Submission #6891: EZGames69's PSX Strider 2 in 08:38.60

Strider 2 is a game that is cool and fun.

This appears to be a 781 frame improvement to the original, but since we are dealing with longer loading times and the inclusion of a longer bios, the time save is likely much more than that. I wasn't able to make a comparison encode due to PCSX having quite terrible encoding support, so to compare both runs, I went by IGT. It's not 100% accurate due to the timer lagging any time the game loads, but it's all I have to work with.

you run by double tapping the direction you want to go, this is the fastest average movement in the game. Strider can collect a powerup that will make his attacks more powerful and give a purple light. He loses it if he takes damage at all.

There is this spin attack Strider can do which is more powerful in some cases compared to normal slashing. It can attack up to 3 times in some cases. You can only do it once per jump however.

If you do a spin attack right as you land on the ground, you can keep moving while you are doing your attack. This can be useful in boss fight that are always moving and you need to keep doing damage on them.

There's also a item called boost, which can shoot projectiles at enemies for every swipe you make, mostly useful for bosses.

every cut-scene can be sped up if you hold down the X button.

Unfortunately this was discovered near the end of the run so it wasnt able to be implemented everywhere. After each stage, you can mash away the screen that says "Strider 2" on it, which saves an average of 1 second each time. Adding it in some areas will cause desyncs in the run, so I was only able to implement it into the last stage.

What's interesting about this skip is if you press start on the earliest frame possible, it's actually slower because it for some reason causes laoding to take longer. This is likely the reason why it wasnt used in the previous author's submission.

We want to grab a power-up sword early in the game for the first few bosses.

The Spider form is faster kill by using the boost powerup on it, both for the first phase and the 2nd phase with conjunction to the spin attack.

Tong Poo's manipulation was difficult to match with the previous movie, where they spawn depends on your position, so I tried my best to get them to spawn as close to each other as possible. I have no idea what causes them to spawn at the same time like in the previous movie.

In the stage with the crane, the previous movie ran into an emulation error where the player would take damage for seemingly no reason. Since this isn't the case for this emulator, we can carry out as normal. It’s better to not take damage regardless because we would lose our powerup if we did. For the boss in that stage, we dont want him to do his spinning disk move because we do less damage to him when doing the spin attack.

For the stage's final boss we just slash with the boost because it's super fast.

10.41 seconds of IGT were saved on this stage.

In the first level of this stage, you can get a ton of speed from the wind if you stay in the air as long as possible, however near the end you will get the wind blowing back at you and slowing down.

on some slopes, it's slightly faster to jump, which saves a couple of frames here and there.

The 3rd level boss can be easily killed by spamming the slash button.

in the 4th level the trick with the spin attack comes in use for the doors here, as well as for the attacking of the motor.

in the 5th stage, you just keep slashing in the air as much as possible before you have to land. I also manipulate her attack pattern to shoot the orange lazer in the middle rather than where I am.

Some bosses have invisibility times for when you can damage them again. the final boss of this stage is one of them. For some reason it's faster to kill the boss while he is in the air, because his death animation is slightly faster.

11.87 seconds of IGT were saved here

Anti gravity means I cant easily move one way or the other until I grab a hold of a wall or ceiling or floor. Some areas where the previous TAS overshot their jumps I was able to minimize the amount of time it took to get from point A to point B.

stage 2 had a weird stroke of luck for me, during the part where you fall up, there's supposed to be 2 enemies that I have to kill to proceed, but I somehow despawned one of them. I aint complaining though because that's gooooooooooood.

Gravity is Gravity.

For Strider Hein fight, we want him to do his dash slash attack, because that makes him the most vulnerable to our attacks. It can be tricky to manipulate, but I got a slightly good amount of manipulation on him.

Grand Master has i-frames for each attack I do. I do a pattern which the previous TAS did not do where I combine a spin attack with a slash, both attacks do the same amount of damage if you time them right. He automatically teleports after a certain amount of hits, so the teleporting is unavoidable.

Final boss consists of spamming the attack button with boost enabled. When you do a certain amount of hits on it, it does an animation of being in pain, before I do the final spin move.

31.7 seconds of IGT were saved here.

To wrap this submission up, I just wanted to say the reasons why I did this game was because the original movie seemed unoptimized (not only due to out of date TASing techniques but even some emulation bugs that caused it to be slightly slower), not only that but since the original TAS was made on PCSX, which I would consider one of the worst emulators used on the site. I figured it would be awesome to update the run to current emulation standards.

I should also mention that if I ever plan on revisiting this game after this submission, I will be looking to do an all stages TAS, which is likely to replace this one if that ever happens. However I discovered that there’s a secret stage you can unlock if you have sram stored in the memory card of the first Strider game completed. So that will have to be something I’ll look into when the time comes.

Anyway I hope people liked the run and to hell with PCSX-rr

For whoever publishes this movie, use this file for the encode: userfiles/info/66321105077067731 It puts my initials on the final score screen.

Samsara: You wanted a judgement? Well, Hiryu go!

Samsara: The big problem with leaving for several years is that people come along and pick up all the projects you wanted to do, and somehow two of them end up on the workbench at the same time, and somehow they're both ninja related. You'd think I'd have expected ninja submissions to sneak up on me like this.

So, this movie. It's very good! It's very good. The glaring emulation bug in the current published run was something I always wanted to see fixed in general, but to see it done in a run that also cuts out a huge chunk of time as well is a really lovely sight. Excellent work on optimization and finding new techniques and strategies to handily overcome the huge "time loss" from the BIOS. We've already discussed the loading screen shortening issue, but to sum it up here: It won't affect the judgement due to it being a fairly obtuse improvement (clearing the screens ASAP does in fact cause longer loads), being found so late in the run's development, and being impossible to implement without requiring the entire run to be redone from scratch. Plus, having a new movie will be much more beneficial for future improvements and comparisons... And I'm super glad that emulation bug is finally obsoleted.

All that being said, this is a cool and fun TAS for a cool and fun game, and I'm accepting it as an improvement to the published run!

feos: Pub.