Messages

1

Gameplay / Re: Fish Form (YES, I know...)

« on: April 16, 2008, 11:59:04 pm »

I actually missed it on my first playthrough as well... the passage that leads to the fish form cave just looks like a dead end, iirc, which is kinda annoying.

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Gameplay / Re: Kelp Forest Boss

« on: April 08, 2008, 02:59:55 pm »

I think it took me 4 vulnerability phases or so to get her to the next part without any +dmg food... I really don't think you should need more than 5.

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Gameplay / Re: Aquaria Speed Runs **Spoilers**

« on: April 05, 2008, 08:26:13 pm »

Well, I think it's probably safe to say that groobo will be doing a run on the game sometime.

Unfortunately (imo), it will make profligate use of the food duping exploit, the Sunken City skip, etc.

Which I suppose is better than nothing, but it doesn't show the game at its finest. Oh well. Maybe they'll allow a separate run on a patched version without those tricks.

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Gameplay / Re: Aquaria Speed Runs **Spoilers**

« on: April 03, 2008, 09:05:42 am »

Okay... just as well with the body thing, since it seemed kinda dumb and broke the game's plot. The Veil trick is creative enough though that I hope it isn't patched, it actually seems fairly difficult to reproduce.

And I guess I missed the discussions on briar rocketing, was probably done before I played the game. I remember you mentioning that you managed to climb up the sun temple, I figured it was done on the west side by climbing the wall, and not the east. How do you get up to the Roc Ruk without Beast form, though? There's a strong current blocking the normal passage that leads up to the Ruk, and I couldn't think of any other way to bypass it.

[Edit]

Oh, you did mention briar "rocketing", my bad. Well, if it's possible to do it without beast form, that would be another huge timesaver. However, if you can't skip the Sunken City, it seems like you'd have to get Beast Form anyways to beat the Golem Boss (right?), which kinda sucks.

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Gameplay / Re: Aquaria Speed Runs **Spoilers**

« on: April 03, 2008, 06:07:51 am »

Gonna bump this now, there were some interesting posts in the SDA thread. Although no one actually said they're planning a run, user groobo posted some neat sequence breaks, notably in order to get to the veil early and bypass the tentacle blocking the body, which allows you to skip Beast form and Li / Sunken City entirely, apparently. The Veil trick strikes me as particularly clever, the Body shortcut is more like "wow that's so obvious that I guess no one tried it". In any case sequence breaking is half of what makes these things fun.

groobo goes on to outline the optimal route as energy -> nature -> sun -> dual, which is probably correct. Sun and Nature are probably interchangeable unless there's a viable briarhopping shortcut somewhere.

[Edit]

Oh, and I might have found a shortcut of my own! I was playing around and discovered that it is possible to get into the Sun Temple from the east side. What you have to do is jump up to the area where the Roc is. Normally jumping off to the left wouldn't give you enough momentum to reach the ledge where the Sun Temple is, but if you use Nature form and plant a briar under your feet, it'll shoot you with a much higher initial velocity than you'd normally have, and if you angle it correctly you can reach the ledge above the Sun Temple's east side... from here it should be a simple matter of briarhopping up the glass tube leading to the memory, and then either dropping down into the temple or possibly continuing left into the boss chamber shortcut.

Only downside is that it probably requires beastform to get up to the roc's area to begin with, and it doesn't save enough time to justify going to Mithrala if that can be skipped entirely. Maybe you could use a trick similar to the one used to bypass the current leading into the Veil, but I kinda doubt it.

At the least, the briar superjump could probably be used in order to climb up the left side of the sun temple quickly, although launching yourself at the right angle seems pretty difficult.

6

Gameplay / Re: What is the body supposed to be? Probably spoilers

« on: April 01, 2008, 09:31:12 pm »

It's generic creepy unexplained organic environment #294.

Probably can be explained by referencing the Creator (or whatever it was that gave the Creator his power?), I don't know.

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Gameplay / Re: Aquaria Speed Runs **Spoilers**

« on: March 25, 2008, 02:44:00 am »

I think TAS only work for games that can be used on emulators that have savestates.

Anyways, the only recording program I'm familiar with is FRAPS, though there may be others that are more-preferred within the speedrunning community.. though FRAPS should get the job done.

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Gameplay / Re: Aquaria Speed Runs **Spoilers**

« on: March 24, 2008, 04:56:39 am »

I think an any-% run would be relatively straightforward, which is why I took the time to propose a route for it. A 100% run might require more planning, but it still shouldn't be too hard... for better or worse, Aquaria doesn't have many advanced techniques that could be used for sequence breaking. While Metroid speedrunning became famous because things like bomb jumping and wall jumping could be used to completely change the game's flow, I don't think there's anything analogous in Aquaria, save for briarhopping, which is only useful in a few places and might not even save any time in an actual run. But it is, of course, possible that there's some trick or shortcut I'm not aware of, in which case this thread is as good a place to highlight it as any.

Outright glitches are, unfortunately, a much more difficult thing to address. In the SDA thread someone pointed to a guy who had run Eternal Daughter, and who actually had an Aquaria video on his YT account where he somehow used bound rocks to push himself through walls and thus across entire areas. That kind of glitching would be detrimental to the enjoyability of a speedrun imo, but it's always subjective.. in any case, it would clearly violate SDA rules, whose philosophy I agree with: "If it obviously looks like a glitch to an uninformed player, it's out." But I don't really have the right to dictate terms like that, I suppose. But this is the line that allowed bugs like mockballing (moving really fast in morph ball form) to be part of the standard Metroid repertoire, since it didn't look like at obvious error.

