After a couple of hits, the boss is dead, and we've saved the day (maybe).The Justifier is a honking great revolver-shaped lump of blue plastic, and it was great. In any event, with all 6 weapons destroyed, we can now attack the boss with the shotgun (the old TAS also used the shotgun here, so this doesn't save me any time).
Also, the missiles the boss fires seem to miss you like 95% of the time, but I'm not sure what exactly causes that. I found the memory addresses of all 6 of these weapons in RAM, and I've posted these addresses in the memory addresses page for the game, for anyone whose interested. I was able to save time over the old TAS here by shooting the weapons in an order which allowed me to destroy all weapons before the helicopter had moved across the screen twice, unlike the other TAS, which had to wait for the helicopter to get into its third movement across the screen while waiting for parts that were vulnerable to damage to reappear on screen. Also, when a weapon goes behind a building, you can't damage it. Each weapon takes 8 hits to destroy, and has their own health bar. The final boss! Before you can destroy the helicopter, you have to destroy the 6 weapons on the helicopter (there are 3 on each side of the helicopter: 1 is the outermost rotor, then there is a plate thing, then there is a gun, and this pattern repeats on the opposite side). However, I did save a few seconds on this boss fight by shooting the helicopter faster than the old TAS did.īoss 5: Helicopter Man 2: Electric Bugaloo: The old TAS also used the shotgun on this boss, so I couldn't save any time from my choice of weaponry. Once all of them are destroyed, the boss dies. Regardless, I manipulated the boss to fire explosives in a direction that I could quickly shoot, and then destroyed all 6 or so of the weak spots on the helicopter, which erupt into flames when destroyed. It's possible to manipulate RNG so the helicopter doesn't shoot missiles at you, but when I did this, it seemed to make it so that certain parts of the boss would never take damage, and I couldn't kill the boss (although maybe there is a way to make it work, and I just couldn't figure it out?). However, sometime a given spot on the helicopter will become invulnerable to taking damage. You have to shoot the helicopter at various precise points in order to do damage. As such, I made the last enemy spawn close enough to the boss that I could shoot them right after I killed the boss but before the boss dying cutscene started, which allowed me to prevent this softlock and avoid losing time.
Also, it seems that one enemy always appears offscreen at the end of the fight even if you don't see any during the fight. For some reason, if you kill the boss while an enemy is on screen, the game will soft lock, with both you and the enemy unable to shoot each other or move, and the level unable to end until the enemy is killed. As such, I pressed buttons at different times to manipulate RNG so that the boss would fire his projectiles as fast as possible, and no enemies would appear around him until the end of the fight (and that enemy would appear right next to him). When the boss fires his projectiles and when enemies appear around the boss is controlled by RNG. I saved time on this boss once again by using the shotgun, which does 2 HP of damage instead of 1 (even though that doesn't really make sense, since the boss is only damaged by reflecting his own projectiles back at him, not from your gun itself, but whatever.). This boss is defeated by shooting the explosives the boss fires, which causes them to fly back into him and damage him. This might be part of the reason why this was the last TAS from 2004 to be obsoleted, since the publication text made it sound like the TAS was unbeatable, so no one even tried TASing the game. However, despite the lack of any evidence to support this, everyone took Phil at his word, and the publication text for the game also repeats this myth. I assume he said this because he wanted to get his TAS published, and this game is so boring to TAS that he really didn't want to have to go back and optimize every shot on every enemy in the whole game. It's obvious that Phil never tried shooting enemies as fast as possible and timing how fast that was, because if he did, he would have found a clear difference of about 4 seconds per stage which results from shooting all enemies as soon as they appear. However, as I suspected, when I actually got to TASing the game, I discovered that this claim was clearly false.
The submission notes from Phil for his 2004 TAS claim that how fast you shoot the enemies (besides the bosses) has no effect on how fast you beat the game, since enemies pop out at a fixed rate.
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