Speed Demos Archive - Power Blade

I think I'll start with explaining the tricks in this game.

Boomerangcancel: When you throw a boomerang before landing from a great height so you don't get the kneeling animation. It saves a couple of frames.

Ladderdrop: When you drop from a ladder and regrab it as close to the bottom that you can.

Wallclip: This is what made this game so insanely hard to compete for the WR... The game have alot of places where I jump at a certain pixel around a corner, turns around, and that gives me a boost up onto the platform where I normally can't jump because it's to high.
Biggest example of this is at the end of Sector 5 after I get the keycard.

Grenadeglitch: By using a grenade while entering the bossdoor, you can kill the boss immediately. A grenade does 2 damage, and when entering the room the boss starts with 1 hp before it fills up to max and the fight starts. So before the fight starts the grenade kills the boss for you :D
This glitch does only work on Boss 1, 2, 4 and 5.

Another thing you might wanna know is that the itemdrops are fixed in this game so that's why I kill stuff in a certain order to get my grenadedrops at the right places.

My thoughts of the run:

Everything went extremely close to perfect except for the clips at sector 6. It's about 3 seconds that I lost there that I could improve the run with, but then I have to hit ALL the clips first try kinda and that is insanely hard.
Hope I can pull it off one day, but for now I will move on to another game since this is almost as perfect as it can be :)

Hope you liked the run! :)
Hit me up on twitch.tv/InfestedRiche if you wanna see more NES-action :)

Shoutouts ofc to ExoSDA for his run that was one of the biggest challenges I've ever faced!
And please check out my pals Crippe123 and k0zzx (it's a zero, not a big o) who are other runnes of this game what I know of at the moment :)

If you want to discuss or share information related to speedrunning this game (tricks, strategies, ...), use this thread:
http://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/power_blade_nes.html
If you have questions or comments about the run, use the existing verification thread:
http://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/power_blade__july_27th_2010.html

General comments and strategies

The difference between normal and expert is that you get less time in expert (obviously of no importance in a speedrun) and that you get knocked back by enemies (you can run right through them in normal). Everything else is identical. In theory, you could go faster in expert by using damage boosts to your advantage. In practice, expert means that a fair amount of runs are ruined because of being knocked into pits and the damage boost potential turns out to be fairly low since your own impulsion often counteracts the boost effect.
All the items come in a particular order depending on how many enemies you have killed (only non-regenerating enemies count). By taking exactly the same route and killing the same enemies, it's therefore possible to plan from which enemies you will get which drops. When I had planned the route, I simply listed in a spreadsheet all potential enemies I could kill and which would then drop goodies. This is the explanation for why I sometimes avoided killing enemies that were in my way. I simply tried to get the drops in as favorable spots as possible. On a final note, there is something strange about the enemy count. Well, at least something I never figured out while playing the game. By comparing different routes, I found that for some reason I didn't get items from the enemies I expected. For example, in this run I got a burger from enemy #47, but I tried a different route and got it from enemy #46 instead. Never mind, as long as you have a fix route, the drops are completely deterministic. By the way, 211 regular enemies were killed in this run.
Since I just discussed the items, I need to say a few words about the route. I first started out taking the levels in order (1-2-3-4-5-6), but I then realized that I got a slightly better drop schedule from taking the inverse route (1-6-5-4-3-2). I also think that doing level 6-5 is slightly harder than doing level 2-3, so that was also in favor of the inverse route. I guess other combinations could be even more favorable, but it also takes precious time jerking around with the level selection. Each level is fairly big, but once mapped out, it's still easy to come up with the best route. The only non-intuitive route choice is in level 2, where I take the route through the invisible wall. The other route is very close time-wise, but considerably trickier to perform.
The game's name is Power Blade and the awesome Power Blade suit wasn't used one single time in this run ! Well, however awesome and powerful the suit is, you lose it after three hits. The main time savings from it are against the 6th and the last bosses. Since I didn't figure out a way to inflict two hits each round on the first form of the last boss without taking a hit myself, the Power Blade suit just didn't make it in this run (other players have figured out how to do this after the completion of this run though). Luckily, the fire boomerang is pretty awesome as well...
What's the story about those wussy bosses dying before even showing up on screen ? And why weren't all bosses killed that way ? Well, by using a grenade upon entering the boss room, the boss takes damage while still having 0 energy. Going into negative energy kills it. The time window for using the grenade is quite large, so it's a very easy trick to execute. I don't know why it doesn't work on all of the bosses.
When planning out this run, I did not fully investigate the possibility of jump clipping and passed it off as a TAS-only trick. This was pointed out in the verification comments (thanks again to the verifier) and has since then by other players been proven to be fully possible to include in a console speedrun. Jump clipping is performed by jumping through the lower corner of a platform which, if performed correctly, will magically allow you to clip through to the top of the platform. This can be used in many places around the game and can cut out sections worth several minutes of gameplay.

