I don't think you can change games without a hard reset (even soft reset just returns to title of the game you're playing, not the game select menu) so it'd need to be 4 movies.
I happend to have made a super-sloppy run of it, which was 20 minutes long. The game has some jump-through-walls glitches, but not very interesting.
It's a little known fact but boomerangs don't actually return when you chuck them. They were invented by the Aborigines to train kangaroo's to jump on their back legs. The concept of using the boomerang as an aeronautic yo-yo is a confidence trick invented by Bob Smith. "I bet that I can lob this bent stick and it will return to my hand," goads Bob to his victim, in the queue to the dunny outside the pub. I should mention that the victim is usually in such a far state of inebriation, that he doesn't see the elastic string attached to the stick. He just marvels at the sight cries "blimin' Emma" and stumps up his forfeit. Poor Boomerang Kid, so taken in by the ruse, he spent the entire day chucking New South Wales' entire boomerang collection every where trying to copy Bob. Now the Aborigines need them all back!
Boomerang Kid was lost by his parents on a camping trip to the outback. Luckily an Aboriginees tribe found him and saved him from being a Dingo's dinner. The Aboriginees raised him as one of their own and taught him the ways of survival in the outback. Snapping Alligators, hungry Dingos and cute Koalas, Boomerang Kid learned about all the animals in the outback and studied their movements. He also learned to find his way around the treacherous terrain that was now his home. Now that Boomerang Kid is older he wants to repay the Aboriginees, so when their boomerang store is raided he sets out to find them, vowing not to return until he has every single one!
KISS MY BUTT, RUBIES
The only problem is the ladder won't appear if I don't have all the treasures. There's a sort of Metroid gateway-to-Tourian check going on here. I found that each of the first 6 segments of the ladder is activated by collecting all 8 of a certain kind of treasure. Then I believe the final segment, the one that takes you on top, only appears if the other 6 did. So you could collect 42 treasures, leaving behind only 1 of each kind, and still see no ladder at all. Or you could collect just the 8 goblets and see a couple of rungs floating in mid-air.
Seeing how it's usually harder to avoid the treasure than to collect it, I like to think that it's mainly a way to railroad the player, you know, to make you feel good and secure for progressing along the intended path, while making any huge sequence break worthless. ...Unless that sequence break includes a trick jump from the 8 rubies piece of the ladder! It is cool how you can run all the way from the end of the game back to the beginning of the game if you missed something, though.
So I did some research by watching every Super Robin Hood video on YouTube, and I learned that it's a popular game for a Famiclone called the Pegasus. Also, there's already a partial TAS, but unfortunately TheSwordUser must not have known of any of the "invisible keys", because they would have saved a lot of time. "Invisible keys" are certain spots you can touch to open a secret passage, extend a ladder, or block an enemy--so they're like the regular keys, only you can't see them and there's no indication that you've grabbed them but your own recognition that something in the level's changed. They usually involve touching a corner of the ceiling, sneaking behind where a guard stood, or hanging from the bottom of a chain over lava. I think only one invisible key is required to beat the game. But I bet most of them will make great shortcuts for any speedrun. (And how did TheSwordUser get sent to the wrong room? That could be helpful too!)
I was first introduced to the invisible keys in this walkthrough, which is a nice guide for beginners who are starting to get stumped. (Took me a while to notice that not only do the guards differ in starting HP and firing pattern, but also whether they fire from the waist or from the shoulder, affecting whether you can duck or jump their arrows shot. They have differing sprites for this, sheesh!) Then I found a few more invisible keys on my own by chance, and I started to feel proud of myself, ready to take pictures for you all... until I noticed that more than one player on YouTube has found even more! They even found a way to make the impossible jump!
There are ways to avoid collecting a few keys that will make it so some of the shortcuts aren't necessary, though. The thing that makes it difficult for route planning is just remembering which key does what, since most times you don't see what a key does while grabbing it. Maybe I should deface another map with labels for all the visible and invisible keys and what they correspond to. But first we have to make sure we've found every invisible key, so I suppose that calls for a "touch every tile" crusade!
