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Game Page: Doesn't exist yet? Well, not for Genesis anyway.

Batman Returns (Any %) (Single Segment) [Good Ending]

Verifier Responses

Quote:
A/V are fine throughout. Batman is there in all his 16-bit glory.

No in-game timer for this one. I got a time of 13:14 starting from control in the first act, to loss of control after batman killing the penguin in their final encounter. I did not include the fight with
catwoman at the very end during the credits, as I didn’t think that counted as part of the game (your lives go to zero before that fight and the credits roll past during it).

I couldn't see any evidence of cheating in the run. Item counts matched with pickups, no values changed spontaneously, other than where it would normally (like health reset on new screen). No unexplainable events occurred either.

About the run...

Good points first, the runner uses small jumps and the grapple hook to move faster where feasible. The runner shows good knowledge of the game by understanding enemy patterns and demolishing most bosses about as fast as possible. The runner uses the kick attack when not using gadgets, which is the strongest base attack.

Gotham rooftops: Very smooth over all. Spam catwoman with bat swarms so she doesn’t stand a chance.

Decrepit building: Good use of jumps and grapple in most cases (missed grapple at 1:30). Bad timing of vents looks a bit sloppy. But debatable if waiting would be quicker than taking the hits.

Statue Bosses: Lucky pattern and good positioning means that this fight could hardly have gone better.

Cathedral: Nice use of taking a hit from jesters to make them fall into spikes (missed at 3:00 which costs time by being hit). Took out gargoyles pretty quick. Good manipulation of Penguins pattern to take
him out in three waves.

Gotham Streets: Can afford to just keep jumping and taking hits because of health pickups near the end of the level. Probably could of taken out a few more of the bikes when things got hectic, to minimise so
many hits. It starts to slow the runner down near the end, but probably only a second. Boss was pretty good. Couldn’t have hoped for a much quicker time without exhausting more gadgets.

Mall: Good dodging at the start. Runner uses guided batarang to take shortest level path. Good manipulation of catwomen by taking a hit jumping on her head to force the whip attack and leaving her open.

Mall continued: Same penguin strats as first encounter, just as effective.

Carnival approach: Good dodging and timing for stupid jesters and fire twirlers (watch those guys standing animation, I swear it looks like they’re beating off). Took a few extra hits, but mainly due to bad
luck, less than second lost all up.

Circus tent: Good dodging of the exploding light globes (they are so lame), but missed the biker with batarang and subsequently lost time and health on him. Also chooses not batarang the others, which leads to probably the most forgivable death in the run, as now the runner has full health to get to the mini boss, but still loses 3 seconds. 7:50 Runner chooses not dispose of biker on new life, and ploughs
through most enemies until what could be argued as an avoidable death at 8:13 with 3 seconds lost. Runner position themselves nicely to avoid the bullets from the unicycling clowns and uses kicks to pin them and take them out quickly.

Train: 8:47 Runner uses damage boost from springs to launch themselves forward. 9:05 Runner mistimes crucial jump and gets hits by blades twice, leading to the most preventable death in the run, losing about 3 seconds. Runner could have used excess smokes to minimise damage on the approach to survive the whole level (Yes I realise, it does actually take time to switch to them, and then to throw them, but it would still be slightly faster and look a lot cleaner). Good boss fight, just unlucky with the last kick, maybe half a second lost.

Sewers: Good choice of path and not too many hits results in a good level. The boss fight was well managed, including resorting to batarangs in the end to kill inside the current wave.

Sewers continued: Same as above, Penguin is destroyed in one wave.

Peguins Lair: Big hesitation at 11:30 and takes unnecessary hits on dagger thrower (probably nervous above ‘insta-death’ water below), maybe lost a couple of seconds. Good use of smokes to pass enemies. And good use of glide and grapple through tricky terrain.

