth certificate... I really don't understand why his name needed to be changed, since I thought the whole point of naming Spacehead's world after Linoleum was to match up with Linus's name. (Or they picked the name Linoleum because it's something you walk on, like earth, and then they picked Linus's name to match.) Maybe they suddenly decided they didn't want to remind people of the Quattro Adventure anymore? Oh, well, whatever, they can call him Stupendous Man for all that it matters now. The new appearance for Cosmic appears in the new opening credits, but the NES/SMS/GG versions still use the old Linus sprites all throughout the actual gameplay. * There's a new option on the title menu called "2 Player Pie Slap", where the bumper cars from the racing mini-game try to shoot each other--oh I'm sorry, I mean they try to "splat" each other with "pies". Gee, CodeMasters, you look so silly trying to construe your little car shooting game as something non-violent. What a waste of delicious pie. Anyway, I think the 16-bit ports add new arenas and replace the cars with little dragons or maybe they're supposed to be robot dogs called "Splatdrones", but it's the same idea. * When you type in a password, the US version will stop your cursor when it reaches the edge of the box of letters, but the Eur version lets the cursor wrap around to the other side. Convenience! * How you receive passwords is completely different. At first I couldn't figure out how to get any passwords in Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade and thought maybe they'd forgotten to put in a way, but then I found the manual, which explains that you have to press Select+Start then Start again to unpause (or the other way around), and then the game will tell you your current password. And you can do this as many times as you want in any adventure area. (Button code for saving as an anti-piracy measure, perhaps? With this I discovered that the base password is BYPETERLEEWILLIAMSON, which gets more corrupted as you complete your quest. Now we know his middle name!) Cosmic Spacehead does it differently. The Select+Start combo no longer works, but now there are flashing P panels in most of the adventure areas which award the player a password, but only once--I think they now also save the fact that you've taken a password icon. This means the player has to budget out the number of times they get to save the game, withholding the use of the P icons until they've made enough progress without losing too many lives for it to be worthwhile. * The physics of controlling Cosmic in the action areas are also completely different. In the USA version, Linus still controlled almost exactly like in his first game, although about the only things that would stun him were certain robots on Detroitica. (No vertical scrolling or enemies that randomly spawn from the edges either, but you often get to go right-to-left!) But in the transition to Cosmic Spacehead, he became a legitimate platform hero for the masses! He's not so slippery anymore. He can start moving forward in the middle of a jump, he'll stop moving mid-jump if you let go of the direction pad, and he can even turn back in the other direction mid-jump if you see danger ahead! You can just jump over things and then fall straight down onto them! It's like such a revolution, man! So yeah, this is one of the most noticeable changes. It's so much easier to clear a platforming section in Cosmic Spacehead it's ridiculous. I noticed something else about the jumping when I tried to collect all the Cosmic Candies in the whole game, the ones that give you an extra life when you collect 10 (or 5 in Quattro Adventure, or 15 in certain ports of Cosmic Spacehead--1-up inflation going on, yikes!). On the route from The Wilderness to The Very Cold Pool, there's one candy on a platform that's easy enough to jump down onto, but it seems to be impossible for Linus Spacehead to jump all the way back onto the next piece of solid ground. Since there's no point in throwing away 1 life for something worth 1/10th of a life, I figured this was nothing but Schmuck Bait, until I played the European NES version and discovered that Cosmic Spacehead can just barely make the jump back over! This is when I started to realize that Cosmic's jump is a bit higher than Linus's, as I ran into another problem later on. In the first Detroitica action area, there's a candy under a platform that Linus can jump to just fine, but I can't reach with Cosmic no matter how I try. It seems that Cosmic's higher jump causes him to snag on the next platform before he can fall through it, and if I do the jump from far enough back that that doesn't happen, Cosmic will be falling too fast when he clears the platform to get far enough to the left to reach the candy. If it weren't for either of those candy issues, I could have ended the game with 21 lives, but instead I had to settle for 20 lives + 9 leftover candies! Darn, does every version of the game have an inaccessible candy somewhere? The funny thing is, I think the change in jump height was not just to make the game a little easier, but also to avoid Cosmic having to snag the middle of a platform and take a moment to zip up onto it so often, as Linus has to do that a lot for just average jumps, and if the player holds A and makes him jump continuously, then Linus won't get a chance to zip up and his next jump will be too low. Ah, yes, and Cosmic Spacehead fixed the "bouncing" issue... mostly. If you hold A during Cosmic's entire jump, he won't jump again once he's on the ground until you let go of the button and press it again. But if you let go of A and start holding it again in the middle of a jump, then Cosmic will jump again just one more time. But, I guess maybe it's nice to be able to jump continuously if you want to? Meh. And, wow, I only just bothered to try PAL Emulation in FCEUX just now and noticed this: Cosmic moves a lot FASTER in the action areas in PAL mode, even faster than he ever did in NTSC. That's... weird. The enemies are still slow; Cosmic's still slower in the adventure areas, the Secret Tunnel, the car factory and its scrapyard; and this effect doesn't happen at all if you turn on PAL mode in the American version. Some kind of automatic PAL detection that changes all the platforming speed constants? Oh, and don't try to turn on PAL Emulation in a game that's already been running in NTSC mode, or you'll get freaky flickering and other bad effects. * This green walking egg ("Headcase" I think is the official name) from the end of the route from Old Lino Town to Border Control seems to have gone missing from the European version. I suppose they thought this enemy was unfair for walking in such a small area to make it hard to get past, but come on, Cosmic has his improved speed and jumping ability now! He could do it! * The adventure areas also see some important changes in interface. In the American version, there are 5 choices of actions listed on the screen as Look, Pick Up, Talk, Give, and Use, which you can select with the A button, but you can also cycle through them in that same order by pressing the B button. In the European version, the 5 commands are displayed in that same order onscreen, but when you press the B button, the first one you get is Use, followed by Look At, Pick Up, Talk, and Give. I suppose the developers suddenly realized how often they required the player to use Use, huh? Not that it would make a huge difference for TASing; that's only another 12 frames to tap the B button to get to Use, or 9 frames when it's interchangeable with Give, which could be done while moving Linus or the cursor anyway. What's odd is that the demo for Cosmic Spacehead on NES still pulls up Look At first, even though I can tell it was re-recorded for that version because the player makes some slightly different moves throughout the demo. Maybe it was recorded on an in-between build, and this is a revealing mistake like the full-power-down from the intro to Super Mario Bros. 3? * In the USA version, if you've chosen an action command but then click A on any part of the screen that isn't an item hotspot (moving Linus in the process if you're in the top section), your action will disappear, and you'll have to choose an action all over again. In the Eur version, your action, along with the first object you've chosen if it's Give or Use, will stay ready to use no matter how many times you click on a blank area. This could be very helpful for speedrunning when you need Give or Use with an item from your inventory, as you can select that item and then keep guiding Cosmic to his destination before the thing you need to Give or Use the item on appears onscreen. Until I do any actual TASing, though, I don't know if Linus Spacehead will actually lose any time if I have to dip down to the inventory only after the target's already appeared. * In both versions the pointer will speed up if you hold the same direction for a second, but the European version's top speed for the pointer seems to be higher. * In Cosmic Spacehead, if you don't pick any actions for a while in Old Lino Town, an image of the NES controller will pop up, with a finger pointing to the B button to help you out. On other systems this will be whatever controllers they use. * Cosmic runs across the world map significantly faster in the European version. Not much a speedrunner of the American version can do about this when there's forced backtracking. * Some of the items in the adventure areas had their names modified. "Gold Lino Dollars" -> "Lino Dollars" "Old Lino Town Telekey" -> "Lino Town Telekey" "Letter From Linograd" -> "Mail From Linograd" "Formica City Telekey" -> "Formica Telekey" "No.2 Hard To Get Thru" -> "No2 Hard