When the moon makes you think like a splash from the sink, that's Faucet Amore.
Objectifs du jeu
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.8
- Aims for fastest time
- Takes damage to save time
- bonjour à tous, c'est moi, Marcel Blagueur
- je traduis mes blagues à la machine cette fois
- s'il vous plait ne bannissez pas Samsara de france pour cela
- ne la bannissez pas non plus de TASvideos parce que ce jeu contient des seins
- un seul amour pour tous
According to Wikipedia, Fausseté Amour ("False Love" in Fausseté Français) is a
Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for Fausseté Amour in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings. According to Wikipedia But A Different Article This Time, Fausseté Amour was developed by AIM, who turned 45 in 1997 so make sure to wish them a happy 71st birthday this year, and published by NAXAT Soft, who turned defunct in 2015 so make sure to wish them a happy nothing this year. The game was released in 1993 to a critical reception of some kind. AIM's other games include
Inspector Gadget for the SNES,
Armadillo for the NES, and Tokyo Bus Guide Bijin Bus Guide Tenjou Pack (aka Tokyo Bus Guide: Featuring a Beautiful Bus Tour Conductor) for the perverts. The game stars Corque, or Kolk, or Colk, or Korque, or Cork, or Kork, or Colque, or Kolque, or Koruku, or コルク. Corque is a scantily clad woman with blue hair, a grappling hook, and pronouns of course, and she traverses through some stages in order to accomplish an objective of some sort.
This is a classic case of me not having a single idea that this game existed until deciding to TAS it. I wanted a PCECD TAS under my belt and Castlevania: Rondo of Blood wasn't quite doing it for me, and this was the first game that jumped out at my while looking up some potential candidates. Turned out to be a fun project with a lot of reasonably interesting speedtech in it, and that's all I'm hoping for in a video-type game tool assisted speedrun project these days. As far as I looked, there is only
a single RTA run of this game from 8 years ago, and nothing anywhere else that I could find.
Astuces de vitesse
Movement
Corque normally moves at a blistering one pixel per frame, though there are a couple ways of speeding her up that are frequently used throughout the run, primarily through the use of her grappling hook thing that probably has a name that can also be transliterated a hundred different ways to mild comedic effect. The fastest overall method of movement under optimal conditions is swinging from grapple-able ceilings, however the key words there are "optimal conditions", which are not always available or even reasonable to obtain when they are.
The fastest consistent movement speed is something I'm just going to call the spin attack. This is done from a grapple, and as long as you don't hold down any direction you'll be moving at a consistent 1.5 pixels per frame. Holding a direction causes you to slow down, because that makes sense. The spin attack is usually optimal for vertical movement, allowing for much higher elevation, although only one stage really makes use of verticality. You are locked into a spin attack until landing, no breaking out in order to grapple again. However, you can bounce off of enemies in order to extend your spin attack time.
Swinging
Let's talk about those optimal conditions. Warning, this is kind of a nightmare.
Corque's position only updates every 8 frames while swinging, and it doesn't update by a consistent amount every time. An optimal swing follows this pattern of pixels per position update:
9, 12, 20, 12, 12, 20, 12, 17, 8, 6
That last 6 marks the end of the swing, where Corque will begin swinging in the opposite direction. You'll notice that this pattern averages above 12 pixels every 8 frames, which means even a suboptimal swing is faster than a spin attack as long as you spend at least 24 frames swinging. Here's the full rough list of PPF values for each position update of an optimal swing:
8 frames: 1.125
16 frames: 1.3125
24 frames: 1.708
32 frames: 1.656
40 frames: 1.625
48 frames: 1.771
56 frames: 1.732
64 frames: 1.781
72 frames: 1.694
80 frames: 1.6
Crunching the data means the fastest you can go when swinging is by cutting it off at 64 frames, taking you 114 pixels forward at roughly 1.781 pixels per frame.
