If Sonic the Hedgehog had a love affair with a golf ball, then the result would be Action Pachio. Giant evil robots have kidnapped Pachio's family and friends and now he must roll and jump his way through six different worlds in the solar system to save them all and defeat the ne'er-do-wells.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 1.11.4
- Aims for fastest real time
- Takes damage to save time
- Plays on easiest difficulty
- Speed vs. Entertainment trade-off
Action Pachio is a platformer with very basic controls. There's Up, Down, Left, Right, and Jump. As you hold left or right while on the ground you start accelerating. You can freely switch running left and right while accelerating, but once you hit top speed you will skid to a halt if you try and turn around. Pressing Down will turn you into a ball. You accelerate fastest while in ball form and can only hurt enemies while in this form, so it's used throughout most of the run. You immediately lose all of your momentum once you jump or go off an edge or land, but if you release the direction button the frame before you jump or roll of a ledge then you retain your momentum. You can freely change direction in mid-air while maintaining a high speed, but only if you press the arrow key for one frame.
Easy difficulty was chosen because it allows for more damage boosts and because bosses take fewer hits. There are 16 boss fights (and 2 mini-boss fights), so the time saved is exceptional. There is no change to the game otherwise.
Stage 1
Jumping on an enemy will cause you bounce to a certain height regardless of how fast you are jumping into them or even if you're holding the Jump button when you hit them. This is true for all enemies and bosses. At the end of each boss fight in the first six stages Pachio needs to be in a certain spot in order to do his victory jump, and he will take to time roll there if you're not standing on it.
Stage 2
Hitting the switches in this stage causes the platforms to move in different directions, but I often have to wait for them to do their thing.
Stage 3
Hooray for obligatory water levels, where everything moves slower. The air bubbles and blowfish are a large source of lag in this level.
Stage 4
This level probably accounts for over half of the lag frames in the game.
Stage 5
Every hanging spike ball has the worst timing possible. You can't really change it, either, because they all start descending based on how close you are to them. I love this game's sound effects. The boss of this stage (whom I dub the Origami Hand Jive monster) was frustrating to figure out. The hitbox is only active when he stops to shoot the bullets. You can bounce off the orange ones, but the green ones will hurt you no matter what. Moving around also causes a lot of lag on this boss, so I can't really put any entertainment in here.
Stage 6
Robot Chicken factory. You can bounce off each of the arms of the boss 1 time, but then they just hurt you after that.
Boss Rush
7 Boss Fights in a row and then both forms of the final boss. 5 of the 7 fights are just copy/pasted from earlier, but with some entertainment added in. Pachio also no longer needs to be in a specific spot after the fight, so I try and get him as far to the right as possible. The squid fight is completely different since the invincibility time lasts way longer for some reason. The two alarm bots act as the boss of the boss rush stage. You can only hit them from underneath, and the hitbox on their fists is about 3 times larger than what's shown.
Final Boss
Big machine. Lots of weaving to make sure I hit the center of it's head as soon as possible each time. The boss's speech box cannot be sped up, unfortunately. His final form is a joke. The speed vs. entertainment trade-off is at the very end. If you jump the frame before the final cutscene begins, then he will continue to jump but at the cost of 1 frame of lag after every jump. (30 frames of lag here)
Inputs made at the end of a boss fight can affect the starting position of one or two enemies in the next level.
Possible Improvements
Better lag management. Most levels have two different routes you can take, and each route has different secret rooms you can access that exit to different parts of the stage. It's likely that I didn't find all of the secret rooms, so some routing changes could possibly be made. There is also a trick to be able to jump off of spikes; if you roll off an edge without jumping, then you can jump off the spikes the frame you land on them. While this trick wasn't used in this run it could be helpful if any routing changes are made.
Samsara: File replaced with a 310-frame improvement. Also, judging.
Samsara: I have to admit I still feel a little weird not seeing your name attached to everyone's favorite Eek The Cat, but it's a kind of weird that I like. I like seeing all these underappreciated games getting great runs, and having never even heard of this game before, this run was no exception. The difficulty choice was understandable, and it looks like a lot of good work went into this.
I'll just HIT THE LEVER over here to accept it to Moons.
