einokeino303
Archon II: Adept (C64) speedrun 03:07 with timer
updated
Not technically particularly impressive, but one of my most played 2p games from that time. Run could be faster for sure with better execution. Proper use of hack cancelling and potion stacking on ground is vital for fast kills. I got most important strats in so good enough. It's not possibly to instant kill any enemies with normal attacks unlike in the Genesis and Arcade versions.
Terrible port. Used to play this as a kid and didn't realize how bad it is was. Controls feel very sluggish and frame rate is crap. I forgot to lower capture framerate. It's definitely not 60fps as the quality settings would suggest (more like 12fps). At least it's better than MS-DOS and C64 versions. Music is still kind of kickass though :D
This could definitely be faster, but no lost rounds is good enough. I'm not sure if the barrel minigame is actually beatable, before the time runs out.
Made with Renoise. Only added VST is Helm. It's a nice free instrument. This track could use more work...
Original track: youtube.com/watch?v=RQYVLGH2zCE
Not a perfect run, but I'm very happy with this time, because I found a glitch in the last boss and it took only few hits to kill him. Normally you'd have to beat him for quite a while longer. I'm not sure what caused the glitch though, first time I've seen that. It might be caused by getting hit before hitting the toe. Definitely room for improvement, considering where to take intentional damage.
Could be better, but my punching hand is hurting already. At least it's a lot faster than my previous run. Maybe Electra is not the best option. World record on Shadow by Tenka is 6m 5s.
Leaderboards: speedrun.com/omf
PS, YT is unfortunately also getting more fucked up all the time, it's getting very difficult to do basic stuff here.
Watch with emu window & timer: youtube.com/watch?v=wgfVlZ1siVY
Watch with timer & emu window: youtube.com/watch?v=9gTATGJ407g
Watch with timer & emu window: youtube.com/watch?v=rZV7rCPAEcc
I'm bionic Batman! Playing the cartridge version for fast load times. IGT: 11:32 (counting full seconds spent in each level)
Got some minor graphic glitches in the first level, never happened before. Middle levels are rather trivial, but the driving stage could be done faster. It appears the compound mixing stage always gives the same combination if pressing fire to start it as soon as possible. In the balloon stage you only need to move up and down, after positioning the batplane horizontally. I was planning on taking an intentional death on the last level, but ended up risking it to get a deathless run. Spawn points are not very generous so I took it a bit safe. It's possible to do "screen wrapping" in this game. That means teleport to the other side of the screen by doing specific movements. Didn't find a good place to benefit from that in this run.
Timing from when the screen turns black after pressing F7 and ending with victory message.
There are three ways to win the game. Holding all active mana nodes, beating all wizards or by destroying the enemy castle. Placing units on mana nodes accumulates casting power. Casting power translates to castle health when casting apocalypse for castle duel. This run is affected significantly by luck. CPU might use expensive summons and make poor choices on movements. This means CPU has less mana and less castle health at the final battle.
Little bit clumsy in some places. Can be improved at least few seconds without a new strategy. Death warps didn't seem to save much time, but I didn't seem to lose time either. Not sure if it's worth going for those. There might be better places to take intentional deaths, didn't experiment or compare much on that. One pixel to death at 03:05 :D
RTA: 3m 27,4s
Favorite from Lotus 2. Not the most difficult track, but drifting of CPU cars is pretty hard to estimate. Two bigger mistakes, hitting a sign and a CPU car. Few graces at tunnels, but those don't reduce speed much.
Strategy could be polished further for sure. Should get the repair facility surrounded completely for proper Carry-All repairs. One important aspect to consider is starport unit purchases, what to buy and when. Harkonnen starts with only 1000 credits and money is very limited all the time. One Carry-All decided to blow up inside the repair facility taking it out simultaneously. This run would've definitely been faster if that didn't happen.
