Spelunker (Irem, 12/6/85)

Spelunker is infamous (in Japan, at least) for featuring the wimpiest hero in video games, a guy who cannot survive a fall of half his body length and who blithely falls right off of ropes and ladders unless you specifically order him to jump off instead. In the hands of the right TASser, however, the dude suddenly acquires Mario-like powers.

The main trick to this updated run lies in an obscure bug involving the “drug,” the hidden bottles of red liquid that are revealed when your explorer passes through certain points in each map. Drugs double your speed for a limited time, but it turns out that if you pick up a second drug just before your current one expires, the timer will go offline and you’ll keep the speed boost for the rest of the game.

There’s a side effect to this, however: You cannot board the left-right moving boat in the third section while in double-speed mode, effectively preventing you from going any further. The workaround involves exploiting another obscure bug: If you tap A repeatedly to climb a rope or ladder quickly, the game (for whatever reason) will not reset the Y coordinate it uses to determine whether you’ve fallen to your death or not. As a result, as long as you get the A-button timing right, you can jump off the rope and fall as far as you want as long as you don’t tumble below the starting point where you first “boarded” the rope.

This TAS uses that bug to essentially force the explorer into the boat. In the process, he also shatters everything I thought I knew about the Spelunker. Maybe he deserves to be treated seriously as a video game hero after all…

Atlantis no Nazo (Sunsoft, 4/17/86)

A full TAS run of the mid-’80s Famicom platform game, one that has a remarkably detailed English Wikipedia page. It’s so detailed, in fact, that I’d like to meet the guy who decided that translating all the info on the Japanese wiki-page would make for a fun afternoon. I have the impression that he (let’s just assume he’s a gentleman) and I would have a lot in common.

Atlantis no Nazo　is a famous game in Japan for a number of reasons — it’s incredibly hard; your hero controls very wonkily and his weapon is extremely difficult to control; there are warps that’re found only by deliberately committing suicide; a couple of stages flash constantly; there’s a “Black Hole!” stage that is an immediate Game Over if you are unfortunate enough to visit it; and so on. Activision contemplated releasing the game for the NES (under the title Super Pitfall II) seriously enough to create a full-on preview version that even included a few upgrades, but the game was really just too old hat for the US audience by 1989.

A “full” or “warpless” run of Atlantis no Nazo, as defined by the creator of this TAS, follows two rules:

- Do not take any doors that are not in plain sight (except for the door between 99th Stage and 100th Stage)
- Do not take any doors that bring your intrepid hero five or more stages ahead of where he previously was

Beating the game this way is pretty much impossible for a human being. I tried it back in the day (i.e. 1998), and I couldn’t no matter how much I tried. It’s not a title for weak sisters, or really for anyone besides hyperactive Japanese children, assuming it was still 1986. But nonetheless there’s a certain charm to this title, perhaps because of the hero’s proud, exaggerated marching gait.

Note that pausing and unpausing the game right after finishing the stage cuts down the length of the little inter-level display, hence the odd sound after going through a doog.

Contra (Konami, 5/26/89)

Just a short update as I’m fighting allergies and mainly want to go to bed at the moment.

Konami is undoubtedly the most important maker who worked on the MSX. The things they did with that machine were, and are, out of this world, and the developers used their technical wizardry to craft some killer games that worked around the system’s limits. (Vampire Killer is the classic example of this.)

That’s why I’m unsure what happened with the MSX2 port of Contra Konami released in mid-1989. It’s one of the few real failures Konami released on the platform. The controls are weird, the graphics strangely undetailed, the original stages completely uninspired. The flick-screen scrolling is particularly confusing because Konami made smooth scrolling happen on the MSX2 only three months later with the baseball game Ganbare Pennant Race 2.

The game gets only two things right: the music, and the way the 3D stages feature your guy moving left/right in addition to forward after completing a room (a little detail in the arcade version that got dropped from all the other 8-bit ports).

Pilotwings (Nintendo, 12/21/90)

Pilotwings Resort is coming out pretty soon, but why not concentrate instead on the only game among the SNES launch titles that got me really, really excited? (What can I say — Mode 7 was really amazing to me, in a way that the PlayStation wasn’t somehow.)

