Timing ends when the parser says it does, and I am once again going easy on the encoders and judges with a recording made on an actual emulator. I seem to have a knack for picking RNG-heavy games with certain yet completely invisible potential improvements. I'm also using the comments template this time, because I am tired and lazy.
- Completes one full cycle at maximum difficulty (DIP switch setting of 8 rather than default 4)
- Loses lives intentionally to save time
- Ignores rescuing the ditched pilots, because nobody cares about those LOSERS anyways, cya
- Ends input early, thanks cheese!
Comments
This one was an easy one, barring me having to redo basically the entire thing because I missed out on a completely obvious timesave, that being destroying the stage boss by crashing into it and skipping the time-warp cutscene (we have the lives to spare). I chose max difficulty, because that's literally just faster and more fun, both to watch and to record, even if it means this gets put into alternative. The RNG in this game is both forgiving and inflexible- it will always spawn enemy planes in front of you with the exception of the last stage, yet the RNG seed takes your input to basically the very last moment until the enemies spawn. This means that prediction is largely limited to waiting until the enemy spawns offscreen so we can be already aimed when they become visible, and otherwise just shooting whatever we see as efficiently as possible. This is another instance where the rerecord count is complete BS, because hitting these enemies with the surprisingly restrictive firing angles requires a lot of fine adjustment, and thus a lot of scrubbing on the TASStudio piano roll; I wasn't keeping count, but just multiply it by at least 10 and that's more accurate.
As for potential improvements... I mean, yeah, probably? This is an RNG game, so it's a crapshoot in this regard as usual. Movement optimizations are probably less than you would expect, because enemy spawn rates are rather steady, and you can only turn your ship and make target so quickly; if you're killing everything that shows up on-screen in a timely fashion, then you're already doing WAY better than an RTA run, and just in general you're just doing fine for yourself. The homing missiles add slightly more required forethought, but not all that much. In terms of trivial timesave though, nope, and that means this fulfills the optimization requirement.
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Rejecting for optimization problems as described here.