ScotlandHey! I was informed people were asking about this run and the strats so I figured I'd pop in. It's been a long time since my run so I've probably forgotten a lot of the minutiae but hopefully I can at least recall the important stuff.
Using the wr vod for timestamps:
Missions 1-3 are mostly self explanatory. Mission 4 is where things get dicey - you need to make sure the shotgun shots are on point, since there's a level of random variance in where the pellets go. A clean shot is a 1-hit kill on the guards, and ammo is very limited on the speedrun route. At 3:24 I shoot a door open. This is a door that is supposed to be locked until you complete a winding route around and press a button. From my understanding the gunshot aggros the enemies on the other side of the door, and they'll open it to attack you even if it's supposed to be locked. Sadly robots cannot open doors, otherwise we could use a similar trick with the door on the left at 3:52 to skip the rest of the level since the exit teleporter is right there.
This is also where it becomes clear that clean movement is very important. Enemy collision boxes are very generous, and you can see on mission 5 I get stuck on enemies quite frequently. You'll rely on the shotgun for clearing paths in a lot of missions since it's the most consistent way to one-shot most enemies.
Missions 7 and 8 are by far the hardest stages in the run. Lots of tight movement, accurate shots, and improvisation based on how much damage you've taken. Get used to these levels. (Note also that I steal some energy halfway thorough mission 7 so I can pay for Blasts later - energy management is as important as ammo management.)
Mission 7 also has some of the run's most prominent glitches. At 12:18 as I'm strafing up the stairs, I spam the action button to trigger the switch under the staircase. Collision for these objects in this game doesn't seem to take height into account. In a similar manner you can hear me activate a switch at 12:58 that skips a room entirely.
12:30 is where you see the main glitch in the run, which I'm referring to as Back Boosting. Your character is pushed backwards slightly when firing certain weapons or using the Blast power. Combined with walking backwards you can clip through walls or make jumps that aren't supposed to be possible. In this instance we use it to clip out of the elevator early to save travel time.
14:34 is another backboost skip to make a jump that's normally too far to reach and skip a tunnel segment.
At 16:45 the transition onto the conveyors is weird and inconsistent. Backboosting with a shotgun shot seems the most reliable way to get you onto the conveyor early.
17:48 is the other major backboost of the run, clipping through to the other side of the wall and saving another big chunk of time. You'll note I actually have to walk backwards for a bit because the trigger for the final door to open is a few doors behind where the boost spits you out.
(Make sure to grab the health boost at the end of mission 9 while you're waiting for the timer to run out!)
The last big wrinkle I remember is the final boss. Krieger has four phases, each with more HP than the last. The best strategy I could find for DPS was to use the handgun on phase 1 along with stealing as much energy as possible, then using it along with the bigger weapons to Terablast the other phases. (Also don't stand directly on top of him as he's dying, or the final explosion will never happen and the orb will never spawn!)
Those are the big things I recall from the run. Hope that helps the two of you!
EDIT: Oh also, I think it's only right to mention that a lot of the nonsense backboost tech from this game was discovered by kalimag! This game came up in a speedrun contest on a discord server we both frequented, and a lot of tech got pooled into the run as it is now.
I gave this a quick check and can't seem to replicate it. Like SunglassesEmoji said, this is what happens when you re-enter the fight right after losing.
A few questions:
- Do you remember what you were doing prior to entering this fight?
- Did you have any mods installed?
- Were you holding any buttons during the screen transition?
- Is there any video of what you were doing beforehand that we could look at? If we can see you entering another stage prior to this happening it'd make it clear this is unintended behaviour.
Minor tidbit. Don't know if this is common knowledge, but I didn't see it in either compendium so:
- Pepper Peppino Speed Walk - In Oregano Desert, Peppino's Pepper transformation caps him to a horizontal movement speed of 8.5. However, the air dash instantly sets your horizontal speed to 12 in that direction, and it isn't capped at 8.5 even when landing. Your speed will remain 12 until you either stop holding the direction or collide with something.
