Submission #503: Walker_Boh's NES Castlevania II: Simon's Quest in 35:00.98

Nintendo Entertainment System
(Submitted: Castlevania 2 - Simon's Quest)
baseline
(Submitted: Castlevania II - Simon's Quest (U).fcm USA)
FCEU 0.98.12
126059
60
11585
Unknown
Submitted by Walker_Boh on 1/15/2005 2:08 AM
Submission Comments
Castlevania time!
I have had this idea for awhile now and now I had some time to do it.
The biggest problem with this game is the day and night thing. It's a cool idea for a NES game but it's annoying when to time attack the game.
Because of this I had to do certain things.
First: I did get both the holy water and the white crystal before heading towards the second town. This forced me to kill a bunch of monsters to be able to afford em both. It's possible to skip the water but I need it later and also the timing with the second town was pretty good. One thing here you might wonder about is why I not stand where the person with the blue crystal appears at day when the day comes. This is simply because if I am on the same screen he won't be there. So I have to be a screen away from him.
I also bought two whips, the first I buy is after the second mansion and this is necessary because else I would have lost a huge amount of time by killing enemies slower.
The second time I have to wait for day to come is when I'm about to pick up the red crystal. This is good though because then I could collect some necessary hearts to be able to afford laurels and the Morning Star. I entered that town with 202 hearts and the Morning Star costs 200 so that was good.
Ok, so for the main improvement.
This game has a really cool glitch! Falling through floor. I use this as much as possible where I can profit from it. However, this is without question the hardest and most stupid glitch ever to perform! Even after doing this time attack I can't fully describe how it works. I noticed a couple of things though which might help if anyone wants to learn more about it:
  • First, to perform it you need to find a place where there are a ledge exactly 2 block higher then the level under it. Stand on this ledge/whatever, walk out, and the moment you start fall, hit the air with your whip. If done right you will fall through the floor!
  • When you start to fall from that ledge Simon (the hero) can fall in 2 different ways. Either he stands tall and falls orelse he is sort of crouching in the air and then starts the fall.
To be able to fall through the floor you MUST be in this crouching form, else I found it impossible to do.
  • Third, it either works or does not work. This helps actually when testing it. So if you are in crouching form and think you are gonna start falling through the floor but you are not, then you don't have to try another 1000 times.
  • Forth, to affect this you can try to do some small changes. For example is hitting air with the whip a good thing. This might affect whatever keeps you from succeding. And I do this quite often in my run.
In the fifth mansion I don't use the floor glitch while earching for the boss. This is because the screen scrolled down so fast so if I were to do that I would end up at the top of the screen. And that seems kinda useless :D
There are a few other tricks I use which might look strange. For example, when jumping and cracking your whip at the same time you will jump a bit higher than usual. This is good because then I can reach blocks I normally wouldn't be able to reach. Also, if you crack your whip or toss a water while you are near to land you will gain an extra pixel so I can reach blocks/platform I normally wouldn't do. One example of this is right after I get the flame whip.
I think that was it. It's about 3 minutes and 30 seconds or something faster than Bisqwits attempt and I'm satisfied with this. It's HARD to perform that glitch.
Enjoy it!
  • As fast as possible
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Abuses programming errors
/Walker Boh

Bisqwit: Even though I might see some places where this movie could be improved, at least I'm not going to do it because this game simply is so much work to play.
And the floor trick... nobody has yet figured out how it quite works, thus it requires thousands of retries per situation.
Finding the exactly right frame to whip and fall is only part of the trick - you also need to affect some unknown variables in the game. These variables might have something to do with subpixel movement, the game timer, or maybe something else.
I'll now process this movie.
Last Edited by on 1/1/2022 6:13 PM
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