I keep mentioning "optimal" swinging, but I have yet to talk about what makes a swing suboptimal. I've prepared a handy image guide to help explain this:
To try and put it as simply as possible, a swing in this game will always reach the same end point on the same frame based on where the hook connects. The closer Corque is to the hook upon contact, the less distance she will travel in the same amount of time. The game will still update her position every 8 frames, but instead of following the optimal pattern above, the first three can be negatively impacted by bad positioning. Here's what I believe to be the worst case scenario for a swing:
-6, 0, 14, 12, 12, 20, 12, 17, 8, 6
8 frames: -0.75
16 frames: -0.375
24 frames: 0.333
32 frames: 0.625
40 frames: 0.8
48 frames: 1.083
56 frames: 1.143
64 frames: 1.266
72 frames: 1.25
80 frames: 1.1875
Still faster than walking assuming you drag it out at least 48 frames, but always slower than a spin attack, and significantly slower than an optimal swing. Generally, if you can't get an optimal swing, it is usually better to spin attack immediately on the grapple, though there are still cases where a suboptimal swing is faster than a spin attack.
Well, that was a lot of words. Let's go back to the simple stuff, now. C'mon. The two of us. Together. As a family.
Attacking
The main forms of attacking are normal hook attacks, spin attacks, and special attacks. Normal attacks are very quick and tend to be the best DPS against enemies and bosses with low invulnerability times. Spin attacks are only situationally useful, as they can't be done without a grapple spot. Special attacks are... interesting! They're performed by jumping and attacking while holding Down, causing Corque to swing her hook in a circle. If she's holding a powerup, then some projectiles will spawn based off which color she's using. Generally, this is slower DPS than well-timed normal attacks due to how long it takes for the circle move, but there's a property to the projectiles that makes special attacks a lot more viable than they sound. The spawned projectiles ignore enemy invulnerability, which helps significantly against bosses that stay invulnerable longer than they should.
The blue powerup is obtained in stage 3 and is kept throughout the run, as it does the most damage of the three and helps immensely with one particularly vertical miniboss.
Death abuse (unused)
The first handful of stages have minibosses along the way that need to be defeated to progress, either by spawning in a moving platform or removing a blocking wall. If you happen to die after defeating the miniboss, the game will checkpoint you forward past the obstruction, potentially saving some seconds by not needing to wait. This ended up going unused in the run as I was unable to find any usage of it that would actually save time. I'm noting it here just for the sake of documentation.
There are three main reasons why it didn't tend to work out for me: The first is that damage needs to be taken twice in order to die, and the first damage is fairly costly in terms of time. Either you lose a lot of movement speed by trying to take the damage during the stage, or you lose a lot of DPS by trying to take damage during the miniboss. Second, you need to set up the death so that you die before the miniboss does. This means you need to use a special attack projectile, and setting that up often costs a couple seconds on top of the first time loss from the damage. Third, you lose that powerup, and you might not be able to get anything back before the stage boss, and that often loses more time than the death would have saved.
Something important to note ahead of time is that you are required to collect 3 red crystals in every stage. If you don't collect 3, you will start the stage over from the beginning instead of moving on. Only specific enemies drop them, so they need to be routed around.
Scéne amon
The first stage is one of the more dynamic ones, though due to it being the first stage I wasn't quite in tune with the movement mechanics yet. Not having the ability to interrupt the spin attack probably hurts the most on this stage, as there are a lot of potential paths to take through all of the grapple-able platforms and that ends up getting limited by taking the half second or so to land, jump and grapple again after a spin attack.
There's supposed to be a miniboss in this level, however it is just barely possible to jump over the normally required pit that contains it. This saves about 6 seconds overall, after accounting for a small time loss on the stage boss because of it.
The rest of the stage is mainly spin attacks, as nearly all of the platforms are placed in such a way that optimal swinging isn't really possible anywhere, and there are enough enemies placed around to bounce off of to extend my spins.
At the end of every stage, Corque will automatically walk toward and jump onto a little platform. She will jump when she's a certain distance away from the platform, so whenever possible I want to land as close to that point as I can. Landing before it loses time from slow walking, and landing after it loses time because the automatic jump takes the same amount of time from when you land, so you're just spending extra frames in the air. Landing directly on the platform is not possible, as it only becomes tangible once the automatic control starts.
The stage boss is Amon, and naturally for any scantily clad woman she turns into Giant Sword Satan to attack. I have to get the powerup here, normally it'd be gotten during the miniboss fight but I did kinda skip that. Amon isn't too difficult though, only 12 health means a couple specials and a normal attack are more than enough.
