Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap - Freefall Comparison
2This video examines a stretch of the game through 5 screen transitions that... theoretically... should take the same amount of time for both players. Note that there are some confounding factors in making this comparison. The run on the left was recorded at 30 fps in Retro graphics mode, while the one on the right was recorded at 60 fps in Modern graphics mode. However, there should be no difference in gameplay.
I tried to start the freefalls simultaneously in the same position, but the run on the right hits the screen transition first. I believe this is due to having more downward velocity because of the different timing that the players used when jumping off of the wall.
In spite of hitting the first screen transition 4 frames earlier than the player on the left, the player on the right lands 4 (or possibly 5, depending on the animation) frames *later* than that player.
How did the player on the left manage to freefall 8 frames faster than the player on the right? It is possible that the left player is running at an accelerated framerate. (62 or so fps would be very hard to visually identify.)
Nonetheless, 8 frames of advantage over 6.3 seconds would translate to about 34 seconds over the course of a 27 minute speedrun.
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There are 987 views in 5 videos for Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap. There's close to 4 hours worth of content for Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap published on his channel, roughly 5.79% of the content that Final Elipsis has uploaded to YouTube.