Montezuma's Revenge - All Items
This is the Atari 2600 port.
All the recent any% runs of the various ports of Montezuma's revenge (along with a bit of help from Spikestuff) prompted me to look deeper into doing an all items run of this port. This is a much easier port for routing an "All Items" run as there are significantly less items, a smaller pyramid, and limited options on where to use various usable items.
This is an all items run, not a 100% run; in the sense that it collects all items without visiting every room (though we don't necessary require visiting all rooms in other games where 100% runs are done).
To my understanding this is a vault eligible goal.
TAS Notes
- Blame Spikestuff for shoving this onto me (about a week ago).
- To be fair, I started this TAS before LobsterZelda even brought up doing a 100% run, so this is by no means an attempt at disrespect to him and his recent posts/WIP.
- In fact, I didn't even watch his WIP until I had finished this submission (which ended up being a bit faster).
- Pretty straightforward platforming for this game
- A handful of death abuses
- As with other ports, the primary limitation to speeding through the game are disappearing-floors and laser-wall cycles.
- Further improvement would require saving enough frames somewhere in the run to complete the game an entire disappearing-floor/laser-wall cycle earlier.
- Doing this would improve the run by approximately 92-138 frames.
- Ladder Boosting: As in many versions of Donkey Kong, this port of Montezuma's Revenge has a ladder boost technique allowing for faster horizontal traversing of some rooms.
- Specifically climbing up the bottom of a ladder for 1 frame (on the earliest possible frame), then immediately back down will position the character further along a horizontal position than he would have been if he'd simply stayed walking horizontally.
- Unlike in Donkey Kong, this doesn't work climbing down then back up at the top of ladders.
- While this technique was used in many rooms of this run, it really only helps in one or two areas due to the disappearing floor/laser wall cycle.
- A particular example is in the room where the sword is obtained in Level 3. Without the ladder boost, it's impossible to make the jump over the lava to the sword on that particular floor cycle. Without the boost, an entire cycle's worth of time would be lost.
feos: I wasn't satisfied with gamefaqs telling false info about item positions and not having the guide for the third level, so I dumped level maps myself. Using those I followed the movie and verified that all the items have been collected.
Just like with the any% branch, I pasted the input used in level 3 to play level 4, and indeed all items were in the same locations, so 3 levels is enough.
By bit-OR-ing address $41 with 0x80 I spawned the torch in the inventory, so it was easy to see that all the items in the dark rooms were properly collected too.
Nothing to particularly enjoy in this game, and no real feedback, so accepting to Vault.