Penguins Lair continued: 12:48 takes a bunch of hits trying to get last kick on rubber ducky when could have retreated and finished it off from a distance with throwable weapon. Not sure that would have
saved any time though, as I believe the player has to wait for the penguin to fly away before ascending. 13:01 missed jump pattern (nobody’s perfect Smiley Peguin fight went well, using the downtime between
waves to take out the transformer and uses the remaining gadgets to take him out as quick as feasible.

Justification: All in all, a good effort in a poorly designed and unforgiving platformer. This run can definitely be improved on with better execution in parts and possibly some different strats. The number
of deaths does detract from the overall run time and appeal, but not enough to reject on them alone.

I was on the fence for while over this one. But as there is currently no active run, and any future improvements, without new tricks or exploits, wouldn’t much more than 20-30 seconds or so, I will lean
towards accept. (Also, I went back and tried to run this game after the first viewing, and quickly remembered what a bitch this game actually is)

Decision: Accept


Quote:
Sorry this took so long, there was stuff that had to be done. Anyways, lets get down to business.

Audio Quality - Good
Video Quality - Good

Act 1 - Gotham City
The Rooftops: An excellent start, especially the route. It sure is real convenient to get all the needed Bat Swarms to use against Catwoman, which was also well done.

The Rundown Building: Just as good as the rooftops, with not too much hits taken from the clowns below. You miss a grapple swing at 1:36 though, but after that was fairly smooth.

Staues: Luckily, they get a nice pattern here in order to dispose of this boss quickly. Could probably save a second if not for that one fireball that hits they and the cogs that just weren't playing nice, but it's still rather solid.

The Cathedral: Some enemy patters, especially at 2:46, made you lose about 2-3 seconds. The gargoyles were taken out fairly quickly as was The Penguin with some nice manipulation on him to get constant hits.

Act 2 - Shreck's Wonderland
Gotham Streets: They could have probably shot more of the goons with a batarang to avoid getting hit so much. But this section was handled well besides that. The mid-boss was also done rather well aside from getting hit a few times.

Mall: Good execution here, nothing special. The manipulation on Catwoman is especially nice.

Mall Chase: The flight down the escalators is near perfect. The Penguin fight is also well done with all the guided batarangs used up.

Act 3 - The Red Triangle Circus
The Outskirts: Pretty smooth here all throughout. Although, they probably could have used more damage boosts to their advantage since the health refills when you get to the Circus Tent.

Circus Tent: Two death here, Although the deaths don't put you too far back at all. That's probably 4-5 seconds there with both deaths. Otherwise, it's an ok stage. The runner's positioning makes this boss go by real fast. Probably could have been better if they moved out of the way of the clowns to kick them without getting knock-back delay.

Circus Train: You get hit twice by some avoidable saw blades at 9:05, leading to another death. Like the other deaths, you spawn right where you died. So that's about 3 seconds lost there. The clown fight was alright, aside from the air kicks near the end of he fight.

Act 4 - Into The Sewers
The Sewers (Parts 1 and 2): That was a nice route the runner used in the 1st part. The slight wait at 10:00 seemed unnecessary since you could just take damage by running into him and then using that to pass him. Only 1 second lost there though, so no bid deal. The fight against Scarecrow was good. The 2nd part also used a nice route. There wasn't anything that I spotted glaring with this half either, so it's good.

The Toxic Water Cannon: The Penguin fight was just simply great. No complaints here.

Act 5 - The Penguin's Lair
The Lair: ...Yeah, 11:30 was pretty glaring seeing as how they jumped around all over the place. At that point they should just take the damage and get up there anyways. The rest of the stage went smoothly with especially nice use of Smoke Bombs to get past enemies.

The Final Showdowns: The first fight against the giant rubber duck was alright, albeit a little clumsy at the end since they stumbled around trying to land a hit. Probably about 1-2 seconds there. The final fight was great with the use of the Bat Swarm to get him while destroying the generator being genius.

Batman starts moving at 0:25 and stops moving at 13:39. So the final time would be 13:14. Anything after that is the credits and shouldn't be timed seeing as how the Epilouge with Catwoman is already the ending of the game.