Life heart/damage management will be another tricky part of planning the game. One thing to bear in mind about the guards with the crossbows is that if you crash into one directly while you're not experiencing prior damage invulnerability, you'll kill him instantly, but you'll lose 3 hearts in the process, which is fatal unless you happen to have the maximum of 4 hearts. (It's 5 hearts that makes you trade in 3 for an extra life, not 6 like the manual says.) So it's probably not economical to do that unless it's something where you have to pass through the guard again with no room to shoot. If you were willing to die doing that, you would waste the fewest hearts by doing it with just 1 heart remaining. But I think in most situations it'll be better to just get hit by an arrow or something first before running through, or jump over, or try a little rapid-fire action... All those other enemies you can't destroy are the ones we should be giving thought to taking damage from first.
If you do plan on dying, I have found that continue points are based on the last treasure you grabbed, the last heart you grabbed, or the ladder you last climbed to enter the current area--whichever came last. Not keys though.
In case anyone cares how to get a high score, here's a breakdown of the scoring system:
10 points for destroying a bat (not necessarily by Robin!)
20 points for delivering a non-fatal hit to a guard (so ones with higher HP are worth more)
50 points for destroying a guard
80 points for collecting an extra heart
150 points for collecting a visible key
200 points for collecting stolen treasure of any kind
10000 points for reaching Maid Marion, thereby ending the game
Since bats respawn infinitely, you can farm them for unlimited points... 10 at a time. Or you can take advantage of the fact that guards regain all their life when you leave the floor they're on, and farm one with multiple hit points near an exit ladder for 20 points per hit as long as you're careful not to shoot when he's red.
One more dumb mystery: Does anyone know why the lives counter on the totals screen maxes out at 6, even though you can actually have up to 11? I can understand if they can't have that many icons on the head-up display, and I can understand if they don't want to bother programming double digits (Linus Spacehead is the same way), but I know the digits up through 9 exist, so why doesn't it use them?!
Whoever finishes a run should remember to do a bunch of extra jumps during the ending to be funny. Robin can keep jumping anytime he's not kneeling until the message screen pops up, and if he's in the middle of a jump when that happens, he'll be stuck up there, blocking the second E in "The End", leaving Marion to stare at his feet! You can also jump from the top of the ladder in order to perform a higher jump once during the ending or even to shoot Marion, but that would delay the ending: It starts when Robin stands on the top platform, resetting his position to above the ladder.
Oh and hey, if anyone does finish a TAS of Super Robin Hood, it would be a great candidate for one of those "game in a map" things that AndyDick makes.
At least, when it's a thin wall, and there's room to run and jump and fall through, and it's on your left. For some reason it never works for me on walls to the right; I imagine they did the collision detection on left edges better, since most of the locked doors have to block you from the right. And don't jump through the wall shown in the picture before grabbing the treasure, because you won't be able to get back to it afterwards!
Oh, but I found an even bigger secret while labeling the map that's starting to drive me crazy. See, I was trying to find out the purpose of that one key that's directly in your path so you can't avoid collecting it. It seems silly to me if it activates something up ahead, since there would be no way not to activate it and you would never see the thing unactivated and never know what the key did. So I backtracked all the way back to the beginning, looking for any new open doors, since the key made the door opening noise. And at the very beginning, I found this!
It's a flippin' WARP ZONE! You walk through the passage there, but you suddenly end up on the ladder here!
What's more, you are automatically given all the treasures up to that point, so you can continue on and still finish the game!
You don't gain any score, though, and in fact, all the previous treasures and barriers are still in place. They really should have put a wall or something to keep you from backtracking from the warp destination, because if you fall down, you can't get back up, the door you haven't opened prevents you from going further back, and if you collect the heart or the diamond, you set your respawn point in that same trap, and the diamond gives you a glitched negative total of diamonds. However, there IS a way back up, just barely by using the glitch jump to get into the wall and jump through it back on top, and then you can use the platform the key starts to get back some more.
So I kept going from there, passing through more doors from the wrong side by glitch-jumping, and seeing the tiles the negative diamonds gave me. In-game, they first show a blank space, then the letters of PAUSE in reverse, then an arrow, then a piece of Robin's boot. On the totals screen, they go from a blank space to some punctuation to the last couple of letters of the alphabet. But when I got to my first negative crown, I ran into a problem.
I cannot get Robin to pass through this wall. When he gets far enough in that he would normally be able to exit on the left side, he gets stuck with no way out. If I make him duck, he never stops ducking, no matter which way he's facing. So the crazy fun ended there.
Oh, but did I mention? It wasn't actually that mystery key that triggered the secret passage. See, I tried loading some earlier savestates, and it turns out that I had somehow opened that passage much sooner. Savestate 3 was the earliest one where I had already opened the passage, while savestate 2 was the latest one where it wasn't open, so I uploaded both for anyone to play with.
http://www.box.net/shared/uuaq6z8252
http://www.box.net/shared/y1vecvczvk
Savestate 2 must have been when I first climbed the first ladder down, and savestate 3 must have been when I was about to test how far down the chain I had to climb to activate the next regular secret passage. At that point I had collected the previous treasure chests, defeated the guard, and blocked the mace ball with the secret spot from the other chain, but I hadn't yet grabbed the key underneath. This was when I was jumping all over the place to try to find more secret spots, so that must have been how I accidentally activated the warp-zone secret passage, but I tried doing all that stuff from savestate 2, and I haven't been able to open the passage again! So now I'm thinking I must have hit something REALLY secret that's almost impossible to find, maybe just a way for testers to skip half the game. Could it require touching a secret spot I forgot to try agin? Getting wedged in a certain wall? Shooting something with an arrow? Riding a ball somewhere or messing with its entrance area? Waiting some amount of time in some spot? Revisiting certain areas? Collecting certain items in a certain order or timeframe? Taking damage from a certain enemy, or not taking any damage for a certain amount of time? Doing any of those actions a certain number of times in a row? A secret button code? Oh good grief I hope I didn't enter a button code by accident...
That's why I call on all NES experts to help with this! I did some RAM searching, and I think 064A corresponds to the state of the secret passage. In states where it wasn't open, 064A was -1 (FF); in states where it was open, 064A was -65 (BF); and when I loaded a state from very late into the game, 064A was 127 (7F), which probably means "Keep the passage sealed, you won't need it anymore." (On another version of the ROM, I had savestates where 064A was -33 (DF), though that was when I was going for least treasure possible.) When I cheated to set 064A to BF, however, the passage didn't open, and it went back to FF as soon as I turned the cheat off, so it may be an expression of the secret being unlocked rather than what decides whether it is. But if it works right, it may save you the trouble of having to run all the way back to the beginning whenever you want to check to see if you've done it!
The glitch-jump isn't just useful for getting through walls and ceilings; by snagging the corner of a raised floor, you can walk around a little bit inside it!
That's all it takes to skip the first three sets of treasures! I must have tested jumping off that chain very thoroughly the first time I explored there. I was able to run straight over there and open that passage from a fresh new game, too.
So now I can stop worrying about that, and I'm now over halfway through labeling the map, and then it will be easier to plan routes. After that I should find out what the effects of negative treasure counts are on the ladder to Maid Marion, just for fun!
Oh and that "unavoidable mystery key" did turn out to open just one door, which was placed after the key, but I was able to confirm which door thanks to the big shortcut. So that was pretty pointless since you won't run into the door closed unless you know about that shortcut, but it is mapped closed on the vgmaps.com map, so I wonder if the mapper was cheating to skip ahead or just said "Oops, I must have forgotten to record this door closed; I'll just grab tiles from the other closed doors to fix it!"
Also, before I forget, I want to mention another technique: When there's a ladder in the floor, you should jump on it, and you'll fall straight through instead of having to climb down some first. I think Robin will grab on automatically if it's to go down to the next screen, though.
I thought I remembered I once made that top ladder reach down into the room somehow, but maybe I remember wrong and I'm actually remembering wanting to climb that ladder the first time I visited, or I'm remembering using a savestate to get back up when I fell off it later.
I played a little Treasure Island Dizzy today, and I found a warp that I didn't see mentioned on the old topic or the online guides I checked!
Just press B here...
...and you'll be sent over here!
If you take the magic pebble with you, this will allow you to bring items over to either side of the island without ever stepping in the water. Could be useful!
Or here:
hello broken trees
Or heck, remember the beginning of the game?
Would you have guessed it's the FIRST jump where you need a boost?
It also annoys me that it looks like you should be able to squeeze through this gap but you can't.
Couldn't they have just closed it up?
Hey, shopkeep, where's your empty bucket this time?
Unfortunately I didn't find any more secret warps there, or anywhere else in the game even after I mashed B on every single spot. You could argue that I should try dropping every item on every spot, in case there's an alternate use (thinking of how trying to use the grave-digger's spade on Hookjaw's grave pops up a message telling you he safeguarded against that), but I'm not up for B-mashing every piece of ground another ten times, or A-mashing with the pogo or whatever, and I doubt anything will come of it. Now I'm not surprised that the secret warp from over the blasting area to the area past the other grave wasn't found by that guide writer, since there's only one spot you can stand on to trigger it, while the other two warps have a range of eight steps that will work. It's not hard to position yourself though, since it's on the edge, so you can just tap right on the screen to the left.
