Cazlab: Make sure you're letting the emulator warm up before you play the run. I forgot to do that for one of my latest recording sessions and the movie didn't even make it to the first level of Japan. Maybe you've been doing that anyway, but I just figured I'd mention it since I know it affects this game.
Ummm.... I got the next level of Africa done plus its puzzle. I'll probably finish the next level tonight and post it tomorrow.
Edit: Hold that thought.........
Update!
Bojo's dead. (Or whatever the crazy witch doctor's name is.) A couple notes about the latest two levels:
Putty Pillars
- Hitting that bird is exactly 4 frames faster than just landing and rolling by. I'm not sure it actually saves any time because of the weirdness of collecting gems, but I think it's more aesthetically pleasing.
- I pass up an opportunity to grab the mouse because he just doesn't save enough time to make up for how out of the way he is. (takes ~400 frames to grab him, he only saves ~300, since most of the rest of the level is vertical movement, not horizontal.)
- I grab that invincibility potion because I thought there was another boulder section after it. I was mistaken. Hence I don't need it, but I'm too lazy to cut it out of the run so I'll just remember not to grab it on the second pass.
- No matter how I tried, I couldn't make the distance between that final pipe and the electro-blue-ball-ifier look clean. It's doable with the mouse, but I'm not wasting ~100 frames for an aestetic difference.
- I'm proud of the work I did with that puzzle, as it's very hard to do quickly at normal speed.
Muddy Moats
- This level is cruel. It has long waits, it gives us the cat when we want the mouse, it forces the mouse on us once we get to a section where we'd rather have the cat, and it forces Goopy the Guppy upon us. I can sum up playing with Goopy in one word: "Ick." He handles like a VW Bus..... without power steering.
- Sorry for the long waits. I couldn't find a good way to make them really entertaining, but then again I was pretty lazy with this level in general. (I've got maybe a second's worth of mistakes in it, if you care to look for them.) I think what I do looks better than just sitting there until the next platform is in view.
- There is one section where I start to jump over a gem and then change my mind, which is because the next platform had just come into range and I didn't feel like re-recording the two previous seconds to save ~10 frames and the aesthetic difference. (This is a test run, after all.)
- The last gem in the moats that I collect can't be avoided because of the top of that pink column over on the right. If I try to jump over the gem I run into that overhang and either fall on the gem or just straight into the moat. Hence no jumping over. Although it's theoretically doable with a jump that looks like one earlier which is really close to another (larger) overhang, I'm too lazy to work out how when I don't even think it changes my time at all. I'll at least give it a try on the second pass.
- I'm not sure how, but that falling block passes right through me as the mouse. This makes me happy, so I'm not gonna question it, but it
should have hit me. Instead, I take a hit from a native later because it's not worth the time it takes to avoid the hit (when I can afford it, that is,) especially since I have to switch to the fish very shortly afterwards.
- The fight with Jobo, or Mojo, or Jomo, or whatever his name is, doesn't go as quickly as it can, for two reasons: first is that I realized very belatedly that I should either be recording frame-by-frame or that I should be using turbo. (Didn't re-record because of that laziness I was talking about earlier.) The second is that I neglected the hovering clay ball completely, whereas I'm pretty sure I could've gotten a couple more hits in if I'd been paying attention to it.
- Puzzle's very slightly not optimized, primarily that I don't speed-up/slow-down the robots efficiently. It's not possible to get to that rock in the second section before the robot gets to it without letting the robot slow down, which I didn't even think about until 5 seconds ago. Hence I move the other things first and kill a couple seconds' time. It'll look better in the second pass, I promise.
So we're at the space station, now. I'm not sure exactly which switches (plungers) I'm going to have to hit and which I can ignore, so that's going to involve some testing. (I'm pretty sure everything on the right path has to go, but I don't know what on the left path can be ignored.) The last level's just a set-speed side-scroller, so anything I do there is pure aesthetics. Anyway.... very close to the end, so I'll go ahead and finish up the test run before I start working on Lufia again. Expect an update by this weekend at the latest, more likely Wednesday.
(Interestingly enough, most of the errors in the run as it stands are hexable. Still, the run in general is still very un-clean, so I'll be re-doing at least through the first level of Africa and possibly pasting the (hexed) rest of the run onto that. I might actually go ahead and finish this game before I get back to Lufia, it depends on how many people are eager to see the finished product.)