Run comments
8.46 (level 5) - Normally, you need to wait here for a moment anyways. Otherwise you will jump into the big, blue robot and get knocked back. I think very little time was lost from this mistake.
15.28 (level 3) - You need to wait a little bit for the frog below to land. Otherwise you will get knocked into the bog.
16.24 (level 3) - If the luck is right (and you need a bunch), it's faster to take out the top beehive as third. Most of the time however, bees from the left will come and interrupt and the end result is slower. How the beehives open is random as far as I can tell.
18.18 (level 2) - Normally, I'm at full health and the burger doesn't pause the game momentarily. This time I'm not at full health and I press the jump button during the pause. While not very time-consuming it could have been avoided by paying more attention.
18.56 (level 2) - You can save half a second by jumping off the ladder with good timing. Somehow I mess up here very easily. Maybe because of always getting hit by that enemy or something. Anyways, I usually just assume the time loss and climb down the ladder.
19.17 (level 2) - The beginning of what I believe is the biggest time loss in the run. It's possible to forward boost through all the crushers. It demands pretty precise timing though and none of my comparable completions did much better. I'd say three seconds were lost.
21.30 (level 7) - I didn't turn around for personal revenge, but because it's one of the enemies that is on my list and thus taken into account for the item drops. In hindsight, it was completely unnecessary though. The grenade I got from the big robot, I could have gotten it from the turret just after instead. It was a split second call and I admit that it was a bad one.
22.10 (level 7) - You need to wait momentarily on the ladder if you don't want to land on the blue thingy and being knocked down the pit.
22.46 (level 7) - I haven't found a way to hit the first form of the final boss twice without taking a hit. Other speedrunners have shown that to be possible though.

Competition (as of writing - early 2013)
First of all, the Japanese version of this game was called Power Blazer and, while similar, is so different that any times from Japan can't be compared with times from western players on Power Blade.
When I started preparing to speedrun this game, I was the first player having done any serious effort in doing so. Since then, it was reported in 2012 an 18:22 (expert, ntsc) by Daltone and a 17:33 (normal, ntsc-emu) by Exo. Both of these runs used jump clipping to cut out quite large chunks of the game and are therefore several minutes faster than my run (if adjusted for ntsc-pal timing difference).

Final thoughts
I do the final editing of these comments long time after the run was completed. Although this run uses routes that are now outdated since jump clipping started to be used in real-time speedruns, I believe this is still the fastest reported time that could be submitted to sda. I think the execution itself is mostly acceptable and that's the reason I think it's still worth to have it published. I have no plans on revisiting this game, but I hope that someone comes along with a run including jump clipping to obsolete it someday.

Credits
- SDA for publishing this run and for providing the community with a non-commercial platform for hosting speedrun videos.
- Anyone who has contributed to the development of Anri-chan. If a tool is so easy that even I can encode videos, then it must good!