Venkar Amon, the leader of the Dark Axis, waged a three year war against Earth. Now, only a handful of soldiers remain in defense of Free Earth. These valiant few are known as the... Metal Warriors.
Briefing
- Takes Damage to Save Time
- Mild Glitch Abuse
Omnigamer brought this game to my attention a few weeks ago. After watching his real time speed run, and since I was stuck on another project, I decided to give this game a try. The result is what you're about to watch. But first, I feel the need to say this; it's easy to make mistakes in this game. Some stages were redone several times and I'm still uncomfortable with them. The "black sheep" of the run is Stage 4; enemies spawning far from each other, not clearly defined way to complete the stage and a slow Mech to control are some possible reasons for that stage to look kind of sloppy.
Tactics
All tricks and glitches used in this run have been found by other people, so I don't have all the details about them, but I'll try to explain the ones used in the run;
Pause Trick
Some enemies, and even your Mech, keep taking damage even with the game paused. It was exploited in some missions, especially on boss fights.
Moonwalk
On early stages of the first run I only used this trick to go from right to left by pressing Left+Right on the Dpad. Later, I found out that it is possible to moonwalk from left to right too. It made some strategies a little faster in the second run, and even allowed me to make camera tricks to avoid spawning some enemies. To do that, you just need to press Up+Down+Right. There is an advantage which is also a disadvantage on the moonwalk trick; you can't change your aim. But it's not a big deal, your aim changes at key frames, I mean, if you're pointing to the right and want to shoot something above your mech, you just need to stop moonwalking for one frame to press Up.
Reverse Rocket
You need rockets to perform the trick, yeah, it's obvious, I know. Hold the opposite direction while shooting for massive damage, but you must be partially inside the object for this trick to work, so it's not useful in most cases.
Switch Trick
The switches in this game have an interesting behavior; they can mess up the tiles changing the layout of the stage. But something must push the pilot while he is pressing the switch, so it's a hard trick to exploit.
Clip Through Walls
It's possible to partially clip into some walls with other Mechs, but the best Mech to clip into walls is Spider. You'll need a corner to be able to clip though.
Missions
There were only wips of the first mission on the discussion topic of this game, so I followed Omnigamer's real time strategies as close as possible. Also, Soulrivers' idea to turn off cut scenes saved a lot of time in my first run too. Now, I managed to implement a lot of Omnigamer's suggestions, along with some of my own and 1990 frames were saved, bringing this run to less than fifteen minutes.
Mission One: Rescue at Axis 5
Locate agent Marissa and get out as fast as you can! The first and most important thing here is; grab some rockets from that vehicle if you want to clear this stage faster. There are some Bazookas, those guys with big guns, that will open the path for you, but they don't shoot very often, so, better bust those doors open yourself. It was discussed in the forum a long time ago, but now we are certain that the middle path, with those flying mines, is faster. To grab the second pack of rockets, it is faster to land first as pointed out by Omnigamer.
Mission Two: Boarding Party
Capture intact a fully loaded Axis supply ship! This is another stage where rockets are vital to advance. Although it's a "run right for justice" kind of stage, you'll need to manipulate some enemies to proceed with ease. To get the second pack of rockets from that random item box, you'll need a little bit of manipulation too. By the way, the items and also some enemies in this game are manipulated by pressing the "B" button for a given number of frames.
Mission Three: War on the Rock
Secure a heavily shielded enemy supply base! Ah, my favorite stage. If I had to redo this stage a hundred times, I would do it gladly. Almost everything here worked as intended; the rockets to blast those cannons, the enemies were in a favorable position and the switch trick was not so hard to perform this time, a real bliss. I said "almost everything" because we still don't know how to reproduce two glitches in this stage; how to skip the text like Omnigamer did in his run and how to control the pilot and Nitro at the same time.
