Here's a good way to format your submission
It would be nice if someone could help me with the headings because I'm having problems with it
! Intodruction
Note that I'm German and have been learning English merely 4 and a half years.%%%
This is my first submission on this great site.%%%
A run about one of my very first games I've ever played, The Smurfs!
! About the game
Here's a short intodruction I found on the internet:
««Three Smurfs have disappeared from the village! As Hefty Smurf your journey will be long.%%%
Jump across the river climb the mountains and travel through mines as you try to find Gargamel.%%%
Papa Smurf is counting on you to defeat Gargamel and bring the missing smurfs home!»»
The Smurfs is a sidescroller in which you must reach the goal in each level by beating or avoiding enemies and jumping across fosses.
There are 12 levels in total + 3 boss fights.
! About the run
* Aims for fastest tim
* Plays on hardest difficulty
* Manipulates luck
* Takes damage to save time
* Used emulator: [=forum/t/2050|Visual Boy Advance 1.72]
In my first attempt I beat the game in 9:16 minutes. This is an improvement of 14 seconds, most of the improvement came from the fact that I didn't know that the first screen was skipable (~220 frames saved). This led to better timings. I also optimized much at level 6, the boss fights and other parts!
! Items
This is about those useless items in the game.
They don't lag but bring bonus points. In the run, I didn't really care for points, though.
The best possible highscore wouldn't have been that amazing anyway.
* __Raspberry__ - Refills your health by one unit.
* __Leaf__ - Get ten of them and you'll earn one extra life!!!
* __Smurf doll__ - Extra life!!! Wow!
* __Star__ - If you get all five stars in a level, you may play a bonus game. Even by getting only one star, there would be a lag of 10 frames. So I always avoided them if possible.
! Tricks I used
__Don't continue reading if you haven't seen the movie yet or it may be less entertaining afterwards!__
I found several glitches in the game but almost all of them were useless and pointless.
* If you get damage, you fall back. By ''turning around in front of an unavoidable enemy'' you fall into the right direction.
* But by ''pressing left + right before getting hit'' you can even avoid the "falling back" animation. However, this bug wasn't optimized well yet.
* You'll run faster on platforms which go into your direction, like birds and water striders.
* and more...
! Notes on certain levels
LEVEL 1 - A level with many platforms and great variety of enemies. I used the "falling into other direction" trick here first.
LEVEL 4 - I stopped slightly in the end in order to luck-manipulate the location the snake in the next level comes from!
LEVEL 5 - In my first attempt I took much damage to save time. But due to better timing I was able to just run through the level without taking much damage.
In my opinion, that unfortunately made this level less entertaining...
LEVEL 6 - I optimized all jumps, and used the floor detection to its full capacity!
LEVEL 9 - Due to buggy layout of the solid sprites in this level, I could have gone a new route but it was sadly not time-saving!
LEVEL 10 - The last polar bear in this level was not avoidable. I wonder if it was intended to be like this...
! Closing words
Thanks to all people who posted into [=forum/t/5618|The Smurfs Thread] in the Gameboy forums.
I hope you enjoy the run!
If there are some people who are too lazy getting the ROM (and stuff), I uploaded a 12 frames slower version onto youtube:%%%
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5fGJSxBkjE