Game Basics

Hi guys, just wanted to write a quick summary of the base game mechanics for any people who may wanna try running this game.

Controls:
A - Fire (how you blow up stuff, duh)
B - Missile (you have limited stock of these)
X - Speed up (this requires fuel)
Y - Slow down (useful when firing down large targets)

There isn't much strategy when picking aircraft, just always select the one furthest to the right (automatically selected by default). Your main time saves will come from quickly blowing up required targets, and flying quickly past all others.

You start off each mission with 10 missiles, and can hold up to a maximum of 40. You can see how many you have left on the upper left of the bottom screen. Your fuel tank is visible by how much "flame" is left in the bar, and your speed is visible by the grey meter inside. Don't blow through a whole fuel barrel immediately, you can only reach a certain top speed and your aircraft will slow down after some time.

You can grab the following pickups from enemies and "bosses:"

- Fuel, refills your tank to full (VLR) Addendum: Fuel is also the only thing you lose item wise upon death and will be dropped to what seems to be 10% which can kill a run)
- Missiles, adds 10 missiles to your stock, up to a max of 40
- Health, refills your aircraft's health bar a fair amount, about 40%(?)                              (VLR) Addendum: health packs seem to give 3 varying amounts of health at random between 10% and 40%-50% but I'm not fully sure of the amounts)
- Plane, gives you an extra life for the current mission 
- Kapow, red box, when used (click on bottom screen) destroys all enemies on screen          (VLR) Addendum: Does not work on bosses or boss adjectives and only works within a radius of your ship)
- Shield, yellow box, when used (click on bottom screen) protects you from enemy fire and enemy contact damage for ~15 seconds. Will NOT protect you from crashing into map hazards.
- Twister, green box, when used (click on bottom screen)... something happens (I'm not exactly sure lol)
- Guns, three different kinds (blue, red and green), collecting will change your weapon into another type (not sure if this helps, I find the green shots easiest to aim though). If you collect the same weapon type you're using, it will upgrade.                                           (VLR) Addendum: You can upgrade any gun 4 times after picking it up (triple shot, triple with large center shot, double large shot, triple large shot). The difference in damage seems to be nominal between everything except for the sonic blaster (green circle gun) which does seem to have a higher dps)

Lastly, don't die. This should be obvious but there's not much to be gained when dying with no fuel, and dying too much will result in a mission restart, which obviously loses a lot of time. (VLR) Addendum: there are a couple instances where dying can respawn you in a better position to where you currently were both in lack of fuel or location but yes dying is typically bad and unfortunately in some cases inevitable with bad luck.)

That's it, hope this helps and I hope others get into running!

General Speedrunning Tips (To be updated when neccesary)

Hi, this guide is here to go over General strategies and other tips for running Time Ace. It is split into 4 Categories, General, Any%, 100%, and TIME ace%. This guide will be updated when neccesary to accomadate new strategies and keep from bloating up the Guides tab.

## General:

### Orientation system:

This is the system the game uses to keep you oriented in whatever direction it wants you to go. It takes the form of the arrow on the top of the screen

I believe it works on an invisible checkpoint system just based on what i've seen while playing. So be careful taking some corners to tight and such but occasionally it just wacks out (which I assume is because the system doesn't update due to either the checkpoint not being loaded properly or you not crossing it) causing your ship to do some crazy movement potentially causing a death

## Collision:

This game has mostly solid collision but sometimes it can be inconsistent, so be really careful when navigating tightly around large structures and corners.

some object collision does extent beyond the object its tied to but its not too common that you will come across it except for a few very obvious examples (some of the rocks in the Mars Orbit boss fight as an example). Additionally some objects are missing some collision on some faces and you will be able to go right through them (some of the city buildings in russia 2 as an example

### Boosting:

for the best use of your afterburner you will want to spread it out as long as possible, every few seconds you want to press the boost button and let go within a second, this will extend your speed and hopefully last you until the next fuel tank

you can tell when your ship isn't doing boost speed becuase it will slow down a lot (you will notice, it gets reallly slow) but also because the pitch of the engine sound will be lower.

### Upgrades: 

you can collect a new guns over the course of the level through random drops, I don't think there is a huge difference in damage between the first 3 (I think the sonic gun (the green one) does more damage overall)

You can upgrade a gun 5 times (normal shot, triple shot, triple with large center shot, double large shot, triple large shot) You will only potentially get more than triple shot in a few levels and triple large is near impossible to get in any level due to IRNG.

Extra damage is always good so go for the upgrades but don't expect them

### Items:

### IRNG (Item Random Number Generation):

Item drops will make or break a run, if it's missing a missile pod or a fuel barrel that can mean losing a ton of time on a boss or just flying through long stretches at normal speed.

To my knowledge this system is entirely random and will be the reason many runs fail later down the line, I have been completely unable to find any sort of pattern as of yet. 

you can also get less useful items or even several of the same items in a row that you don't need leading to time loss ( a big example is getting one of the worse gun pickups, this will make more of a difference in TIME ace% then the normal game runs but still)

### Spawns:

Every single enemy spawn except for boss related swarm spawns (in US3, Mars Orbit, and unknown which are based on your location so it's predictable) are 100% the same every single time, every enemy has been specifically set to appear where they do which is crazy considering how ubsurd some groupings are on some levels (specifically the tunnel of doom for example) so they are learnable.

## Any%:

## 100%:

The big difference between Any% and 100% is the additon of three new required levels and being required to play the repair minigame once meaning you can't mindlessly spam through the menus the entire time and need to be aware. The most efficient way to play through the game is to do the regular any% run (levels, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18) but you would play the repair minigame going into level 7 in order to unlock level 6 (you specifically need to do the repair minigame there because it won't work at any other level)  you then play levels 6, 12, and 19 in reverse order as you can spam press into level 19 immediately after finishing 18. (so the order is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, R, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 ,12 ,6)

## TIME ace%: 

basically a time trial mode I guess 

since you are using the best ship in the game you have a lot of extra boost (especially on earlier levels where the ships used  full game runs are signifigantly worse) and you also start with the best base weapon. this means any weapon pickups other than green you get are a detriment and should be avoided if at all possible though in some situations it can't be helped and you just have to hope the luck is on your side.



Name	Author
Game Basics	AJL828 5 years ago
General Speedrunning Tips (To be updated when neccesary)	Vivalaradi0 4 months ago