To Get Thru" "No.4 Where's The Floor?" -> "No.4 No Floor!" When I first started seeing these changes I wondered if they decided the dollars weren't gold or if early players were confused into thinking that #4 involved puzzles with fake floors or invisible floors when it really just means that it has longer stretches of floorlessness than normal. But now I realize that all the names were made to fit into 20 characters or less. Why this revision added a limitation that wasn't there before, I couldn't guess. It doesn't matter for speedrunning though, as the hotspots for inventory items extend all the way to the right side of the screen for whatever reason. * I haven't done a full comparison of the other languages included in the games, but they have a few words changed too, usually to fit the 20-character limit again. Some languages still mention the dollars being gold or phrase #4 as a question in Cosmic Spacehead, so that's why I'm sure those weren't editorial changes. I played around in Spanish for a little while on one of my old password saves and noticed that "No Mans Causeway" was left in English for Linus Spacehead, but translated to "Arrecife De Nadie" for Cosmic Spacehead. "Deposito De Buses" became "Parada De Buses", and even the password entry text, "Ingresar Contrasena", was changed to "Formar Contrasena". So there have been new translations and re-translations, but I believe all specialty fonts for signage throughout the game had to be left in English in all versions. * There's a humorous scene in Linoville, a bit of an Easter egg, that only happens in Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade. The first time you enter Linoville, you see a tower with a satellite dish mounted on it. The second time you enter, the dish is now spinning. The third time you enter, a UFO appears out of the sky and circles the tower, causing the dish to spin faster to try to follow it until it spins so fast that it explodes as the UFO flies away. In the European NES version, the dish still spins on the second and third entrance, but the flying saucer thing never appears. The fourth time you enter Linoville, there's this weird glitchy-looking stuff on the tower, with the hooked thing on the bottom flashing the same colors as the cursor and passwords. What happened here? Did some of the revisions to the code break the scene in some way? * One drastic graphic change is at that Nearly Freezing Pool, where all the plants have been removed, and some of the smaller rocks lying around have changed shape slightly. I don't get the point of this one, unless maybe it's supposed to draw the player's attention more toward the pool or away from trying to cross it by examining the surrounding area. * Some plants that went up to the very top of the screen in the Dodgey City area action zones don't go up quite as high in the Eur version. Not that it makes a difference, since you can't stand on the steps that would take you off the top of the screen anyway, but I found it funny that the PAL version had trouble using more scanlines. * In Linoville's camera shop, the "camera supplies" sign is blanked out for Cosmic Spacehead. Huh? Why? Oh, hey, this is another place I checked out in the Spanish mode. Yeah, a few of the Spanish-only characters showed up as garbage tiles in Linus Spacehead, but appeared all right in Cosmic Spacehead. Hmm, did the old camera store sign mistakenly rob tiles from the other language character sets, and that's why it was removed? Or was FCEUX on the blink? Maybe this has something to do with why the flying saucer's gone too. * When you free the staff from the kitchen in Detroitica, their speech is right up against the left edge of the screen in Cosmic Spacehead, while for Linus Spacehead the speech got the usual left margin. Don't know why they would change that on purpose, since you want to leave room on the edges in case they get cut off on certain TVs. More broken code? * Cosmic Spacehead also changes it so that when you free those workers but double back from the action stage, the button's hotspot is gone, so you can't free them again and read their little monologue all over again. Makes sense, unless you think they're so pathetic they'd get locked in the kitchen again right away. * The post office workers originally blinked white pixels, but now they blink gold like the attendants at Cape Carnival and The Border. ...Okay, this is getting too pixel-nit-picky, enough already! So you can see how one could be torn over which version of the game to speedrun. The European version may be faster in many places, enough to make up for the parts that weren't speed-corrected for PAL, but it's also easier in many places too. Picking the fastest version of a game is nice, but I thought we wanted to run the hardest settings possible. Maybe Cosmic can do better stunts with his improved jumping physics, but a run with Linus could show how to be nearly as fast despite the more challenging controls, and having to stick to one speed per jump can make it look more graceful anyway. I know in the rules there's a preference for United States versions, but is that just because they're United Statesian, or is it a preference for what is usually the first version released in English, such as in Linus Spacehead's case? I hope we can decide for sure soon. I was going to end this post with a list of possible speed strategies for the game, but it's getting too late, and this post is already much too long, so it'll have to wait for another day.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Dwedit
He/Him
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 692
Location: Chicago
By the way, both versions of the game include NTSC/PAL detection, so it will run correctly in either mode. I'd assume any speedrun of the game would run in NTSC mode, since it's faster.
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
But that's the thing, Cosmic Spacehead moves a lot faster in the action stages only in PAL mode for whatever reason, and there are some more speed corrections in some places but not others, so I don't really know what would be fastest overall.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Oh, right, I said I was going to update with some ideas for speed strategies, didn't I? Well here goes! *You probably already guessed this, but the Luk-E-Day machine isn't random at all. It always pays out when your remaining number of Lino Dollars is 1, 25, 30, or 35, never at any other number. Thus the maximum you can ever carry is $84! The guaranteed payout at 1, along with the game's refusal to let you buy anything unless you have at least one more dollar than the price, is to keep you from running out of money. The higher ones are so that it doesn't take too many more tries to get another fifty dollars after spending some of your prize money, although it kinda assumes you'll get the post office supplies first, which makes good sense anyway. What's interesting is when there are some things you're allowed to buy or collect multiple times even once you don't need them anymore, such as the photos and the gunpowder in the post office. It would be worth testing whether it's faster to waste money on extra gunpower than on failed tries of the Luk-E-Day, since with the SupaVend you won't be waiting for the slots to spin around, but you do have to take the time to scroll back up from the new gunpowder to your money again every time. At any rate it would be cooler than the player acting as if Linus really was just waiting for a lucky pull of the slot machine. *You've also probably guessed that you don't need Old Lino Town's teleporter's side effect to get through the Secret Tunnel. Yeah, it's one of those places, where you COULD get the glowy thing to see in the dark place, but you don't HAVE to, so the viewers will likely be subjected to a sprite jumping up and down a blank black screen, but oh well, the light didn't illuminate very far around Linus anyway. So really, you don't need the Old Lino Town Telekey at all. You can even teleport there without it if you go to Dodgey City's teleporter: They had to leave you a way to get back out in case you didn't pick up any other Telekeys, so if you simply choose "Use teleport machine", you'll go back to Old Lino Town regardless of what keys you're carrying. Not that I think you'll even need to teleport to Old Lino Town... *Um, you get to pick up the Linoville Telekey before you enter the action stage between No Man's Causeway and Linoville. So you could just turn around right after grabbing the telekey, take the Old Lino Town teleporter over to Linoville so you can use its status effect to reach the camera shop, and never play that action stage. Is this an intentional sequence break, or just a very bad design oversight? Whatever, it makes sense to do it unless playing that action stage and teleporting out from Linoville is quicker than all that backtracking, which I doubt. *On Detroitica, there are sequence breaks through the special action scenes in the factory that also may be intentional, or not. In case you didn't fully understand how the car-jumping section works, there's a key you collect before the last car that operates the computer in the previous area. By turning on that computer, you can solve an easy password puzzle that deactivates all the robots that were zapping Linus and booting him out of the room, so you can pass by them freely. So about the only point of the key is if you got most of the way through but got zapped by the last robot, you can do a puzzle to skip having to try to pass all the robots all over again. But if you pass the last robot successfully, then the key isn't necessary and you just move on without deactivating the robots. I don't know if the programmers meant