George Foreman's KO Boxing is a rather boring boxing game released in Europe and Brazil for the Sega Master System. The game is known for being very easy to beat, simply by stun locking every opponent in the corner. The current run is a significant improvement over the existing publication due to much better strategy and optimization. It is also an improvement over my previous submission.
Improvements:
- It turns out I was wrong about PAL being faster in my previous submission, so this one is back to NTSC (Techniclly PAL-M)
- You have some influence on the count after each knockdown, so I minimized it as much as possible. Thanks to zoboner, all counts are now 5 counts.
- By varying your punches, you can extend your combos to the point where almost all the opponent's health is gone in the first knockdown. Using this, I was able to get knockdowns 2 and 3 on all opponents with a single super punch.
Developement of this game.
This game has a notably complex development history. As noted at Sega retro: https://segaretro.org/Heavyweight_Champ_(8-bit) the game was originally released as "Heavyweight Champ" in several regions. It was released as "James 'Buster' Douglas Knockout Boxing" in the US, then also released as "George Foreman's KO Boxing" in Europe and Brazil. The graphics in the original and 'Buster' releases are bland compared to the Foreman version, so going with this one definitely seems like the right choice.
NTSC vs PAL
This game is able to detect which region console it is playing on. It then uses this information to vary how much it does in a frame. Generally speaking, PAL is faster overall to play then NTSC for this reason. But, they didn't apply the changes to the counts (this is what I missed in my previous submission) and as a result counts take the same amount of frames in both NTSC and PAL. This makes the counts notably faster real time in NTSC. Since the counts end up making up a significant fraction of the run, NTSC ends up winning in the end by about 2 seconds (I redid the run on both settings just to make sure.)
Besides that, it turns out the PAL is actually TOO fast. It inadvertantly misses a trigger to disable audio (by one frame) during loading transitions. This creates very irritiating audio buzzing in some cases. Fortunately NTSC is faster so you won't have to hear it this time!
At first I was skeptical that such a significant error would be overlooked and thought there might be an emulator bug, but Kega Fusion and TwoMBit both agree that this behaviour is correct.
Special Thanks
Zoboner's contribution with understanding this game is what led to this improvement. It is now a much cleaner run as a result.
ThunderAxe31: Judging.
ThunderAxe31: This run looks optimized to the fullest. Good job!
Accepting as improvement of the current movie.
feos: OH! Let's hope the new year delays a bit just for this run.