Alaska, USAYou're getting way more confident in your movement!
One thing I noticed on the 2nd boss: it's fastest to either hit with both of the footballer guys it drops each cycle, or hit with neither and only use the sword. If you hit with only one and then attack with the sword, the transformer will only let you get a couple hits before it flies away.
Ah, that's unfortunate. Until this I had held out hope that there actually was no RNG in Clockwork Knight :(
Yeah, I kind of figured this (I thought I posted about it before?). You can jump into the boss in the first phase and get a ton of hits, but it doesn't speed up the fight at all. The last time I was grinding this out I figured out it's best to just get it down below as quickly as possible by having it jump on the same tiles over and over and not provoking any other attacks.
I think a few of the bosses have this property where each phase has a combination of damage and time/animations involved. I also suspect the Kitchen boss has a similar property with taking "damage" to knock if over, plus how many hits are allowed each time it's knocked down.
I did some testing, and there is zero difference in loading time between my Saturn with the Fenrir ODE, and loading times before when it still had a disc drive. I suspect it will be the same for other ODEs too.
I'm considering adding an ODE category for modded consoles that use an ODE (optical drive emulation) board. These boards only really affect CD loading times, so it's not at all fair to compare such runs to all-original hardware. I could also lump this together with emulator runs, since they both will (probably) have faster than normal loading times, and both kind of constitute "unofficial hardware" runs.
Does anyone have strong feelings on this?
That was my observation in the past. An emulator would about half a second on each level transition (double when going to roulette) compared with the hardware I tested with. If you want to dig deeper, it will be very important to record what emulator you are using (there is quite a bit of variation in emulation quality).
I also am very aware that age and condition of the hardware makes loading time on a real Saturn somewhat inconsistent, too :( Every few hours when doing runs I would get a weird extra-long load of like 20 seconds of a black screen.
I'm pretty sure the kitchen boss isn't RNG, the number of cycles the pot does in the background depends solely on exactly where the boss is when you attack the pot off. There is a decent spot very close to the right edge, and another if you stand just to the right of the tip of the spatula in the background (which is where I usually tried to go).
Getting the glitch on the kitchen boss would be even better, but I think it's basically frame perfect (and depending on where you are standing sometimes is actually a time waster).
Regarding the helicopters (and attacking on the ground in general), it's slightly faster to attack in the air. You could save a little time by attacking right after starting a jump, instead of attacking on the ground like I do.
Also a big time saver with the attic boss is that you can attack the boss directly with your sword after the arms fall off in the second phase. It's actually slightly slower to get the head to fully juggle on top of the boss, faster is to keep throwing it up, and getting double hits with it.
My sum of best is 15:15, no doubt 15:00 is possible.
No problem! I'm glad it turned out to be simple.
Oh, interesting.
I haven't done a run in a while, but I think I just mash A+B+C+start. It does seem like a little more time is spent on the "miss" part than in my runs (the fanfare gets to a later part in your TAS).
Does it depend where the rotating letters are in their rotation? Single-frame stepping, I can see the letters rotated a different amount for me than they did in the TAS. It looks like it took more rotation to get to the "MISS" for me, but maybe it's not that simple (like it needs to finish a certain number of rotation counts /after/ displaying MISS or something).
If you land right at the very end of the spring at the end of the level, you will just fall off the end with no jump at all.
I think that's the fastest way to end a level, since that's the nearest place you can land with a jump that will end the level, and it avoids doing the jump onto the letters.
I saw, thanks for the shoutout! I had a feeling that you had seen my run, when I saw you doing the high-low attacks on the kitchen boss. That, and it seems like no one else ever used either of the warps in their runs.
That's very interesting that hard has fewer coins. At the first warp, you have to be careful not to pick up any coins to avoid that at the end of the first world, but because of the coins above the crane in 2-1 and some in the train level you can't really avoid it in the second world on up.
I didn't know that you could just sword the attic boss in the final phase. That would have saved a few runs.
It's also interesting that you don't need the invincibility to do the zip in the attic, I had thought that was needed. I'll have to try that out! That's why I didn't do the zip on the first falling ceiling in the route.
Interesting to see hard mode done. I had thought it would be faster as you could pick up a stunned can and just run with it to kill the rest, instead of pausing to kill each of them with the key, but it actually looks like some levels like 2-1 just have way better enemy placement too.
The load times look several second faster than real hardware, though :(
It's also quite strange you didn't get the one million point bonus on the train level, although I do not know if that exists in hard mode.
I would be curious to head how the infinite footballer glitch on the first transformer and the kitchen boss glitch actually work :)
I currently have a run pending for Clockwork Knight (6 days old). The mod for Clockwork Knight has been inactive for a year. The only other contact information on the profile is their Twitch page, which has been inactive since 2016.
Thanks.
EDIT: link to the board: https://www.speedrun.com/Clockwork_Knight
