Details

  • Visual Boy Advance 1.7.2 re-recording v20
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Collects all items
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Abuses programming errors in the game
  • Manipulates luck

About the run

This is an improvement of 2142 frames, or just under 36 seconds, over Dragonfangs currently published movie. The improvements comes mainly from greater optimization in movement, and some from better ammo management. Some also comes from aiming for realtime instead of ingame time, this essentially means that I sometimes have to optimize door transitions to scroll less, avoid some lag, and taking a Super Missile and a missile earlier in Norfair to avoid two extra door transitions during the cleanup. I had hoped to improve the run more, but Dragonfangs run turned out to be very solid, especially as far as room strategies goes.

Notes copy-pasted from the old run

  • Exiting a spin jump will still keep your vertical momentum unless you shoot.
  • If exiting a spin jump without shooting and while rising, you'll still rise for a frame regardless if you hold jump or not, if you then press jump again you'll start spinning again and still rise. I can't actually remember ever using this for time saving purposes.
  • Exiting a spin jump positioned the right way under a ledge, you'll get pushed down a bit, and since you don't lose any vertical momentum by exiting a spin jump you can save a bit of time.
  • Doing the "corner boost" at a certain place in Chozodia made a part of the room load incorrectly. But it's just a visual glitch and can't be used for anything.
  • The horizontal movement of all of Samus's projectiles are related to Samus's movement, so if you move in the same direction of a missile it will move faster to keep itself away from Samus, avoiding a doppler effect. This same technique can be used to "curve" shots by shooting diagonally and then moving sideways.
  • If multiple projectiles hits an enemy, all of them will do damage. This is only really useful against the Brinstar Worm/Charge Beamst/Boss right after missiles that drop the charge beam.
  • Shooting while turning around cancels the entire turnaround animation, speeding up a turn by quite a bit.
  • Starting a spin and shooting at the same time makes the shot appear at the bottom of Samus's sprite instead of at the arm cannon.
  • Morphing and shooting at the same time fires the projectile at the back of the Morph ball sprite.
  • After the Chozo ghost battle it usually locks you in place before transforming you to your full suit. But if you turn around during a certain time frame of about 4 frames you can move freely again and the rest of that scene still plays out the same. If there happens to be any stun pistol shots left on the screen when the you've got the suit for real, they'll turn into garbled plasma sprites.
  • Power Grip is usually way faster than other forms of vertical movement(shinespark excluded) because there is only a single frame without upwards movement.
  • There is a "sticky walls" effect when spin jumping. In other words, if you touch a wall while spinjumping and then try to move away from it, you accelerate way slower than you would if you haven't touched anything. Most likely there to make wall jumping easier.
  • Space Jump removes the ability to Wall jump, which would've been faster if there's a wall nearby. But at the same time, Space Jump removes the sticky walls effect.
  • Ingame time still runs during the "Item get!" popup.
  • Mother Brain will usually only take 5 missiles or a super before closing its eye to charge a beam. But there is a short amount of time right after a beam is fired where she'll accept damage anyway.
  • Bosses in this game die too fast :P
  • The frame you start spinning will always be the same velocity as the frame right before it. This can be used to maintain running velocity for an extra frame when you run of an edge. In addition to this, releasing the direction you're running at the right time will cause Samus to slowly decelerate instead of immediately slowing down to normal aerial velocity. These two can be used in conjunction. To produce the best result, you should release the direction right when you leave the edge then hold nothing for 2 or 3 frames, then spin.
  • During the first frame of the aerial turnaround animation, Samus will continue to rise regardless if you're holding the jump button or not. This can be used to go from a straight jump to a spinning jump without stopping in midair.

Thanks to

Huge thanks to Dragonfangs for his previous submissions, which helped greatly in the making of the run, as well as pointing out that it would be faster in realtime to pick up the stuff in the "scroll-glitch room" before the cleanup after getting your suit back. Thanks to P.JBoy for helping me to get the GBA memory watcher to work on my computer (there was some weird error I couldn't figure out). And thanks to various people for poking me to get the run done :p

Baxter: Very good optimizations, accepted as an improvement to the published movie.
OmnipotentEntity: Encoding.