Here it is,
AngerFist's second and
Adelikat's first Mega Man run.
This run is 31 minutes, 34 seconds. That makes it 57 seconds faster than
Kyrsimys's currently published run.
The creators behind Mega Man 6 did a pretty good job covering glitches due to you don't have the robot dog itself: Rush Jet. Instead, you'll be transformed with Rush Jet whenever you want to reach a high ledge etc. So we had absolutely no ability to check for glitches or major tricks because we obviously did not have the Magnet Beam (Mega Man), Item 1, 2 and 3 ( Mega Man 2), Rush Jet (Mega Man 3), Balloon Adaptor (Mega Man 4) or Super Arrow (Mega Man 5). The reason I'm mentioning those tools is because they help you a lot to speed things up, in our case, we had no such thing besides sliding.
Speaking of sliding, even here you have to wait (depending on the situation) 1―2 frames before you can slide, which is very frustrating. So don't get too disappointed because we simply did not have the opportunity or the ability to include a single significant glitch or a trick. The only trick that has been so far discovered is by Baxter during when you are climbing on a ladder. Using his trick (also depends on the situation), you can save between 1―3 frames on every ladder. Luckily, he discovered it halfway through our run so that's why you won't be seeing me using his trick for the first half of the run. A minor important note, we worked on this from December the 16th to January the 16th so it took us exactly a month to complete this run.
I played all the stages and my superb team-mate Adelikat took care of all the bosses. After the first boss, Adelikat was approximately 30 frames behind and I was having doubts whether he could actually be a awesome Boss Assassin (not that I'm a perfect player myself).
He then redid the first fight and saved about 1 frame. Then he brutally crushed all my doubts I had over him, when he fought Plant Man and was done, he replied to me: "Muhahahaha". From then on, I knew he had turned into a Boss Killing Freak! Doubt me? Watch how he saves nearly 450 frames on the Mr.X 3 battle and all other boss fights. Adelikat, it was truly an honor working with you as you handled every bosses magnificently and I could not be more pleased with your performance and your evident dedication and devotion to our project. Respect!
Before we started working on this run, We swear to God that we had no great expectation to improve Kyrsimys run by more than 10―15 seconds. So we where pretty stunned when we gained 57 seconds for the whole run because, as I have said earlier several times, Kyrsimys did a very strong, solid and good run (note that he used Famtasia, which is much harder than using FCEU). In overall, we are actually pleased with our run and we really hope you will enjoy the run despite knowing the above mentioned facts about Mega Man 6.
I would also like to take this opportunity of thanking
Bisqwit who helped me checking the first stage if everything were ok and
Walker_Boh and
Baxter for always showing genuine interest in our run and support and of course Kyrsimys, who helped us a few times with important questions and such.
This was my first joint effort on a TAS.
My primary role in this was to defeat all bosses, which turned out to be no light task at all! Especially for someone who has never attempted to TAS a Megaman game. Some improvements merely involved more accurate shooting, taking advantage of FCEU's frame count and frame advance features. Interestingly, boss placement and the last shot is different than any other megaman game. Ideally the boss should be on the far left or right side of the screen in order to minimize lag. In addition Megaman must remain motionless until some of the debris exits the screen, and then he should run to the center.
So where did we managed to save 57 seconds?
- Some Bosses were luck manipulated to get a significantly faster routine.
- Major points of lag were elimated throughout the run.
- A lot of time was also saved by minimizing weapons changes. As with everything in Mega Man 6, weapon changing is very slow (at least 116 frames). Many times it was faster to use the mega buster or a suboptimal weapon rather than switch to a better one. This accounts for a large segment of the improvments.
*SPOILERS*
Some of the largest chunks of improvement came from using more optimal weapons for some DR. X and Dr. Wily bosses, most notably Wily himself (yeah, you were shocked that it turned out to be wily afterall huh!)
I would also like to thank the above mentioned folks and all the people who gave encouragement throughout the run.
I would also like to thank Angerfist who I enjoyed working with very much.
The usual stuff:
- Aims for fastest time
- Manipulates luck
- Takes damage to save time.
- Emulator: FCEU-0.98.12-blip
- Abused programming errors (lol, only glitch here is the ladder glitch).
Bisqwit: Having closely monitored the progress during the
making of this movie, I'll naturally accept this movie.