NES Back to the Future 2 & 3
Emulator Used
FCEUX 2.1.2-interim
Priorities
- Uses no passwords
- Aims for fastest time
- Abuses programming errors in the game
- Abuses deaths (and a game over) to save time
- Manipulates luck
About the Game
This is a side-scrolling platformer/puzzle game based off Part II and III of the Back to the Future trilogy.
In Part II there are 30 items scattered throughout 16 streets in three different time periods. In order to get an item you have to get a key to unlock a door to the object room. In the object rooms you have to jump around and collect all the clocks and then a trophy appears which ends up being one of the items. Each item also has its own secret room to be dropped off in its correct time and place. Only two object rooms are completely unreachable and the only way to reach them is by getting a seed, planting it in 1955, then going to 2015 where it becomes a fully grown plant you can jump on. Part III is the same thing except there are only 10 streets in one time period (1875) you have to deal with. That means you don't have to worry about time traveling or having to plant seeds to reach certain places. The object rooms have pieces of gold to collect instead of clocks and a large block of gold appears after collecting all the small pieces of gold instead of a trophy. In both Part II and III you can collect the star icons that pop out of enemies to throw stones as your projectile weapon.
Control Combinations That Helped Me Save Time
Pressing Start+A at the title screen allows you to skip the dialogue sequences at the beginning and go right to the game.
Pressing Select+B in an object or bonus room allows you to exit that room. You lose a life by doing this unless you have already obtained the item you need in an object room but you can't exit until the score finishes tallying up.
While walking left you can press left+right and he can do the moonwalk! : D
He can also walk in place by pressing either left or right, hold up+down, then letting go of left/right.
On-Screen Sprite Limit
There is a sprite limit in this game that only allows 7 or 8 sprites on the screen at a time. If there's already at the limit, the items that are supposed to appear on screen at that moment won't show up (like some very important radioactive fuel units). The fish are the worst to deal with because they blow bubbles which means extra sprites on the screen.
Luck Manipulation
It was not easy to luck manipulate in this game. If you enter an object room one frame later or even 10 frames later the luck manipulative enemy behavior doesn't change.
Part II
Planning the Route
- Streets 1, 2, and 3
- Streets 10, 13, and 15
- Streets 12, 14, and 16
- Streets 9 and 11
- Streets 1, 2, and 3 again - I have to revisit this section because there is an object in street 3 of 2015 has object room for object 10 and the puzzle room for object 22 but street 16 of 1955 has it the other way around.
Time Travelling
I have to have 10 radioactive fuel units to time travel to an adjacent time period (1955 to 1985 or 1985 to 2015) but to time travel from 1955 to 2015 it costs 17. Sometimes I'll be running around looking for radioactive icons to time travel in this run because they get used up very quickly and I need to time travel so much to get to streets that aren't connected in that particular time period. The game will only allow you to have up to 40 of them and they stop appearing when you collect 30 of them. I go into bonus rooms where there are radioactive fuel units (there are 40 in that room). Also you can make them reappear by entering and exiting the screen via time travel or street exit but they only respawn about 4 or 5 times then they stop respawning.
Object Rooms
I tried to kill the long waiting sequences for the slow-moving enemies. The worst enemies in the object rooms were the little frogs because their behavior is random (they can climb ropes and poles). Sometimes they get in the way when you try to climb a rope or slide down a pole and other times they won't. There are also these white glowing balls that home in on you if you stand in an area for too long. I also noticed something about the setup of these rooms. The clocks you collect are part of the background and they are always at the bottom left-hand corner of a "block" (16 pixels x 16 pixels). There are also pellets that fall from the top of the screen which appear in different patterns depending on randomness. Another interesting thing about the object rooms is that the type of platforms match the time period you are in.
Part III
This part only has 10 streets in one time period to deal with. It's also easier because the object rooms are on the same street as the puzzle rooms for a particular item.
There's not really much to say about this part of the game for the main streets themselves.
Object Rooms
It was really hard to decide which way to get the pieces of gold was the fastest because there were so many possibilities due to the breakable/placeable parts of the room. In some object rooms you literally have to wait for the falling blocks to pile up so that you can jump up to a higher area. I have tried getting up to higher places without having to do so but I couldn't find a way. The slow-moving enemies weren't really a problem in these object rooms. They still have the weird white glowing balls that try to home in on you.
Man this has been a great year for me TASing NES games! I got to jump through the ceiling (Contra Force), fall through the floor (Hook), slide through the wall (Mega Man 5) all while keeping the space time continuum in balance (Back to the Future 2 & 3)!! : D
Flygon: Added in YouTube module.
Baxter: This is a very good TAS of this game. It is however not a very good game to TAS. Even most of the yes voters had problems with the length and repetitiveness of the movie. Rejecting this submission due to bad game choice.
Noxxa: Judging in consideration of the vault tier.
Noxxa: Accepting for the vault.