EDIT: A similar trick occurs in Funny Farm. With Mort equipped, Peppino's horizontal speed is capped to 8. But while attacking with Mort, your speed momentarily increases to 10. So mashing the attack button while walking with Mort is 25% faster than normal movement.
Holy crap, this was a gamechanger. Diagonal inputs were definitely a source of a lot of turmoil for me, so having a down input on demand made things way easier. I finally managed to put together a run I'm reasonably happy to upload thanks to it.
Thanks a bunch!
I'm on a budget Xbox pad. This means that unfortunately the d-pad is very questionable, hence relying on the analogue instead. I managed to get all the P-ranks, but full runs call for a lot more consistency than I can manage with this setup.
I'm thinking I might just have to relearn the game on keyboard at this point...
So I love this game and have been trying to get into speedrunning it for the last couple of days but I've quickly run into a problem. I play on pad pretty much exclusively, and only now am I realising that the default pad settings for this game are kind of...weird. I'm getting awkward effects like my dives out of jump being inconsistent and other stuff that generally doesn't feel right. I assumed it was just my motor reflexes being lame, but I was getting the same inputs 100% of the time after 30 seconds on keyboard.
Any pad players out there who've figured out some decent deadzone settings? All I could find online was one post about it and it wasn't really aimed at the speedrun crowd. If I can get stuff like mach cancels more reliably it'll be a real gamechanger for my ability to run this game.
Runs for this game require the in game timer to be visible. Please see the rules for clarification.
I'm willing to discuss this idea, if anyone else is interested.
To my understanding PC is the most common platform for speedrunning the game, so I think it makes sense to use the PC achievement list. That said you're right in that being unable to reset achievements is a problem: verifying the whole list from an unmarked run would be really tough. It could be possible that the runner tracks achievements as they collect them so the verifier knows where to look, but that's a lot to ask. It's a shame the game doesn't have any sort of internal achievement system that you could more easily reset.
So I'm admittedly on the fence about it for that reason, but if someone finds a suitable solution I'd be interested. At the very least I'd probably want runs to be timestamped for when each achievement's collected.
Hrm. Controllers only have a single shoot button. I play on controller as well, which is probably why it took so long for this trick to get brought up.
About mapping multiple buttons - this is a difficult issue I'd like some suggestions on, since this is my first time modding a game.
On one hand, it's true that keyboard has an inherent advantage due to having multiple fire buttons. But conversely, letting players bind multiple shot buttons risks an arms race where people just try to hit as many buttons as possible - or even take the Doom Eternal route and just map shot to a mouse wheel. It would, in essence, turn into a turbo button, which obviously wouldn't fly.
Also worth considering is that the game is multiplatform. Non-PC platforms presumably can't do the same thing to give themselves extra key bindings, so letting PC players do it is an inherently unfair advantage.
Of course you could limit people to three fire buttons maximum, but this would be nearly impossible to moderate. You'd have to ask players to show their inputs on the entire stream, which seems like overkill that just makes things really inconvenient for non-PC players.
I think the dealbreaker for me right now is that the extra shoot buttons on the keyboard are awkwardly placed. If they were right next to each other then I'd be more inclined to let custom keybinds do something similar, but on a quick test I found that this is just a really uncomfortable way to play the game. (I was using A/D to move and Space/Right Shift to fire, and the awkward hand positioning really messed up my fine control.)
In any case, my current leaning on this is not to allow external keybinds for extra fire shots. But if I've missed something here please let me know and I'll take it into consideration.
I have no idea how I never noticed this.
As you said, it's completely possible in game, so I see no reason not to allow it! I'm curious as to what changes this would make to the run. Faster boss fights, obviously, but it could also help with stubborn enemies in reservoir/abyss. Are there any weapons in particular that benefit from the extra speed?