The only real complaint that I have is that there were some moments where the runner waited to get hit just to pass several enemies. Wouldn't it be faster to just run into them and keep going rather than wait for them to throw a projectile to get hit with. But these errors are so small that they probably add up to around 5-10 seconds at most.

So my final verdict is an Accept. It's probably improvable by ~20 seconds, Bus as a first run of the game, It's well polished and planned showing that the runner has good understanding of the game.


Decision: Accept

Congratulations to Jason 'honorableJay' Feeney!
Thread title:  
The Dork Knight himself.
I'm gonna hold off on sending in the final encodes for this. After reading the verifiers' comments I wanna do a little testing in a few areas (namely the 3-4 train section, and a few smaller areas) to see if I was really using the fastest strats.
Edit history:
honorableJay: 2013-05-15 07:52:18 pm
The Dork Knight himself.
Ok, after some thought, I'm going to self-reject this run for a few reasons:

1. I had too much bad luck with a lot of areas which makes certain parts (the 3-4 train) pretty painful to watch. It sucks that areas like that I have no control over what state enemies spawn in, but that just means I have to keep at it until I can get better patterns.

2. A trick that I knew about, but didn't think it really had any uses (the attack cancel), has uses in key parts of the run. If I don't get this trick in I'll never live it down.

3. I want to set the bar as high as possible for this game, and knowing that at least 10 seconds can come off with better enemy luck alone is cause for me to just keep grinding at it. While I am using the fastest strats for most of the areas, bad enemy luck and spotty execution hurt quite a few sections.

Thanks to the verifiers for taking the time to go over this run. Hopefully you'll be around for the (hopefully) final submission. I do have a few responses to your comments:

Verifier 1:
Quote:
Decrepit building: Good use of jumps and grapple in most cases (missed grapple at 1:30). Bad timing of vents looks a bit sloppy. But debatable if waiting would be quicker than taking the hits.

That area is very touchy with the grapple. I can't just grapple anywhere, it has to be the middle of the broken floor. If my grapple tries to connect in the =|= part of the floor (the area you can stand on along with the bits of floor directly to the left/right) it just whiffs since that's an ungrappable surface. There's no way for me to truly know where the grapple zone is since there's nothing I can use as a reference point. Another aspect I have to factor in is the angled view of the entire level: since everything is tilted at an angle, the grapple is also affected. Compare the grapple in that area compared to others and you'll see that when it fires to the left it's moving at about an 80 degree upward angle, but to the right it's somewhere around 30-40 degrees (normal angle is about 55 degrees both left and right). As for the vents, they're not sync'd with each other, and they don't spray the same amount every time. That's another spawning rule: when the vents spawn they can spout 1, 2, or 3 times, and the timing window between spouting is very short.

Quote:
Gotham Streets: Can afford to just keep jumping and taking hits because of health pickups near the end of the level. Probably could of taken out a few more of the bikes when things got hectic, to minimise so many hits. It starts to slow the runner down near the end, but probably only a second. Boss was pretty good. Couldn’t have hoped for a much quicker time without exhausting more gadgets.

Actually trying to Batarang the bikers is much slower than to keep moving and hope the spawn patterns are good. I did take more hits than normal in this spot, which is why I had to kill the last few, but trying to kill them is about 5 seconds slower than what you saw in this run. With extreme luck I can actually jump over all of the bikers without stopping and constantly despawn them to the left.

Quote:
Circus tent: Good dodging of the exploding light globes (they are so lame), but missed the biker with batarang and subsequently lost time and health on him. Also chooses not batarang the others, which leads to probably the most forgivable death in the run, as now the runner has full health to get to the mini boss, but still loses 3 seconds. 7:50 Runner chooses not dispose of biker on new life, and ploughs through most enemies until what could be argued as an avoidable death at 8:13 with 3 seconds lost. Runner position themselves nicely to avoid the bullets from the unicycling clowns and uses kicks to pin them and take them out quickly.

