Speed Running

2004-10-09 04:36:23 pm

I must say - most excellent run carlmmii. Watching your run made me remember 2 things:

1) Just how much I loves the Main Tunnel Music

2) Just how much I think this game should get a remake like the original.

Congrats!

carlmmii

2004-10-09 04:47:36 pm

Thanks. :)

Quote from Dragondarch:

2) Just how much I think this game should get a remake like the original.

Very much agreed. My main gripe is that a lot of the rooms are repeated templates they threw together, especially the tunnels around the ruins. If they could do what they did with Zero Mission and add landmarks in the same fashion, more people would want to finish and replay it.

I think the comment I've heard the most about it is how repetitive it is, and how easy it is to get lost... just like the original. :?

GreenMamba

2004-10-09 05:42:18 pm

What luck, there's french fry stuck in my beard.

I've always wondered why the original got more flack for being repetetive looking when MII was just as much so. (and in black and white!)

Yoshi348

2004-10-09 06:12:33 pm

PAGE BREAKER

Ready and willing.

I'm not sure, but if I had to guess I'd say it was the smaller screen size.

nate

2004-10-09 10:35:35 pm

Quote from carlmmii:

Got it for $35 through Small Dog. Paid $11 for 2-day shipping.

Most other vendors have it for $40 though.

jesus. the reason i ask is ... i'm not sure why, but when i ordered mine (xmas 1999), they were only $15. well, it turned out that i wouldn't see the product for another ten months (but i would pay the original price for it!! woot!). i guess they had some issues in the final stages of production, and they've been at that high price ever since. imo, griffin tends to take itself too seriously, like a good portion of the mac community, and so you see a lot of hilarious stuff coming from them.

Radix

2004-10-10 03:05:42 am

Just finished watching the run... definitely nice. You forget to roll in a lot of places, like the entire second half of the game, and definitely had some bad luck (1st zeta = bleh) and I'm surprised at your change in weapon strategy but it seems to have been what was needed to get under 1:10! I time the run as 1:09:23. I guess you didn't count the 5 second 'look at me' at the start. The reason i count that, counter to my rule of "when you get control" was I count that in my save run so there'd be a save penalty instead of 0 time to save... and then I count it on the first spawn just to be consistant.

Two questions... how do you space jump straight up?
And you only want credited as 'carlmmii'? Is Carl your first name or not? Rolling Eyes

carlmmii

2004-10-10 04:07:06 am

Once you get the varia suit, as far as I can tell there's practically no difference between your roll speed and your run speed, so I figured there was no use in wasting the time to duck and roll. I could be mistaken though... are there any real numbers out there?

As far as the 5 seconds, that's cool. I had no clue as to how these were officially timed anyway. :D

For the vertical space jump, just do a spin jump as normal, but as soon as you press A to jump, release the direction. The same is possible with regular spin jumps, but serve no useful purpose as I can see.

And yeah, carl's my first name, but mostly I'm just known as carlmmii. It's kind of stuck to me for the last 6 years. Embarassed

One point that I do want to mention now though is the 3-block jump. I haven't seen anyone else do this, so I don't know if this is well known or not, but I do quite a few of those jumps in the early section to squeeze out a few seconds. It's just a matter of ducking, then jumping immediately at full height, which gives the limited 3-block height instead of 4. Nothing much, but it helps.

Once you get the varia suit, as far as I can tell there's practically no difference between your roll speed and your run speed, so I figured there was no use in wasting the time to duck and roll. I could be mistaken though... are there any real numbers out there?

As far as the 5 seconds, that's cool. I had no clue as to how these were officially timed anyway.  :D

For the vertical space jump, just do a spin jump as normal, but as soon as you press A to jump, release the direction. The same is possible with regular spin jumps, but serve no useful purpose as I can see.

And yeah, carl's my first name, but mostly I'm just known as carlmmii. It's kind of stuck to me for the last 6 years. :oops:

One point that I do want to mention now though is the 3-block jump. I haven't seen anyone else do this, so I don't know if this is well known or not, but I do quite a few of those jumps in the early section to squeeze out a few seconds. It's just a matter of ducking, then jumping immediately at full height, which gives the limited 3-block height instead of 4. Nothing much, but it helps.

nate

2004-10-10 01:08:49 pm

Quote from carlmmii:

carlmmii

is that short for carl mega man ii?

