Submission #5252: Hetfield90, nrg_zam & GlitchMan's SNES Mega Man X3 "100%" in 42:16.24

Goals

• Uses no passwords
• 100% item collection
• Aims for fastest time
• Abuses programming errors in the game
• Manipulates luck
• Takes damage to save time

Overview

New Tricks

• Reverse Wall Jump - By pressing Left+Right the frame before jumping off a left-facing wall, X will turn around and wall jump off the air in the opposite direction. This is useful for getting over smaller walls more quickly, and also facilitates a more optimal wall jump interval pattern on single wall climbs.

• Instant Wall Breaks - By scrolling a breakable wall off screen while it is under invincibility frames from Tornado Fang, the wall will break instantly regardless of its hp.

• Zero Zipping - Since the air dash animation's shorter hitbox allows you to get much closer to ceilings, calling Zero from this position will cause him to be lodged in the ceiling with his taller hitbox after warping in.

• Preliminary Charged Shot Skip - By swapping to Parasite Bomb and back to buster 3 frames later at a green charge will allow you to use saber without having to dump the preliminary charged shots.

• Hyper.C ammo Conservation Glitch - Wall kicking during the animation of the 2nd hyper.c shot while the first is still on screen will move the combo to saber without expending 2 ammo. Also, swapping to buster after using saber but before the saber comes out will conserve that 2 ammo as well.

• Hyper.C Weapon Swap Climbing - By tapping a wall after a hyper.c neon jump and weapon swapping to Tornado Fang on a specific frame, the neon animation is interrupted and no ammo is expended. This method of climbing can only be done as long as you have full hyper.c, and boasting a vertical speed of 715 sub pixels per frame(sppf), it far outclasses any other kind of vertical movement in the game(besides arm+leg upgraded ladder climbing). For reference, single wall climbing with no reverse wall jumps is 563sppf, with RWJs is 577sppf, and back and fourth wall climbing between two close walls is 596sppf.

Stage Info

Table of time saved per stage

Intro Stage

• In addition to allowing for faster wall climbing in general, reverse wall jumps keep Zero closer to the wall so he can take a more optimal damage boost after the saber jump and dodge the 2nd spike ball completely.

Tunnel Rhino

• Damage boosting on Rhino allows for longer range Doppler effects from being able to stand closer to the wall as well as delaying Rhino's charges at specific times.

Blizzard Buffalo

• Letting go of forward the frame you touch a slippery surface will yield dash speed on that frame instead of the normal frame of walking speed.

• Leaving a neutral dpad position after turning around for a horizontal slippery surface "slope" jump will utilize momentum from the ice physics while X is airborne, which is faster than holding forward.

• Ending a dash without holding forward has a very long stand up animation that is normally avoided in all other situations, but doing this on a dash from a slippery surface will allow X to slide through the air and do a mid-air jump.

Neon Tiger

• With carefully placed Frost Shields and manipulation of Bit's jump heights, you can use 2 additional charged Frost Shields during the fight.

• By alternating between Ray Splasher and jump patterns, you can utilize Frost Shield's slow travel time to get more charged shots in between Neon Tiger's i-frame resets.

Gravity Beetle

• By jumping to a specific height and firing the frame before hitting the ground, you can actually hit Gravity Beetle with charged Ray Splasher while he is still on the ground. Since Ray Splasher gives Beetle such long i-frames, it's fastest just to hit him with consecutive charged shots.

Toxic Seahorse

• Since it takes so long to menu the swap to Zero and back, this zip only saves ~3.5 seconds(mainly because you skip the long miniboss explosion).

• With Zero's taller hitbox, he's able to grab the ledge on the left immediately after the miniboss door without having go over to the right like X does.

• Interrupting Zero's wall jump trajectory with a saber jump allows him to enter the ladder gap with a much higher wall jump. Normally he would fall back down while stuck in saber animation, but swapping back to X at that point fixes this problem.

Blast Hornet

• Nothing really changed on this stage aside from a few reverse wall jumps. Initially we thought it would be 2 frames faster to move Byte to Catfish's stage so that we wouldn't have to wait for the charged shot after the Bit/Byte room in this stage, but we forgot there was a big health drop sitting on the ground before the Catfish e-tank that you would have to avoid after the Byte dboost(which would have cost 4 frames instead).

Volt Catfish

• There wasn't much to add on this stage either aside from reverse wall jumps and some lag reduction. A lot of the wall heights in this stage are too awkward to utilize the specific intervals that reverse wall jump patterns demand.

Crush Crawfish

• Same story as the previous 2 stages.

Vile

• Vile is dragged to the right side during the ride armor phase to set up a single-shot Ray Splasher double hit in phase 2, which can only be done while Vile is jumping from left to right and with a specific permutation of shots earlier in the fight to set it up. The same charged Ray Splasher trick used on Gravity Beetle also works on Vile's second phase.

Rhino Revisit

• Nothing new here besides minor movement nuances/better lag reduction.

Doppler 1

• Nothing new aside from RWJs and weapon swap climbing.

Doppler 2

• Since you swap to Zero much later in 100% than any% or all stages, it's faster to do the Mosquitus descent glitch on the right wall instead of the left. This is actually 6 frames slower than the god descent pattern from v1, but that pattern is only achievable if the stars align when you get there, which didn't happen in v2. Here's some disassembly of Mosquitus' descent behavior that FractalFusion did. RNG values with no letter next to them instruct Mosquitus to fly "towards Zero", and ones with letters next to the correspond to 1 of 8 45° angles. The god pattern consists of Mosquitus flying "towards Zero" or "down/right" for ~30 consecutive values in a row, which are few and far between in the game's ~45000 value sequence.

• The main limiting factor on Volt Kurageil is how long it takes him to send out his metal projectile which you shoot with the corkscrew shot(you can't use the saber until this shot has completely dissipated, and it takes much longer to despawn offscreen). As such, it is faster to hit him with the blade beam on the first attack since it deals 4 more damage, so the second blade beam(which is required to achieve explosion skip) kills him one damage over time tick earlier.

Doppler 3

• There are 3 new glitches involving the saber and/or hyper.c which greatly expedited the boss rush.

Sigma

• If you kill Dr. Doppler with a blade beam to damage boost off of him after the fight or damage boost off 2 blue missile guys at the start of the Sigma stage, you can fill hyper.c to do the neon swap climb before Captain America. Unfortunately, either method of refilling hyper c. resulted in a net time loss of a least 20 frames.

Possible Improvements

• This wasn't brought to my attention until after the TAS was completed it, but you may be able to get the double kill on Mac/X's prison in the SNES version if you delay killing Mac and wait for him to jump. I'll look into this for the any% run.

• If there is some way to zip horizontally in this game, Rhino's revisit could be theoretically skipped if you get the buster upgrade and chimera armor via zipping. We weren't able to pull it off, but I won't say it's impossible for sure until parrot14green gets on the case.

Closing Remarks

Acknowledgements

• FractalFusion: for assistance with lua scripting, disassembly, and encoding as always.

• Feos: for fixing a number of bugs and adding features to TAStudio that made making this run a lot easier.

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