I swear I didn’t manipulate my savings to make this happen. Total final savings: 40271 frames = 11:11:11 in mm:ss:ff format. It’s supposed to be a stealth mission where you follow the Vortex Larva as it wanders aimlessly through the mazelike ruins of Atlantis.īut it turns out to be faster to just swim right in front of it in a few places to get it to swim directly at the gate, instead of through a convoluted series of waypoints.Īlso, when it’s angry, you can push it with your sonar, and how hard it gets pushed depends on how fast you were swimming when you loosed the sonar blast. This level is littered with stone gateways that only open for an enemy that can kill you instantly if it gets mad. There are some other factors like needing to refill health from occasional schools of fish, and regularly spaced eels in the walls that will kill you in two hits and don’t grant invincibility frames, but these are minor details (that happen to add a huge amount of complication to TASing this boss.) But the speed you run into it also matters, so hitting charge against it whenever possible saves just over 12 seconds more. Simply constantly swimming down into it from above saves about 39 seconds. In the first TAS, I never learned this, because you take damage every time you bump it, so I never thought to check actively swimming into it. So, it turns out that Ecco can push the giant conch shell around. Once the shell settles at the bottom of a ravine, a large eel comes out that you can kill, ending the level. There’s a giant conch shell which floats down an undersea ravine, occasionally trying to crush you against the walls, or summoning gigantic eels that kill you nearly instantly. This level is essentially a long boss fight. Performing a long charge (charging with initial speed below 3 pixels per frame), which immediately increases Ecco’s speed by 4 pixels per frame for 1 frame, followed by 23 frames of base 0.15625 pixels per frame (during which 1 frame worth of standard acceleration can apply for speeds of up to 0.65376 pixels per frame), then 2 frames of 4 pixels per frame per frame acceleration, 3 frames of charge acceleration, and then getting the full cycle of a short charge without the initial speed boost.(Normal acceleration is possible during these final five frames of the charge). 5 pixels per frame for 5 frames before ending and allowing a new charge. Performing a short charge (charging with initial speed of at least 3 pixels per frame), which immediately increases Ecco’s speed by 4 pixels per frame, followed by overriding normal acceleration for 19 frames of charge acceleration (slower than standard swim acceleration at low initial speeds, faster at high initial speeds), then decreasing Ecco’s speed by.This is most efficient in 12 frame cycles of 11 frames down 1 frame up. Pressing the accelerate, which increases Ecco’s speed by a varying amount depending on his current speed and how long the button has been held down.There are three ways to accelerate in this game: And, of course, the developers must have thought they were developing a PS2 game or something, because the game uses a wide variety of polygonal hit-boxes and detection boxes, and terrain collision is achieved by a bunch of invisible collision polygons that vaguely conform to where it looks like walls/floors/ceilings are supposed to be. On top of all this, the game tracks position to the 65536th of each pixel, which combines with the eight-frame steering rule to snowball tiny variations in position and timing into gigantic differences in result. Additionally, the way acceleration works is obscure, requiring a repeated pattern holding the button for 11 frames, than releasing for 1, the fastest way to get to top speed from a dead stop is to accelerate for 5 frames, charge, immediately cancel the charge, and then charge again eight-frames later when the cool-down wears off (maintaining the optimal acceleration input all the while). Otherwise it takes 30 frames without any form of acceleration before Ecco begins to lose speed, and even then does so at a maddeningly slow rate. At top speed, Ecco swims just under 40% faster than Super Sonic can run, but has an eight-frame rule on steering (except orthogonal flips), and no way to slow down, except for orthogonal flips, which take too long, or crashing into walls, which slow Ecco too much. It is also highly resistant to speed-running. Ecco: The Tides of Time is the sequel to Ecco the Dolphin, and has been one of my favorite games for a long, long time.
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