On further consideration, I found myself musing that if I were one of the game's designers (*cough*) or maybe just had a lot of money lying around, it might be a good investment to put up a modest bounty (usually around $50 or so) for a speedrun that gets hosted on SDA, which would probably give the game exposure to thousands of people. This would at least make for an interesting precedent, as I don't think a developer has ever offered a bounty on their own game to a 3rd-party site.

9

Gameplay / Re: Aquaria Speed Runs **Spoilers**

« on: March 24, 2008, 02:15:58 am »

Well, I think pretty much any time that would get the ball rolling would be nice, so that people would see it and then propose improvements.. that's generally how these things progress, I believe.

Anyways, I did make a thread on SDA:

http://speeddemosarchive.com/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=pcgames;action=display;num=1206320908

I'm not sure it'll get much of a reply, but it doesn't hurt to try.

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Gameplay / Re: Aquaria Playthrough Diary

« on: March 24, 2008, 01:02:30 am »

Sorry, been a while since I played, and since the diary complained about the boss flashing red when he wasn't being damaged, I thought it was like that. My bad if I'm wrong, though.

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Gameplay / Re: Aquaria Playthrough Diary

« on: March 24, 2008, 12:08:05 am »

Make a distinctive sound when shots push him back, but don't harm him, and maybe make them richochet slightly (I'm trying to think of a way to make it obvious they push him...but nothing is coming to mind, really I think the only solution is added narration...)

Personally, I'm fond of what they did in the Metroid games... hitting a boss in a meaningful manner but not actually damaging them life-wise would make them flash yellow, while actual damage would make them flash red.

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Gameplay / Re: Aquaria Speed Runs **Spoilers**

« on: March 23, 2008, 11:56:55 pm »

Yea, I might go ahead and do that later.. it just kinda seems odd to post a thread about a run that I'd rather see someone else do.

In any case, looking things over, going Beast -> Nature -> Sun wouldn't take any more time than Beast -> Sun -> Nature, barring the possibility that one of them would take an extra turtle trip (I'm not sure which, though.) I'm not sure if using Nature form to climb the left side of the Sun temple would save any time, maybe there's someone way better than me at fast briarhopping though. I'd like for it to be possible just to make the run more interesting, though. In any case, a segmented route would probably go something like:

1: Start to song cave to saving before the "boss" that gives you Energy form
2: Energy temple up to the save before the boss
3: Leave energy temple, go through open waters and Mithalas to the save point outside the cathedral
4: Mithalas cathedral to the savepoint at the beginning of the area with all the currents
5: Leave Mithalas (get beast form), pick up the ancient turtle near it, head to the savepoint before the Kelp Forest boss, getting the Kelp Forest turtle along the way.
6: Get Nature form, take the bulb to the turtle, then the turtle back to outside Mithalas, head up to the Veil, get Li and save at the first Sun Temple crystal
7: Either climb the left side of the Sun Temple to the boss or do it normally (possibly saving before the boss if doing normally, if so this would make an 8th segment, but let's assume we don't..), get Sun Form, leave through the exit in the boss' room, take the nearby turtle back to outside Mithalas, save somewhere on the way to the Abyss.
8: I'm not sure which route is fastest through the Abyss to the Sunken City, but suffice to say one should figure it out and do it, go through the Sunken City, save before the Golem Boss.
9+: Save as few times as possible throughout The Body (the crystal is kinda out of the way), but realistically it'd be hard not to have to do it a couple times. Definitely save before the final gauntlet, after getting Li back.
10: From getting Li back to the save before the final boss.
11: Final boss.

Something like that sounds about right.

13

Gameplay / Re: Aquaria Speed Runs **Spoilers**

« on: March 23, 2008, 10:09:22 pm »

Bumping this thread because some really should record a full speedrun. It could probably get accepted to sites like SDA, I imagine, which would bring publicity to the game.

To outline the basics, a game like Aquaria could support several different types of speedruns:

-- Fastest completion with any ending
-- Fastest completion with best ending
-- Low % runs
-- 100% runs

afaik the first and the third would actually be the same, since there are no major sequence breaks in the game (hmm.. there should be!) and if there were they probably wouldn't add to the final time. The second would just be the first with a few extra detours that would require the acquisition of Spirit form (not sure about Fish form), and would probably not be as interesting as the first or fourth runs, which for all intents and purposes should be what people focus on.

A good any-% run would probably entail:

-- No extras such as various armors (jelly armor..) or pets or health upgrades. Detours for Spicy / Volcano rolls might be acceptable, since they speed up boss fights.
-- Becoming really really good at bouncing off the walls to travel. It looks silly but it's a huge time-saver.
-- IDEALLY one would be able to navigate the Abyss without Sun form (right?) This isn't reasonable to expect, but it would save a lot of time.
-- I think people have already got the right idea in terms of route: After energy form, go Beast -> Sun -> Nature. Really, the only real choice in route planning is when to go for Nature form, and it seems most logical to do it after you get the turtle by Mithalas. Beast -> Nature -> Sun wouldn't be much worse, though, and if I understand correctly that it's possible to climb up the side of the Sun Temple using Nature Form, it might actually save some time.

Anyways, yea, I'd love to see a real run done according to SDA rules, there's a slight possibility that I might try one myself. But if people are getting to the last boss in just over an hour, that's pretty awesome and deserves a full recording.

14

Gameplay / Re: A La Carte - Recipe tool-tips

« on: March 05, 2008, 08:03:15 am »

Yea, this is actually a good idea.

One other thing that would be convenient would be if you could make multiple copies of the same item at once. Not quite as important, but dragging the same items over and over got kinda dull.

15

General / Re: My Aquaria Thoughts (Spoilers)

« on: March 03, 2008, 07:54:22 pm »

The Final Cave is before Hell. Hell has no parallel, I agree..