This game, featuring music by my beloved Soyo Oka (who must have really like that “blaaa” instrument because it’s used in two tracks), is one of several to use a DSP-1 coprocessor in order to speed up the trigonometric calculations required for the quick scaling/rotation seen in-game. F-Zero does not use this coprocessor despite having even faster scaling/rotation moves. This is because — and I forget who told this to me, so I can’t give a source — something like half of the game ROM is composed solely of precalculated cosine tables, obviating the need to come up with the figures in realtime.

Japanese Wikipedia claims (unsourced) that the first shipment of Pilotwings in Japan did not include a DSP-1, something which I don’t think is actually true. What is true is that the game may have either the DSP-1, DSP-1A, or DSP-1B chip onboard. The 1A is a simple hardware revision to make the chip smaller, while the 1B is the same as the 1 except with a few bugfixes to the microcode that drives the device. You can tell which chip is inside your Pilotwings without opening up the cartridge because the 1B revision actually triggers a bug that’s easily demonstrated. Start up the game and keep it running until you get the gameplay demo with the light plane. If the plane lands correctly, the game’s running on a DSP-1 or 1A; if it crashes well in advance of the runway, you’ve got a DSP-1B.

Neat, huh? And until I started researching this, I didn’t even realize there was that “secret” side pool you could hit with that one bonus stage.

Famicom Grand Prix II: 3D Hot Rally (Nintendo/HAL Laboratory, 4/14/88)

Nintendo’s shot at copying Out Run…or perhaps Victory Run, more accurately speaking. Japan was going through something of a rally fad during the late ’80s, mainly because on-board rally computers got cheap and kei cars became powerful enough to be useful for racing under rally conditions. Nintendo also did a reasonable job simulating hills and winding roads with the engine behind this game, better than Yuji Naka managed with the Master System port of Out Run, although it’s still a little jerky.

This game isn’t exactly a simulator — you can choose from one of three cars at the start, and picking up enough ! marks on the road lets you unleash the “Hot Dash” turbo mode. Hot Dash keeps your car from slowing down in snow or desert stages, which is important because the sports car (the fastest in the game) performs pretty poorly in these conditions.

3D Hot Rally also marks the game debut of Soyo Oka, a female musician (there were a surprisingly large of these in the Japan industry from the very beginning) who worked at Nintendo from 1987 to 1994. Her contributions to Pilotwings, Super Mario Kart and so on are probably better known, but the little ditty that plays during the races here is remarkably catchy as well.

Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari (Technos Japan, 4/25/89)

There’s been a lot of activity in TASsing the Japanese version of River City Ransom lately. The current top TAS for the US port beats the game in six minutes, 53 seconds, but for Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari, that time’s gone down to 5:53:32, just over a minute quicker.

A few of the tricks you’ll see in the video above:

- Riki (aka RYAN) is picked instead of Kunio (aka ALEX) because that makes the conversation with the girl on the bridge go quicker, to the tune of about 8 seconds.

- Previous TAS runs involved Riki earning enough cash to buy Stone Hands, which lets him rapid-fire punches — a good, relatively cheap way to power up your character. This time, though, Riki instead purchases the Isis Scroll from the hidden shop in the tunnel. This bargain-basement ($20) item upgrades how much damage you cause when you throw objects at people.

- Pressing left and right at the same time causes your character to do crazy things in this game, usually resulting in him falling off the screen and dying. This TAS uses that to kill off Riki after buying the Isis Scroll; this puts him back at the last mall visited, which is faster than actually running back there.

- It turns out that your throwing stat is used to determine damage not only when you throw a weapon or item, but when you kick it as well. To be more exact, when you kick an item and it strikes an enemy, it causes the same amount of damage as the last time you threw an item and struck an enemy. Therefore, you can do a jumping-dash-throw weapon at an enemy for max damage, and then spend the rest of the game kicking garbage cans at guys and one-hit killing everyone except for bosses…which, wahey, is exactly what happens here!

I hereby rename this game The Adventures of Ricky Rude and His Magical Garbage Can.

