CanadaYeah, it's definitely not fun to play, but I wanted to do a run for the sake of completing as many Action 52 games as possible. It's very similar to Thrusters or Space Dreams or Operation Full Moon in terms of being a dull autoscroller.
I certainly do not recommend this to anyone.
Howdy,
This is just a heads up that I added Critical Bypass as a category as I finished a run of it today. It's not a particularly fun speedrun but it's pretty easy. That's another one down.
Cheers.
Yeah, Rocket Jockey is definitely broken open now. I got a 33s time after playing it for just a couple minutes. This one is much, much easier than G Force while also having predictable enemy spawns.
So far as I can tell the vertical shooters don't have this time save. I did check out Thrusters and Space Dreams but I wasn't able to make the levels end any faster.
Well I guess we're gonna have to dust off and optimize another one. Hahaha. I did not have these developments on my Bingo card.
Oh also noticing from Beard's run that you can press start on the "level 2" and "level 3" announcement screens to end them more quickly. Good to know!
On Rev A you are able to skip it more quickly, yes. You can also buffer the start press so long as you don't press start early and pause the game.
To add onto this from what I learned while grinding this for a few hours:
- The enemy spawns are not RNG. They seem to be influenced by which enemies you kill but otherwise the enemy spawn patterns are always the exact same. This allows you to predict where are going to spawn and be ready for them.
- Enemy shoot/attack patterns are also very predictable. There are some bad patterns you get that you always get and you will need to maneuver around them.
- You can spawn an additional enemy at the start of stage one and two by shooting the first enemy early.
- Running into enemies counts toward level progression, so even if your shot misses you can still run into the enemy. This does cause damage though so shooting is still ideal.
Well that's pretty neat. Good find. Hilarious that nobody ever thought of trying that after all these years until now.
Hello,
This is a heads up that I updated the rules for the GBC version of the run to clarify when timing begins and ends as there was nothing in the rules regarding this specific version and the existing runs on the board were all using slightly different start and stop times.
The rules have been added to be as consistent as possible with the N64/PS/DC versions. Time begins when you select your fighter, which is visually signified when the cursor on the fighter changes over to the ? box. Time ends on the first frame when the WINNER! message appears.
I've retimed the existing runs which were changed as follows:
NintenLew had 33s and was retimed to 32s.
FrozenFaygo had 19s and was retimed to 21s.
Jaypin88's previous/obsolete WR of 20s was retimed to 20s so it was not changed.
If there is a category split it would need to be Any% and No Skips rather than Glitchless because the old runs before the skip was found used glitches to kill the bosses faster.
Hello,
The runner CubbyCat discovered that if you use the climbing glitch on the screen with the final boss you can enter an Out of Bounds area and fall into the ending screen that appears after defeating the boss. In the rules it technically says time ends when the screen turns black after defeating the boss, not when this screen appears, so this technically does not fulfill the end condition for timing. However this was also written before this climbing glitch was discovered.
I personally do not think this should be allowed because it's removing the only remaining element of skill in the run (i.e. killing the final boss quickly) as everything would be just mashing which would be a pretty boring speedrun. The only alternative would be a category split for Any% and No Skips which would have the same problem because the regular game has a long and boring autoscroller in it (likely the main reason nobody ran the game).
On the other hand it is just using the same glitch as is used elsewhere, which are all allowed, and is only technically not following a rule that was written before the glitch in question was found, so I can't think of any reasons against allowing it other than it negatively affecting the speedrun itself.
Anyway just throwing that all out there. Personally I don't like it and I will stop running this if it's allowed but I'm not the only person playing the game.
Cheers.
I've been made a mod and have updated the categories to account for this glitch (as well as any new ones that may be found).
Hey!
Congrats on completing that one. I remembering trying it out with save states back when I was running these and I gave up out of frustration. Good job. It's a stupidly punishing game.
I added a new category for this game, and submitted your run for you (also the frame count came out to a slightly better time of 6m 10s 100ms).
If there's any other Action 52 games you've completed a run for that don't currently exist on the board just let me know and I'll add them.
Cheers and congrats again.
Makes sense and I agree with both points made. The non-Warpless categories are a total gong show now and might be off-putting to new runners encountering those as a default category.
Adding milliseconds will be a good idea because the top 3 times are already very close to each other and there is less than 2 seconds left to be saved.
Hello,
Originally the board combined N64 hardware and emulator runs onto one board but after recent submissions it became impossible for runs performed on hardware to achieve a new WR due to the significant advantage emulator's provide due to them not lagging (this is particularly noticeable in the underground stage).
It's difficult to say exactly how much of an advantage emulator has but based on how much this game lags, which it does a lot in every stage, it will come out to several minutes across the entire run. Given this it no longer makes sense to combine hardware and emulator now that an optimized emulator run has been submitted.
So I've added an additional category variable to split the boards up by both difficulty level and hardware/emulator.
Cheers.
Howdy,
I've completed a run of Crazy Shuffle so I've added it as an available category.
Have at it!
Hello,
We now have completed runs for Operation Full Moon so I have added it as an available category.
I did some testing and found out that it's easier to count how many enemies you've killed. After a set number of kills stop spamming and you should expect to see 1 more enemy before the boss (possibly none if you despawn one of them but that is rare).
The counts for each stage are:
Stage One: 11
Stage Two: 6
Stage Three: 5
Stage Four: 5
Stage Five: 7
Stage Six: 8
Actually, after watching steven's failed attempt video here I noticed that spamming the fire changes how the hazardous blog things drop down which makes the run faster. So the ideal strat is to spam the shot until you're near the boss then stop to prevent a despawn. I did this by watching my timer and stopping after 1m 10s passes from the previous split.
This piqued my interest in the game so I completed a run of Boss so I've added it was an available category on the leaderboards. The enemy spawns are always the same—the only RNG is if the stationary enemies will shoot at you or not—so you can predict when they will appear and not need to spam the fire button and risk despawning the boss.
Hello,
It came to our attention that the Rev A version of Shooting Gallery only works on emulator and does not work on hardware—regardless of use of EverDrive/PowerPak flashcart or an original Action 52 cart—and will crash after the first level or when attempting to return to the main game menu. So far as I can tell this only happens on Rev A and not Standard, but playing on Standard is significantly slower than Rev A so any runner who uses it would be penalized.
This game does not look like it would be competitive due to its design/nature, and we don't want to have emulator-only categories, so we're going to remove the Shooting Gallery category.
Here is an example of the bizarre behaviour exhibited on hardware:
