Midnight Resistance is basically a Contra game made for Sega Genesis.

Story: An evil enemy kidnaps the heroes' family. The hero is pleased, as this gives him a reason to wear a tight sleeveless shirt and blow up stuff with bug guns.

There is no published movie of this game but there was a submission of this game by Shakespeare awhile back.

This movie is 4089 frames faster than that submission.

I chose to do this game because I think it has a lot of TAS potential. It has a lot of level variety. It has a lot of complexity in terms of weapon selection, and boss fighting.

The rejected submission suffered from some technical quality issues so I was inspired to improve it.

Some of the improved time comes from using the Easy mode. There are 3 difficulty settings, easy, normal and hard. The previous submission used normal since difficulty only affects boss hp values. I use easy mode by the same logic. The precedence for the site is to use hard mode only when other factors are affected. This is holds true here as well. Hard mode would basically mean you get to watch the enemies blink longer before exploding.

This game has some interesting characteristics for its genre.

You turn on firing with the C button. You character will then autofire until the C button is pressed again. This is a real pain for a TAS since you should not waste shots. To shoot a single enemy requires to hold the button for 2 frames, release 2 frames, and hold for 2 frames more. Very cumbersome >:|

You can lock the characters shooting direction by holding the B button. This is very nice since you can aim in on direction but move in another. This adds a lot of rich possibilities in strategy over the course of the TAS.

After each stage ther is a weapon room. You unlock these weapons with keys that you collect in the level. The last weapon in each room is manipulatable by delaying the entering of the room.

The best weapon is the nitro. You get 50 of these bad boys when you obtain it. By shooting up or up+l/r it will set a blast up in the air and rain down on the enemies. It also does 5 damage compared with 1 from the regular weapon. The bulk of my boss fighting comes from this weapon.

I also get the flame thrower (what shooting game isn't complete without one of these? :P). But it is only useful after getting the supercharge upgrade. This allows it to do 3 damage and have a pretty blue flame instead of a crappy red flame.

Until then it only does 1 damage so it isn't more powerful than the default weapon. Plus its range is more limited and causes more lag. I saved a lot of time from the previous submission by waiting to get this weapon.

1) Easy mode - This isn't as large of an improvement as it seems since I had the advantage of weaker bosses. I can't say for sure how much I saved from this but my guess would be about 20-30 seconds.

2) Weapon choice - I wait to get the flame thrower

3) Boss fighting/weapon use - I saved a lot of time using RAM Watch to monitor hp values of the bosses. I also relied more on the nitro weapon than the previous submission did.

4) Lag reduction. I improved a lot here. The sections where you have to wait and avoid enemies I play with them but shoot them before they cause lag.

5) Various other things like getting up ladders quicker, destroying doors on the first possible frame, etc. Nothing too noteworthy.

(Note: while I do not get hit, I do not intentionally avoid it. It merely is not advantageous to do so).

Enjoy!

Truncated: Good enough viewer response, even though the game generates huge amounts of vacuum. Accepted.