OK! I had to learn a lot about speedrun as a site to make it work, but I've consolidated all the runs into a single board. Style is now a variable that you submit alongside your run, and the board shows your best runs for each separate style. I had to go through every submitted and obsoleted run to manually list the styles, so that was a bit of a slog. Hopefully this inspires more people to submit runs!
(Note - I couldn't find the old videos linked for evsnipe's obsoleted runs, so I listed them as boulder by default. If they find the footage of their old runs and they weren't Boulder, let me know and I'll update the board accordingly!)
This is a good suggestion, I think! There hasn't been a lot of activity on the other boards, so I'll try to set this up. This is my first time moderating a board but hopefully I can figure it out easily enough. Will update in here once I've gone through the runs and listed everything!
As of January 3rd, 2021, IGT displays in-game are mandatory.
Most runs used this anyway, but after realising this was never laid out in the ruleset I've decided to make it official. I received a run recently that used an auto-splitter instead, and it took me a bit of work to verify it was accurate. This makes things a bit easier for judging purposes and also means people don't have to go to the effort of setting up an auto-splitter!
Also, by popular demand - style-locked categories are now available! For now I've set up categories for every style other than Boulder, since Boulder is already the dominant option for Any%. Have fun handstanding your way to victory!
Huh, that's really odd. I think there are programs you can use to set framerates for GameMaker games? I'm unsure about how that works though.
The ingame timer is locked to framerate, so 60 consistent would definitely be the benchmark. I'm guessing an inaccurate timer was how you discovered the problem to begin with?
It was indeed an oversight. The Switch port's relatively recent and I wasn't aware of it until I saw this post.
Updated accordingly!
So the Air Palace update dropped today and there's a big change that reworks the speedrun entirely. Mostly for the better because they take out a lot of the RNG that goes into getting good cursed item rolls, but things also get much trickier.
The change in question comes from the cursed item stand which is now available at the plaza. You can spend gems to get a cursed item at the start of your next run. This does NOT override the relic you equipped, so you can still enter with the pathfinder's map.
On that note, there are two new cursed relics which outclass everything in 1.0. There's the Laws of Contingency, which makes all attacks do 99 damage and somehow makes the machine gun mage build even better than it already was. And if you're completely insane there's Chaotic Comedy, which causes everything to die in one hit. Up to and including council members. [Sura needs one hit for each form, but his shield is ignored entirely.]
Chaotic is maybe the more interesting of the two in that it gives room to experiment with arcana builds. You no longer need the damage from the machine gun build because everything dies in one hit anyway. So does the priority become wiping rooms fast with stuff that'd otherwise do little to no damage?
There are probably pros out there with way more thought in this than I have but I figured I'd at least start up the conversation.
EDIT: As a note it doesn't seem like the autosplitter works on this version. It starts on 1-1 as it should but it doesn't make splits properly.
This happened during one of my runs yesterday and it was strange enough that I figured it was worth posting here. My guess is there's a very short window (1 frame?) before the boss starts attacking and Thunderstone happened to hit at that exact moment.
Probably not viable enough to use consistently, but if the stars align...
A well-researched and written post! Unfortunately it only serves to further prove that I don't know this game as well as the people actually running it do. :V
I've reached out to Sappho and she's agreed to accept a position as mod for the game. Apologies that I've not been super active with this game - tbh I sent in the first run as a joke of sorts, but it's been great to see people actually sit down and figure the game out. Here's to many more fast runs and 15 second email waits!
So as some people may be aware, twitch had a bug that caused several weeks of highlights to be deleted. That bug happened to get rid of both my WR runs, and I don't have local copies for either. This is entirely my bad.
I don't know what the ruling is on this, but if necessary I'm willing to have the scores roll back to the fastest times with footage. Here are the twitch vids for those:
Normal:
Hard:
I made a brief attempt to run the game again but it's been two months since I last touched it and I am rusty as hell and not really motivated to put in the time again. Apologies again for not being better prepared for this. >_<
