[TAS] TMNT 2003 - Stage 1 Area 1-2 (WIP) - Donatello NG%
38 years ago, I made an attempt to beat this game. Dolphin TASing wasn't that stable, I didn't know much about the game despite overplaying it in my childhood, my PC wasn't strong enough and I wasn't experienced in TASing. I beat Stage 1 Area 1 and dropped it.
Now, the problems are fixed, emulators are improved and I'm ready to do a serious attempt to complete the whole game.
Donatello is selected as the easiest turtle. Nano Giant and Stockman are difficult, but this is gonna be paid off by countless timesavers on regular enemies.
Difficulty: Easy.
It will look fast and easy on Stage 1, but the pace of Stage 3 and beyond will be much slower.
- TAS vs RTA rules -
RTA's NG% is not actually a New Game. It completes the whole game beforehand and has all the power-ups since Stage 1, making about 50% of fights trivial because each crowd is killed with a single strong attack.
TAS starts a new game for no progress at all, and turtles' attacks are weak. Stage 1 Area 4 will already be difficult because Foot Ninjas don't die from a single strong attack, unlike in RTA.
- Comments -
Area 1 - 0:30 (vs 0:32 RTA NG+)
This area is trivial. Each mouser has 4 hp, which means, if one gets pushed back by another falling enemy, it dies. That's why the whole squad of mousers gets destroyed of a single attack. Mousers hit each other like snooker balls.
Squad 1. When a single mouser dies, one extra mouser fall down from the ceiling after a specific amount of time, so it's not necessary to kill all the squad in one hit.
Note: it's not clear what happens when an enemy fall down to the battle field, if it has its hitbox on the ground and it becomes vulnerable at a specific moment, or the hit area of Donatello's swing is 2 metres high.
Squad 2. Matched the timing to make the rocks fall down just in time when the animation of mousers coming out is over. Hitting them with the bo doesn't save time.
Squad 8 (last one). Hitting is faster than matching the timing for rocks to fall down.
Area 2 - 1:49 (vs 2:29 RTA NG+)
The two Purple Dragons variations both have 18 hp. They die of a single strong attack or an electric shuriken.
All squads are beaten in the fastest time. Regular shurikens are used to detonate barrels. Electric ones are used to kill separated enemies.
I did the time calculations. It's faster to sue them here, break the box to the left from Giant Mouser boss on Area 5 and fulfil electric shurikens there, rather than saving them for the boss.
- Misc -
The turtle can perform a dash at any time, in the middle of any move or combo. Dashing is usually faster than letting the move be finished, except for turnarounds.
When there are 2-3 enemies standing close to each other, it's better to do a running strong attack. It lets you to change the direction in a small range and perform at dash immediately.
Idle strong attack (bo swing) can hit up to 6 enemies, but they all mustn't stand behind each other or else one falling enemy knocks down another enemy and it doesn't take my damage.
Enemy falling and vanishing sequences have some sort of random timings in scope of 0-2 addional frames, like in Doom, to make them all look not identical. In theory, this can save some time, but it's quite a big task to pull off.
Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.8 with Dolphin 5.0-16426 core
https://tasvideos.org/Forum/Topics/23347?CurrentPage=1&PageSize=25&Sort=CreateTimestamp
No graphical extensions were used while recording this video, so it may look a little messy.