Commentary for this run is available in the movie file as well as subtitles in the Temp encode.

This is The Adventures of Batman and Robin on the Sega Genesis, based on the TV show of the game name (although mostly referred to as "Batman: The Animated Series"). It was developed by Clockwork Tortoise, a short lived American video game studio. The game is notable for having some off the most technically impressive graphics for it's time, and often is compared to visuals seen in the Demoscene.

There are three weapon types in this game that batman can throw, the red weapon type is for batarangs which has a spread ability, the Green weapon type is for bolas which don't have a spread ability but have the highest damage per bullet, and the Blue weapon type is for shuriken but is the weakest weapon in the game. The only notable feature of the shuriken is its fast recharge time, however it's small damage output makes it useless for this run, so we avoid it.

Weapon items spin around and occasionally change colors, when you pick up the same colored weapon you are currently holding, it's level increases by 1 and can be maxed out at 7. With the red weapon, it does the highest damage output if you can ensure all 3 bullets hit your target. Otherwise I will switch to the green weapon in some cases.

This stage starts us off with the red weapon on level one, we can immediately pick up an upgrade on the trashcans to get us to level 2, this will let us shoot 2 bat-arands rather than one.

You will see a combination of forward air kicks and downward air kicks. Sometimes I may go through a section using only downward kicks to position myself for something or to influence RNG.

Each stage will have checkpoints where we need to fight a wave of enemies to continue forward. These are activated when the screen is in the correct position. For the first wave, enemies will fall from the top until I defeat enough of them for the next wave to spawn, then I take care of the rest by using the skull powerup which is basically a bomb that kills everything on screen.

Important to remember that when reaching a checkpoint, the waves will not start until the rest of the screen is cleared, this is why I use the skull when going into the 2nd checkpoint.

I had also grabbed a charge powerup which gives us instant charge meter for our weapon, this is useful not only to shoot things at full power but also because charged shots have a quirk to them where they can hit enemies off screen.

The next checkpoint only needs less than 2 enemies on screen to move on, and I intentionally slow down to make one of the big enemies jump onto a ledge so he stays there and despawns by the time I reach the checkpoint. At this point we have leveled up to level 4 of the Red weapon which shoots one big batarang, but once we level it up again we will get our spread back.

Boss Fights in this game have slightly lower health on 1 player vs 2 player, however it's slower to deal with bosses on 1 player due to damage output being cut in half. For the first phase of the fight we want to wait until it moves to the middle of the screen, as when you get it's health low enough it'll start moving to the middle. This will save a bit of time from it moving back to place. For the 2nd phase I do a mix of melee attacks and air kicks as I am waiting for my weapon to charge up as it does so much damage. For the final phase we just shoot her until she goes away.

At the end of most levels batman will move to the left side of the screen to do a victory pose, I try to position him as close as possible to reduce the time it takes to reach it.

Not much to talk about in this area, other than for the copter section, the next wave of them will spawn after a very short span of time when the last ones spawned, and I can get reward items if I kill them before they start following me. I use this to get a charge drop so I can deal with them coming at both sides of the screen.

I also eventually fully level up the red weapon here and later switch to the green weapon for the next area

The green copters can immediately start following you so I try to take them out with shots. Harely will show up in two areas once I deal with the on screen copters.

When she shows up for the Crane section, she will move to the other side of the screen if I get too close to her, so I just stay in place and just shoot until she's down.

Here we have 2 checkpoints which just have balloons flying at us. These checkpoints are completely timed and it doesn't matter how fast we destroy balloons.

Later in the 2nd checkpoint I allow a copter to fly around me, while this may seem like it's for show, I'm also interested in the charge item it holds as I can use that in the following joker fight to deal some quick damage. Although right before I reach Joker I had to deal with another wave of copters right before entering which might be bad RNG.

Autoscroller, fun.

Not much to say about the majority of this area, however we do use a slightly faster method to shooting bullets by shooing on the ground followed immediately by jumping and shooting in the air. I didn't realize you could do this until I started working on this level and did not feel like going back to redo earlier levels as it would be a ton of redoing RNG manipulation.

The longest level in the game by far. I'll just write some key notes:

Rockets carry item drops and are determined on the frame they spawn.

I sometimes wait for the last possible frame to pick up a charge powerup to bring it into mini boss fights.

Skulls are used on occasion to deal with off screen enemies or mini bosses

every enemy spawn is timer based and doesn't always have to be immediately destroyed.

The present boxes can be destroyed instantly if you shoot it fast enough, each doll will have it's own hitbox and health, and will spawn one at a time. If you destroy the first doll that shows up on this present box you can destroy it instantly.

We can use some damage boosts from ceiling bomb thingies to gain a bit of distance and even make the screen move a bit faster.

The quick kill we do on the presents can also be done on the doll slinky enemies when they spawn off screen, and can be used to take care of the big ones at the end of this stage.

This cat has a weird thing where you can deal double damage when you use kick attacks, which is why fully charged shots seemingly do not do that much damage. It's very weird.