Mission Four: Ship Defense
Use Two Prometheus units to defend the ship! This is my least favorite stage. Well, in fact I hate this stage; although it was redone several times, it is hard to say if that stage is as fast as it can be done. There are things on this stage that we can't say for sure if they are done as optimal as possible. Some things that I know for sure; you must kill at least 24 enemies to clear this stage, if you stay in one side of the ship some enemies will not spawn and some enemies will disappear if you don't get close to them fast enough. So, my strategy here; kill everything in sight as fast as you can.
Mission Five: Frontal Assault
Destroy the huge ground defense cannon! Ballistic proved to be the best mech for this stage, period. It was discussed a possible strategy involving Nitro passing through the shock barrier in the upper path and although it is possible, it is a lot slower and has the disadvantage of taking too much damage, making it a lot harder to reach and kill the boss. There is a funny "Let's play Metal Warriors" video on YouTube where the guy also takes the lower path, I just made a few improvements. In the first run I kill the boss with Ballistic's plasma shots, this time I'm using the pause trick as it saved quite a bit of time. There is a trick called "La Bola Blanca", with this trick it is possible to cause damage constantly with Ballistic and it may save more time here, but sadly, we're not able to reproduce it.
Mission Six: Jungle War
Locate and steal the enemy's new full flight combat unit! Lots of improvements here, but the biggest one is a better use of the damage boost on the Nitro section. With Spider, I'm now using a Speed Boost item, but it's still not possible to reach the elevators one cycle earlier, sadly. Collecting that Speed Boost cost me no time at all, so, it will save a little bit of time near the end of this section. I also fixed some mistakes on Drache's section, but the biggest improvement is the use of a Speed Boost item, here this item is a little out of the way, but it is worth collecting anyway. One thing that would save tons of time here is if you find a way to clip into the walls of this stage, Drache is one of the mechs that can move while inside walls, the other being Nitro.
Mission Seven: Fire
Keep the Axis forces from destroying Dorado's base! Unlike the previous stage, this one has just few changes, but they saved quite some time. One of the most notable changes is that this time I'm passing through a building instead of under it. I tried it in the first run too, but it didn't work back then. The "shoot to the music" part before the boss fights is inspired on McBobX's Contra 3 pacifist run; I love that part of his run. No big changes on the boss fights, but using the pause trick sometimes will cause the invincibility period of the boss to last longer, so it is used more carefully this time.
Secret Mission: The Tower
Enter the tower and steal the Axis command key! Little is known about those flying mines, why it sometimes push you up, down, left or right, but this time I was lucky enough to take advantage of one of those mines. The rest of the stage is pretty much the same as in the previous run; a few mistakes fixed here and there, better movement of the pilot and Drache, but nothing major.
Final Mission
Get inside and knock out the super weapon! This stage is huge, but it is rather easy to work on. The most notable difference here is that this time I collect a weapon upgrade instead of using Prometheus to open the path to the boos. The strategy on the boss is also different; Omnigamer suggested that strategy on my first attempt, but only this time I was able to make it work. Well, that's that. I hope you enjoy the run and see you on my next project, thank you.
Medals of Honor
- To Omnigamer, for tricks, suggestions memory addresses and most of the strategies you'll see in this run, thank you.
- To mklip2001, for encouragement in the game's topic, I appreciate that, thank you.
- To Derakon, also for support on the topic of this game, thank you.
- To Hikaruon, his post about a possible skip of Stage 8 made me test items I was overlooking on the first run, like a Speed Boost on Stage 6, thank you.
- To Soulrivers, I wouldn't have turned off the cut scenes if it was not for your wip, thank you.
I also want to thank Nilusxyz, JRD and JoeL for their glitch videos on YouTube, sadly we couldn't figure out some of the glitches, but you'll see a lot of their discoveries in this run, thank you guys.
I said in my comments that it's easy to make mistakes in this game, so your best bet if you're trying to improve this run is stages with multiple paths, like Stage 7, and of course the infamous Stage 4.
feos: Accepting for Moons.
(Screenshot from the YouTube encode, obviously not usable in the publication)
