Jumpin' Kid: Jack to Mame no Ki Monogatari (ジャンピン・キッド ジャックと豆の木ものがたり, "Jumping Kid: The Tale of Jack and the Beanstalk") is a variation of the famous fairy tale, Jack and the Beanstalk. It is a challenging platform game that plays somehow similar to Mega Man but lays heavy stress on vertically platforming.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: FCEUX 2.2.2
- Aims for fastest time
- Takes samage to save time
- Abuses programming errors in the game
- Manipulates luck
The game has warps to skip or lead to whole alternate routes of some levels by beating certain bonus stages.
Some levels also have small alternate paths in them.
However, none of these could save time as it would take too much time to use any of them.
So I just take the "default route", which happens to be "warpless".
The game is known to be very frustrating in normal gameplay. Jack's jumping is slow, inflexible and easy to miss the platforms, despite his large collision box. Enemies are hard to dodge as they can't be killed without some time-limited power-ups but only temporarily stunned, and respawn very quickly. The non-time-limited power-ups, Beans that improve Jack's attack and Springs that improve his jumping height are easily fully lost as a result of getting hurt by anything (except the weird "yoyo" obstacles hanging from the ceilings of the castle). In addition, they require to kill certain different groups of enemies in different stages to be dropped at all.
Most stages in the game are vertical scrollers. For some reasons, both of Jack's Y position related to the screen and that of the vertical scrolling can vary within some ranges even when Jack has landed on the same platforms, which can affect how long it takes between Jack's jumps and sometimes whether Jack can make a jump up to the higher platform or not.
The jumping/falling mechanism is somehow weird on its own as when Jack falls down past the height of his previous foothold,
his horizontal speed will immediately be clamped into some small value. Plus how the game handles the subpixels in a strange way, it is usually slower to make jumps when going left or right, but there are rare cases where jumps can be faster.
The attack mechanism is even weirder in a way that Jack can only fire "the second bullet" if he has collected and been holding (not lost due to getting hit) 1 or more Beans, which is the only bullet of the maximum two that can be aimed diagonally up at Bean Power Level 2 (max).
This makes it difficult to attack enemies coming from above and requires careful planning for the bullets' usage that sometimes "the first bullet" has to be fired at air in order to let "the second bullet" be rapid-fire-able.
The annoyances above are all handled and optimized carefully in the run.
Special thanks to
mtvf1 for the Nicovideo encode.
Memory: Optimization seems good despite the weird mechanics.
The TAS felt fairly generic to me. It had a decent pace but there was nothing really unique about it. Although there was some positive reception, there was also some fairly negative reception and one person I asked to take a look told me they outright zoned out after a minute. It feels fairly in line with Vault entertainment standards so that is where it should go.
Accepting to Vault.
