Oh joy, I'm on the verge of my two most favoritest things in the TASing world: autoscrollers, and luck manipulation.
I'm in level three, about to start an insanely long autoscrolling portion. This isn't so bad, it's just that I suck at making them interesting to watch. No, the problem is the luck manipulation. This level has no fire swords in it, and with such a large autoscrolling area, I'm given no choice but to get a fire sword for the boss out of the bonus drop since it wouldn't waste any time nor look awkward. The thing is the chances of getting a non-bomb "bonus" out of it on very hard are slim to none. In the many times I've played this game on that difficulty, I've gotten... one blue gem and three apples. The other several hundred drops were all bombs.
Now, I know that the drop can be manipulated based on the frame you grab the 10th blue gem or any red gem. This means, however that I will have to test what I suspect will be a few to several hundred frames to get the desired drop. Testing this manually will be a tiring and irksome process, and I don't know how to make a script that would help out the testing of it. Feh.
While this project isn't canceled, do consider it delayed. In the meantime,
here's what I have so far.
If anyone knows of any fire swords in this area that I am just *completely* overlooking, please, do tell!
(I didn't try to manipulate a fire sword in level two because the lengthy manipulation would have interfered with the flow; if nothing else, consider it an entertainment trade off. The fire face fight isn't so bad)