Clever. Have you tried collecting Mijinion's weapon to fight High Max? I think that was one of he's weaknesses, other one being Turtloid's weapon, but I could be wrong.
I'm not so sure about Commander Yammark's portal... sure, the stage is short, but the secondary area is slow to navigate.
Another thing that bugs me about this route is that you'll be trading off the invulnerability glitch, which will bite you back since it'll both slow you down a bit and create lots of lag when using Zero, specifically in Gate 1.
With tools, I don't think Gate two would be unfeasible using X, but not being able to do the in-stage skips might cost you too much time in the end, unless you figure out something nice to get through anyway. You also need to have High Max doing his desperation move, which might prove difficult to fight against with charged Yammark's weapon. That is, unless your current way happens to be faster there, too.
Hyper Dash might work if it didn't require any leveling, which takes way too much time, especially in a TAS.
Yammark might work for Zero thanks to the invincibility glitch if it wasn't so much longer than Mijinion. Too bad.
Are you sure not using Z-buster in the High Max fight is faster? The difference between the damage they do is huge.
Other than that, looks very nice. Turloid's level went really smoothly this time around in comparison to the previous versions.
You know, I've had faster non-assisted High Max battles. :/ What you need to do is manipulate High Max to do only three routines: The three small spheres (which are unavoidable in the sense he'll do them eventually), then the big ball punch move (use Ensuizan to take his shield off, then shoot him with your buster. Does double the damage in comparison to Ensuizan), repeat until he can do his desperation move (make sure he does that as soon as possible), then proceed to kill him like you did. Ensuizan does the most damage excl. buster.
It looked like in the YouTube video that you don't strike High Max on the first possible moment when he shoots the 3 spheres.
I'm yet to watch the rest, might edit this later.
About Gate 1... is it really necessary to get hit by the dog to do the third jump in that spike shaft? I do know that taking damage in the last rising lava corridor was just pointless; you can kill it with extended air Ensuizan from above.
In the Nightmare Mother fight you could've landed some extra hits. The normal jump-slash extends to the core, so you can hit it immediately and afterwards. Also when you managed to destroy the other core you made no attempt to hit the other one. Are you sure that's impossible?
When ascending the narrow ladder shafts, it might be faster to keep changing sides, not stick to the same side.
Not sure if I've said this before, but you are aware that you can steer your aerial dash up or down in Jet Stingray's bike segment, right? You could shorten the distance you drop between dashes with that. Was there a reason not to use it?
Other than that, looking great so far, especially the things you did in the Mushroom and Stingray fights. Edit: Meant Spider instead of Stingray, oops. Nothing wrong with Stingray but Spider was pretty sick.
Funny, because I'm pretty sure I did that without tools back in the day. Maybe it's my mind playing tricks on me, but... hmm, I was probably using the Paramite, then. Ah well.
On TD2: Is the meat truly necessary to kill the first paramite? I remember you can get it killed even without the meat... that or you didn't have to kill the paramite at all. It might've been possible to listen to the song while the bees sting you and still stay alive, although it's a close call. The lower meat sack is closer to your way, anyway.
On Temple Door 2: Wouldn't it be faster to just visit the lower level first and then the upper level, not upper-lower-upper? You don't really need to visit upper levels first.
On Temple Door 3: Wouldn't it be faster to start running at the very end? Standing up seems to take time.
Other than that, nice!
If only the edge of the screen was a little closer, you could make the sligs run to the mines... perhaps it's possible even now if you confuse them enough so the chase gets delayed?
At any rate, even if you do get to the other side, could you clear the game without the god form you get from Paramonia & Scrabania?
Are you sure you cannot confuse the AI enough to allow you to slip by the first Slig, seeing you don't have to kill the second one? There are lots of things you can do with the poor AI, and chanting is just one of the ways to manipulate it.
Has there been anything that required frame perfect input so far? It's looking good, but there hasn't been much that says "This is a TAS", if you catch my drift.
This would allow me to do a different stage instead, as soul body would cover the no-plasma issue for frost walrus' stage (it dominates the ice, and you can still fire normally while using it), but at the same time would slightly increase the amount of time that it takes to kill the split mushroom miniboss without frost tower/aiming laser.
Ah, but in this case, wouldn't it be faster to simply do the skip, seeing it was slower by 100 frames vs. Frost Tower kill when you factor in the time to take the foot parts, by this strategy you'll benefit from not doing Walrus first? :)
That is, unless you can get Mikwuyma's FT Colonel glitch working.