Those 2 deaths are actually part of the plan for this area. There's only 2 hearts in this level, and you don't get them until section 3 (for me this level is broken into 4 parts: mirrors, punching bag boxes, circus net, and boss fight) plus both of those hearts are in bad spots. The first (under the first rope I have to climb) wastes more time than dieing/respawning (partial health refill), while the second is in a nearly impossible spot to get (underneath the final net, requires an extremely precise grapple swing). If I did wind up going for the second health (which is a full refill), the chances of being able to swing back to the right and still continue on are very slim since I'm getting shot at from above and to my immediate right. One thing I think wasn't mentioned in the run comments is that you can only swing once per jump. I can spam the grapple as many times as I want to, but once it connects I can't use it again until I land. I also can't do a standing jump/grapple, I have to be moving forward to use it.

Quote:
Train: 8:47 Runner uses damage boost from springs to launch themselves forward. 9:05 Runner mistimes crucial jump and gets hits by blades twice, leading to the most preventable death in the run, losing about 3 seconds. Runner could have used excess smokes to minimise damage on the approach to survive the whole level (Yes I realise, it does actually take time to switch to them, and then to throw them, but it would still be slightly faster and look a lot cleaner). Good boss fight, just unlucky with the last kick, maybe half a second lost.

This is another planned death, although I was forced to die earlier than normal due to the obvious mistake. I tried testing the smoke bombs again (after originally testing it while planning this run) and it's still slower than just taking the hits. The good thing is I am able to avoid that death entirely so long as I have at least 3 bars of health by the time I get to the boss fight with a slight strat change. Whether this will save time is debatable since I have to resort to using Batarangs over the Mighty Boot for the boss (which are weaker). Now the problem with taking the hits is how the enemies spawn (which as I mentioned in the comments dictates about 90% of the run): if I get good spawns with the sword swallowers, they'll pull out the sword later and give me time to setup for a good damage boost (or possibly jumping over entirely with no damage taken). Bad spawns make them pull out the sword sooner and either hit me before I jump or I get a bad damage boost (to the left instead of to the right).

Quote:
Penguins Lair continued: 12:48 takes a bunch of hits trying to get last kick on rubber ducky when could have retreated and finished it off from a distance with throwable weapon. Not sure that would have saved any time though, as I believe the player has to wait for the penguin to fly away before ascending. 13:01 missed jump pattern (nobody’s perfect). Peguin fight went well, using the downtime between waves to take out the transformer and uses the remaining gadgets to take him out as quick as feasible.

That Rubber Ducky strat is hard...........INSANELY hard. Aside from the ice physics I have to take into account, I can only land a few kicks (4 is the absolute limit) before I have to decide to jump to the next platform OR if I can stick it out. The shorter icebergs make the choice really easy: just get the fuck off of it. The longer icebergs always play with my head, making me think I have more time than I really do. On top of that, the constant flying-penguin-missiles really fuck with my kick rhythm. It's not easy to see, but one of the punches I throw to the left is from the constant hits throwing off my rhythm, so I wound up pressing attack about 1 frame before pressing/holding right on the Dpad. I've had better fights, but only by about a second or two.

Verifier 2

Quote:
Act 2 - Shreck's Wonderland
Gotham Streets: They could have probably shot more of the goons with a batarang to avoid getting hit so much. But this section was handled well besides that. The mid-boss was also done rather well aside from getting hit a few times.

Unfortunately there's no way to avoid getting hit by this guy. The plan is to get close enough to take contact damage rather than a punch, but the timing on it is really tough to get consistently.

Quote:
Act 3 - The Red Triangle Circus
The Outskirts: Pretty smooth here all throughout. Although, they probably could have used more damage boosts to their advantage since the health refills when you get to the Circus Tent.

Circus Tent: Two death here, Although the deaths don't put you too far back at all. That's probably 4-5 seconds there with both deaths. Otherwise, it's an ok stage. The runner's positioning makes this boss go by real fast. Probably could have been better if they moved out of the way of the clowns to kick them without getting knock-back delay.