00:00:00 Eye of the Beholder (1991)
00:02:20 Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon (1991)
00:05:38 Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos (1993)
00:08:57 The Legend of Kyrandia (1992)
00:12:16 Dune (1992)
00:16:08 Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty (1992)
00:18:56 Prince of Persia (1990)
00:20:49 Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow & The Flame (1993)
00:24:15 Magic Carpet (1994)
00:27:38 Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire (1990)
00:30:05 Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon (1989)
00:33:33 Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (1993)
00:35:18 Beneath a Steel Sky (1994)
00:37:19 Monkey Island (1990)
00:39:56 Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (1991)
00:43:58 Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1990)
00:46:55 Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992)
00:49:12 Ultima VII: Part Two - Serpent Isle (1993)
00:50:36 Pagan: Ultima VIII (1994)
00:51:53 Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (1992)
00:55:46 Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds (1993)
00:57:50 Might and Magic: Darkside of Xeen (1993)
01:00:00 ShadowCaster (1993)
01:01:41 Master of Magic (1994)
01:02:58 Master of Orion (1993)
01:04:08 The Terminator: Rampage (1993)
01:05:51 Delta V (1994)
01:07:41 Syndicate (1993)
01:09:48 System Shock (1994)
01:11:49 Space Hulk (1993)
01:13:17 Wing Commander: Privateer (1993)
01:16:19 UFO: Enemy Unknown (a.k.a. X-COM: UFO Defense (1994)
01:17:48 Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi (1991)
01:22:05 Strike Commander (1993)
01:24:01 Star Wars: X-Wing (1993)
01:28:03 Star Wars: Tie Fighter (1994)
01:31:14 Alone in the Dark (1992)
01:33:30 Alone in the Dark 2 (1993)
01:37:28 Sid Meier's Civilization (1991)
01:41:10 Sid Meier's Colonization (1994)
01:43:32 The Settlers (a.k.a. Serf City: Life is Feudal) (1994)
01:45:35 World Circuit (a.k.a Grand Prix 1) (1992)
01:46:44 Fury of the Furries (1993)
01:48:17 Gateway II: Homeworld (1993)
01:50:39 HeroQuest (1991)
01:52:58 Special Forces (1992)
01:55:12 Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994)
01:56:36 Blackthorne (1994)
01:59:21 Flashback (1993)
02:00:21 Dragonsphere (1994)
02:06:32 Frontier: Elite II (1993)
I tried rushing initially from different spots to get quick kills on construction yards and heavy factories, while building rocket turrets at the front of enemy bases. However, rushing trough the rocket turrets inflicts too much damage and it's likely wisest to advance from bottom left, even if it's a slight detour. I also tried building forward bases at different spots behind enemy bases for rocket turrets and repair facilities, but that just messed up the micro too much. Might be possible to make that work.
All the gold has to be collected to get the boss fight and credits.
Trying out the strats discovered by tz, working just fine also on Amiga version. It's not necessary to capture the castle to win, dominating CPU in statistics is sufficient. It's probably not necessary to grab additional land or construct many buildings to increase stats. Key element is likely for CPU to construct at least one barracks quickly, attacking it immediately and hoping for a quick win. Still worth testing different ideas, not 100% sure yet on the exact victory conditions. I didn't capture the second barracks in this video, but the victory condition was met before the final kill, possibly calculated before animating combat results. I was a bit slow stopping the timer at the end, but this is about three and a half minutes faster compared to my DOS time.
I did a deathless run for the Amiga version over 8 years ago, but that run was very slow. This run is over 40 seconds faster if compared with the old video without load times. I was hoping to get another deathless run, but unfortunately that didn't happen. Unnecessary fumbling as a result of rushing and not paying enough attention, easy mistakes to avoid. There isn't that much left to improve on the time though so not much point to keep grinding. At least it's still 1cc so good enough. Major improvement here over my previous run is at the last level, where I got stuck for a long time before. Another several second save comes from 1 cycle at the fighter planes.