for the last robot to be impossible to dodge, or just very difficult, but either way it is possible to dodge, so there'll be no need to use the Computer Key in a speedrun. Similarly, the very next section has giant robot Vork throwing junk at Linus to knock him out and then throw him into the Scrapyard, where Linus can collect a fire extinguisher that will put out Vork's power source and go through another action stage to get back. Again I don't know if Vork's tossed scrap was supposed to be impossible to dodge, but those of us used to fighting GutsMan can manage to jump enough of the things to sneak past Vork without turning him off (especially if it's Cosmic Spacehead with his improved jumping ability), thereby skipping another whole action section. I think at some point the developers must have gotten fed up with this sequence break, though, because in the Amiga version, Vork doesn't throw anything for you to dodge. Instead you're set on a higher walkway leading directly into Vork's waiting hand. I guess I can understand if they realized too many players weren't figuring out the fire extinguisher puzzle and thought they HAD to jump over all the thrown blocks. Another drastic change in the Amiga version is right after that, where the towers aren't electrified, but you now have to deal with bottomless pits and enemies from the previous Detroitica action sections. Also it replaced the flying dodo bird things in the surfing section with more of those "Tubeflies" or whatever they're called that fly around No Man's Causeway. What's up with that? *And what's up with the asteroid-"dodging" section before you stop at space station 59-C? I found that in order to end it, you actually have to bump into a certain number of asteroids, I don't remember exactly, but I think it's 10 or less. If you keep dodging them successfully, they'll just keep coming for many more minutes until you finally fail and bump into enough. Despite that, Linus always says afterward that he "guzzled gas" dodging the asteroids and needs to stop at a space station to refuel. Not to repair all that damage from the asteroids that the game forced him to hit? I think either there was a last-minute rewrite of the asteroids scenario to make it easier, or the game designers were having a bit of fun with us. Interestingly, some ports of the game don't let you move your spacecar at all, so it's basically just a movie where you watch Cosmic get pummeled with asteroids while he sits passive until he complains that he guzzled too much gas "dodging" them, and versions with more advanced graphics actually lack the battle damage that accumulates on the car in the original. So instead of a cool minute of perfect dodging, a speedrun will just hug the right edge of the screen to soak up all the asteroids immediately as they appear. *Can the door in Formica City be opened without a helper? I notice I can start moving the cursor right after pushing the first button, and the door starts opening right after I issue the command rather than when Linus actually reaches the button, so I can redirect Linus back to the left shortly after the door starts opening, but any action to direct Linus away from the button immediately starts closing the door, so Linus always ends up blocked by the time he gets over there, even if the door looked about high enough to pass under. Now maybe I'm not timing it right and it just doesn't work at head-pinning height, or maybe the "door closed" status is set immediately rather than in the middle of the closing animation, but one thing worth noting is that I can't get this to happen at all in Cosmic Spacehead, so I guess that's another version difference. If they bothered to fix this, does that mean they discovered it actually worked at some point? *You know that letter from Linograd you have to wait for? I did a bit of testing to see what actions I could take to make it arrive, and I discovered that simply standing still in that same spot in the post office for about 159 seconds was good enough. So you want to spend at least that much time questing for other stuff after sending your own letter, plus whatever time the timer is frozen in some places because some section "doesn't count" towards it. Now for route planning... I think everyone realizes that Detroitica is a very straightforward sequence, just use the sequence breaks I mentioned. The space station doesn't seem to give you any real alternatives to solving it, either; just visit the ends in the correct order (425631) to grab everything efficiently without backtracking, and remember to pick up all your stuff again except in the last room. The parts on Linoleum after using the missile seem straightforward, too: Backtrack to Old Lino Town after grabbing each new Telekey to use the effects of the Linograd and Linoville teleporters, and make sure you've obtained another 50 Lino Dollars by the time you teleport into Linoville. So it's really the early part of the game where you're juggling a few different goals and have several possible routes to try to intertwine your quests efficiently. I suppose you could say the two main goals are obtaining a ticket to Detroitica and clearing the path through Linograd. For the Linograd part, there's the secret tunnel you have to open to access Linograd by sending and receiving a letter (reading it is unnecessary in the NES version, just having it in your hands is good enough), and then there's the 4 missile parts to collect. Two of them are found in the post office, but one of them can only be collected after you gather the other three. Another, the fuse wire, is far west of Formica City, requiring an item you obtain during the driving/ticket quest, so you definitely need to work that one into the middle of the quest for the driving license somehow. One more part is in the cave west of Linograd, so that means there will be 2 trips to Linograd before you can down that wall. For the bus ticket, there's a pretty clear sequence of places to go once you start opening up areas. You've got to get more money at Cape Carnival to buy passport photos to get your passport at the post office, where you should also get your letter made and delivered at the same time, so you probably might as well get your helium balloon from the Cape Carnival attendant at the same time as the first batch of money. Then you go South from Old Lino Town to show your Passport, East to collect the Icing Sugar, then back to Old Lino Town to go East to Give your Helium Balloon and Use Icing Sugar, so you can go further East to collect the Dodgey City Telekey. You have to teleport in and out of Dodgey City with the Telekey to get the Plug to use in the bathtub, so that gives you some options. Then after you repair the Bath Tub, you get the Surf Board and the chance to buy your Driving License, but you would have needed to work in another trip to Cape Carnival before that to have more than the $50 required. Hmm... And then remember you have two routes to get back to the west from Dodgey City because you can just fall down the little cliff thing in if you want, so test both ways for time, though I'm leaning toward the right/south way because you'd probably be going for the surfing section next. So we've got to work in another stop at the Luk-E-Day and a trip west through Formica to use the Surf Board to get the Fuse Wire... Maybe we should make a list of things you have to visit more than once in this game so we don't forget. -Luk-E-Day Machine: 3 times, because you have to go from $1 to $50 to spend $12 of it on post office supplies so you can start getting more places and get your letter sent early so you can spend plenty of time waiting for the reply; the second time you're going from $35 to $84 to pay for the Driving License; and finally you'll go from $30 to $79 to get that camera in Linoville just before leaving the planet. -Cape Carnival Attendant: 2 times, because you need the Helium Balloon to clear the way to get that Driving License you need to come back and play the bumper car race for the Bus Ticket. -Enquiries Office: 3 times, twice in a row early on to get the Passport and buy the materials for your Ready Made Letter, and once more later to receive Cousin Linochev's reply letter. His/her buddy at Lost Property Office you should only talk to once, though, after collecting the other three missile parts; no reason to have that useless joke book stinking up your inventory longer than it has to. -The Riverbank: 2 times, because you can only fetch the Icing there first, then you get to cross it later. Or you might also backtrack through it after the final trip to Dodgey City. -Dodgey City: 3 times I guess, once from the left side to get the Telekey, once into its Teleport Machine with that telekey, and once from the right side to bargain with Shady Lionel. -Linograd: 2 times before you can blast away the wall, then you end up backtracking through it a few more times later because of its stupid incoming-only teleporter. -Old Lino Town, Cape Carnival, Passport Control...: Too many times for me to want to count, blech! Okay no more whole-area counts! Well the SupaVend might be the same way, depending on whether you end up using it to diminish your money to make the Luk-E-Day pay out right away. So what I was thinking was, you have a mandatory teleport in to Dodgey City, and a mandatory teleport out from it. Where you teleport in from doesn't matter, so it may as well be Old Lino Town's since it'll be the closest. Then you may as well use the Formica City Telekey to get out, since you'll need that teleport effect to get through Formica City and the later teleporters aren't available yet. That's why I would go grab the Formica City Telekey right before going after the Icing Sugar. But at the point you teleport out of Dodgey City, you won't have the surfboard yet, so I was thinking you'd turn right around and head back east from Formica City after pushing the far button, since that button makes the wall stay open permanently. (Test whether it's faster to collect both characters on the left and then turn around from the action stage so you're not sending the characters that longer distance to the right twice.) Now you have to revisit Cape Carnival before the final trip into Dodgey City to collect the $50 for Shady Lionel... I was thinking, maybe this could be done on the same trip as entering the Secret Tunnel for the Match and collecting the Helium Balloon. The only issue is whether enough time will pass for Linochev's letter to arrive before I want to take this detour to the Caves. If it's after the first trip to Dodgey City (meaning I grabbed the Helium Balloon at the first opportunity), that should be a safe bet. But if I want to save grabbing the Helium Balloon until after the Tunnel's open, so I'm only adding the distance between the hole and the Attendant rather than between the Luk-E-Day and the Attendant, well... I'm not sure if there would be enough action scenes to make enough time pass. After the first trip to the Post Office that would be the OldLinoTown-PassportControl stage, the PassportControl-FormicaCity stage, and the PassportControl-TheRiverbank stage. 