Scéne procel
Thankfully, this is the game's sole autoscroller stage, and thankfully that means I don't have to explain too much of it. Normal attacks start to show their prowess at the minibosses, allowing a very quick kill. Enjoy the rest of this autoscrolling. I sure didn't!
Procel may or may not get this run rejected. Let's see how it goes. Basic fight, keeping her stunned with normal attacks means she can't counterattack, and a full force special at the end saves about a second over continued normals.
Scéne lilim
Not much to talk about here, either. This stage is where I found out about death checkpointing, and it was originally going to be used here but I ended up finding a really quick miniboss kill, to the point that it was faster overall to do that instead of take the death. There isn't a lot to grapple in this stage, so enjoy the walking.
The strategy for the miniboss involves crouching in order to very slightly extend the range of the diagonal normals. This allows me to barely save enough time to avoid the dumb laser attack.
From what I understand of the story, Corque is searching for her sister, Meriya. Keep that name in mind for no particular reason at all. Lilim decides it's a fun idea to very briefly imitate Meriya, but the ruse falls flat by the introduction of ONE HELL OF A GUITAR SOLO, and also she pulls out the knife way too early. Lilim then transforms into an easy boss. Oh well.
Scéne marla
Finally, a stage where I can return to my swinging ways, llllllllladies. The usual movement stuff happens throughout the stage, prioritizing swings and spin attacks.
I believe this miniboss holds the longest amount of screentime that any required enemy gets in the game. Give it a hand! Also, I hate this thing. I ended up redoing a fair chunk of the early part of the TAS and, for some reason, when I resynced back to this stage, I was unable to get this damn thing to spawn. I had to resort to a slower entry in order to make it work.
The screams of the damned really make this song pop.
Marla has a long enough invulnerability period that it's worth taking the damage on the second phase to have better positioning for the special.
Scéne siki
The cartoon slip-on-a-banana-peel noise really makes this song pop.
A vertical stage! This one's finished very fast with spin attacks. Normally, getting your armor back wastes time, but since I have to wait for the platforms anyway it's a free hit later on.
Anyway,
Amon, Procel, Lilim and Marla decide that transforming is for losers and gang up on Corque. Boy, I love anime games. I love how much sense it makes to explain them. Anyway, not transforming is also for losers, because they all go down in pretty much one special.
Scéne meriya
Huh, that name sounds familiar for no reason at all.
This is a very bouncy stage. The crystals were a bit of a pain to collect. There might be better enemies to collect them from, but as far as I can tell it's only those floaty boys that drop them in this stage and most of them require waits and other things that aren't forward motion.
Corque finds her sister! You can tell they're sisters because they have the exact same pose, and weapon, and pretty much the same outfit. Gee, I hope they don't fight.
They fight. The jump before the battle slightly delays the start of it, but it allows me to get some immediate hits in since Meriya will always jump back.
Meriya may or may not get this run rejected. Let's see how it goes.
Scéne goatbone
How is this the second time I've met an antagonist named Goatbone in any video game? How was there a first time?
This is probably the most straightforward stage in the game. Hardly any grappling until near the end, and most of the enemies just jump out of the way of your walking path. The most exciting part is the waterfall that allows for some smooth, albeit brief, grapple action.
Goatbone was annoying. I don't think it's possible to one cycle him, but I was able to do a good chunk of damage to make the second cycle near instant.
Goatbone's second phase may or may not get this run rejected. Let's see how it goes.
Dernières réflexions
After a long string of failed projects, particularly in the Castlevania subgenre, it was nice to be able to find something that was a lot less of a pain to optimize. It may not be the fastest game, the fanciest game, or the most entertaining game, but it sure is the Faussetéiest game.
Remerciements particuliers
- I used r_a_f_i's RTA run pretty heavily for reference, mainly to figure out stage layouts and routing around crystal collection.
- DeepL was amazing for giving me a submission text gimmick!
Désolé de
- ...any and all French speakers for this submission text gimmick ._.
Capture d'écran suggérée
Frame 41014:
PCECD screenshots appear to be broken in BizHawk 2.8 (but they work in latest dev!), so the above is a poorly cropped screenshot of the whole window. Uh, have fun with that knowledge.
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Merci à EZGames69 pour l'examen! The looks great indeed, accepting.
fsvgm777: Traitement en cours. (processing)
