About the game

Orders from ground control are in and Daffy must leave for Mars immediately. His mission: stop Marvin the Martian and his army from destroying Earth! To do this, Daffy is equipped with three lives, a jet pack and an unlimited ray gun. Within four stages, Daffy will face robots, Marvin's dog K-9, Instant Martians and an odd assortment of cosmic creatures.

About the run

  • Takes damage to save time
  • Uses warps
  • Heavy glitch abuse
  • Genre: Action
  • Genre: Platform
Used emulator: VisualBoyAdvance v21-interim
This game was on my gameboy collection catridge along with many other gameboy games. My plan in the long run was to TAS most of the games I knew from that catridge and this is why I'm so addicted with gameboy games. I made a testrun in 2008 and uploaded it to Youtube, but nothing much else happened. mmbossman contacted me later about this testrun and eventually we began working on a new version. I found a whole ton of new glitches at that time, shaving more and more time from the route but the project was stuck when we didn't know how to manipulate luck in a certain room. Time went by and I found later on that you can manipulate luck by pausing the game, though there wasn't any progress on the run anymore. Scepheo contacted me about my WIP and wanted to assist me. The project still didn't gain much more progress, but he made some useful technical discoveries.
But today things have changed. I randomly played this game out of boredom and tried the Out-of-bounds glitch in stage 2. From the testings I made on the GB version, I expected the game to crash but it didn't on the SGB version. And within hours a whole new and faster route was found and the TAS was finally done, within 1 day! Yes, I had so much fun doing this and I couldn't stop. I like these kinds of projects where you aren't stuck at a certain place and where you know what to do. :D

Tricks

Movement

Shooting slows you down by 1 speed unit but it was still done at places where it didn't waste time.

Wacky cart in stage 1

When you land on the cart in the very first room and start hovering in mid-air, you can gain a lot of speed (96 speed units). If you reach the end of the room with this speed, you gain access to the 'superstages', a set of levels the programmers left in as a challenge for advanced players. You are given many lives and points (for HP refills and weapon changes). In this TAS, I slow down before the screen transition to enter room 2 instead of the superstages. I keep my speed status throughout the entire battle with K-9 (dog) to exit the room faster later on.

Out-of-bounds glitch

When you enter a new room, your sprite is often located slighlty offscreen but will be ejected into the screen on the next frame. You can stay offscreen by holding "down", but you can't directly go out of bounds. In order to go out of bounds, you need to exit the previous room with a jump and in the state of shooting. If done correctly, you can go out of bounds once you are falling downwards in the next room (while holding "down").
You need to wrap around the screen until you can reach glitched exit tiles. If you touch them, a black screen appears with the title "SUPER STAGE". You can skip this screen by moving right, before touching the tile. But it may send you to a different destination (like it was the case with the route in this TAS - I couldn't skip the SUPER STAGE screen in the first stage).
The destination of these glitched exits is often the next room. In the regular stages, the game will often freeze upon getting the SUPER STAGE screen. It froze on stage 1 when I did my testings on the GB version but it didn't when I tried the SGB version!

The "down" arrow key

It acts very strange sometimes. When holding this button, all of Daffy's momentum is stopped until you let go of it. This is also what enables the OoB glitch.

HP glitch

When moving to the left with 16 speed (maximum speed when walking), press "right" and "B" the next frame and your health points will increase by about 64 units.

Route

Stage 1, room 1

I use the cart to move faster. Shooting the enemies didn't waste any time.

Stage 1, room 2

Mini-boss battle! Shooting is faster than landing. I kept my superspeed status to exit the room faster. I couldn't place the dog more into the middle of the room as his movements can't be manipulated.

Stage 1, room 3

Stage 1, room 4

I'm using the OoB glitch here. It is the first place in this stage where it can be used to reach the glitch exit.

Glitched flying stage

Scepheo found a way to exit this room faster. Thanks! ;)

Glitched boss 2

There are two routes here. Both are basicly the same, but going to the left triggers another SUPER STAGE screen so I'm going right. This exit is very glitchy and may cause opcode errors but I got past it easily.

Glitched flying stage

Glitched superstage 4, room I don't know, boss, wtf

I'm glitching through many rooms here... Kinda funny! Then I land in a room of superstage 4 with a glitched boss that acts weird. He keeps falling from the top of the screen and doesn't get damaged by jumping. He acts as a gate to the next room...

Glitched boss 4

If it weren't for the solid floor in this room, I could have glitched further without delay. In order to defeat this boss, you need to kill the two things that pop up on each side of the screen occasionally. They are killed in 3 rounds...

Glitched boss 5

The 5th boss, Marvin, is a joke boss since in the regular game, you can't die in his boss room and he gets killed by one jump. There's no floor in this room though since it is glitched. All you have to do is kill Marvin in this room and survive 20 seconds until the Staff credits play, but it takes me 2 deaths. I have many lives left so I could have ended input early. But I thought that part would look sloppy if I had done this and it would have extended the encode. So I chose to end the input once you can see the first frame of the Staff credits.

Screenshot

I usually don't care about the screenshot, but this time I'd like to suggest these two:

Closing

Thanks to mmbossman, Scepheo, and others! Have fun!

Nach: This is one of those movies where one doesn't have a clue what's going on during most of it. It's done well, and well received. Accepting.


Editor, Expert player (2372)
Joined: 5/15/2007
Posts: 3940
Location: Germany
There is no forum topic for this game other than this submission topic. So I'm just going to post here about a possible improvement I found: After going to the SUPER STAGE (black screen), and then moving through the next room, you will land in this room: Instead of moving through this room, you can apparently press "right" and then on the next frame "left" to go to the next room. (The problem was that moving into a "next room tile" with leftward speed would bring up the long SUPERSTAGE black screen, whereas rightward speed would not. By using the input I described above, you can make the game believe that you have rightward speed while moving into the tile from the right.) With some better luck manipulation it might also be possible to get an even faster "plate room" (the room where you fly on a plate).