3 stages, if they're much less than a minute each, they're probably not long enough for the wait. I suppose you could add the action stage from OldLinoTown-TheWilderness and turn right around, but that's adding backtracking between the middle of Old Lino Town and the entrance to The Wilderness, including crossing the world map, for what? That little space between the slot machine and the hole? Or there's that FormicaCity-CosmicCoast stage, but that's only possible after visiting Dodgey City, so, uh... I don't think it would... help... Okay it's getting late and I'm getting tired now, so anyone else who's familiar with this game should let me know if I'm missing something that would make this easier to figure out. Thanks for reading!
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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I just played through the Game Gear version of this game, and I discovered that it basically removed the puzzle of Formica City. Now the first button opens the barrier permanently, making the second button useless, and there is no special effect to the Formica teleporter. I don't think it's due to a lack of buttons, since the Master System version let you change character using the pointer rather than an extra button. Maybe there was an issue with the characters ending up on opposite sides of the screen. I'm pretty sure some more enemies were removed for Game Gear, too. For some reason, only the last jumping fish in the surfing section still appeared. So those things might make it faster... But then, why play a port with some of the interesting stuff taken out? I really want to go First Installment Wins on this one and stick with the Entertainment System version. Maybe if it's not too hard to TAS, I could also do the PAL version just to see how it compares. The Genesis version isn't too bad either, but that "porthole" around all the action scenes annoys me. Plus when I play the SMS and GG versions on Dega, there's a glaring emulation flaw where either the backgrounds are too high or the sprites are too low, along with some odd flickering. I got through it on Kega Fusion, but I had to start saving a lot because sometimes the game would freeze in the middle of certain teleportations. The Game Gear version did lead me to a theory as to why the names of things were shortened for Cosmic Spacehead, though: On Game Gear, 20 characters is the most that can fit on one row of the screen. Do you suppose CodeMasters came up with the 20-character limitation in anticipation of the Game Gear port so they wouldn't have to deal with overflowing text once the port was made?
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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Since I've mostly gotten the route figured out, I started a TAS to figure out those crucial first areas of the game this week. http://www.box.net/shared/x7n0g1x8qg What do you think? Working on this led me to realize some other factors to worry about when going for minimal time moving that arrow around. There's the fact that if the item Linus needs next isn't in the three slots on screen, I'll need to go all the way over to the left in that lower section to hit the scroll arrows some number of times, costing 7 frames per press of it. This can be done without wasting any time when Linus has to run all the way to the left through a previous adventure area. When starting on the left such as I demonstrate in Old Lino Town, it only wastes a little time, so that must be the second-best option. The order in which you collect things matters because every time you receive an item, the inventory automatically scrolls so that the new item is on top. In this version of the game the inventory is always sorted into a predefined order, so if the new item is at the bottom of the list there'll be only the one item name on screen, or if it's second-from-bottom, there will be only two. So when possible, we want to get items so that the latest one is or is near one we want to Give or Use next; for instance, grabbing the surfboard after the driver's license is probably a good idea, since I plan to Use it on the water after traveling through Formica again. Items that get used up in conversations, you don't need to worry about, as Linus coughs those up instantly no matter where the inventory list is scrolled to. Otherwise every press of A or B makes the pointer freeze for 2 frames after. So moving and tapping A every 4 frames, the pointer can only just keep up with Linus's steady 1-pixel-per-frame run. There turns out to be an advantage to selecting one of the actions in the on-screen list with A whenever the pointer needs to swoop past them, even if it's not the action you need, because you can press B starting from that point in the action list if you need to and save some of the earlier B button presses that would have delayed the pointer 2 frames each time. You can select things in the graphic area and actions on the action list with A at the same time as you move with the direction pad for one frame, but to select something from the inventory or scroll it up or down, you need to press A alone. I have noticed that many of the objects Linus uses cause him to move to one exact spot no matter which spot on the object I click on, so if Linus is about to use a machine but I need to pull out money first, I'll set him on that exact spot or as close as I can get before dipping down into the inventory. During conversations, a 1-frame press of A on either the frame Linus's speech appears or the frame before is normally enough to skip to the next line, but many of the responses require holding A for 2 frames, and the last line can take 2 or 3 frames of holding A and then another press of any button. "Priming" the pointer arrow to move faster is another key to optimizing its time spent flying around. After you've held the pad to move the arrow in one direction for 16 frames, it changes speed from 1-pixel-per-frame to 2-pixels-per-frame (or maybe 3-pixels-per-frame in Cosmic Spacehead, since it's easier to overcompensate for PAL by adding 50% to speed values than to properly compensate by adding 20%). If you ever stop moving in that direction for more than 8 frames, then the pointer goes back to 1 pixel per frame, but it only takes maybe a frame or two per amount of time over 8 that you stopped before it bounces back up to 2 pixels per frame again. I have found that when you're "primed" for double speed like this going left, you're already primed for going right, and vice versa, but neither direction helps you prime for up or down. Similarly, having double speed upward is the same state as having double speed downward, but they have no bearing on left or right. Using diagonal directions a lot then can keep all directions primed at once, except you may want to watch out for when the double speed makes you overshoot your target by a pixel and waste a bit of walking time unnecessarily. I have been able to keep the high horizontal (left/right) speed primed across adventure areas, but for whatever reason I can't get the priming to transfer over for vertical directions at all. In this movie, I buy gunpowder in the post office twice because I discovered it's a little faster than losing at the Luk-E-Day, and I also discovered it can save a bit more time to buy the gunpowder on the way to doing something else in the post office rather than just standing still and re-purchasing it continuously, so I plan to waste the other two dollars on gunpowder again while coming back for Linochev's letter. I think it'll be fastest to get that letter and start the trip for the matchstick and more money after grabbing the Dodgey City Telekey but before using the Telekeys. I just have to hope the "arcade" sections don't get too boring. Linus moves at the one speed and doesn't have any attacks, so all I can do is put in lots of near-misses and collect lots of candy. If you couldn't tell, I'm explaining every facet of TASing this game just in case I lose the will to finish and somebody else takes it up, or if somebody wants to beat the time of the work-in-progress to point out a flaw in my speed strategies! Oh hey, I think I figured out the reason for Cosmic Spacehead's change in graphics at the Nearly Freezing Pool, and it's probably for the same reason as the camera sign. Look what happened to the apostrophe!
