Intodruction
Note that I'm German and have been learning English merely 4 and a half years.
This is my first submission on this great site. A run about one of my very first games I've ever played, The Smurfs!
About the game
Here's a short intodruction I found on the internet:
Three Smurfs have disappeared from the village! As Hefty Smurf your journey will be long.
Jump across the river climb the mountains and travel through mines as you try to find Gargamel.
Papa Smurf is counting on you to defeat Gargamel and bring the missing smurfs home!»»
The Smurfs is a sidescroller in which you must reach the goal in each level by beating or avoiding enemies and jumping across fosses.
There are 12 levels in total + 3 boss fights.
About the run
- No passwords
- Aims for fastest time
- Plays on hardest difficulty
- Manipulates luck
- Takes damage to save time
- Used emulator: Visual Boy Advance 1.72
In my first attempt I beat the game in 9:16 minutes. This is an improvement of 14 seconds, most of the improvement came from the fact that I didn't know that the first screen was skipable (~220 frames saved). This led to better timings. I also optimized much at level 6, the boss fights and other parts!
Items
This is about those useless items in the game.
They don't lag but bring bonus points. In the run, I didn't really care for points, though.
The best possible highscore wouldn't have been that amazing anyway.
- Raspberry - Refills your health by one unit.
- Leaf - Get ten of them and you'll earn one extra life.
- Smurf doll - Extra life!
- Star - If you get all five stars in a level, you may play a bonus game. Even by getting only one star, there would be a lag of 10 frames. So I always avoided them if possible.
Tricks I used
Don't continue reading if you haven't seen the movie yet or it may be less entertaining afterwards!
I found several glitches in the game but almost all of them were useless and pointless.
- If you get damage, you fall back. By turning around in front of an unavoidable enemy you fall into the right direction.
- But by pressing left + right before getting hit you can even avoid the "falling back" animation. However, this bug wasn't optimized well yet.
- You'll run faster on platforms which go into your direction, like birds and water striders.
- and more...
Notes on certain levels
LEVEL 1
A level with many platforms and great variety of enemies. I used the "falling into other direction" trick here first.
LEVEL 4
I stopped slightly in the end in order to luck-manipulate the location the snake in the next level comes from!
LEVEL 5
In my first attempt I took much damage to save time. But due to better timing I was able to just run through the level without taking much damage.
In my opinion, that unfortunately made this level less entertaining...
LEVEL 6
I optimized all jumps, and used the floor detection to its full capacity!
LEVEL 9
Due to buggy layout of the solid sprites in this level, I could have gone a new route but it was sadly not time-saving!
LEVEL 10
The last polar bear in this level was not avoidable. I wonder if it was intended to be like this...
Closing words
Thanks to all people who posted into The Smurfs Thread in the Gameboy forums.
I hope you enjoy the run!
I uploaded the movie on Youtube
adelikat: Good voter response, and nice game choice. Congrats on having your first submission accepted :)