Submission #5410: coolpapa's NES Adventures of Dino Riki "no weapon upgrades" in 20:07.88

This movie is essentially a challenge run for Adventures of Dino-Riki. The goal is to use only the starting weapon to beat the entire game, while still taking no damage. The result is probably impossible for a human to replicate, since there is some damage that is probably unavoidable without tool-assisted reflexes or a stronger weapon.

Dino-Riki is an autoscroller, so there's no optimization for speed (outside of boss fights). This run, however, beats the game without picking up any weapon upgrades and taking no damage. There is some room for improvement speed wise, especially in the first boss, but my focus was killing as many enemies as possible with the crappy basic weapon. The main drawbacks of the basic weapon (which are supposed to be rocks, according to the manual) are that you can only have two on screen at once, and they move quite slowly. The biggest challenge comes later in the game when you get surrounded by a circle of black spheres which converge in on you and automatically hit you unless you kill them first. To kill them in time with only rocks, you have to move to make the spheres collide with the rocks, since waiting for them to hit takes too long. I am skeptical that this technique is humanly possible, but it is definitely possible to take some damage from the spheres and still successfully beat the game.

Straightforward - just a lot of dodging and precision shooting. The first boss fight is probably the worst part of this run - I waste some shots by not timing the boss's movements properly, but I doubt it's more than a second or two.

Similarly straightforward, like stage 1. This boss fight is pretty good - there are more opportunities to stand still and button mash. (With the basic weapon, you need at least a frame between shots, and since you can only have two shots on screen at a time, I think human button mashing can be pretty close to perfect.

This stage has the first appearance of the evil black spheres. This is the damage that is probably unavoidable in a live run with the basic weapon. They close in on you and hit you unless you can kill them very quickly. In this run, I did a lot of firing two shots and then moving to draw the spheres into the shots. Especially when the spheres get close, there is a lot of frame-by-frame movement required to make this work.

The final stage revisits all the previous levels and makes you fight all the bosses again. (My second fight of the first boss is a little better, I think.) The evil black spheres make several more appearances, often with pits around to make things more difficult. The final boss has some smaller enemies on screen, meaning you have to do more dodging around and less rapid firing. I think this is the other boss that could be shortened by a bit of time.

The next most challenging run would be to not pick up any speed upgrades, either. I am not sure how possible the evil black spheres would be to kill in the first cycle with no speed upgrades, though....

Noxxa: Judging.

Noxxa: I can appreciate what this run is going for with its goal choice, but in the end it just doesn't hold up well enough in the entertainment department. The votes also reflect this. Rejecting due to insufficient entertainment for a Moons-level category.

Better luck next time!