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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Dwedit wrote:
By the way, both versions of the game include NTSC/PAL detection, so it will run correctly in either mode.
Ah, I think I just realized what you're talking about: Both versions do have a speed correction for the music in PAL mode, though not a pitch correction. The game detects what kind of system during the company logo, and so if I set FCEUX to NTSC after the game detects PAL, the music will be extremely fast; likewise, setting it to PAL after starting NTSC makes the music very slow (and a little lower-pitched, as usual). But only Cosmic Spacehead has the one other speed correction that I know of, for Cosmic himself, in all sidescroller action areas that aren't "specialty" stages or the demo. Yeah, even if you start Cosmic Spacehead in PAL mode, the demo will always show Cosmic moving NTSC-style, even though when you play that same Old-Lino-Town-to-Cape-Carnival route for real right afterward, you get the super speedy Cosmic who runs at 1.5 pixels per frame even if you switch the emulator back to NTSC at that point. It's a little confusing, and that's why I thought they might have left in an older version of the game engine just so the demo would still work after making more changes. I know it's not still the original Linus Spacehead mechanics, as you can see him fall straight down in the middle of a jump that started with forward momentum. The faster cursor and map running are always there in Cosmic Spacehead no matter what kind of NES, as I suppose a little extra speed in those respects is always welcome even if you don't need to balance out a slower system, and it's not as if they change the difficulty of any action. So the detection for arcade area speed was more important, since if Cosmic gets the 50% speed increase in NTSC, he's getting a speed overcompensation he doesn't even need and would therefore move at LUDICROUS SPEED! Recently I thought of another reason the name change to Cosmic was stupid: Linus likes to use the word "cosmic" as an exclamation, and since Cosmic Spacehead doesn't change any of that dialogue, Cosmic often shouts his own name for no particular reason. I also thought I had found the reason for the name change when I came across a song by Wavves called Linus Spacehead. "Aha!" I thought, "There must have been a trademark dispute over the song title, and CodeMasters had to change the name so it wouldn't match the song's!" But no, it turns out that song wasn't even from the nineties, it's a brand-new song from just this past month. So they named the song after the game, not the other way around. Sheesh. Well, I did complete two more action stages in this test TAS! http://www.box.net/shared/x7n0g1x8qg I think I may rescind my "minimal jumps" rule completely in favor of "most dangerous jumps", since who cares about "Oh, you FELL off that platform instead of jumping, you did so few jumps that way, amazing!"?
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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http://www.box.net/shared/x7n0g1x8qg Today I discovered that the hotspot for the Formica City Telekey is ridiculously long, extending as far to the right of the Teleport Machine as it is to the left of it. This wasn't even fixed for Cosmic Spacehead on NES. So this time Linus gets to use his psychic powers to teleport the Teleport Key into his hands. Stumbling in the dark coming soon...
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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DO MEGADRIVE YO, I LOVED THE MEGADRIVE ONE! Sorry, I just had to. XD
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Okay I may take another look at it!
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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I like the NES version more. \o/
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Great, then I'll keep working on it! I updated http://www.box.net/shared/x7n0g1x8qg all the way to collecting the match and using the teleporters. Now I need to figure out the fastest way to open passage through Formica City. It doesn't seem possible at all to get through the wall with only one person, but with two in play a lot of glitches start appearing from just a little fooling around. For example: -Right before one Spacehead smacks into the wall, hit Select and he'll suddenly appear at the same position as the other one as the "Dead end" message appears. If you get both Spaceheads across a closed door this way and enter the arcade area, the door will be permanently open when you come back, even though you didn't push the other button. This trick has a lot of potential in my view. -One character can fade away for various reasons on a timer, such as when one is trapped on the other side of the wall, or when one is just idly holding the button. One cool thing I found with this is to have Linus 1 Using the Button on the right side for a while, then send Linus 2 over to Use the same Button when Linus 1 has been fading for a few seconds already. If he finishes fading while the other Linus is still running, suddenly the wall will be lifting and the lone Linus will be running through it to Use the Button that permanently opens the wall. Probably too big a waste of time to wait for the fading away, but still interesting. -The Linus who pushes the right button can also be the Linus who pushes the left button, with the other Linus's only job being to scroll the screen. So you go from Use Button directly to Use Button again, but the cool part is that when Linus hits the closed gate, it suddenly pops up to the top, and he continues through to the button. So there's that deal again with a Use taking some effect before Linus reaches the apparatus. Now, if you have one Cosmic Clone right next to the open door, make the other step away from the first button, switch back right away, and try to go left, and you'll find that he's nevertheless blocked by all the space under the door. So the graphic effect of the rising and falling barrier seems not to matter too much. The real key is the left button's hotspot for pushing it, which the game seems to deactivate whenever it doesn't think you should be able to reach it. -Sometimes I can get the effect of the second button being pushed even though all I did was send the clone on the right through the door. I think it happens by mashing Select and A together, and this would save the trouble of selecting Use, but I can't get it to work very often. So this is an example of the many glitches I may have seen but haven't figured out how to reproduce reliably, or that wouldn't save a significant amount of time even if I did figure them out. Really any glitch that makes the right button act like the left button would be very helpful, whatever it takes to confuse the game that much. So now I want to find all the Formica City glitches possible and learn how they all work so I can find the fastest way to get through it! I invite everyone to mess around with that area at the end of my movie and report what they find! Remember that the goal is to leave Formica City to the right once the barrier has been permanently lifted, because I can't finish the areas to the left until I collect the Surfboard; this part is just to clear the way for later when I no longer have the teleport effect. This means we'll want to test sending both clones all the way to right versus collecting them on the left and immediately exiting the action stage to send a single Linus to the right so he's not waiting for a clone to cross the entire screen.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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More success today! I was just seeing what would happen if I immediately hit Select after sending the first clone to Use the Button, and it turns out that the second clone runs a certain distance, then the second Button is considered pushed! If I switch back to the first clone, he'll run all the way through to push the second Button, but that's unnecessary. Surprisingly, this only works if I start with the first clone. So this is probably the fastest way, as I never even reach the first button or see the door, but now people will wonder what I even needed clones for. All these clone glitches work in Cosmic Spacehead as far as I can tell, and so does a minor glitch with the Bath Tub where I use the Rubber Plug on it, clear the "That's sealed it!" text, and lead Linus away from the Bath Tub before he climbs into it. What happens is the Rubber Plug isn't considered to be in your inventory anymore, but it is considered to be in the top line of the inventory. Confusing, huh? What that means is when you hover over Dodgey City TeleKey, it suddenly turns into A Rubber Plug, and you can use it again. But if you use the scroll buttons or receive a new item, it will be gone forever. The fact that I could get this "Clear text early and move pointer before Linus finishes running to perform action" trick to work there, but not in Formica City, makes me a little suspicious still. All right, I collected candies on the way to Dodgey City in a way that messed up the music! I almost did that on the way to The River Bank the first time, but I found I had to avoid the candy to reach the next tree branch in time. Oh, and today I remembered to fix a one-frame mistake in the second visit to the Post Office, so don't use old savestates from after that.