Hello everyone. Here is my latest run for Lost World: Jurassic Park on the Playstation, made in Bizhawk 2.3, but it should sync in any build past 1.13.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park is a 2.5D platformer/action game. In it, you play a series of characters including some iconic dinosaurs. The order you play characters is set.
There are different difficulties in this game. As far as I can tell, the only difference between difficulties is the number of lives you start with, so I just chose the difficulty that didn't require me to go into the options menu.
As always, here's a link to the TAStudio file [dead link removed] from when I was making the movie.] I didn't make a huge effort to organize it, but it may be interesting for people who want to see the iterations and different things I tried.
Since you play as five different characters, they each have their own unique set of moves (except the two humans who have the exact same move set). The mechanics for each of the characters lead to very different strategies and playstyles, so it would be best to go through character by character.
Compy
For the most part compy levels are pretty straightforward. Basically run right and jump to avoid obstacles. Still, there are some mechanics that are worth talking about.
Basic moves
Compy has a jump and a few attacks, which all move at the exact same speed. Jump height is not controllable. This leads to points where straight jumps will overshoot the platforms you're aiming for.
Before compy gets moving, there is a short startup animation, basically a few frames before you start accelerating. Jumping at first frame of the level will get you moving immediately (although sometimes doing that will cause you to land where you don't want to)
Whenever compy comes into contact with enemies, it plays a stunned animation which stops it in place. Attacking in the air will let you go through an enemy hitbox without slowing down.
Mid-air jump
The only technique I use in these levels that's not intended is the mid-air jump. Every move that compy has besides the jump are supposed to travel across the ground. Sometimes you can use them to throw yourself off a cliff, though. With the circle attack in particular, they really expected it to only be a ground move, to the point where when the animation ends, the game thinks you're still on the ground, even if you're falling. If you use the move near a drop, you'll actually see it falling faster to stay near the ground sometimes. Jumping in midair will reset your falling speed, essentially making that point the new falling start point. The compy has a couple of places where it has to descend a pretty far distance. You're expected to move down from platform to platform carefully.
Hunter
For some reason, if you decide to shoot up then right while simultaneously trying to change lanes in midair, the game allows you to fly. Human levels become all about optimally using this glitch. It moves faster than any of his moves, and allows you to ignore some obstacles, turning what may have been a more twisty road into a direct path from point A to B.
It's kind of funny. Part of the reason I decided to start TASing this game in the first place is I wanted to play around with the grappling hook moves in human levels. Guess what.
Raptor
Now this was fun to do. Raptor moves quick and has a lot of movement choices which allow for advantages when aiming for speed.
Downward attack
When you decide to attack in the air, raptor will immediately start diving toward the ground. This happens no matter what point in the jump you are, which means raptor is the only character where I have a little more control over where I land after jumping.
Rolls
If you decide to roll immediately from a stop, raptor will roll a little faster than running speed, then stop moving forward as it transitions to standing.
If you roll when already moving, raptor will do an extremely quick roll, somewhere between 1.5 and 2 times as fast as running, then when it stands it'll continue to travel forward. After you reach a certain point in the animation, you can decide to stop in place rather than continue moving forward.
The fastest way to transtion from standing to moving is to jump, then at first opportunity do a down attack. After that, you can do the faster version of the roll rather than the slower version.
T-rex
T-rex levels were challenging, but less fun to work on. Basically, the biggest problem is that taking damage in these levels is inevitable. There is really no way to dodge every attack that comes at you. You can very often save more time by getting good enemy behavior than you can from using the fastest movement technique. Also t-rex loses health fast. I knew before going into these levels that avoiding eating was not going to be an option. Luckily, if you're forced to grab an enemy with your mouth, eating is the fastest way to get moving again, so I can feel a little less guilty about it.
Movement
T-rex's attacks move faster than running speed but have a pause on the front and end of the animations that make them slower than just running. Some moves will cancel the part of the animation in other moves that cause the slow down. Jump basically cancels the end animation on every move except for jumps. The bite attack cancels the end animation of the jump, which is why the fastest way to move if nothing gets in your way is to alternate jump and bite. It only moves slightly faster than running, though, so if I have to start running to get better enemy behavior, I'm not losing that much time.
Damage boost
It's funny that the largest and heaviest character is the only one can be propelled at high speeds by enemies. Damage boosting is another reason I knew that I was going to lose a lot of health in these levels. On other dinos, to boost, t-rex has to get hit from the front, and then jump over them to get hit from the rear with a kind of specific timing. Just getting hit from behind is not enough.
Once enemies get rockets, I have a lot more opportunities to get thrown forward. There's still a specific area and possibly a specific angle t-rex has to get hit at to be sent forward. One thing I haven't mentioned yet, enemies do not run out. That means that, spawning point, what and when they decide to fire, and the angle they fire at can be manipulated to some extent (though not to the level that I would like. They seem to decide most of this stuff pretty far in advance, except for the rocket angle, but even that is small variations.)
One last thing.
Once you start the eating animation, your health will be refilled even if you're interrupted out of it. If you're lucky, that'll allow you to take a hit that would have otherwise killed you, but as this video demonstrates, even if you are killed while eating, your health still gets refilled.
Hunted
Since she has the same move set as hunter, the levels for hunted go in pretty much the same way. The difference is she has a boss fight at the end of her levels, so I have to think about optimizing weapon damage.
Weapon damage
There is a limitted number of weapons hunted has access to.
The first from the purple pickups is a flare. This distracts t-rexes and does no damage.
The second from orange pickups is the rocket. This does 15 damage per hit, but fires every 16-18 frame, even when using the rapid fire glitch, which means that by themselves they are slower DPS than the default weapon.
The third with the cross hair pickup is the machine gun. This does 3 damage every 2-3 frames.
The fourth, which can only be picked up in the last level, is the flame thrower. This also does 2-3 damage per frame. It goes back and forth between flame thrower and machine gun which does damage fastest on their own.
The last, with the blue pickup is the time bomb. These do about 27 damage a hit, but fire really slow. Also, their damage radius is incredibly small, to the point where they will often not do any damage, even when right at the t-rex's feet.
The flamethrower will continue to do damage for a long time after you stop firing, also if you switch to rockets on the frame they were going to fire if you had kept the rockets selected, they will still fire. That means I can switch to rockets and still have the flamethrower doing damage on those frames.
After I ran out of rockets, I tried to switch back and forth between machine gun and flamethrower such that as often as possible I was doing 6 damage a pop, which means both guns were doing damage simultaneously.
That's about it. I hope you enjoy the movie. I still think this is a decent game. It's definitely got its problems, but there's some fun to be had.
feos: I've been following the subtitles and the submission text while watching the movie, and everything seems to make sense and actually be what it's said to be.
The game has some gameplay variation, but aside from a few segments they are still quite repetitive. Controls don't allow for too much variety either: you can only move back or forward, and the movie mostly just goes right, with occasional jumps/attacks/damage boosts. Even the firing glitch quickly gets old, despite of how ridiculous it is. There was almost no feedback, and I personally consider this movie a borderline case. But due to low action to length ratio, I think it leans towards the Vault. Otherwise, accepting,
arkiandruski: stand by..
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: We don't have to assign tiers to every single submission we judge anymore, and this one is standard eligible, so setting back to accepted!