Recorded this to try a turret rush. Not completely happy with the time, but this strategy is very inconsistent, at least when played like this. Often after capturing the turret, it gets instantly destroyed, before there's time to place anything close to it. Even if second turret placement is successful, it's still possible to lose those structures to rockets in few seconds.
Leaderboards: speedrun.com/omf
I'm not very good at this game so had to cheese it. Lost time to perfects.
Original tracks:
youtube.com/watch?v=GpGjkj0hlf4
youtube.com/watch?v=yolnSe2-0Lw
Quads have some problems to follow orders moving and targeting where ordered. It's sometimes better to get those into good positions by manual pathing instead and let them auto target. One thing to consider would be to capture more enemy structures. Destroying captured structures with low health to get more infantry and using those to damage or capture other structures.
Improved my old Harkonnen record for this mission by over four minutes, but less than two minutes over my best Atreides time. Wasn't very hard to get this and there's room for improvement. I'm still contemplating about best strategies for this mission, but done for now.
I was planning to turret rush with MCV at the palace, but got distracted and was late with MCV. Should've built second repair facility, instead of heavy factory at MCV. Heavy factory and IX could be skipped entirely. Haven't decided yet about how many palaces to build and best targets for missiles. These could be construction yards and heavy factories, maybe even turrets at the palace.
Routing of this run is mostly based on speedrun of the SNES port done 7 years ago by Khan Fusion. I'm not using every trick shown in that run. To my understanding that run is segmented, where each world is recorded separately. There is a more recent single segment recording of the SNES port by Drumboardist, but nobody has speedrun the Amiga original version before.
This run is several minutes slower compared to SNES runs, mostly because of two reasons: loading times and lag. Another thing is using special weapons. There's only one action button for the Amiga version and it needs to be held down for few seconds each time to activate specials.
I was considering about recording this game with WHDLoad and CPU speed set to fastest possible instead of A500 cycle exact. Anyways, decided to try and keep this as close as possible with the original A500 version, while using emulation. Even though it probably doesn't matter much, because nobody to my understanding has ever done a speedrun of any game on a real Amiga.
Not an exceptional run, but I'm happy enough with this time to post. I could probably finish the SNES port or the new remastered PC version in about 24 minutes.
I was reading about nodes in http://masterofmagic.wikia.com/wiki/Master_of_Magic_Wiki and found out about a glitch I didn't know about before. Magic spirits can be used to capture nodes without combat by switching view to other plane before moving. This speeds up the play significantly.
Node mastery was picked to boost node output. Having to go through more spell research is not so bad considering benefits. Sage master is also picked for faster research speed.
Thanks to TheSupremeSkill for commenting about nodes. That directed my attention to MoM Wiki where I found about the node glitch. I also found out that Myrron nodes are more powerful, but more heavily guarded. Still new stuff to find about this game after all these years :)
All picks are used on specials instead of spell books. Playing in myrron enables beastmen race. They grow fastest of all the races receiving a 1/2 power / population bonus. At the beginning power and mana are converted to research and later to power required for casting the spell of mastery.
Not sure about perfect number of cities, considering time wasted on micro vs research speed. Most of city infrastructure is focused on improving research speed directly or through population growth. Few miners guilds and banks were built to speed up constructions.
I decided to see how long it would take to win space race victory. Two city strategy seems pretty solid for this goal. More cities would require more micro and that probably isn't beneficial in the long run. On the other hand, one city might not be sufficient to get enough research and construction speed for the space ship to get a decent time. Didn't try that though.
Optimizing research, build orders, city construction, unit commands and such better would definitely allow faster completion time. I also made mistakes and lost about 17 seconds for copy protection. Sub 30 is good enough to post.
CD32 version seems to be pretty much identical with floppy, but has faster load times. I counted time from pressing fire on the first level start to fading of the last level stat screen.
Selecting max energy and easiest difficulty on start. Energy is needed for damage boosting through pits and enemies and bosses have less health on easier difficulty. Didn't really need all the extra lives, also collected one backup along the way.