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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Uh... I guess I should have started experimenting with sending Linus all the way over to his destination before rooting for items sooner, because that helped me save some more time on the first visit to the post office, about 30 frames in total. So you may as well watch http://www.box.net/shared/x7n0g1x8qg from the beginning again. I added the surfing segment and the screen after that, where I used a trick where clearing a message before using Pick Up let me move the cursor again right away instead of waiting for Linus to move. So Linus is doing the telekinetic pick-up again! It might be a while before I make much progress again, because now I need to do some timing tests regarding Cape Carnival to figure out when to win the money for the camera, when to win the bus ticket, and when to stop and scroll the inventory, which is what those tasks will affect. The Bus Ticket shows up near the bottom, the Gold Lino Dollars are near the top, the missile parts all show up in an area in the middle, and the teleport keys are above those but below the money. So inserting either of those Cape Carnival stops anywhere has to cost some time in having to scroll the inventory one more time. One advantage to racing for the bus ticket at the very next visit to Cape Carnival is that Linus enters the Secret Tunnel from the middle, but he exits it a little to the right, so it saves a bit of running to go to the attendant before the hole. The next two trips through Cape Carnival are from the tunnel back to Old Lino Town to use its teleporter, so the hole positions become a disadvantage then. Also, using the Luk-E-Day machine before seeing the Attendant would make it so the Luk-E-Day's repositioning of the inventory wouldn't matter; I don't have to select any items to race, and it'll just get set to the Bus Ticket afterward anyway. So I feel there's a good chance that doing both before blasting the wall in Linograd will turn out to be the best way. I'll also need to learn how to TAS-run the bumper car race, which has me a little worried as I've never done this for racing games before, unless Bomberman sliding on ice counts? It looks as if the trickiest part is just squeezing past everybody at the starting line, but I don't know. I wonder how random the cars' A.I. actually is... I haven't really had to deal with randomness at all yet; the Bangers' explosions go in random directions, but jumping over them lets Linus get away before he ever has to worry about it. Using the tile viewer in the PPU Viewer shed some light on those changed graphics I mentioned before. I'm starting to wonder if the game was originally intended to only use the letters A through Z, the punctuation marks ! ? . , and the numerals 1 through 0, with no commas, apostrophes, or support for languages other than English. The Nearly Freezing Pool is the giveaway for this, I think, as it has only those characters, so I like to imagine the developers simply forgot to update that area later (or they were seriously set on making that whole plant fit in), and that's the reason for some apostrophe 'mistakes' like "Its too wet for that." But in addition, the big versions of those characters are all neatly in a row together, with the smaller versions all in a row a few lines down. The other characters are spread somewhat haphazardly between those two lines, each character having its small tile immediately after its big tile. The Camera Shop is interesting, because while it does have ,, ', Ç, Ä, Ö, and Ü, it's missing the ¡, ¿, É, and - that other areas have. Did it get an in-between character set, perhaps from before Spanish was added? I tend to think Cosmic Spacehead still could have squeezed in enough tiles for the sign, but oh well. It's funny how when those tiles between the text characters aren't needed, they're always the floor and upper wall tiles from the Post Office.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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Great, I got up the courage to record the bumper car race, on the "Get money and ticket at first opportunity" route. http://www.box.net/shared/x7n0g1x8qg This part I'm a little nervous to settle on, as I don't have any sort of standard for what the perfect time might be, whereas with the platformers I can just say "Keep the screen scrolling!" But with the racecars, I can't even be sure if I'm getting a faster time than on a previous try, except in certain spots on the left and right sides of the track where I can straighten out and line the car up with some part of the wall. So I welcome anyone familiar with racing games, especially top-down ones, to take a look at this mini-game, see if you can come up with any more tips, or try to beat my time. At least it should be easy enough to text-edit in a better race time later, as I haven't gotten desynchs editing anything else in this game. One thing that's assuring is that unless there are major timesavers to be found in the first two laps that would make it faster to skip the shortcut the third time, then it doesn't really matter if they could have been a little bit better, since I'll still end up waiting for the shortcut to open on the third lap. Another thing that makes it simpler to TAS is that there seems to be no way to influence the other cars. While they can bump you around, they defy Newton's third law of motion and fail to be bumped back. They are also unaffected by holes, and you can even see the green and blue cars drive right through each other at around 30 seconds left and 20 seconds left. I suspect the reason they can't be bumped by anything but walls is that they don't really have AI, just prerecorded paths, as I always see them drive in the same places every time I play, at least in the same version of the game. So I wasn't able to squeeze between green and blue at the start, but I did squeeze between blue and a hole after that, and I had to skate by each of the others once. I think green might have boosted me a little in the right direction once, actually. I find it funny that although green got the head start, it screws around so much that it's the only car that doesn't make a third lap within the 98 seconds. Some stuff I noticed about the bumper car's abilities with frame advance is that it can't move more than one pixel per frame in any direction, but it can move one pixel in both of two directions per frame, so that's why diagonal driving looks a bit faster than horizontal or vertical. Obviously the direction you face only influences where the acceleration is applied when you hit A, but all three diagonals that combine the same two directions will max out at one pixel per frame in both directions. So down-down-right and down-right-right will eventually reach and maintain the same direction as down-right, only down-down-right will be slower at maxing out right, and down-right-right will be slower at maxing out down. One more cool thing I noticed is that the game only accepts input for turning once every 4 frames; from the time I started, I just had to remember "One more than a multiple of four is fair game." It's probably an easy way to make it so that if you hold the direction, it'll take your car a full second to turn all the way around. (It's similar to how I noticed that in the platforming stages, the D-pad only accelerates Linus every 2 frames, so every other frame whether you're still holding the button doesn't really matter.) While hitting corners and walls head-on is generally a bad thing, in certain places I found that grazing a corner a certain way could save some frames by stopping Linus's car from drifting to the side so much, while not interrupting his forward momentum too much for it to help. One time when I was just testing I somehow got thrown inside of a wall, the small rock wall next to the long barrier on the left, but of course I bounced out by the time I managed to save at all, so I don't know what caused it. Probably there's some kind of "seam" to be found in the corners, but I doubt you can get in just by accelerating straight into one. On the other hand, I've also gotten stuck on the shortcut wall where the game won't let me pass through to the left for a while even though it's clearly in the down position. Then there's the usual finding of checkpoints you can touch in a certain order to trigger a lap without actually driving between all those checkpoints, but it really doesn't look as if it would save time to drive around walls extra times to do that.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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All right, I finished No Man's Causeway last night, as it was as annoying to record as it usually is to play. I had to wait for all but the first and last lily-tongue things, as well as the first and last bomber-tube-fly-bird things, but I pretended I was waiting for the last lily-tongue thing because I was going to have to wait before jumping over the last bomber-tube-fly-bird thing anyway, and to best manipulate the semi-random pattern of explosion orbs it throws, I needed to change how I moved while it was still far off screen, and standing in one spot until I needed to jump made it easier to change the timing precisely. That isn't too confusing, is it? I also tried jumping to some of the invisible footholds on the right sides of the tall platforms from the left, but Linus would never quite reach them. I decided to use those waiting spots to make Linus duck a lot more than usual to show how scared he must be. So when I finish Linoville, I think I'll stop and retry all the parts that I had any doubts about, then see if I can upload the first 15 minutes to YouTube in case having a video there attracts more interest in the game.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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I am aroused attracted to games with videos :3
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
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Cross-posting this from the WIP topic! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l-rPipDDy0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbZ2Yx43olg I updated the movie file one more time at the very beginning. I recently realized that the company logo can be cleared faster after a reset, even if that reset came before the company logo! And would you believe that I thought of this the day before I looked at the Dizzy the Adventurer submission text and saw that Alden came up with the same idea years ago? Unfortunately I wasn't clever enough to improve anything else yet, so I figured it was safe to throw it onto YouTube now.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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That turned out to be a quick tour of Detroitica. Two minutes later, Linus is already ready to leave! http://www.box.net/shared/x7n0g1x8qg updated What did you think of how I dodged the robots? I only noticed afterward that Linus's ground speed appears to be affected by whether Vork is moving forward or backward.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
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More analysis of an obscure game than is necessary + TV Tropes references? Can we hang out?
