United StatesWith Fluffybunny701 getting into speedrunning this game, it pushed me out of my gaming funk and brought me back to playing and routing this silly-ass GBA title. As I've done with my other GBA speed games, I reached out to the devs to see if they had any insight into things we could do to speed it up. Things like bugs, glitches, or even just interesting things that happened during development. There were two guys who were pretty easy to track down who worked on the game back in 2001-2003. First is Jag Jaeger, who was the Project Manager on Nightfire. The second is Vince Valenti (is it weird that both their names are alliterations?) who was the lead programmer on the title. Since it's been almost 20 years since the game was in development, I'm not sure how much information they even have anymore, as JV games went on to make mostly Beer Pong games for phones and the Wii. I reached out to both of them on Facebook, though I'm pretty sure that they will get lost before they take a look. On the nearly defunct JV Games website, there is some contact info that I'm going to use to send them an e-mail, see if they are willing to have a phone/skype/facetime interview. Can anyone think of some questions that would be good for asking? I would LOVE to get my hands on the game code, but maybe they are aware of some game-breaking bugs? How amazing would it be to be able to warp to the end credits or something?
They also have a phone number listed on their contact page, so I'll probably call their office if I don't get a reply to the e-mail within the week.
I just went through Austrian Castle, finishing with full health and 100% Accuracy, in order to get a better understanding as to how the points are tallied, here's how it works:
Looking at this we see that the maximum bonus points you can get for any stage are 100k. 25k each for the Bond bonus, Accuracy, Health, and being under the Par time (no problem for us, right?). With 200k for Dispatched/Subdued Enemies.
Bond Bonus: Grabbing the bond bonus in each stage gets you an automatic 25000 points.
Dispatched/Subdued: Max points for this category is 200k, but the exact point value for each enemy is going to vary greatly depending on the stage.
Accuracy: This needs some more testing, but it is directly related to how many shots you take vs how many hits you have, with a max point value of 25000. This is going to be where most of the leeway is in running this game, as the better people get at running it, the better their overall accuracy will be, thus removing the need to kill quite as many dudes to move on.
Health: So the max health is 9hp, if you finish the stage with full health you get the full 25000 bonus, each point you lose takes another 11.1111%. So finishing the stage with 7 health will give you a final percentage of 77% and a point value of 19250. Making sure you finish with top health makes a huge difference in a speedrun situation, but since the enemy accuracy is an absolute crapshoot, there's not too much you can do to make sure you finish up with a ton of health.
Time: This is a free 25k to us speedrunners.
Does someone want to go through and find out the point values of the enemies in each stage?
So the goal of this post is to confirm exactly how many bad guys you've got to kill in order to still achieve a bronze rank on Austrian Castle.
There are 5 guys in the intro area, since we don't lose time killing them as we have to wait on the truck, go ahead and kill all five of them. (**EDIT I just realized it's 6 guys here hahahah)
After the truck area you need to kill at least 5 enemies to have a high enough score to get a Bronze Medal, assuming you are grabbing the Bond Bonus before dropping down and taking out the last 4 thugs before Heli.
So it looks like 14 enemies total (**EDIT It's actually 15), with really the middle section of Austrian Castle giving any sort of leeway in routing.
So if we need to kill 5 dudes in the second section, what's the quickest way to do it? Right now I'm thinking that you would rush the ramp, kill the two guards inside, rush the next ramp and kill the guy that is directly in your path. Take the right corner, and skip the guy directly in front of you, killing the guy a little further up. Then clip the guy next to the armor and bob's your uncle. Maybe killing the two guards who stand still at the door as you enter the second area would be easier kills. Gonna do a couple tries and see if I can optimize it.
