Here is an improvement to Prower's run of Mega Man X3. It's 3 minutes and 45 seconds faster, and while I'm sure it can be further improved, it's much closer to being perfect and it's been suggested that I should submit this as it is for now.
This movie:
- Aims for fastest time
- Takes damage to save time
- Abuses programming errors
Emulator: Snes9x 1.43 WIP 1
I follow mostly the same route as Prower, with the following important differences:
- I skip getting the air dash upgrade because it takes about 20 seconds to pick up and I didn't think it would save enough time to make up for it, despite allowing extra jump height and mid-air dashing. And I'm now pretty sure I was right about it being faster to skip it; I didn't notice more than 5 or 10 seconds of time lost from not having it. It would've made a lot of things easier, but most of them not necessarily faster.
- I fight Vile after Neon Tiger's stage instead of before it so I have two weapons he's weak to (to avoid running out of ammo during the fight).
- I don't kill Byte since doing so is mostly a waste of time waiting for him to explode.
I use some pretty strange strategies at times, but trust me that they are faster (or at the very least not slower) than what Prower did, as is probably obvious from the time difference.
The bugs abused are:
- damaging some bosses when they should be invulnerable (mainly Toxic Seahorse and Crush Clawfish)
- passing through enemies using drills
- making a platform disappear by scrolling it off the screen
- extending Zero's Z-Saber damage time by hopping
- jumping up ladders without climbing (more of a trick than a glitch, also works in MMX and MMX2)
- invulnerability abuse to climb spikes (most likely a feature by this late in the series)
That's all for now...
(This wouldn't have been possible without Prower's movie to refer to, and the WIP of his (now-cancelled) improved version was also quite helpful, as were various related comments/suggestions/examples (especially those of Mikwuyma).)
Bisqwit: Processing...