Uploaded July 2010 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
For copyright issues I'm not the one who made this run, neither am I the owner of it, I am not related with any of the speedrun. This video is the property of www.speeddemosarchive.com. This run was made by Jeff Feasel.
Author's Comments :
One of the things that makes Adventures of Lolo such an interesting game, besides the fact that it's arguably the best puzzle game series on the NES platform, is the fact that the game's possibility space is so limited (the game is on a 21x21 movement grid, and input is usually only taken every 8 frames (at 60fps), or every half block of the sprite grid). To put it simply: there are only so many possible things to try. With an emulator it isn't hard to test them all, and people have hacked away at this game for years. Numerous TAS videos for Lolo have been made (in particular Baxter has made a series of 10 TAS over the last 5 years, gradually incorporating essentially all known tricks to bring the completion time down to 22:04 (by SDA timing standards)). Nobody knows what's the absolute fastest the game can be completed, but it sure can't be much faster than 22:04.
In most of the rooms, the route i take is optimal (at least, with respect to all known tactics). However there are a few places where a substantial amount of time can be saved by doing some very risky maneuvering. Too much risk is not a reasonable strategy for console, so for certain rooms i had to plan a route that compromises between risk and time-cost. The majority of the time difference between my best console run (23:02) that you see here and the best TAS run (22:04) come from just a small handful of rooms, all of them being situations that require complicated and risky manipulation of enemies (the remainder of the difference coming from errors in execution). It is often possible to skip much of the time you'd normally spend "boxing in" enemies so that they can't hurt you, and in some cases you can even use the moving enemies as temporary shields against other enemies. I can pull off a few such moves where i let the skulls roam free (e.g. Rooms 1-4, 2-5, 3-1, and 7-5), but in some cases (e.g. 10-1) it just isn't feasible.
The route i eventually settled on was approximately 22:50, if executed perfectly. It was a formidable task committing all 50 rooms to memory, many of which involve rather long, complex, and unobvious paths. It took several days to memorize what to do in each room. But even after committing the routes to memory, i found that i was still unable to reliably memorize the order in which the rooms appear.
Each time i enter a new room, it takes some amount of time for me to recognize the room, recall the plan, and begin moving. Usually about a second or more, which adds up to a minute or so of wasted time over the whole game (which is clearly unacceptable). To avoid this, i made note of the initial direction that i must head in each room, so that i could start out holding that direction before the room fades into view and then get my bearings while i was moving. I made a chart with these initial directions (and notes on the numerous special cases where i must make a turn soon after starting the level). One complication with this plan is that there is usually no down-time within or between rooms with which to consult my chart. The only down-time in the game happens between floors (every 5 rooms), so at each floor change i use this time to consult the chart and commit the next 5 initial directions to memory (which i would then have to keep repeating to myself as i played so as not to forget; i believe this is called "echoic storage").
The execution is pretty tight overall. There are a few instances of corner-sticking or overshooting that lose me a split second here and there. I also lose about 1.5 seconds in 8-2, about 1 second in 8-5, about 1 second in 10-1, and about 2 seconds in 10-4, but that is pretty much the extent of the execution error. Considering how easy it is to make mistakes in a game with such a discrete movement style and narrow timing windows, i'm amazed that the run turned out as well as it did. Consider the following: There are 1837 turns in the route you see here, and about 80% of them are in places where no overshoot or undershoot is allowed. At each turn, the d-pad direction must be changed within an 8 frame window. Aiming for the center of this window leaves a margin of error of 4 frames (67 ms) for each turn. So, in short, this game requires one to be accurate to within 67 milliseconds (or 1/5 of a second) nearly 1500 times. Yeah. And that's just the turning part.
For copyright issues I'm not the one who made this run, neither am I the owner of it, I am not related with any of the speedrun. This video is the property of www.speeddemosarchive.com. This run was made by Jeff Feasel.
Author's Comments :
One of the things that makes Adventures of Lolo such an interesting game, besides the fact that it's arguably the best puzzle game series on the NES platform, is the fact that the game's possibility space is so limited (the game is on a 21x21 movement grid, and input is usually only taken every 8 frames (at 60fps), or every half block of the sprite grid). To put it simply: there are only so many possible things to try. With an emulator it isn't hard to test them all, and people have hacked away at this game for years. Numerous TAS videos for Lolo have been made (in particular Baxter has made a series of 10 TAS over the last 5 years, gradually incorporating essentially all known tricks to bring the completion time down to 22:04 (by SDA timing standards)). Nobody knows what's the absolute fastest the game can be completed, but it sure can't be much faster than 22:04.
In most of the rooms, the route i take is optimal (at least, with respect to all known tactics). However there are a few places where a substantial amount of time can be saved by doing some very risky maneuvering. Too much risk is not a reasonable strategy for console, so for certain rooms i had to plan a route that compromises between risk and time-cost. The majority of the time difference between my best console run (23:02) that you see here and the best TAS run (22:04) come from just a small handful of rooms, all of them being situations that require complicated and risky manipulation of enemies (the remainder of the difference coming from errors in execution). It is often possible to skip much of the time you'd normally spend "boxing in" enemies so that they can't hurt you, and in some cases you can even use the moving enemies as temporary shields against other enemies. I can pull off a few such moves where i let the skulls roam free (e.g. Rooms 1-4, 2-5, 3-1, and 7-5), but in some cases (e.g. 10-1) it just isn't feasible.
The route i eventually settled on was approximately 22:50, if executed perfectly. It was a formidable task committing all 50 rooms to memory, many of which involve rather long, complex, and unobvious paths. It took several days to memorize what to do in each room. But even after committing the routes to memory, i found that i was still unable to reliably memorize the order in which the rooms appear.
Each time i enter a new room, it takes some amount of time for me to recognize the room, recall the plan, and begin moving. Usually about a second or more, which adds up to a minute or so of wasted time over the whole game (which is clearly unacceptable). To avoid this, i made note of the initial direction that i must head in each room, so that i could start out holding that direction before the room fades into view and then get my bearings while i was moving. I made a chart with these initial directions (and notes on the numerous special cases where i must make a turn soon after starting the level). One complication with this plan is that there is usually no down-time within or between rooms with which to consult my chart. The only down-time in the game happens between floors (every 5 rooms), so at each floor change i use this time to consult the chart and commit the next 5 initial directions to memory (which i would then have to keep repeating to myself as i played so as not to forget; i believe this is called "echoic storage").
The execution is pretty tight overall. There are a few instances of corner-sticking or overshooting that lose me a split second here and there. I also lose about 1.5 seconds in 8-2, about 1 second in 8-5, about 1 second in 10-1, and about 2 seconds in 10-4, but that is pretty much the extent of the execution error. Considering how easy it is to make mistakes in a game with such a discrete movement style and narrow timing windows, i'm amazed that the run turned out as well as it did. Consider the following: There are 1837 turns in the route you see here, and about 80% of them are in places where no overshoot or undershoot is allowed. At each turn, the d-pad direction must be changed within an 8 frame window. Aiming for the center of this window leaves a margin of error of 4 frames (67 ms) for each turn. So, in short, this game requires one to be accurate to within 67 milliseconds (or 1/5 of a second) nearly 1500 times. Yeah. And that's just the turning part.