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Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Sure! Go ahead and comment on any part of the run that looked interesting! http://www.box.net/shared/x7n0g1x8qg I just updated again with the asteroid section. It turned out to be more annoying than I expected. There are ways to change what new asteroids are generated: Pausing with the Start button at different times works, although I didn't end up doing that this time, and hitting an asteroid will change the upcoming asteroids too. But hitting enough asteroids is the whole goal, so I make the outcome more volatile by trying to accomplish it more quickly! Often what happens is it appears that I've just hit the last asteroid I need, but it's not over yet because another asteroid spawned moments before due to the next-to-last asteroid I hit. The slow acceleration makes it pretty pointless to try to figure things out frame-by-frame, so what I ended up doing was recording a lot at full speed and keeping whatever made "That was a close one!" pop up the soonest. I noticed the asteroids can bounce you to the left, but not up or down, so it worked best to scoop up four or five asteroids in a column. When I decided I had come up with a good enough sequence, I redid it with frame advance to be more precise and look less random, only to find I was getting worse times with the same method. It turns out that the amount of time Linus spends automatically "rubberbanding" around to reach the center point before his speech is greatly affected by slight changes in velocity I made in the last moments I had control. So it was more trial-and-error to figure out the button sequence that improved on the rubberbanding the most rather than extending it. When it was all over, I found the memory address that counts the asteroids hit, 05EC, to see what total I was really hitting during the recording. It does count up to 10 before it stops spawning asteroids, but I learned that some asteroids count double for no apparent reason, and I hit two such asteroids during the movie, so that's why I only needed to hit eight altogether that time. Is there a way to force more double-asteroids to appear? You can try to figure it out, but I've had enough of this for now! Now I've updated the movie file one more time, up to collecting the anti-gravity slide. One annoying thing that becomes apparent with the low gravity is that Linus's jump height fluctuates with the moment you start a jump, so you see a substantial change in the height he reaches just by waiting 1 or 2 frames. And one stupid fuzzball near the end ruined what could have been another non-stop stage run. The first spring in the next action stage is holding me up just a bit because the springs' movements are random decisions, such as how far to jump and how long to stay compressed. In the "headwind" zone, jumping is significantly slower than running, but I may need to put in an unnecessary jump just to get that spring to move at the right time, and it won't work by the time an unnecessary jump could have collected a candy! :( More updates: I recorded No. 5, but I didn't upload yet because I probably need to go back and redo a few things as I learn some new techniques. It was nice to return to "Ordinary" physics, where I could jump as much as I want. Without the headwind, Linus can now jump over a still spring! The springs don't seem to be as influenced by changes in jump timing there as in No. 2, though. For the last spring I had to try hitting Start to pause on a certain frame to keep it out of the way. Then I realized I could have used Start earlier, including at the beginning of No. 2, so for all that work I put into manipulating No. 2's springs I may have to do it all over again. And I went back and played around with the asteroids with savestates while watching the counter. Whether I get 1 or 2 from an asteroid doesn't seem to depend on the asteroid itself, but the way in which I hit it. I think it helps to have a high vertical speed, as I mainly got 2 at a time when I was slamming down into asteroids from above. I suppose there's some sort of twin hitbox issue somewhere. But, ugh, this luck manipulation is getting to be more than I was prepared for. I might want to take another break from this.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
I haven't given up yet! Well, I did give up on using the pause button to save time. Even though I started to save a few frames when I used pause instead of jumping in the windy area, by the time I finished I had somehow fallen 20 frames behind. But I did find a useful trick for the SCUMM areas: If I guide Linus off a ledge without leading him any further, then use Pick Up on the anti-gravity slide or trampoline he used to get up there, Linus will grab the item in mid-air, allowing the cursor to move again sooner. I improved No.2 and No.5 with this! http://www.box.net/shared/x7n0g1x8qg I also went ahead and did the platformer for No.6 already. And I discovered some more evidence of how rushed the Spanish translation was. Yeah, somehow the translation for "You've come to the right place sonny! Shady Lionel at your service!" got replaced by "Se pa how can you help me?", heh. Another thing, if you watch Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade's demo in Spanish, it desyncs at the very end when the cursor ends up between the words for Give and Use and fails to select either, and so Linus doesn't get to spend his money. I also found more evidence that the PC version of Cosmic Crusade may have been the very first conversion of the game (or that it was simply rushed as well). The green Headcase that was removed from all other versions of Cosmic Spacehead is still there!
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
All right, that should do it! http://www.box.net/shared/x7n0g1x8qg now completes the game. I pulled off a glitch in No.3 when I was trying to bounce to the left instead of the right. It turns out it is possible to get to the left from the trampoline if I keep leading Linus to the left, but if I don't lead him very far, then he can fall back down and think he's a whole screen over to the left. If he falls in the right spot, then I can still pick up the trampoline during that fall. So that saved about forty frames over bouncing to the left for the bridge and coming back for the trampoline. So tomorrow I'll go over those last few levels to make sure I can't think of any ways to improve them, then I'll make some more videos and write some notes. This is your last chance to tell me if I did anything wrong!
