Simon speedruns Jazz Jackrabbit 1

[Simon]

30:19

Haven't highlighted that yet. Attempt #155 starts at 1:57:10 in this video. Maybe Akseli wants to look at Sluggion 2 for the lulz. I re-routed jumps in Marbelara 2. This WR simply redistributes mistakes from the previous one, I get the Technoir 2 spring, but exit the game after episode 3 again.

And I'm not as excited at the end.

grams: Thanks!
ccx: I'm pushing to the backburner the decision with the cycles. I'll have to bring it up again once somebody else posts runs to the leaderboard. I estimate that you can get 2-5 more seconds with faster cycles, it looks less than the 20,000-to-40,000 difference.

-- Simon

[Simon]

I'll stream Sonic With A Gun tomorrow, November 25th.

Sonic With A Gun is a mod of JJ1 that looks and feels like the old Sonic titles for the Sega Genesis. There are several scripted events After chatting with the SWAG's creator, I found that nothing is scripted, all the Sonic-ness comes from magic already inside JJ1.

Link to my stream
Webpage for SWAG

I have played a few levels only. Most of it I'll play completely blind. Allegedly, the levels get very hard later on. See you tomorrow!

Unrelated bonus link:
Music from JJ1, JJ2 + TSF, and JJ3

-- Simon

[Simon]

One of my RAM sticks broke 5 days ago. Firefox crashed every 10 minutes, sometimes even after seconds. I memchecked my PC today and removed the broken stick. Now I'm at 8 GB RAM instead of 16 GB, but nothing crashes anymore <3 So happy to be able to stream again.

<Akseli> aaare youu reaadyyy ??!?!?
<Akseli> Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Tubelectric remix, the guy says at the beginning: "Are you ready?"
<SimonNa> Bust-a-move
<SimonNa> I am considering to stream within a couple minutes, but Akseli wants to go to bed already
<Akseli> Yeah I have pretty early mornings: need to wake up 10.15 am every morning :P

Your decision was healthy and unstressful. :-]



2016-12-01: I made up for the mistake today. 30:08.

2016-12-03: First time under 30 minutes: 29:59.

2016-12-22: 29:57. Speedrun.com leaderboard with video.

-- Simon

[Simon]

I still run JJ actively, for 4 months now. I stream on twitch 3 or 4 times a week, 2-4 hours each time.

On 2016-12-22, before I left town to visit my parents, I WR'ed with 29:57, yet I'm unsatisfied. :-) This run screws up in comparatively easy places. In the two weeks since, I found several tricks and improvements. I feel like I can get 29:50 easily, and 29:40 with grinding. But I haven't managed to beat the 29:57 yet. Several good runs died near the end. geoo and Animiral recommend more conservative playstyle. I'm not sure whether I want to compromise. I want the perfect finish. <_<;

GIFs: dying runs at -15, -28, -13

Run #351 was at -28, had an excellent Crysilis 1, and had potential for under 29:30. :O

Explanations: #338 loses the bird. The bird is necessary to sequence-break the next level, to kill the boss inside the ship from the outside. Losing the bird costs 50 seconds. #351 swivels too early, cutting the jump too short. In #353, I assume to have taken the invincibility, but I jump too early, before having taken it.

I fixed a rounding bug in the run timer and am already contemplating another issue (unsplitting a mistaken split doesn't un-gold the mistake). The timer isn't updated much these days, but they still merge pull requests. That's good style when you don't develop actively.

I made a Youtube channel for future runs. It's widespread to speedrun on twitch, then upload the best runs to youtube: Video-on-demand works better there, it reaches a wider audience, and viewers can comment on the run. Right now, the channel has only the 29:57.

Edit 2017-01-09:

New best with 29:33. Happy!

-- Simon

[Akseli]

This thread keeps being awesome.

And those dying run gifs are at the same time weirdly enjoyable and so painful to look at.
#338: This is the case in my opinion where the optimization is not that worthy at all (saving fractions of a second?), just make sure that you don't lose the bird (complete ruining of the run)...
#351: This is the most difficult situation in these gifs, obviously. I don't know how much slower the rest of Crysilis2 and Battleships are without the guns and ammo if you shoot the check point sign in Crysilis2 and just continue the whole run after a possible death in that dangerous lower left area of the level.
#353: Another epic piece of blooper material, there's not enough patience at the end of a solid run. Entertainment value is high, even though it's opposite kind of a situation compared to a great success.

[Simon]

Several things happened this week. On 2017-01-09, I WR'ed Episodes 1-6 with 29:33, a massive improvement over the 2016 records. This is the first run with the new skip in Dreempipes, you shoot a water-raising switch through a thick wall. I heeded Akseli's advice and took care with the bird.

<Akseli> nice WR there, congratulations Simon!
<Proxima> just finished watching, great run :)

Thanks thanks!

