Mega Man X2 is an interesting game to TAS, due to the various functions of weapons that do more than just destroy enemies. Making a TAS of this game is not easy, because many actions must be done at the exact frame. All this dashing, jumping, and grappling lead to a fast-paced action TAS that is interesting even for me to watch.
The secret weapon known as the shoryuken (rising dragon punch) can only be gotten by first obtaining all other items and upgrades in the game. Although time is spent gathering these items, the shoryuken's one-hit kill capability makes up for all this. Getting the shoryuken may be the fastest possible way to complete the game, although no one has tried a no-items run or a run obtaining only the X-Buster upgrade.
The emulator used is Snes9x 1.43 Improvement (patched version) and uses WIP1 timing.
Aims
(from highest to lowest priority):
Uses no passwords
Aims for fastest completion
100% items (excludes Zero parts)
Abuses programming errors in the game
Takes damage to save time
Manipulates luck
Programming errors abused
Dashing and shooting an uncharged X-Buster shot does 2 damage to enemies when it would do 1 otherwise.
Shooting while charged (and remaining charged). I do this once - against Wheel Gator.
Dash-charging with the Ride Armor while close to an edge allows you to jet forward at charging speed, faster than normal.
Notes on weapons
X-Buster: X's standard weapon. I use this to kill enemies (non-bosses) a lot. With the glitch mentioned above, it does a lot of damage in a short time and is easy to switch out.
Strike Chain: Grapples onto walls.
Spin Wheel: Allows charging while weapon is still on-screen.
Bubble Splash: When charged, powerful (but lag-inducing) bubbles surrounds X and allow high and fast underwater jumping.
Speed Burner: When charged, allows a fast mid-air dash. Makes X invincible during use, except when underwater.
Silk Shot: Destroys enemies (non-bosses) even faster than X-Buster, but hard to switch out.
Remote Mine: Can stick to walls. Charged form is slow enough to deliver multiple hits.
Crystal Hunter: Turns some enemies into crystals that X can stand on.
Sonic Slicer: Stays on-screen long enough to make delayed hits on bosses, but that's all I can say.
Shoryuken: Does 16 damage non-flashing (8 damage flashing) and 8 damage every two frames thereafter. It is an awesome one-hit kill weapon.
Why over half the weapons start with S is beyond me. :)
I hope you enjoy the run.
Thanks to Blechy for inspiration and Blechy and DeHackEd for tips.
More notes to come later
Bisqwit: Updated the submission for changed nickname.
DeHackEd: It's popular. It's being made into an AVI.
I concur with Phil.
When this movie is published, the filenames of the publication can't have this number sequence. It's easily confused with timings, version numbers and what not.
To change your username, contact me privately and discuss what you wish to change it to.
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2161
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Oh my god... I voted YES. Very YES :). I've been following your WIPs for this game, and I'm more than happy with your result. This movie truly deserves a star, in my opinion.
Blechy's original run is still a favorite of mine and this one is unbelievably a huge improvement. An easy YES vote. I wish I didnt know about the jump through ladders glitch from nitsuja's X3 run (I think)... otherwise a beautiful run.
Good job random number guy :)
EDIT FractalFusion :)
This signature is much better than its previous version.
Yes because its faster than the previous submission and i thought it looked better. One thing that caught my eye(might be nothing), in the first x hunter stage after the first 8 bosses. One of the ladders there. You charge up the fire beam(dunno what its called) and use it to reach the ladder, but you fall a little bit down before you grab the ladder.
The best time you have is the time you share with other people.
Hmm... what does [o1] mean? I thought there was only one US version of Mega Man X2.
ROM sites have different names for ROM's, so I'm not sure about consistency.
It's probably a time-waster. As soon as I got the Speed Burner, I overused it as if I thought it was always faster than Strike Chain or just plain dashing. In this case, I basically used the Speed Burner as soon as possible without regard to height.
I know this run can be improved. Skipping the intro even more, jumping up ladders, using the Strike Chain more and the Speed Burner less, and especially jumping up walls. If anybody can tell me the optimum pattern for jumping up a straight wall, that would be great. (Or maybe I'll try and figure out myself.)
I think [o1] means means it's an overdump. Although I'm not sure if that's the one you actually used, but if you did it doesn't seem to matter. I had no trouble viewing it with the same ROM that worked for the other movies, at least.
For going straight up walls, I'm not sure there is an optimal pattern. It probably depends at least on how high the wall is. And if there are two walls close together, I think there's a certain distance apart from each other where it's faster to switch back and forth between them than to continue up one of them.
In X1, optimal climbing is achieved by releasing B for one frame every 20 frames. 19 isn't enough to keep contact with the wall depending on the height, and higher numbers are slower.
I tested this using a script to enter the input for me on Sigma 4.
There are exceptions. In the case of places like Flame Stag's level, places to stand would be well suited to a landing and rejumping rather than pulling yourself up the wall.
Another exception: If using this method causes you to do a wall-jump from the very top of a wall you're trying to climb over and clear it by a huge margin vertically, it is faster to let a few of the earlier wall-jumps go a bit higher so that it takes one fewer total jumps to get over the top (since every wall-jump is about 6 frames of waiting).
Also, 20 is enough of an interval if you start the jump as far away as possible from the wall, but if you start closer you can do 19 for a few times or even as little as 16 if you're as close as possible (and there are definitely situations where you can get closer than the maximum jump distance to the wall before wall-jumping without losing time, such as if you just jumped from a ledge near a wall). I would guess that it starts getting slower below a certain interval since it will start cutting out on the high-speed upward motion near the start of the jump while increasing the total number of jump delays, but I haven't tested what that number is.
I worded it a bit strange. Speed Burner is faster than dashing but by very little. I just abused it like it was always better to use the Speed Burner, and as much as possible.
As for the jumping thing, throughout the run, I was not sure whether releasing and pressing B to jump as soon as possible (suppose I jump from the outside layer of the wall) was the best, or if it was better to wait out slightly (assuming the wall is arbitrarily high). I know that I should try to reach the next ledge as close to the height of a jump when possible. I think anyone who goes through the run frame by frame would be surprised at the inconsistency of my jumps.
How do I skip the intro? I played around with this game in frame advance today, and I decided I might make a naked run, just to see how much longer it'd take than doing it with all the pickups.
And yeah, I've played this game for a very long time, and I liked this movie, but since I'm new I can't vote. :P Too bad.
How do I skip the intro? I played around with this game in frame advance today, and I decided I might make a naked run, just to see how much longer it'd take than doing it with all the pickups.
And yeah, I've played this game for a very long time, and I liked this movie, but since I'm new I can't vote. :P Too bad.
From the beginning (frame 1) press start for two frames then release start for two frames, and repeat over and over until the 550th frame. Best with a hex-editor.
Actually, never mind. Just clip out the first 600 frames of DeHackEd's run and use that.
http://tasvideos.org/750S.htmlEdit: I have no idea why it works.