Game Gear "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story" is a beat 'em up that feels kind of like Double Dragon but harder to speedrun than Ninja Gaiden.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1
- Genre: Beat 'em up
- Uses hardest difficulty
- Aims for fastest time
- Takes damage to save time
- Manipulates luck
This is a basic 2D beat 'em up game, but has many different moves: punch, big punch, kick, big kick, jump kick, crouch kick, plus super jump which is used when traversing up and down between platforms.
Enemies do not lose any HP unless they fall to the ground with 2 consecutive punches or one big punch/kick. Most enemies have 1 HP, but later in the game most have 2. Bosses have 12 HP.
Sometimes enemies do not appear if previous enemy is killed at correct time, or by some other unknown condition. Even better, sometimes a forced screen halt is skipped without any reason even when there are many enemies still left unkilled. The screen lock override feels very random, maybe it is lag or some other mechanism that unfreezes the screen. Sometimes the screen unfreezes by walking for some time towards right or by just waiting for it to unfreeze, but it is usually slower than just beating the enemies as intended. Even without the mysterious glitchy screen this game is by far the hardest game I have tased. Lag reduction is not easy and fights can be complex when multiple enemies are doing their own thing and you try to line them up for fast killing. It is often very difficult to find perfect solution due to the possibility of glitchy screen scrolling. Every input in this TAS is as precise as possible, but the overall strategy can be improved if you dissect the game mechanics and invest 100,000 rerecords.
If you see the player stop suddenly for no reason it is because of screen scrolling or lag or enemy manipulation. It looks bad occasionally if you don't know what is going on, but on the other hand the game showcases some great fast fights by Bruce Lee. Anyone can appreciate those good moments in the TAS.
Stage by stage
There are 12 stages and 4 bosses.
1-3
Boss pattern makes him throw chains, so perfect combo fails.
2-1
Enemy movements need to be manipulated so that they line up with ice cubes. Sometimes ninjas run to bad direction so random player movement is needed.
2-3
Keep the boss away from the ice cubes or he will toss them while becoming invulnerable.
3-2
I need to kill the first ninja with correct timing. Otherwise a barrel will not appear and the next fight with 3 ninjas will be slower. Even barrels can appear and disappear for no apparent reason.
4-1
Now for some reason the screen scrolling glitch not only skips the current lock screen but it also skips all future lock screens in the whole level reducing lots of lag because most of the enemies never appear. Using the screen scrolling glitch to skip the fights is slow and ugly, but it saves about 400 frames compared to doing the fights normally.
4-3
I manipulate RNG so that the boss teleports in optimal location at the right side, with a probability of 1/6. I end input early with a jumpkick.
I believe that the human speedrun WR will always remain at least a minute longer than the TAS because of the screen scrolling glitch which may require special random movements by the player. A speedrunner's nightmare is the final boss who looks like Shredder and teleports randomly and has a very long invulnerability pose that can be countered with frame perfect input.
I did the Game Gear version because that is what I am familiar with. It is a different experience compared to the Master System version.
Useful RAM addresses
1145 HP
0C91 X
0C93 Y
0D16 Boss HP
0D17 Boss invul
0D5A Boss HP
0D69 Enemy X
Have a nice day!
CoolHandMike: I found how the various groups of enemies were dealt with quickly well done. Despite the game having a rather limited moveset what is there is used to complete the game as fast as possible. Optimization looks good and the stage routing has no issues I could see. Blocks and pits are used as much as possible to complete fights and the high jumps are at a minimum. Found no improvements poking around.
Accepting to Standard.
Well done!