First checkpoint we need to destroy a certian amount of dolls, we can use a flying doll to get a skull drop to move on to the next wave where presents start to fall.

In the 2nd checkpoint I can use damage boosts from the floor to get up high enough to despawn other towers of dolls and save time having to deal with them. I was able to do this for 3 towers in total.

3rd checkpoint is also timer based and doesn't matter too much how fast we kill them. You also need to shoot directly at the doll chain itself to shrink it and not shoot the big doll as he takes no damage so long as he's holding the chain.

4th checkpoint we can quick kill the first two enemy spawns, but the 3rd one spawns immediately after the 2nd one dies and on the 4th one we can only quick kill one of their doll chains.

After the world becomes a trippy acid trip, we just try to do close range attacks on the giant doll making sure not to miss any shots.

There is a theoretic skip for this stage that has not been reproduced. RTA runner TopazDragoon39 somehow managed to end this stage early and go straight to the teapot table, but his game crashed for seemingly unrelated reasons. We are unsure if this is reproducable but for now we will continue this level like normal.

While most of the spawns here are timer based, the first 3 enemies are not, so we have to take care of them as soon as possible. The level ends after we deal with 43 enemies.

Straightforward level, near the middle we do a checkpoint skip that saves about 40 or so seconds. right before we reach the 3rd checkpoint we want to wait for a doll slinky to spawn, once it does we then try to move forward without despawning it, then off screen a teapot will show up and we just have to continue forward without despawning that one, then once the screen stops we have sucessfully skipped the checkpoint.

I later switch back to the Green weapon for the upcoming boss fight.

Mad hatter will rubber band back and forth from the player, but if we get him on the left side of the stage he can stay in place for us to whale on him. We switched to green for this fight as his hitbox is rather small and we can't land every shot on red.

This stage out of all stages is the one that I had the most frustration with due to how little it makes sense.

Basically the first 9 or so flying drone spawns will happen in the same order, and after that the game will eventually end once you destroyed a maximum number of them. However you can end it faster if you use RNG manipulation, because for some reason the game will randomly decide if certain enemy clears will count to level completion, and if it triggers 3 times, the level will end much faster. We also use skull drops to deal with some enemies instantly.

It's a little hard to explain but this video demonstrates how it sorta works. The one colored timer address needs to show green at least 3 times for the level to come to an end.

We can get a little damage boost from the tanks here as well as the steam making machine thingies in the 2nd half.

We heavily use skull drops here in order to minimize spawn timer pauses. I end the level by collecting a charge item right as I deal with the final enemy with a skull drop, that way I can bring the charge into the final boss

Using the charge, I can quickly deal with the first phase of the fight, then later just keep shooting at him. A drone unfortunately kept getting in my way and ate up some of my shots, but it wasn't a huge time loss as it always roams to the player and I needed to use the read weapon for the higher damage output, and because I needed to get close to ensure all the shots hit the target.

So I will admit this run isn't perfect. There is a lot that can be improved on a 2nd attempt.

I could utilize the faster weapon fire rate that we saw in level 2-1. I also could put more time into item drops in levels 2-2, as the 2 player wip was able to deal with a mid boss by spawning 4 skulls and 2 charge items, which is really tight and hard to do on 1 player. But I could only do 1 skull drop and one charge drop.

Despite this, I believe I did the best I could with what I could reasonably work with, and I'm overall happy with the final result.

Massive shoutouts to a couple of people:

Archanfel and Truncated, both of which have been working on the 2 player category for this game and have been very helpful providing some advice on certain areas of the game.

feos and r57shell, both who put a ton of work in the lua scripts for this game over the years.

RTA runners for the game, like TopazDragoon39, A-Frame, Cypherin, and many others.

Thank you all so much for the work you all put into this game, and offering me advice whenever I had questions.

nymx: Claiming for judging.

nymx: There is one thing that I've noticed about EZGames69...he knows how to pick the right game to attract the community. Having really good music, great animation, tactful strategies, and the ability to entertain...this one matches up to the level that I believe could eventually be classified as "Stars".

With well over 5 minutes cut from the human WR , EZGames69 demonstrates excellent execution with perfect timing of strategies that eliminates his enemies so quickly that you wonder where the attack came from. In fact, there are spots that I thought "player deaths" were introduced to cut time...but nope! EZGames69 just goes right up to the brink of death and emerges as the victor! He also has notable moments, when it comes to the Boss fights, as they are destroyed without time waste. But! What kept me glued to the movie...was the ability to cut down the stopping points in the auto-scroller scenes, especially the long scene in the middle of the game. Side-by-side comparison, against the WR, really shows some impressive advancements that you really can't tell without watching for yourself. It was like watching a race and wondering how could you inch even further ahead. Additionally, that scene had some moments that seem to be tough...but EZGames69 decides to play chicken with a large number of missiles, allowing for them to chase each other and die off all by themselves.

You demonstrated excellent effort here. Having a movie with more re-records than the total frame count says that you weren't going to let a frame get by. I congratulate you on this effort, as I'm proud to be the judge of such a fine submission.

Happily Accepting!

feos: Processing...