Gimmick! (Sunsoft, 1/31/92)

Ah, Gimmick! Tomomi Sakai’s gift to platform lovers everywhere. I’ll never forgive the Famitsu reviewer who gave it 5/10.

If you’re not familiar with the game, you may wish to view Frank Cifaldi’s annotated introduction first so you can appreciate all the things the new, improved TAS above is doing. Most notable to me was the shortcut in Stage 2 that mostly eliminates that long, boring trip to the pirate ship. Bravo!

(I’m sorry updates haven’t been more full-featured lately. Lot of personal work occupying my time.)

Chō Makaimura (Capcom, 10/4/91)

It’s easy to spot an early-era SNES game. There’s slowdown in places where you wouldn’t expect any slowdown. The Mode 7 effects are a bit janky and look a lot better in screenshots than live. The music is really tinny throughout — an issue Capcom seemed to struggle with all through the console’s life, come to think of it.

Nevertheless, Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts is a decent platformer, just as hard as any other in the series, and this TAS attempts to get through the game while defeating the absolute bare minimum of enemies — the bosses, and a set of cockatrice heads that must be killed in order to remove a wall blocking your way. The results are pretty spine-tingling, and even though this is a TAS and you know Knight Arthur is never going to die, it’s still thrilling to watch him take this leisurely stroll through the demon world.

Note that this video begins with the final boss of the first playthrough to save time, since (like with most Ghosts ‘n Goblins titles) you must beat the game twice in a row to get the real ending. Stick around for that ending and you’ll also get to see an interesting bug that was fixed for the SNES release. In the Super Famicom Chō Makaimura, if you reconfigure the button assignments in option mode and then finish the game, Arthur’s movements in the ending will grow more and more haywire, until he finally dies in one part of it. If you beat the game with 0 lives left, the ending is then halted by a Game Over and you have to “continue” to see the rest of it. (Doing this kills the ending music, and the credits roll at the very end is completely silent as a result, which is why it was cut out of this video.)

Jason goes eco-friendly, gets frog back in under 5 minutes

He doesn’t need to spend hundreds on diesel fuel to drive his cool futuristic tank, SOPHIA THE 3RD, through the Plutonium Underworld or whatever the manual called it. He can just get with the green generation and hoof it. That, and warp in and out of existence at unexpected (but oddly beneficial) times.

It turns out that the PAL version of Blaster Master (released three years after the game’s 1988 debut) introduced some timing bugs that allow skillful players to perform tricks like mid-air double jumps and going through doors that aren’t really there and other Rod Serling-type stuff. Programming bugs like these cropped up now and then on US or Japan-made games that were later ported to European NESes, where  — like with the Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 — the system ran at a different video-output speed (50hz versus 60hz). This meant that some games required extensive recoding to to work in foreign NESes, and it’s also the reason why European-exclusive games like Asterix and Mr. Gimmick suffer assorted dealbreaking bugs when you plug a real PAL cartridge into a real NTSC NES. (These timing differences are also why the music is pitched lower than you might remember it in this video.)

The maker of this TAS has posted a long file explaining everything going on in the video.

Something else I discovered as I was writing this: Area 4 is a lot easier in the US/Europe version than in the Japanese original. I remember gamers having enough trouble with the lock-and-key sequence that Nintendo Power did a whole bit on it, but Sunsoft actually made the solution a lot more obvious for America, didn’t they? Metafight’s take on that room makes it look like there’s a bug in the level data or something.

Rockman 2 MIN (2008)

Rockman 2 MIN is probably the most extensive ROM hack of Mega Man II I’ve seen. You might as well just call it a total conversion at this point. The stages, music, graphics, enemy patterns, and a lot of your weapons have been changed.

As for the difficulty? “I don’t intend it to be that difficult,” the author TAR writes, “but your choice of stage order might be vital. If you can beat the original, finishing this should be possible enough.” I don’t know about that. TAR really likes his spikes.

You can take a tour of this mod through the TAS above (noting, of course, that the speedrun takes advantage of bugs that are no fault of TAR’s). See how much of the music you can guess — you should be able to spot at least a couple tunes from old Kirby and SaGa games.