Quote from carlmmii:

One point that I do want to mention now though is the 3-block jump. I haven't seen anyone else do this, so I don't know if this is well known or not, but I do quite a few of those jumps in the early section to squeeze out a few seconds. It's just a matter of ducking, then jumping immediately at full height, which gives the limited 3-block height instead of 4. Nothing much, but it helps.

lol. the same trick exists in super metroid, except it gives you more height, not less. go diversity in the series, i suppose.

Radix

2004-10-10 01:16:01 pm

Actually I did know about the 3 block jump because sometimes I'd accidentally duck from my crappy d-pad and then not get the 4 block height that I needed... but I never realized you could actually duck on purpose to only jump 3 blocks when you wanted :-p

The only timing I ever did of walk vs roll was in the first long hallway, roll was a few seconds faster. I don't know why varia would make you walk faster, it never seemed like it to me!

carlmmii

2004-10-10 01:17:46 pm

More height? Shocked

I'll have to look into that...

And no. carlmmii actually stands for carl 2002 (MMII is roman numerals). Call me geeky, but whatever. :P

nate

2004-10-10 01:31:55 pm

...

ajbolt89

2004-10-10 01:44:12 pm

lol no way

I assume then that you graduated in 2002 or something?

carlmmii

2004-10-10 02:05:40 pm

Yup... and never felt like changing it after then.

Edit: Well, I just did some tests, and it looks like my observation was correct.

No varia, running: 7.08 seconds
No varia, rolling: 5.12 seconds
With varia, running: 5.13 seconds
With varia, rolling: 5.11 seconds

Radix

2004-10-10 06:45:23 pm

hmmm... well what do you know.

I guess you'd better try to beat my any% now because i wasted so much time unmorphing and morphing Embarassed

At least try an SS, you can probably get very close to my time, if not beat it, because of the 40 seconds I lose from saving!

carlmmii

2004-10-10 10:52:45 pm

Quote from Radix:

At least try an SS, you can probably get very close to my time, if not beat it, because of the 40 seconds I lose from saving!

That's a good point. I'll probably just go with your route, since it seems to be the best solution.

I'm wondering though about which energy tanks to pick up. It seems as though it might be better for the 3rd energy tank to pick up the one in the outside drop, and snag the missile tank with it (or not, depending on luck), instead of picking up the one near the alpha metroid with no missile. I'm trying to figure out which missile expansions are the most out of the way to collect... the only one that really stands out is the one hidden inside the blocks right there in the ruins.

The only other ideas I had were skipping the high jump (which I doubt helps at all, since even though it'd save around 2 minutes to get it, practically the entire rest of the game suffers due to the decreased speed of space jumping), and skipping the varia suit (the acid dipping is still possible with 4 energy tanks, but again the overall speed is hindered due to running much slower, which comes out to several minutes lost). If I manage to do a decent run, I'll try it with the high jump skip, but definitely not the varia skip.

The only real area I'm expecting to botch is the metroid fights, since they never seem to go my way in SS runs. But with 40 extra seconds, that might be enough to counter it.

Any other ideas? :?

[quote="Radix"]At least try an SS, you can probably get very close to my time, if not beat it, because of the 40 seconds I lose from saving![/quote]

That's a good point. I'll probably just go with your route, since it seems to be the best solution.

I'm wondering though about which energy tanks to pick up. It seems as though it might be better for the 3rd energy tank to pick up the one in the outside drop, and snag the missile tank with it (or not, depending on luck), instead of picking up the one near the alpha metroid with no missile. I'm trying to figure out which missile expansions are the most out of the way to collect... the only one that really stands out is the one hidden inside the blocks right there in the ruins.

The only other ideas I had were skipping the high jump (which I doubt helps at all, since even though it'd save around 2 minutes to get it, practically the entire rest of the game suffers due to the decreased speed of space jumping), and skipping the varia suit (the acid dipping is still possible with 4 energy tanks, but again the overall speed is hindered due to running much slower, which comes out to [i]several[/i] minutes lost). If I manage to do a decent run, I'll try it with the high jump skip, but definitely not the varia skip.