CapnClever presented Jazz Jackrabbit at AGDQ 2017. He did a splendit job, episodes 1-6 in 30:39 with excellent introductory commentary by CapnClever. He used my newly-found skip in Dreempipes 1 and the all-out aggressive 3-boost method in Crysilis 2, I didn't expect this. Both I and Vortale regarded the run highly in the youtube comments. I commented the run live for the German restream.

Last night, I PB'ed episodes A-C in 16:05. Sloppy Exoticus 2, but an exciting and smooth Deserto. ("Whatever comes after here, I want to damage boost off, so I want to be out of shields by here.") There's still potential for improvement in this run, the error density is higher than in episodes 1-6. As you can see in the videos' top-right corners, I attempted episodes 1-6 about 400 times, and episodes A-C only 100 times.

-- Simon

[mobius]

that's pretty cool.

I find it a tad ironic you got famous for this, but not for building a game from scratch in your free time

[Simon]

I will show both Jazz Jackrabbit and Titus the Fox in the Zocktoberfest, a German online marathon, on November 3 at 02:40 UTC. I will post links to the marathon stream on shorter notice. The commentary will be in German, but I'll give nods in English to the communities around both games.

I've speedrun Jazz since September 2016. The community is small, only 5-6 people have ever run it. I've held world record since November 2016. geoo has contributed to the route, he found the death warp in Jungrock 1 at 16:15 in the WR linked below.

Titus the Fox is even more of a niche game, it's a 1992 platformer for DOS. Looks easy, turns out hard. Everything snowballs into disaster already from very few mistakes. In 2012, there was a segmented Fox all-levels run in 20:21. I've worked on the route heavily with Covert_Madness and Rikus, and now have an uncontested single-segment all-levels in 15:45.

Best times with video:

• Jazz, 6 episodes
  
• Fox, all levels
  

I run both games on twitch, each at least once per week.

-- Simon

[grams88]

Checked out your (fox all in 15:45 video) you've done really well Simon, that is quite fast. I just completed Titus the fox game must of been around last year for the atari st but I've never tried a speedrun of it. There was something that I found in relation to the lives system in Titus the fox. Say for instance you have all your energy and you collect more energy, I think that increases the points and you end up getting more lives when you complete a level. It's funny that as with a lot of the old games, you sort of had to figure out how the lives system works, sometimes in certain games you get certain amount of lives and those have to last you the entire game.

Foxy's den was a bit of a nightmare level, I had system so that I could remember what way to go when going up the ladders. The man on the helicopter thing probably has to die, I remember them being a bit of a pain as they were able to follow you everywhere.

I remember that pipe level being a bit of a nightmare as you had to try to remember where to go. You managed to speedrun that one quite well, I don't think you even entered the pipes.

I remember on that level going home, you had to conserve the boxes, don't throw the boxes away which can be an easy thing to do.

I must say welldone for getting that speedrun time.

[Simon]

Thanks for watching!

Yeah, Foxy's Den has many enemies, we can't kill all due to the item shortage. I found this level extremely hard as a kid. In the speedrun, most enemies are predictable, only the rolling fireballs are erratic and can kill runs. All 3 helicopter enemies have to die.

Pipe Dream without the shortcut is trial & error, and lots of memorization, sadly. That's the difference between 1990 game design and modern games.

Congrats for beating Fox on your own! I assume the Atari version and the DOS version have comparable difficulty.

-- Simon

[607]

Friday, huh? I hope I'll be able to catch it live... I'll look into it when it gets closer, I'll at least save the date somewhere.

[Simon]

My Jazz Jackrabbit in the Zocktoberfest marathon starts in one hour (October 30 at 23:20 UTC). This is a German marathon, commentary will be in German.

https://www.twitch.tv/germenchrestream

Fox will be in the same German marathon on Friday, October 3, at 03:28 UTC. I've submitted the Jazz run to the Shots Fired marathon, that will have English commentary. Probable date is Thursday, November 16, at 17:00 UTC.

-- Simon

[Forestidia86]

Looking forward to that and much luck! May the bird be fast.

[grams88]

I would say that there is a little bit of a difference with the titus the fox Atari st and the dos version. One of the main ones I noticed was at the boss with the axe, in the atari version the boss room looks a bit different to the dos version.


Thanks Simon, it was a hard game to complete but I wanted to complete the game as it was one of those childhood games I used to play a long time ago.

[Forestidia86]

Want to congratulate to your Fox run:

Spoiler

It was an overall great run.
But that level 9 snakepit. Such things can happen; things that worked always fine suddenly won't work anymore. I'm glad you made it through and the frame perfect jumps were overall actually quite well. It has shown that it was very clever to take so much extra boni for the lives.
The first point in the run that seemed a bit tight was level 7 but you did a great boss. Level 11 seemed to have worked reasonably well (afair). These were the three levels I thought that seemed the biggest danger.
And you managed to get that lvl 4 skip. Nice.
All in all it seemed very courageous to do that run in a marathon but you really have built up an impressive consistency there.
It was again a great run with great commentary and a great (marathon) time.