This is a TAS that chooses to forgo the OoB-like glitch present in the
previous submission which I've set the branch name to GEG (though this may not be the appropriate branch name).
Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.8
- Aims for fastest completion
- Glitch abuse
The City in the year 1989
From the very start, I press R for one frame and a vertical direction for two. This prevents the screen from scrolling and is the main strategy used for lag reduction, which is a big issue in this game. It allows us to shoot most enemies before they appear on screen which is still doable without the glitch, it just prevents as many lag frames as possible. In this first level, there are only a couple lag frames and these are from the beer bottle collectibles scattered around the level. I try to collect as many as possible that are along the way, without needing to backtrack.
Nothing notable really happens in the sewer section. Ladders can be jumped up which is much faster than just climbing. This particular ladder was quite interesting because you could clip through the block to the right of the ladder, though this didn't help at all.
Feudal Japan
First, the item immediately at the start is jumped over as this briefly slows down McMike. There are a couple of spots through the overworld portion of the level where he takes damage and this seems unavoidable, however no time is lost because of it.
The underground is also fairly uneventful. There is one spot near the start where I was able to double jump, saving some time. This was the furthest across the screen I was able to get which led to a large amount of unavoidable lag frames. Large amounts of lag frames crop up again because of enemies and beer bottles in the following underground areas
The City, September 2030
The final level is a mix of the previous two, combining both overworld and underground sections. It also has the most lag frames which I was unable to remove.
At the end, there are two bars, both of which can be seen as endings, however this TAS chooses to enter the bar that I guess is the 'good ending', unlike the other bar which the
RTA wr enters
Potential improvements
The biggest and most obvious improvement would be minimising lag frames. Movement should be optial though you can never be 100% sure. It could also be decided that the TAS should end in the 'bad ending' bar which would save a couple hundred frames though I don't remember the exact amount.
ThunderAxe31: I wanted to make sure that this movie doesn't need the "warpless" label, so I asked the author to check if the
currently published is actually using some kind of intended warping system. After some experiments, I've come to the conclusion that that is in fact a glitch, as it was thought from the start. So this movie still doesn't need the "warpless label".
There are two game versions released by the original developer, and it seems that the one used here is the fastest, currently.
The execution is good and the game is beaten while avoiding major skip glitches. Accepting as a new branch.