Many items can be skipped: Maze Djinn in the first level, diving boots in the underwater level, crampons in the last level. Extra energy amulets, health pickups and extra lives are not necessary either. In the first and second levels it's required to collect certain number of gems / coins.
Didn't manage to show all possible time saves. Second autoscroller flying level went really poorly, but you can't lose time (except for the boss) there so it doesn't matter. This game would be so much better if they hadn't included those boring flying levels :P
Shouts to Retroplay for his longplay video, that was helpful for routing this run.
Basics of this game are very simple. Collect enough mana to finish a level. After the first few levels mana collection requirements quickly become more excessive and levels take longer to finish. New spells and enemy types are introduced very slowly. Most challenge can be found around levels 33-50
Not playing on SVGA resolution for several reasons. It's easier for me too see stuff on the minimap, easier editing and to avoid possible crashing. Sorry for the SFX quality, there's no volume controls in this game so it gets distorted.
00:06 Level 1 Al Jahan: 22.9s
00:42 Level 2 Khallabad: 17.1s
01:13 Level 3 Sulghir: 27.1s
01:54 Level 4 Akrir: 27.1s
02:35 Level 5 Cessecca: 1m 21.7s
04:10 Level 6 Qazziel: 2m 51.5s
There's no shortage of supplies in the first level, except for gold / gold ore. Mineable ores always spawn at the same locations. The castle should be located near the gold deposits. CPU always prefers to build at the same location. It's easy to manipulate CPU starting location by positioning the castle. CPU might build the castle much further away if positioning is slightly off. Immediate objective is to get the first smelter started to produce gold from stockpile ores. Secondary smelters and mines can be queued and connected later with roads to force construction start in preferred order. One guard hut is required for sending attacking units.
I got very lucky with combat rolls in this run. Mainly, one level 3 knight managed to clear out lots of units early. I didn't even register how many bodies he was piling up. I should've sent my other level 3 knight to follow, hoping to get continuously lucky and finishing the mission super fast. In my earlier attempts I was saving the upgraded units for later at better combat odds. With exceptional luck this mission could be several minutes faster, but that could take lots of attempts. There's room for further optimization also. My gold production was lagging behind, because of suboptimal pathing. I had much faster gold income in another play, but that ended up much slower because of poor combat luck. Including the castle, all military buildings must be cleared to win. Fortunately I managed to take out the one manned guard hut quickly.
Back in the days, when I played this casually I didn't have a clue how combat worked. For a long time I thought units could be upgraded only in military buildings with gold deposits. Instead, it seems like all upgrading takes place in the castle. Gold stored inside the castle or military buildings (doesn't matter which) improves morale. Morale affects the upgrade speed of units and improves combat chance.
I'm playing on easiest difficulty for one reason. At the beginning of the world 2 fuel tank gets broken and getting fuel needed to save colonists becomes extremely tedious. Flying ability is limited to few seconds with full tank on medium difficulty. Player is supposed to use colonists for hauling fuel close to space gate. Unfortunately, there are only few fuel pods in some of the levels and waiting colonists to haul those takes a very long time. It is really boring and colonists might get lost along the way. After they finish hauling, fuel can be picked up to save few colonists. After all that is done you'll need to wait for new fuel pods to respawn and that alone can take a long time. Then you can repeat the process to save the next batch of colonists and so on. No fuel drops from enemies either, except on easy difficulty. Moving with the tank is also very slow.
I try to show some intended gimmicks for different type of missions even if it wasn't always necessary on this difficulty. Some nice ideas behind this game, but IMO it wasn't properly playtested for different difficulty modes. Controls are not excellent either, especially with the tank where you have to control the turret to shoot anything above or below. With the space ship you can move / aim up or down more easily, but the game tries to force horizontal plane. You can do instant 180 degree turns with both the tank and the ship. That helps with controlling, but might be confusing to watch on video. SP is a bit repetitive, even with the gimmicks, because combat itself isn't very interesting. The 3 second action / danger music loop quickly becomes annoying as well.