For 3-1, I use as many damage boosts as possible given the enemy spawn patterns. Every hit I take in this section of the run is planned. The best example is at 6:36 in the run: I intentionally take a hit from the flipper, then stand inside the flame clown. This allows me to take the least amount of damage and use the invulnerability to grapple up to the next section. The most time that can be saved on this section of the run is maybe 1 to 2 seconds.

For 3-3, as I said in reply to the other verifier, these 2 deaths are planned and practically unavoidable. The lack of health pickups along with enemies placed in spots to guarantee hitting Batman (and every single one of em dealing 1-2 bars of damage out of a total of 11 health bars) means taking hits here is just part of the plan. If I can figure out how to consistently despawn a few of the flame spitters the second death can be completely avoided. As for the knockback on the unicycle clowns, that is completely unavoidable. Unlike the same clowns you see on level 1-2 (the broken building), these guys get pushed back with every hit they take, so there's no way to stun-lock them in one spot with the fist. My only other option is to spam the kick (which has a wider attack box). The other problem is that while it's technically possible to corner stun one of the clowns, the other clown will never come into position to also get trapped (which wastes a ton of time since the second clown will start wandering to the lower half of the ropes). Standing where I do allows me to kick them from both sides since the kick's attack box extends behind Batman's sprite.

Quote:
Act 4 - Into The Sewers
The Sewers (Parts 1 and 2): That was a nice route the runner used in the 1st part. The slight wait at 10:00 seemed unnecessary since you could just take damage by running into him and then using that to pass him. Only 1 second lost there though, so no bid deal. The fight against Scarecrow was good. The 2nd part also used a nice route. There wasn't anything that I spotted glaring with this half either, so it's good.

The wait at 10:00 was intentional. If I tried to jump into him to take the damage, I would've been boosted to the left (due to where my collision box would touch his), landed where I started from, and not had enough time to pass through him without taking another hit.

Quote:
Act 5 - The Penguin's Lair
The Lair: ...Yeah, 11:30 was pretty glaring seeing as how they jumped around all over the place. At that point they should just take the damage and get up there anyways. The rest of the stage went smoothly with especially nice use of Smoke Bombs to get past enemies.

The Final Showdowns: The first fight against the giant rubber duck was alright, albeit a little clumsy at the end since they stumbled around trying to land a hit. Probably about 1-2 seconds there. The final fight was great with the use of the Bat Swarm to get him while destroying the generator being genius.

Yeah 11:30 is not easy to look at, but at least I didn't fall into the water (which normally happens when I take a hit there due to the momentum when I land). How I landed on a platform that isn't there at all is really weird. I'm assuming there's a few pixels at the bottom of the angled platform that the programmers accidentally left in (which explains the complete lack of ice physics when I landed). As for just taking the hits and getting up there anyway, I'm a bit confused as to what you mean exactly. If you mean just take the hits from the axe girl and use the invulnerability to grapple up, that strat doesn't work (already tested) since the setup for that climb has to be lined up correctly and Batman won't grapple if his sliding momentum is too high. But don't worry, I already have an idea that could save a nice chunk of time in that area. Again the Rubber Ducky fight is hard (as mentioned before) on top of the ice physics, the penguin-missiles, and the fact that it's a 1-shot strategy. Any mistakes immediately drop me into the water and end the run, so I have to be careful about when to attack and when to move to the next iceberg.

Unfortunately the Credits fight is part of the official timing for this game since 1) I have control over Batman and 2) the game doesn't actually end until the fight is over. This puts the official time at 13:29, although 13:14 sounds like a really good goal to work towards Smiley

Even though I'm going to reject this specific run, I'm still going to do a live commentary on it tomorrow (5/16) at 11pm EST. I figure it's better than wasting the footage.
The Dork Knight himself.
Live commentary finished, go here if you're interested in seeing the breakdown.