Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1
- Aims for fastest time
- Takes intentional damage
Game mechanics
- L/R to move
- 2 to jump
- U to enter doors or interact with buttons, or climb up ropes
- D to crouch
- 1 to shoot, on the dinosaur level its a jump attack
- 1 + U to shoot up
- On the triceratops autoscroller level only, L/R + 1 to slide
Tech and glitches
- The landing animation is a few frames long and stops you, jumping can cancel this animation, at the cost of at least one frame, so cancelling the animation by jumping depends on each situation, maybe you do it to skip several animations, or continue the jump chain up to a point where the animation can be cancelled in some oher way, like taking damage
- I don't continue jumping or try stop skip the landing animation when at the end of the level since the character has to do its walking animation, after which the level actually ends, so its better to trigger that animation as soon as possible, and it doesn't triger while not grounded
- On the level where you control a dinosaur, the jump attack is slightly faster than walking speed, so its done when landing or before making another jump
- On the dinosaur level, holding L + R stops your movement, even when midair, didn't find anything useful with it but its done on the bossfight
- On the dinosaur level, you can clip the edges of walls when climbing, can be used to climb faster
- Shooting on the ground stops you in place, so when shooting is necessary I first jump
The first three levels can be done in any order, the only thing that matters in the order is that the Brachiosaurus Area is done last, since the car position at the end of it is 20 frames faster than the car position if one of the other levels where done last.
On the Brachiosaurus Area, there's a section, where the falling rocks appear, where I break the jump chain and it seems like it should be possible to continue, this is done because that's a major lag point, and continue jumping would create a lot more lag frames that you'd save.
On the boss of the Brachiosaurus Area, I shoot first before going to the button and turn on the lights, this shot is done to get the boss to start going towards me, which speeds up the fight since you can only shoot a few frames after the previos shot has landed. The lights have to be on because otherwise the boss in invulnerable.
On the triceratops autoscroller, there's points where I stop walking, and even a point where I slide into some spikes, this is because when the triceratops breaks the platforms, it can create a lot of lag, which is minimized by standing still, sliding into the spikes is done to get ahead and be able to stand still later on.
The last section of the game is an autoscroller, so I end input early, using the last turn to avoid the attacks of the T. Rex
Notes
The reason the rerecord count is 0 is because, when I was checking the level order of the first three levels, I made some copies of the project with the New->From now feature, starting at the first frame, which makes a new TAS from a savestate, I didn't notice until when I was done that the file I was working on was one of these files, tho since the savestate was from power on, I just copied the inputs over to a fresh file.
The rerecord count of that other file is 15391.
Possible improvements
Reducing more lag on the Brachiosaurus Area or the triceratops autoscroller, or ending input earlier would be the best bets.
Samsara: A short and fun little run with a surprising amount of depth in regards to frame saves and movement weirdness. Nicely done! Accepting!