Playing this game from floppy images wasn't an option for repeated runs. Decided on this CD32 version, which seems to be identical, except for faster loading times. Loads could be excluded from game time anyways. It might not be clear when I press fire to start the game so decided to start the timer when the first level appears on screen. Timing ends when screen goes black after defeating the last boss. Myth requires precisely timed movements with clunky controls and each seemingly small mistake can cost lots of time.
First level was poor, I haven't completely figured out best positioning for devil spawns. Optimally, you'd want him to spawn near on the same platform to get two shots at each cycle. Second level is simple, but the woman can be locked by moving too far, making it necessary to walk back to reset her loop. She can be shot in the C64 version, but that doesn't work on Amiga. Shield is totally optional to get and skipping it saves few seconds. Jumping over third medusa shot is optimal to get into close range for decap without the shield.
Positioning becomes important after killing nine vikings on the boat. Killing tenth activates the bird and getting a swing on first loop saved me lots of time. Big mistake at the beginning of the forest. It's one of the easier levels to go fast, but it's not possible to jump over ogres. Spirits at the fire move randomly, possible to lose or win time time there.
It might be possible to get one loop kills on both garrisons at the domain of Odin. Thor spawns at the arena are random. Sharing space with him allows dealing damage without getting hit back. Mistake there cost an extra loop. Taking an intentional death at the first valley tomb to skip backtracking. After a timed autoscroll end boss should go down in two loops with megaflame and shield.
btw. Check out this remake! youtube.com/watch?v=x29Eb0f38xo
This original game has only six levels. I'm happy with my routing and everything worked out really well in this run. I'm not going to be improving on this anytime soon. I also had one extra (safety) life and two extra keys at the end. Shouts to lemm for his longplay, that assisted me with routing this run.
There are two annoying bugs. Doors sometimes suck several keys instead of one if approached from a wrong angle. This is why I sometimes hug walls to enter specific doors and collect few extra (backup) keys. Another thing, taking damage from killed enemies. This happens sometimes when walking too fast, but it's not consistent. Enemy spawns are affected by pacing throughout levels. There are choke points where aliens are spawning indefinitely out of the screen. These spawns can be manipulated by movement and generally by moving fast, but it's not always simple.
This map is same for all houses, except for locations of bases. First, the two sandworms in this map are disposed. One worm is trapped and shot by siege tanks and deviators are fed to the second one. Unfortunately, one siege tank had to be sacrificed there because of scouting hastily. Two forward bases with rocket turrets were constructed. Main assault base near Atreides got a repair facility. Most efficient route to Emperor's construction yards is through the Atreides base. Secondary assault base got a second heavy factory, in case enough units got destroyed in the main assault to lift the unit cap and allow more siege tanks. Harkonnen construction yards are easy to destroy from the left, instead of trying to get through the palace in the middle.
This time should be easily improvable.
EDIT: The stolen video was removed from YT few hours after posting this video! Thanks everyone for the sympathy ;)
Best strategy I found for this mission is to maneuver behind Atreides base from the left, where it's least fortified. Taking out structures from behind, deploying an MCV, second repair facility and second heavy factory near the Ordos base before final assault. Different houses begin assaulting only after discovered by player units. This is why it's necessary to be careful not to scout near the Ordos base until Atreides has been disabled. This mission is rather difficult to finish fast, because Construction Yards are at hard to reach locations and enemy keeps rebuilding turrets and buildings. Sniping CYs with missiles or figuring out a better strategy would probably allow time save. Got extremely unlucky with missile accuracy as well in this play.
First level has SFX by default and levels 2 & 3 have music. Player can't choose between music and SFX. Nice small game, much better compared to horrible Amiga version.
There are three difficulty levels for championship and you have to race through all three to unlock bullet league where you drive against the bullet car. I recorded pro and bullet car leagues. There are also two special modes where you have to knock down cones or drive through gates. These modes can be driven on same six tracks seen in championship mode and are not particularly interesting events. Only drove quick run for slalom event at the end to demo the bullet car. Bullet car can be seen in the beginning of the video at the car selection screen only because I had already unlocked it before recording the menu.