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Did I mention this one yet? Another subtle fix in Cosmic Spacehead I just noticed is that you can hold the A button while moving the cursor around, and it will continue to function in controlling Cosmic and selecting objects even though you haven't let go of the button. So it's more like you're "dragging" Cosmic around rather than picking point after point. It would have made this TAS much easier, I'll bet! Also, in some ports of the game, if you drag Cosmic slowly or in small increments, he won't get into his running animation and will appear to just slide along in his standing pose. Fun. Now, in playing through the game in other languages just for the heck of it, I noticed something cool. Of course translations will have to edit or remove jokes when they're based on language, but did you know that if you play Cosmic Spacehead on Genesis or Amiga in a language other than English, the graphic for the package of icing sugar is replaced by a large cube of ice? It had always been called as such, with a description like "It's frozen solid," but I like how they went to the effort of putting in an alternate graphic. The Genesis version is pretty cool actually, with the most advanced graphics and the most sound effects and not as many omissions as the Amiga version. The Amiga version is interesting too though, being largely similar to the Genesis one but sharing some traits with the IBM-PC version like tweaking the difficulty with only 3 password checkpoints in the entire game and requiring 15 candies to gain an extra life rather than 10. I think Cosmic also runs faster on Amiga, the way he does in the PAL NES version, except he doesn't jump higher like in most other versions. The Genesis version seems to have neither the higher jump nor the faster run, although it's still pretty easy with being able to change direction mid-air. Oh, so, a new TAS? I don't think I'll be making one, but if someone feels braver about messing with luck manipulation and car acceleration in the last half of the game, I would like to see that improvement! Right now I'm just writing more notes in case anyone ever needs an article about Cosmic Spacehead and its development... Some more updates: I played the NES version some more this weekend, and I found a few more glitches. I discovered that Linus can use the blowpipe before he's picked it up, and even if he can't reach it! Just stand underneath and hit Use on it, and Linus will pull out a second blowpipe and blow. Of course the game isn't fooled enough to actually put the blowpipe into your inventory after this, so it's probably useless. I think there just isn't any checking done whether those platforming tools are in Linus's reach when Use is used, but they don't go anywhere if they didn't come out of the inventory. Interestingly, all the platforming tools can't be Used on other objects in the hub; the Use command immediately gives a failure message instead. Also I found more weird entrances. In the camera shop, if you move Linus to the edge of the room and choose Use Door, then he will hit the edge of the doorway and fade out the area immediately instead of running all the way to wherever you clicked. I don't think that's useful at all because Linus is already in front of the door. But I found something better at Cape Carnival: Run all the way to the T-shaped post that triggers the "Hey, bud..." message, then choose Use Secret Tunnel. Linus will immediately enter the tunnel after a single step! I don't know yet if this saves time, since Linus has to run almost as far from the attendant after the race as he would to the tunnel, but it's definitely worth checking. There's more: You can exit the post office immediately from the left edge of the screen! You could also do this with the barriers at the border, but you don't really have any reason to. Oh, and none of these places work in Cosmic Spacehead. So this was the glitch that Cosmic Spacehead fixed that was causing the different behavior at the Formica City wall. Then when I got to the space station, I started playing around with leaning against walls before picking up items, and Linus would pick up the item before reaching it, and once I got Linus to pull out a blowpipe while running over the blowpipe, but nothing too special. But then, in sector No. 3, I realized something simple: After crossing my bridge, I could just pick it up right away, because I could reach it from the other side, and I didn't need to cross the bridge again in that room. Sheesh, why didn't anybody remind me that I didn't have to go back for that bridge? Linus Spacehead fans are slacking! I don't care how cool you thought that glitch was, there was NO REASON for me to be such a dummy about that! Maybe there'll be a new TAS after all...
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Hey everyone, I meant to post another update a few months ago, but I kept putting it off. I really should have done it sooner because I edited important information about improving the last run into the last post, and I bet not everybody noticed the edit. :) The main thing is that I now understand the basis of some glitches I had been using and some that I missed. Basically, whenever Linus stands beside a solid wall, the game gets confused and thinks he's standing in front of every object in the area, allowing him to pick up or use objects before running to them--and if you stop his movement early, he can get those objects without ever having stood next to them. Using an exit takes place immediately with this glitch too. It even happens by accident to most players in a couple of sectors of the space station, where Linus falls off a block he can't climb back up on the way to the exit, and that counts as a wall which triggers the glitch, with the effect that Linus appears to be running against the side of the door rather than proceeding to the middle of the doorway. Height checks are still in effect, though, and in fact can work against you in other outer sectors if you select the exit door while Linus is standing against a wall and on a floor that's at a different height than the door: The height check happens at Linus's current location rather than his final destination, and the game tells you he "can't reach" the door even as he successfully arrives in front of it. So that coast where I grabbed the fuse-wire from a distance was one such place where it worked because the shoreline acts as an impassable obstacle to Linus on foot, and I don't think it had anything to do with clearing the message about the green water as I had first suspected. One place I didn't find before making the TAS was the barrier to the car race at Cape Carnival. Bumping into that allows Linus to instantly enter the tunnel to Linograd, which might save a little time after completing the race, I didn't test yet. The very farthest left pixel Linus can stand on in the post office also counts as a wall. That would be a very quick way out the door after using the mail slot. Or maybe it could be used to start the vending machine on the way to the door? Someone will have to check that and plan the routes through the post office all over again. Then there are some places where you can pull off the glitch, but it's useless, like in the camera shop and the top of the space station where you start out on top of the exit anyway. I also found a way to get Linus frozen on the surfboard forever. :) As it turns out, this was the one actual glitch that Cosmic Spacehead fixed. If you recall, using the glitch to push Formica City's first button remotely failed to allow Linus to sneak under the door every time I tried, but Cosmic Spacehead doesn't allow that to happen at all, even though several other glitches involving the Linus clone still work. So anyway, remember places like that and how the glitch works if you're planning to make a new TAS. Also, remember to pick up the bridge from the right side immediately after crossing it in the money box's room, rather than going to all the trouble of finding a trick to bounce back up there later like I did, just because I was in the habit of leaving platform items lying around until I was done with a room. Then there are some murkier possibilities for improving the time, such as the random timing of enemies like the spark-dropping birds, the car zappers, and the springs, the more annoying two-dimensional acceleration in the car race, and the car vs. asteroid section that combines both those problems. It's mainly a matter of trial and error unless you can come up with a more technical approach somehow. In addition, I noticed a few more strange things when I replayed the game with my sister last summer. I let her try the bumper car race once, and purely by accident she turned around and steered the car straight through a big chunk of the wall right behind the finish line. I recall I also did something like that once, skating across the inside corner of the rocky wall on the left. I just wish I knew what the trick was; I guess we'll have to keep messing around with those walls to see if they have seams to their boundaries or something, and have movie recording on while testing it to catch it if it ever happens again. Some other things I saw were useless but interesting. In the dark tunnel, I can occasionally get the glow light out of synch by standing a certain way so that the lighted area is a square behind Linus and the circle masking. And there's something up with the password system: It seems that if I start the game from a password, certain Cosmic Candies are missing throughout the game compared to if I start it with New Game, even if that password came from the very beginning. I considered making a list of which candies they are and finding how many, but I think it's only worth mentioning that it's probably just a little reward for playing the whole game in one sitting without running out of lives. :) I'm not ready to commit to another TAS again at least to the end of this year, so here's a good challenge for someone who wants to improve a TAS but doesn't want too hard of a task. Just learn the quirks of moving around the game, find and fix those flaws I mentioned, and make up your own style of waving the arrow pointer around when you're forced to wait. Good luck to all! ...Whoops, I remembered one more thing to report, in case anyone still cares about the 16-bit versions. I forgot who it was, but someone on IRC pointed out that when traveling from Old Lino Town to The Border/Passport Control on Sega Genesis, it's possible to jump the first gap without climbing onto the floating rocks overhead. See, where the original NES version had invisible footholds on the right sides of certain structures, the Genesis version added a few on their left sides. Always gotta try jumping everywhere, even if it looks pointless, yup.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude