A fun little TAS I whipped up. This whole game is an auto-scroller, so the only goal is to be as entertaining as possible until the boss fights. I don't know if I can maintain this level of energy over a 30-minute run, but we'll see. I feel like the first stage is pretty fun to watch, at least!
This movie plays the first level; the fm3 contains a bit of level 2, which I decided not to encode.
A movie of this game was already published back in 2012. The authors decided to go for a pacifist playthrough (feel free to laugh at my title, Undertale fans), which wasn't very popular among the viewers. It got rejected, only to be resurrected and locked in the Vault. A lot of the comments said, "why not use the third quest (hardest difficulty) and kill all the enemies instead?" So, 6 years later, that's what I've decided to do.
Goals
The goal of this run is to kill the maximum amount of enemies. But, since you can sit at the boss of this stage and kill piranhas forever, this number is technically infinite. Therefore, I've implemented it as a secondary goal, i.e., kill as many enemies as possible without losing time.
Note that most bullets have health and can be destroyed like an enemy. For the purposes of this run, these do not count as enemies. Nobody wants to see the Silver Surfer farm bullets for a half hour!
Potential Misunderstandings
Here I've laid out some questions you might have about this movie:
You used a password! Isn't that against the rules?
Not in this case! The password S4FHFB is only used to unlock the hardest difficulty mode.
Why do you waste so much time on the password screen?
The characters can only be incremented/decremented every 16 frames, but the cursor can be moved every other frame. I took advantage of these properties to input the password in the most confusing way possible.
You let some bad guys get away!
Believe me, I know :/ In the first stage, it's just not possible to kill every enemy; I picked the path that would let me kill the most. I tried using my bomb, but the enemies up top are too strong to die to one bomb. By the time I get more, there are no more branching paths to mess me up. I'm sure they will come in handy in later stages, though.
Techniques
Finally, I want to detail some techniques I used.
- Pressing left every other frame causes you to sit still relative to the world. But you have to do it on the correct frames, otherwise you'll end up moving left.
- Most of the time, start only needs to be held, not pressed, for the menus.
- Bullets can only be shot every 5 frames.
- The orb moves before shots are fired, so you can press AB on the same frame and still have the bullets change directions. I use this every time I need to press B for maximum excitement!
- Power-up drops are not RNG. Certain enemies are set to always drop certain power-ups. I suppose this isn't that big a deal if you're already killing everyone anyway.