Pro league is much harder than bullet league, because of more opponent cars blocking the track. All cars behind the player will move at least with equal speed to player, but cars ahead will have reduced speed. Collision system in this game is not very realistic: If you hit a rear half of an opponent, your car will jump all over over the screen. Hitting front half causes computer cars to crash.
"The graphics engine was very good for its time, providing extremely fast texture-mapped graphics on a 486" [MobyGames]. Game was recorded with max details and resoulution.
02:40 Pro League
21:21 Bullet League
39:29 Slalom (bullet car)
Played on Elite (max) difficulty, lots of room for improvement, but I tried not to be cheap and stack up lots of shields. Genre specialists won't find this one a decent challenge, unless playing for maximum money remaining at the end. Still one of the best shooters for PC.
"The 2010 edition includes improved graphics and native support for higher resolutions (640x400, 960x600 and 1280x800). Standard graphics are also available" [MobyGames]. This video is from the original DOS release.
Bravo Sector
------------
Wave 1: 02:42
Wave 2: 06:58
Wave 3: 11:32
Wave 4: 15:24
Wave 5: 19:22
Wave 6: 23:08
Wave 7: 27:00
Wave 8: 30:48
Wave 9: 34:50
Tango Sector
------------
Wave 1: 39:19
Wave 2: 43:07
Wave 3: 47:20
Wave 4: 51:02
Wave 5: 54:48
Wave 6: 58:51
Wave 7: 1:02:37
Wave 8: 1:06:30
Wave 9: 1:10:30
Outer Regions
-------------
Wave 1: 1:15:04
Wave 2: 1:18:50
Wave 3: 1:22:34
Wave 4: 1:26:26
Wave 5: 1:30:18
Wave 6: 1:34:03
Wave 7: 1:37:53
Wave 8: 1:41:56
Wave 9: 1:46:00
Tournament is completed first and then the rest of the tracks in single race mode. Game glitched at Mars where all the opponents freezed at the start / finish line after two laps. That happened before with some other tracks when I was not recording so it appears to be a random glitch.
This is the latest DOS release version I could find. Audio commentary is removed for some reason, but I prefer to disable it anyways. Listening to emulated fart sounds and generally obnoxious noise gets annoying very fast. I got another version with commentary included. That was used to record track introduction commentary for each track at the end of the video with short previews of track. I also played the last two races from that version with commentary enabled.
Never liked this game much for the wonky physics and camera rotation. Pretty much impossible to play with cockpit view, because the track disappears very often. Colliding throws camera around the cockpit and there's no chance to see anything. Constant screen shaking is also very annoying, but you get used to it. I'm not sure if it was this bad back in the days, because haven't played this in 20 years, but I doubt it's a DOSBox issue. However, BRR has the option to play multiplayer in split screen or with serial link / modem connection. Options at the time for PC multiplayer gaming were still limited.
Tournament
00:05:20 Round 1: England
00:07:44 Round 2: U.S.A.
00:12:36 Round 3: Egypt
00:16:10 Round 3: China
00:20:37 Round 4: Russia
00:23:51 Round 4: Japan
00:27:11 Round 4: Germany
00:31:13 Round 5: Mars
00:36:29 Round 5: Italy
00:41:03 Round 6: Hawaii
00:44:28 Round 6: France
00:48:42 Round 6: Scotland
00:52:32 Final: Moon
00:55:42 Ending
Single races
00:56:10 Kenya
00:58:32 Chile
01:02:29 Australia
01:05:55 Mexico
01:10:02 Ireland
01:12:33 Arctic
01:16:50 Norway
01:21:15 Spain
01:25:26 Venus (commentary enabled)
01:29:08 India (commentary enabled)
01:33:51 Track introductions
01:42:50 Credits