[TAS] Mega Man 2 - Zipless: Progress Update 1

I'm pushing steadily on towards Dr. Wily. Wily 2 and 3 are pretty much RTA with perfect execution and a bit of showing off, with the exception of shooting the guy at 2:46. That's not something we usually go for in real time.

Wily 4 (Purple Hell) is where things start to get interesting. There aren't a lot of zips in this stage, so the first section looks extremely similar to a standard "zipful" TAS, right up until 4:42. In this section, there is one unavoidable hit of damage that you don't have to deal with when zipping. Why is this hit so important? Because of the Crash Bomb glitch.

The Crash Bomb glitch lets us damage enemies by running into them while a crash bomb is exploding. There's a really easy setup on one of the Boobeams that we go for RTA, which you can see if you watch just about any run on the leaderboards (I didn't TAS that far in this video). But there's another setup we can do for the Boobeam on the left, which I do get in this video. Using finalfighter's excellent lua script, I was able to observe and manipulate the intricacies of this phenomenon, and kill the Boobeam like in the regular TAS.

OK, great. But what does that have to do with that Sniper Joe hitting me? Well, the dimensions of the Crash Bomb glitch hitbox (referred to by finalfighter as MadWidth and MadHeight) are determined by the location of the previous time you took damage. The regular TAS is able to obtain the MadWidth and height values it needs earlier in the stage from a Telly, but in a zipless run, we are forced to obtain them from that Sniper Joe shot. This is a problem, because that bullet gives us shitty values. I was able to get some halfway decent ones right before the door by taking an extra hit from that other Sniper Joe, which I otherwise would've used an Item 1 to jump over. This wastes time and leaves me with an extra Item 1 that I don't need... Although, the regular TAS saves one for the alien fight, so maybe I need to do some rerouting!

I also played around with taking damage in the actual Boobeam fight, but that gives you more shitty values and is super slow, too. It's possible that this current route is actually optimal, depending on how the alien fight goes.

finalfighter's script: http://www.yuko2ch.net/rockman/crdoub...
WR zipless run: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/23495590...
Regular "zipful" TAS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVa4Z...