Submission #4810: Alyosha's NES Super Turrican in 07:23.02

Super Turrican is an action platforming game whose distinctive feature is the morph ball mode (similar to Metroid) which lets you travel at high speed and through enemies. The game features many tricks for going fast.

This run features significant improvements over the published run, in which a significant improvement was known even at the time of publication. Since that time, boss skips and a level zip have also been found. The current run also has significantly faster boss fights.

Significant time is saved in all stages. Two common tricks include jumping at running speed while exiting morph ball mode, mentioned by Truncated in the original submission, and 'running' speed while in morph ball mode, which for some reason wasn't known about in the original either.

Main improvements are movement based. No route changes except for a neat jump in 1-2 that mklip2001 suggested to me in the thread. The boss fight is also much faster.

Savings:

1-1: 105

1-2: 217

1-3: 365

Again more optimized, the boss fight is much faster.

Savings:

2-1: 154

2-2: 79

2-3: 181

The boss skip here was originally found by jorf in a real time run. The trick is to spawn an item in the first slot and get it to fly close to the boss' room. This prevents the boss from spawning. It's a relatively rare setup, since enemies don't always spawn in the slots in the same order, and the direction the item flies is also random.

Savings:

3-1: 113

3-2: 293

3-3: 338

There is a zip in 4-3 which involves jumping up the right side of the level. You have to be careful though, if the screen isn't scrolled properly when you enter morph ball mode you simply go up to your death.

Savings:

4-1: 276

4-2: 386

4-3: 143

Another boss skip here involving a flying enemy right below where the boss normally spawns. This one is quite a bit simpler the the level 3 boss. Just morph ball over and then go back, I also do a quick jump to start the screen scrolling up to where it needs to be for the mini-boss on the other side. The last boss is much quicker then in the original.

Savings:

5-1: 122

5-2: 415

5-3: 1199

I noticed this game a while back, it looked fun to TAS and was also fast paced. I'm surprised how much savings there really were. There are lots of opportunities for optimization, I'm sure I missed something along the way, but I don't think I made any major mistakes.

Thanks to mklip2001 for going over my WIPs and offering suggestions for improvement.

Also thanks to Arc for originally improving my first boss fight, making look much closer at hos specials work and how bosses absorb damage. This made subsequent bosses much faster as well.

Noxxa: Claiming.

Noxxa: The older runs of this game were judged based on an apparent assumption that the game identifies whether it runs on a NTSC or PAL system, and fixes its internal timing accordingly. However, while there are some differences, the timing is shown to be significantly different between NTSC and PAL anyway, with NTSC timing being much faster than PAL timing. As this game was only released in Europe regions, and therefore intended to be run on PAL timing, this means the game is running faster than intended.

While there have been precedents of this game being accepted with NTSC timing, and this run is objectively an improvement to these runs, the old runs are also over nine years old, and there is no reason to continue a bad precedent of running a game on these settings now that it is known and verified to be faster than intended. I'm rejecting this submission for that reason.

This submission: #4812: Alyosha's NES Super Turrican in 08:36.39 beats the game using a higher difficulty mode and correctly using PAL mode, so rejecting this submission in favor of that submission.