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Commander Keen: Marooned on Mars is the first episode in the Commander Keen games. In this episode, aliens from the planet Vorticon VI find out about the eight year-old genius and plan his destruction. While Keen is out exploring the mountains of Mars, the Vorticons steal vital parts of his ship and take them to distant Martian cities! The four parts are the Joystick (for manual flight control), the Car Battery (for electrical systems power), the Vacuum Cleaner (reworked as an ion propulsion unit) and the Everclear (alcohol for fuel) — see Bean-with-Bacon Megarocket for details. Keen must explore the planet, fight the Martians and their robots, find the members of this Vorticon outpost and wrest the parts back from their wicked, clawed hands!
This is a tool-assisted speedrun, you know the drill.
- Aims for fastest time
- Abuses programming errors
- Manipulates luck
- Genre: Platform
Movie information
JPC-RR v11.6 was used to make the movie.
This TAS uses version 1.31 of the game. There are no TAS-relevant differences between versions - this one was chosen because of wide availability. You can locate a copy of it on the official site.
Here is the ImageMaker report on the disk image used:
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Tricks
Randomness
The RNG is seeded from the initial RTC time and only invoked when randomness is required. Having critters that behave randomly on-screen is the only way to advance the RNG. These include pink robots and all Vorticons. For details, TODO: make github or something
THIS MEANS THAT MANIPULATION IS VERY LIMITED, VERY TIME-CONSUMING AND DEFINITELY WORTH USING ALL CAPS
Oscillating movement
Every few frames, Keen moves one additional pixel forward unless he's not moving. The timing can be manipulated by entering levels earlier or later.
Exiting levels
Keen's position when entering doors is irrelevant - while he will be out of view faster if landing closer to the edge, the transition will still be equally long.
Level border funkiness
Some level designer somewhere thought that exposing level borders was a good idea.
That wasn't the case, as demonstrated by both Keen 1 and Keen 2. The latter doesn't have any useful application for it, though.
Stage by stage comments
Introduction
Shooting the rock requires ammo. Grabbing the ammo here would be slower.
As always, luck in manipulated.
Battery
Having the Yorps and the Vorticon Guard avoid Keen is less likely than you'd think.
Joystick
Not having ammo here costs some time, but it's still faster than grabbing the ammo on LV01.
Green
Vroom
The Vorticon cannot be manipulated to jump over Keen - by the time his actions become random, it's already too late for it to matter.
Everclear
Input is ended early.
Special thanks to:
- Xarthok: for following progress with devotion, helping with route planning and providing useful feedback.
Suggested screenshots
TBA
Nach: Very nice run, accepting.