Gargoyle's Quest: Ghosts 'n Goblins, known as Red Arremer: Makaimura Gaiden in Japan, is an action-adventure/platformer game for the Gameboy. It was developed by Capcom, released on May 2, 1990 in Japan. This game stars Red Arremer (known as Firebrand in the West), who goes off into the Ghoul Realm to defeat the King of Destruction, Breager.
RNG Manipulation
This game has an overworld, and within this overworld random encounters can occur. From what I’ve found, it appears that the game has a 32 bit LFSR for its RNG, which for the overworld seems to advance every 8 steps. But it doesn’t stop there: for these random encounters, the game doesn’t just use one of the RNG bytes, no that would be too easy, the game also uses a frame counter for these encounters. Essentially, the game adds the second RNG byte with this frame counter, then does a bitwise AND by 3, and if the result is 0, an encounter occurs (so ¼ chance for an encounter). This does end up with a fatal flaw, if going to a tile causes an encounter, delaying movement by 1 frame will essentially guarantee no encounter takes, which this movie takes advantage of a bit.
Clipping & Zipping
So for whatever reason, if you hold Left+Right on a wall, you can clip into a wall and if you do it for longer you eventually end up just zipping (and this also ends up glitching the level layout). Clips aren’t always used for zips though; they can simply be used to clip upwards/downwards a block, although this is usually used to get up 1 block higher rather than lower. This the main improvement of this TAS, as all previous TASes appear to have forgone this glitch (under the guise of “entertainment,” yet the currently published movie managed to get auto-placed in Vault, only reason it’s in Moons now is because it’s simply not vaultable). There are some limitations that do have to be considered for this glitch though.
You cannot zip leftwards. Only rightwards.
Upwards zips are possible, but they require damage taken (and of course the damage source positioned in the right place).
Zips can cause the map to glitch out to the point where you end up just becoming stuck.
Flying and Wall Climbing Tricks
To quote the previous submission:
-When flying, the most efficient way to conserve wing power is to periodically stop flying, fall for exactly three frames, and then start flying again. If you do this the right number of times, you will travel farther than you would by letting your wing power run out normally. This is used multiple times throughout the run to cross large gaps and get Firebrand to affix himself higher up on walls than he would have normally.
-If you try jumping off a wall while holding in the direction of the wall, you temporarily lose control of Firebrand while he jumps up. If, however, you jump off a wall without holding the D-Pad, or while holding the opposite direction of the wall, you never lose control of Firebrand and can immediately pull him back towards the wall. This allows you to climb up walls MUCH more efficiently. By my own research, the most efficient climb pattern is to keep rapidly jumping off, getting back on, jumping off... (once every 9 frames.)
These are used extensively throughout the run.
Stage by stage comments
Stage 1 (Demon Portal)
Zip to the end then quickly defeat the boss. Not much to say. I do let myself get myself hit by the boss right after firing the final blow, which ends up playing the victory fanfare with the damage sprite, a bit humorous.
Overworld
Point A to Point B with a mandatory fight. Yawn.
Bridge 1
Zip
Stage 2 (Tower)
So to get to the boss, I essentially need to get to the top left corner of the map. This does seem like a problem since I can’t zip leftwards. However, I can use an upwards zip to glitch the map so I can simply get to the outside of the tower from the left side. Then it’s just climb the tower to the top then zip inside the boss room. The boss was a bit faster than the published TAS (mostly due to being able to kill the top-left eye without needing to retreat for attacks).
Bridge 2
Can’t zip this time, got to walk back normally.
Tunnel 1
Zip isn’t as good as I’d like due to an enemy, but minor really.
Bridge 3
Copy paste Bridge 1 inputs literally
Bridge 4
Some zips are done, but nothing too major can be done with them sadly.
Stage 3 (Castle)
Same zip is done 6 times, then I climb up the wall and fly off in order to reach the boss. I switch to my recently obtained Block Buster then quickly defeat the boss.
Stage 4 (Desert)
I hate this stage, you can’t do any zips early on as the map glitches in a way that makes it impossible to finish the stage. Most of the stage is zipless, until the end where I use a minor zip to get down to the boss room.
Overworld/Town/Cave
Point A to Point B with some enemies and boring exposition. I switch to the Claw as soon as I can.
Bridge 5
Zip
Tunnel 2
I do a minor zip in one of the blocks to glitch the map slightly, creating a hole in the ceiling I can climb through then zip to the end.
Stage 5 (Castle 2)
Some zips then I go down to the boss room. To note, this boss can only be hurt with the Block Buster, so I switch to it for this fight. I need this later anyways so this works out.