Firstly, getting the leg upgrade to perform the miniboss skip in split mushrooms stage actually turns out slower overall by about 200-400 frames. Right now I get the feeling I'm not going to find those frames elsewhere through using the leg upgrade, so I'll probably skip it after all, despite the fact I've already collected it.
That's bad news. The leg upgrade is quite useless (not to mention slow) save for the Mushroom skip. You could do the skip with the aid from the body parts, but picking that presents numerous problems, since the closest thing to a good route would be Spider-Owl-(Stingray?)-Beast-Dragoon to get the parts unless you can find a way to a) get a ride armor to the ledge where the capsule is or b) somehow glitch your way to the capsule. So far I have no knowledge how to pull either off, unfortunately.
The routes down sides would be that you need to fight more bosses without the recommended weapons and not having Rising Fire for Spider or Beast. While the body part would also save time in parts other than the Mushroom skip, the cost might be too much to pay. Also, getting the part itself probably takes more time than it takes to get the leg parts, so it's only a very slim possiblity that might work, if even that.
It's a bit of a shame that skip couldn't be used after all.
O_O
How did you damage Owl constantly before he went off screen? I had no idea you could do that. How do you do that?
The vids were fantastic. Simply fantastic.
One thing, though: Wouldn't it be faster to use charged shots on the cannons in the first part of Storm Owl? Seeing shooting normally seems to stop you and all...
The Beast miniboss fight makes you lose some time, because Plasma does more damage, can be fired first and probably so that it inflicts damage on all three pods. Not 100% sure about the last point, though. Not massive, but it's still relatively substantial considering it's a TAS and what you gain in the boss battles is likely not that much. Of course, I might be wrong.
One of the problems with trying to fight Owl with Stock Charges it he shields himself with the said orbs, although that problem is far less difficult to circumvent with tools.
I haven't timed the Owl vulnerability time but I think it's one second or close to that. Sadly, I think that particular move is unlocked only after he's health drops to half.
Personally, I'm going for the stock shot storing upgrade over the plasma upgrade. I've found almost every instance that the plasma is useful in outside of boss fights can be easily substituted with another weapon (in particular either 4 consecutive stock shots+charged rising fire or charged rising fire+normal shots).
I'm not too sure how much damage the plasma actually does to a boss or enemies, but I believe each stored shot does 2.5 damage, but doesn't pierce certain enemies/objects. The main object that this would be troublesome for is the ice in frost walrus' level, being that the normal charged shot and the plasma shot pierce them, but the stock shot doesn't. I don't however see this being too much of an issue, but time will tell, as there's a lot of ice to push through.
I looked into that a while ago, and I can say that Plasma Shot is probably the upgrade you want. Stock Charge is uselful against Dragoon & probably Stingray if you kill it with the buster, but you'll lose time against Owl, Walrus' ice cubes and Beast's mid-boss. The Plasma Shot is also useful on numerous other occasions (although quite the lot of them can be circumvented with special weapons like charged Ground Hunter and Twin Slash).
I'll remind you (in case you haven't read the stuff that happens over at SDA) that Owl loses its invincibility while it's blowing away the Wind Shredder orbs, which can be abused somewhat with the Plasma Shot. Not so useful if you're using the Stock Charge upgrade.
I suggest fighting Stingray before getting the Plasma Shot. because his stun from Frost Tower is so long, it might be beneficial to fight him without it, using full charge shots on him until the last hit, where Frost Tower would be okay. i say full charges because his stun time is the same for full charges and half charges. i say before Plasma Shot because the lingering blast might mess up the charge shot strategy.
If the plasma shot does 5/hit, and you're not able to fully charge one by the next opening (and there is a plasma orb there still), that orb will still give you a slight damage boost, putting your overall kill ability above the stock shot depending on how short his window of invincibility is.
There's a 3 ball limit on screen, so if he fires 3 ground hunters first then you'd be free from a ball staying on him, but it'd probably take longer for him to do that than for you to get in another hit.
The plasma residue does laughable damage (along the lines of 1 or something) and still triggers the full invincibility, so you don't want that.
If you don't have the Plasma Shot while you're fighting Stingray, it probably does the most damage if you alternate between fully and half-charged shots while changing the distance between yourself & Stingray to get that small bit of extra charging time for the full shot, unless the full shot's power is much greater than the half-charged's power.
FractalFusion wrote:
Cremator wrote:
You lost time by triggering the first portal sequence during a jump. Curiously enough you didn't do that again; was that intentional?
