WIP_002 / next >>
The Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer is a GBA game I played when I was younger, so I recently got in the mood to do a quick TAS.
This game is mostly a beat-'em-up style game where you go and fight a bunch of different types of robots. Robot-spawning sections prevent the screen from scrolling further until enough robots are defeated. Robot sections are interspersed between platforming parts, with control panels to unlock and hazards blocking the way.
A few brief notes: you can swap freely between the two characters: Mr. Incredible and Frozone. Frozone generally seems more useful because he can fly and his freeze ability is good at disposing of robots. Mr. Incredible is required to progress past certain obstacles, though. Different robots have different amounts of health and deal different damage; an easy tactic is to freeze every robot, but there's probably faster ways to handle them. The fastest movement is rolling, so it's preferred. Flying and walking visually appear to be similar speeds. Jumping is slow. Frozone can freeze certain preset platforms, but he's locked in place while freezing; often, you can use his flying ability to avoid having to freeze any platforms at all.
This TAS goes through the first five levels of the game on Normal difficulty (the lowest difficulty). As I recall, difficulty mainly affects enemy health.
The first two levels (Metroville, Tutorial) were frame-optimized with TAStudio. They're okay, but there's a few improvements I know about, including not freezing the low-health robots.
The later three levels (Robot Factory 1-3) used rewind-based rerecording to get rough routes for each level. They definitely have numerous improvements that would be possible in TAStudio.
Currently, this run is almost 6 minutes ahead of the current RTA speedrun world record of 1:07:26. It finishes Robot Factory 3 at around 15:47 (TAS time), while the RTA record finishes Robot Factory 3 at 21:36.
I played this run in mGBA, but I'll probably resync to GBAHawk when 2.0.0 releases. There might be slightly more lag in GBAHawk, but nothing seems too laggy so far.