Bridge 6
There isn’t much to zip through, the best I have is the top portion of the map.
Stage 6 (Castle 3)
Like the desert stage, zipping usually will end up glitching the map to the point you can’t complete the stage. This goes for both upwards and rightwards zips. Although luckily, it only happens for major zips, so minor zips are okay (which ends up useful for one section). I end up not needing to switch to the Claw and back for this stage due to clipping through the beginning spikes, although this is at the cost of some health. Due to the amount of damage timesave this stage has, I would either need to forgo one another damage timesave, or take a detour to grab the heart. Turns out that grabbing the heart ends up costing the least amount of time, so I do that.
Final Boss
This guy is a joke, 9 hits with the Darkfire and he’s defeated. I get ground to the spikes once I fire the last hit to avoid some lag. As an interesting note, his arms and upper head appear red, with the rest of his body green. This is really just a quirk with how the GBC colors DMG games. The GBC gives the background a different palette than sprites (for this game, it’s green for the background and red for the sprites). So most of this boss is actually just part of the background, with the rest composing of sprites. You might also notice that the sprites seem to sometimes disappear. This is really just due the GB’s 10 sprite per line limit, which ends up easily going over due to the absurd amount of sprites on the boss (4 sprites per arm and 6 sprites for the head).
I do feel that this run is different enough from the currently published run that they can be published side by side, but the published run is in danger of falling into Vault with its entertainment rating, so for the moment, I'm going to have this run obsolete [2033] GB Gargoyle's Quest: Ghosts'n Goblins "no zips" by Jigwally in 22:38.72. This in no way precludes a future run avoiding the left-right glitch from being published as a separate branch if it qualifies for Moons on its own merits.
As for the tier, though feedback is mostly positive for this run, there are a few vocal voices speaking out against it. Their arguments are very valid, but it feels like a Moon run to me. Even with zips, there is variety in the gameplay and the game is just the right amount of broken, where you can still kind of understand what's going on, but know what's happening is not supposed to happen even with no knowledge of the game.
Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 2227
Location: Georgia, USA
That was quite different from the previous run! I liked the previous run, and this is actually a bit of a letdown on entertainment for the most part. But I can't fault you for going with speed here. The glitched boss graphics would be funnier if they looked anything like what they should normally do, but they're full on unrecognizable.
Yes vote for destroying the game.
... but if you find a zip glitch in the NES sequel game, then we may have to fight about it ;-) I helped out with that run, and it means more to me.
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically.
Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.)
Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html)
Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature!
Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
I voted No. I was a proponent of not using the left+right glitch in the previous run, because I find it quite repetitive, and I think this game is entertaining enough as a platformer on its own. Not to mention the large amount of Japanese text in this TAS renders it mostly incomprehensible. I'm still glad to see this run made, though, since there's no reason not to publish it in the Vault.
YoungJ1997lol wrote:
Normally i would say Yes, but thennI thought "its not the same hack" so ill stick with meh.
I think this game is entertaining enough as a platformer on its own.
Honestly would believe that... but sadly it's objectively not true. The previous TAS was pre-vault, and when Vault came around, it got automatically placed in there due to its abysmal ratings. Although that was actually a mistake since it wasn't vaultable in the first place so it was replaced into Moons.
I guess to be clear, I believe this movie should obsolete the previous movies, any idea about some zips and zipless branch separation can't really be done just due to zipless not really worthy of its own branch due to its ratings.
Also for the JPN choice, I really didn't think there was much reason to use the English version. Story is boring imo, and I found out when making this that were some cases of religious symbols being cut out of the Western versions (for obvious reasons). The game is just going to Vault anyways so who cares anyways lol.
I really don't understand the complaints here, imo the glitches add some spice to the run and are enjoyable to watch. Yes vote.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11495
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Watched both and I think the clipping makes this movie worse. The current run is kinda slow paced and shaky, but it's still a great game for this "primitive" platform, there's a lot of variety in gameplay, and it's easy to follow. With clipping that loops level layouts, it either seemingly never progresses or just breaks everything beyond recognition, turning all the complex gameplay into "zip zip zip win", pretty much "zip right for justice".
There's definitely content to miss if this obsoletes the current run, even if it's borderline. This run, clearly Vault IMO. Voted No.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Are you sure this updated movie file has the right cycle count? The sync settings were not changed to account for cgb in gba handling being changed from 2.5.1 to 2.5.2, so I'm suspecting the cycle count was off simply because the wrong bios was used.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11495
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
False alarm. Restored.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
