Suggested Description: Woody Woodpecker must save his family and friends, and he does just that on record time.
Suggested Screenshot: Frame 9146
Stuff I think it's worth mentioning first:
- This movie is played back in the Difficult mode of the game. It has more levels, no invincibility frames after taking damage, you cannot hold infinitely to keep attacking and avoid damage, and different enemy behavior compared to the Easy mode on the game.
- Although very few know, this game's ROM you download on pretty much any website out there is a modified version of the original game. It modifies almost nothing, it just removes the loooong title screen the original game has, and obviously, this movie has to use the original ROM.
Pecking exploits
In this game, Woody's main attack is pecking (happens when pressing B) and it's main use is to damage enemies, but it is exploited in three different ways:
- Cancelling the falling animation: When Woody lands from great heights, or from a jump, a small animation of him getting up plays, that costs a few frames. But if you press B a few frames before hitting the ground, the pecking animation will overlap the falling animation, and Woody will not lose as much speed.
- Pseudo-invincibility: Although it isn't infinite like in the Easy mode, you can peck your way through enemies to no get damaged
most of the time. - Manipulate subpixels, subspeed, whatever: (Mostly on Level 5) it's used to getting better positioning so some 2-block wide gaps can be cleared without jumps, thus, saving time.
My goals with this movie were:
- Beating the game in difficulty mode as fast as possible
- To try to jump as least as possible, jumping is veeery slow
- To try to take as least damage as possible, if boosting is not an option
Detailed explanation of some levels
Level 1
Mostly optmized movement, trying to jump as less as possible and not taking damage. In the bossfight against Smedley the Bear, dropping the pinecones (or is it hazelnuts?) right after damaging the boss with a peck, skips their damage animation.
Level 2
Trying to get all keys without taking damage, which can be very challenging to do fastly, due to having to peck an enemy and jump straight up to get the key, needing very costly speed loss.
The Bossfight
In the bossfight, you're supposed to wait for Wally to turn back and wait at a barrel to damage him, however, you can simply wait for him to turn around, and, because of shitty hitboxes, hit him from inside of the barrel while he's turned back and then do the intended way to play the level. And that was the Early Damage strat in my previous TASes of this game. But then, I realized, you could simply hold the B button and mash A really fast to keep hitting him from inside the barrel, and that's what I named The Ultra Kill. Sadly, this technique is around a second slower on difficult mode, due to the game having a cooldown on the B button, so you have to mash B too, making the fight a bit slower.
Level 3
Almost the same thing as Level 1, trying to optmize movement as much as I can, mainly on the sloooow climb there is on the middle of the first section of the level. In the skiing section of the level, the rocks can actually give you a good amount of damage, so almost all of those have to be jumped over, which lost a little bit of frames. On the bossfight, when dropping a pinecone/hazelnut on Charlie the Polar Bear's head, he would jump to the other way he would've instead on the Easy mode, which lead to having to do a little re-route here, going straight to locking the boss in the right side of the screen.
Level 4
There's pretty much nothing I can say about the first section of this level, I just jump and avoid the enemies. The second section, intentional damage is taken after some enemies to get a little speed boost, saving some frames. In the bossfight, the strategy is to try to lock the boss to the left or right side of the screen as fast as you can.
Level 5
Manipulating positioning to clear out some larger gaps, and skipping Buzz's Bomb Throws, which can cost over 5 seconds every time. Sadly, some enemy patterns are very bad on this movie.
Level 6
A very straight forward level. Navigating through the level using the fastest barrel route to get all keys, while optimizing movement. The bossfight is pretty simple aswell, simply getting from cannon to cannon as fast as possible, while trying to avoid damage as much as possible.
arkiandruski: Claiming for judging.
arkiandruski: Since this has a known shortcut and the author has expressed interest in reworking the run, I'm going to reject this for lack of optimization. Unfortunately, this run wouldn't be different enough from an any% to warrant a new branch.