I wasn't sure at first whether or not this was a good game to do. Having watched the previously cancelled 1p run of the game. It seemed pretty bleak that I should ever consider doing this run, but I enjoyed the game a lot when I was younger and I always wondered for a long time why a 2p run was never done. After considering that I thought why can't I fill the gap. The first moments of running it, I didn't think this was going to work out until I found a jumping glitch that enables either player to travel triple the height of what there normally capable of doing. The greatest piece of advice I recieved for the run was from Nitsuja when he said that I should the autohold feature. This never would have been possible on previous versions of GENS.
- One person controls two characters
- Aims for fastest time
- Abuses programming errors
- Takes damage to save time
- Uses left+right movement
The levels end when the trailing player touches the end point of the screen so its important that the leading player does everything in their power to help the trailing player maintain there speed so I use a magic cape jump to deal with enemies and obstacles. Although its not always that simple because sometimes the other players cape stuns the other person, leading to a significant delay. There also other complications such as the enemy recovering before the trailing player can run past them. The magic cape jump does lose speed a little, but usually not enough to trail behind the other player. Donald always starts ahead of Mickey in the range of 10-20 frames, more often than not it 20 frames.
World 1: For the jumping glitch to work you just need something thats springy that will propel that player twice there normal jumping height. Its frame specific but its more than replicatable and is risk free if you jump late. Tapping the button for one frame at the exact moment will cause the player to propel twice the height, holding the button for two frames will allow the player to go triple the normal height. Holding the button any longer will allow the player to go slightly higher, but it will cause the floaty effect that a normal jump would cause and is entirley useless throughout the game. I also use left+right movement to pass through the eagle, but that was the only use it had in the game.
As soon as a player is in crawling animation and is under a tunnel, the game puts the character into auto pilot so doing any kind of fast crawl cancel is not possible. Crouch running under high up tunnels is infinitley faster than normal crawling the best timing I found for doing it was down for six frames and letting go for three frames and then iterating the process.
World 2 :
The Wild West level is by a country mile the hardest level in the game to do, as its a vertical climbing stage where nearly every enemy on the screen causes either players problems espeacially during climbing animations. A third of the re-record count was taken up by this level alone. The rope glitch was a sweet find, it happens becuase the rope is fully unwinded before the screen has caught up with the current on screen player. Only one player was able to reach the ledge first time after performing it, so the other player needed to wait until the other player was high enough to reach the ledge and then touch the rope themselves, while still facing the correct direction while performing it. The drawback to doing it is that no player will be able to hand down any rope until either player takes damage or dies. The next glitch was legendry and it hard to properly explain until you see it yourself. When performing the magic cape move in midair it is briefly assumed that when the player is in their finishing stance that they're standing on the ground, but its not possible to jump during this process because the falling animation imeadiatley kicks in preventing them from jumping again, but this can be abuses if the other player is standing in the right place above them becuase its assumed that they are able to stand on top of them and therefore they can jump. When the help speech bubble appears, the game is confused becuase it thinks a fully formed rope exists and pulls them up to the previous screen coordinates of the last rope position.
The glitch still exists in the clouds and would have been annoyingly activated if I jumped a frame later on my second jump for either characer, I did find one cool shortcut for it though, but the glitch was lost as soon as the Mickey casts the "Alakazam" trick after the boss battle.
World 3:
left right swimming saves roughly four to five seconds during vertical accents.
Before I get hit by the starfish in the Sunken Ship level I go into crawling animation before I get hit to avoid the normal damage animation.
World 4:
I thought at first what I did was a sequence break, but it turns out after all these years that the Christmas Tree level was nothing more than a secret level, but I did use a shortcut that saves 20 seconds. Candy Land level is my favourite level in the whole game.
World 5:
I seriously want to kill anyone who ever worked on the game for producing such a lame and tedious second level namely the Mystery Door level. You are made to do various sections from previous worlds and you can't avoid them, All the gameFAQS where wrong on this level as they said that you have to choose the right door to advance to the last level or face doing a previous level. It doesn't matter what door you choose first as it will always be the swimming level and if you choose the same door again you'll have to do the level all over again. The second door will always be the Magic Carpet level, then the Diamond Mine level, then the previously skipped Christmas Tree level and finally the Magican's hall.
The last level seemed to lag a lot which was somewhat annoying. The bosses in the are barely worth mentioning a whimper becuase it easy to optimize the first frame of opertunity becuase the cape has a long time damage period and large attack radius.
Truncated: This has taken a while, will try to reach a desicion within a week.
Truncated: After discussing this some, my verdict is Reject. Many levels have long streches of mindless running, with nothing interesting happening. The water levels are the worst. The only fun parts are the high jumps in the first level and the rope glitching later, but overall I don't think there's enough going on to make this interesting, and nifboy had it right when he cancelled his movie of this game with the words "I picked an awful, awful game to even try to run".