The only real area I'm expecting to botch is the metroid fights, since they never seem to go my way in SS runs. But with 40 extra seconds, that might be enough to counter it.

Any other ideas?  :?

Radix

2004-10-11 12:33:28 am

I considered all of those things. Skipping high jump is awful, you lose at least 2 minutes I think. I get the tank that I do because I need the refill at that point for the acid trip coming up. I mention in my commentary that getting varia was a hard choice, it lets you do the acid trip with less tanks and when I caclulated the time of getting varia vs those tanks and not even doing the shortcut, the savings was only like 15 seconds to do what I did.

Good luck Wink

Brightstar

2004-10-11 08:45:37 am

Hey, just wanted to say congratulations. But be warned...I held back in my last run. Or rather, I learned something after my run but never put it up in case someone like you came around.

I was also thinking the same thing about 4 energy tanks as well...

ShadowJedi

2004-10-11 09:12:51 am

Quote from Radix:

I'm aware you can fire missiles fast when you're right in the queens face, but compare my fight to yours and it seems obvious you used turbo. You're shooting 10 a second, nobody can tap that fast!

When playing Mario Party 4, I did 88 button-pushes in 10 seconds, and I messed up for about a second. So actually, that's 10 pushes per second for me (almost, 88/9). I think I can do much better now, too.

I didn't think anyone played this anymore.

Radix

2004-10-11 05:34:15 pm

Quote from Brightstar:

Hey, just wanted to say congratulations. But be warned...I held back in my last run. Or rather, I learned something after my run but never put it up in case someone like you came around.

If only everyone were so petty to not try their best and keep strategies selfishly secret. Then speedrunning wouldn't exist and I wouldn't be spending 4 hours a day on average working on a site I make $0 from.

Banks

2004-10-11 05:38:48 pm

BTW i've had an IBJ in MP for years now, but didn't want to say anything because i like all the fuss geo causes people.

KennyMan666

2004-10-11 05:53:56 pm

Viking

Precursor

Quote from carlmmii:

The only other ideas I had were skipping the high jump

First time I played through Metroid II I never even knew HJ Boots existed. I didn't know about that they actually were in the game until I watched Brightstars 100%-run :P

carlmmii

2004-10-11 07:36:19 pm

Kinda funny if someone keeps something secret and someone else discovers it on their own. Laughing

I'll see if I can do a quick run right now to see where my time stands for any% SS. Hopefully not too bad...

Brightstar

2004-10-11 08:15:07 pm

...Nevermind...I've moved on from Metroid II. You win. Here's the technique. I call it the spider ball throw. Please note that it only seems to work when you're moving to the left.

http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/jfields/sbthrow.avi

Radix, Banks, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that.

carlmmii

2004-10-11 09:53:04 pm

Whoa. Now that's interesting, and probably useful!

Well, no luck so far with the SS. The main sticking point is the same area of interest: ruins 3. Although I can get there with enough health reliably, my skill isn't quite up to par when fighting gamma metroids... which this is full of. I think I may have to get the missile refuel on the way back, instead of forward, just to improve reliability and make it at least possible for me. With that, I think the only thing I have to really work on is the mid-air gamma metroid fight.

Brightstar

2004-10-11 10:43:01 pm

Why don't you try going down the hole first rather than falling down that long hall? That way you'll know for certain if you have enough missiles to finish off the last gamma or not. If you can enter it at near full energy, you can also do the aerial battle that I pulled when I originally did the run on the emulator before it was ruled as not acceptable anymore. It'll take a lot of energy yes, but making it to where the alpha is will give you another energy tank, and then what you can do is after you fight the gamma on the far right of area 3, you can space jump up to the point where you grab the energy tank and missile by landing on one of the little bars, morph, and spider ball throw yourself to the otherside. A little risky, but if done right, you'll leave the top part of area 3 with full energy. But if you're going to do that run, you should seriously consider picking up either the wave or plasma beam so you can easily take care of the gamma that's in all of that webbing.