It doesn't waste time. The cursor thing just leaves Zero at the same time as if I stay on the ground.
Certainly didn't look like it, but OK. You probably know better (I never bothered actually timing it).
I figured out at what point whether the Enigma (and supposedly the shuttle) destroys the colony or not is decided. This is not a substitute for luck-manipulation.
To set it up, I quickly played through and beat Grizzly and Firefly, two of the four bosses with Enigma Parts*, then reduced the hours remaining to 7 (since there is a theory floating around that less hours means higher rate of success). I made various savestates and determined:
- The RNG does not change at all outside of the stages (including subscreen menus where you can change your weapon). That means that the only way to alter (and hence, luck-manipulate) the RNG is to do it in the stages, and before the stage ends.
- The RNG is altered by things like waiting, and (relative to waiting) jumping, during a stage.
- The success rate for the Enigma for two parts and 6 hours remaining was around 1/5. Same for 1 hour remaining. Though it is still possible that it is harder to do with, say, 13 hours remaining.
- I believe the RNG is global due to the following comment I found on YouTube:
Kristallranke (YouTube user) wrote:
It depends somehow on the savegame file. I was able to destroy the space station with the Enigma with only 2 of 4 parts and I repeated it several times! However, as soon as I saved my game directly before the enigma shot using another slot, it didn't succeed anymore even when using the old save game
In regards to a speedrun, do not reset, reload, retry immediately after every failed attempt to destroy the colony, because it is guaranteed to fail again. You should enter a stage before trying again.
Don't know if the PC version works differently, but I've done that in the way you're describing to be impossible. I used the F9 soft reset, though.
*)By the way, when testing this, I decided not to get more Enigma parts because the Kraken and Whale stages are a pain to play. Speaking of Kraken, the level design at the beginning is horrible. I never thought I would see a level where you could die before the word "Ready" disappears from your screen. That's a good thing, though, if you want to kill yourself off for a quick save after blowing the colony (this means you, Cremator :D).
I'm quite sure I tried that, and it was slower. I assume the game starts the counting on Kraken differently than in Grizzly's stage. It's been a while but since I thought Kraken to be faster and then scrapped it, it must've been slower.
I also think the starting animation lasts too long for it to be worthwile for a TAS to use it (which you would do if you're going for 100%, unless you can pull off a massive rank leveling before doing the normal levels or somehow get a different ruling for this site, which I doubt somewhat).
That's an interesting choice with the route so far, but it seemed to work out nicely. I was wondering how fast you could repeat the Ryuenjin move on the miniboss, though, since you can start damaging it right away and the damage is greater so it's hard to say if you can take back that time in Magma Dragoon's and Frost Walrus' levels.
You can skip the autoscroll after Mushroom's miniboss, but I don't know if that would actually save time as you need to scroll the screen back just a little bit to do that. Have you tested it, FractalFusion?
A note on the intro stage: Don't climb the ladders. You waste almost 2 seconds by using the ladders instead of wall jumping your way through it.
As for the colony: It shouldn't be too hard to figure out by first giving it some classic, manual input to get colony destroyed and slowly backtrack your way, changing from human input to frame perfect. When the colony no longer blows up, you've found at least one spot. It's a bit of a chore that way, though, but could a bot handle it, perhaps?
My guess is it's related to the frame when the second set of the cutscene (ie. failure/destrution cutscene) is loaded.
Also, is it truly faster to wait the first car to pull its... thing, whatever it is... back instead of getting damaged in a way that doesn't slow you down much; there are many ways to do that, fastest way probably being dashing under the roller and getting damaged while facing left to minimize the recovery animation and to get through the car quickly.
The fastest way to complete the game is probably to use Zero in a low% manner (unless you're doing it per internal clock instead of real time), because you can kill everything and every one really fast (even in the last level) with Zero. The non-assisted runs aren't doing that because it'd be too hard to get everything done correctly while having the bosses cooperating to ensure a fast completion, but that is not a problem if you have tools to aid you. I don't think having Black Zero to be faster either, because it takes quite some time to get the armor, and the 25% (or so) increase in damage and more health probably won't make up for the time you spend getting it (again, applies only if you are aiming for real time record, not the ingame timer. It's a bit complicated like that).
So... is the tool emulator available for the public somewhere? I've always wanted to try TASing these games, if only to check new strategies & other possibilities. I don't check TASVideos frequently, sorry if it's on some new hot topic around here I simply didn't notice.
Edit: Oh, you have a PSX sub-forum nowadays. When did that get there? :P