I did find a spot where Dizzy perpetually snaps between two screens until you move him to one side! Yeah...
The flippers could be a valuable item for sequence breaks. The only thing you actually need the flippers for is escaping with the coin at the very bottom of the ocean. You can get to the dynamite from the left, and into the whole smugglers' cave without digging up the grave, if you float over the killer fish. (As far as I can tell a regular jump won't work.) You can get up onto the right beach without the help of the bubble-fish, which means you can leave that whole crowbar business behind unless you're going for the coins underneath the rock or you want to leave your flippers behind at some point. The flippers are also one way to get the coin on the mast of the sunken ship, the other way being to jump off the island in the sky to the left. Flippers also generally save you from time-consuming underwater jumps and waits for other sea creatures. But I think you still need to pogo to the island in the sky anyway, since I haven't found a way to squeeze past the last torch in the smugglers' cave unprotected. And warps and flippers don't change the fact that there are three things you need to take out of the smugglers' cave through water, the second requiring you to bring in a brass key and the third requiring you to bring in a fireproof suit, and the only way to save a trip by bringing out two items at once is to leave your flippers behind, sadly. Flippers also won't help in the mission to retrieve Hookjaw's treasure because you need to save a slot for the bible. So their value to a no-coins run is especially limited.
I noticed that when you blow up the big rock, only the lower piece of shrapnel can kill Dizzy, not the higher one. You can stand on top of the block and stay safe, or you can even stand just far enough away to jump that lower piece.
I was playing around with the boat that takes you to the end of the game, and I noticed a few funny things. First, while you probably already know you'll get the same boat parts from the merchant in the same order no matter which order you hand him the treasures, it also doesn't matter in what order you drop the boat parts into the water; you'll still assemble the boat correctly. So you could drop an ignition key into the water and see it turn into a boat, drop a gallon of petrol on there to turn it into a motor, drop another outboard motor onto it to weigh the boat down with gas, and drop another boat onto the boat to start it up. (And no, I'm pretty sure you can't rehydrate the boat anywhere else.)
And I noticed that the boat doesn't really travel across screens. It's more like there's a second boat that's generated on the next screen as soon as you start up the first boat. Their positions are independent of each other, but a cautious player would wait until each boat reaches the edge of the screen, maintaining the illusion that a single boat crosses over the edge. But you don't need to wait for either boat to move to make the final jump.
I also played in the "sound effects only" mode for a while. Music mode has almost all of the sound effects anyway, though; sound-effects-only only adds a "fut fut" noise when Dizzy walks or jumps. The walking noise is different inside the big fish. There you're actually forced into sound-effects mode for that one screen if you were already in music mode. If you switch back to music mode inside the fish, it doesn't disable the special walking noise, and the music restarts when you exit the fish. Speaking of music, why does the NSF file for this game contain 6 songs that are never heard in the game? Did the composer get ambitious and start programming music for events that were never added? And why is it so easy to glitch up the music in Super Robin Hood?
Oh yeah, I played a little Super Robin Hood on one of the compilation ROMs for Pegasus I found. Pegasus 4-in-1 is a mix of the Quattro cartridges for NES, containing Soccer Simulator from Quattro Sports, Go Dizzy Go from Quattro Arcade, and Boomerang Kid and Super Robin Hood from Quattro Adventure. These ROMs don't seem to have great emulator compatibility, as I had to try Nestopia to get them to start at all, and even that wouldn't load Go Dizzy Go or Boomerang Kid. Super Robin Hood worked just fine, though, and I even opened the supersecret passage again! Pegasus 5-in-1 is quite amazing, as it contains BigNose Freaks Out, MicroMachines, The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, Ultimate Stuntman, and BigNose the Caveman--which had all been released as stand-alone NES cartridges! But why is the second BigNose game first and the first BigNose game last?
Some kind of testing area? Dumping ground? We have here a jellyfish, a dehydrated boat, a dozen random background tiles, and a group of six little fish that I don't remember seeing anywhere else in the NES game. Those little fish kill you if you touch them. What do you think is up with that?
