I'm doing some notes for running Any%. I started with getting info about all the possible maps one can get, so I run into PSO-world and I saw like 5 variations of forest 1 and 2.

But then on gameplay I just got 3 variations. So ¿Do the other patterns only appear in missions?

Thanks ;)

I'll be uploading some documents that I have been doing since last year in the next days/weeks. I wont upload them inmediately because I need to present them in a more friendly way so they are understandable.

These documents may include: Datamining of the game, Enemy behavior, Skill level growth, Routes for different categories and some other misc stuff about the game.

All (or most) of them will be in drive's google sheet format.

I think getting ALL the items would be actually a nightmare xD.

The closest thing to a 100% is Max battles. There you can get as many items as you want, and I think is the best since you really don't need all of them to beat every enemy, there's also SO many useless items. Also my thought on the chest and items is that they are just consumables and also you get items from battles when getting a SS or S rank, making items not "really" important from a story perspective (I mean they don't make too much sense to a 100% in my opinion).

There's also the idea of Max%, that would be All Techniques + Max battles, but I ommited that one because is also a nightmare to learn everything, like, All techniques alone is already veeeeery difficult to route.

Last year I routed a little of Max Battles, I can share my notes in a couple of days (I need to order them to be understandable xD). But basically what you want for Max Battles is either level up Arms OR Legs full, then as far as you get 5 power bars you start doing 6-tech combos (Jumping Axe or rolling savate for kicks / Rising Uppercut or charged punch for punches).

I found that Rising Uppercut is by far the strongest, and also if you level up arms you can do Arm Throw into Neck Lock on pretty much every enemy for quick knockdowns. The problem is the punches are weaker on early game. So the real decision is:

Go full punches: Slow beginning, but faster mid and end game Go full Kicks: Very fast beginning, but mid and late game might be slower

Recomendations:

• ALWAYS go for Advantage encounters if you can, on mid game (from Area 3 and on) all the Advantage encounters are insta kills with 6-tech combos (you start with all your power bars in advantage). For the battles that CAN'T be advantages, if you go for the punches route wait until you have around 1.5 power bars, then do Arm throw into neck lock, then just repeat neck lock until enemy dies. If you go for Kicks route, you can charge several power bars and then go for Arm Throw into backicks or just charge for a 6-tech combo.

• For Ultimate, you are expected to never get hit, so you need to learn how to Manual Step* and also have good movement and knowledge of the enemies in general. In general is better to stay close to them and react to their attack, specially if they can shoot, because on Ultimate shots deal A LOT of damage, but they only do it if you are far.

*Manual Step: The main trick of the whole game. Most of the enemies (like 90%) do an animation before a physical attack. You can react to this animation and do a back jump to completely avoid the attack.

Since nobody answered, I'll just ban High res and High res letterbox

For those who don't know, 3DRealms launched a lot of games on steam, including Hocus Pocus (http://store.steampowered.com/app/358290/Hocus_Pocus/).

It is NOT a different version of the game though. It is NOT even a "more official" version. I actually bought it and is just a folder with DosBox, the Rom of Hocus Pocus and a cool .exe that sets up the game for you.

Cool thing about it: if you have problems setting up stuff like DosBox, this "version" does it for you... well, not absolutely because it has different source for the sound engine, and if you want the original sound you need to do a bunch of stuff to configurate it. It's still pretty speedrun friendly because it already had all the good set up for DosBox to emulate it at proper speed.

But yeah, I mostly wanted to say that they literally put a folder with DosBox and a rom and started selling that in Steam xd.

Ok so I finally got my adapted N64 to start running and experimenting with my Japanese copy of the game.

I did a test with the resolutions and having jumper/expansion pack. It seems that expansion pack alone cuts a little bit of lag even on low resolution (almost unnoticeable). But the great concern is high resolution and high resolution letterbox.

For fast read all be calling Low Resolution LR, High Resolution HR, and letter box HRLB, and from this part and on all the test were made with the expansion pack.

It seems that HR and HRLB save time over LR in parts were you normally experience lag (they kinda "cut" the lag). For example: going from "gain control of Diaz" to the first door saves around 1 second in HR and HRLB.

On parts were there's normally no lag, all three methods seemed equal. To test this I used the stairs holding up (getting diaz in and out of them) for a minute and I count the nunber of times that diaz repeated the action. All three, LR, HR and HRLB had 27'ish repetitions.

So now the real talk: HR and HRLB potencially save real time (probably not game time, but you never know in this game xD), BUT they look super arkward on the screen, it almost feels like the game is cutting frames, making the game difficult and maybe even unhealthy to play.

My thoughts in the matter is that HR and HRLB should be banned for player's health sake. And btw, just having the expansion pack seems to cut very little lag even on LR.

PD: if anyone can corroborate this (although several people on the internet sais HR is unplayable) or bring similar experiences on other games with similar issues, that would be very helpful x)

Pandora.

UPDATE: There is now a setup for Lasers AND Keys without reseting the counter, and is way faster and safer xD

So now with the new knowledge (shoutouts to xDarkEdge!) we need to adjust the rules a little again.

We already talked a few things, basically it will not be allowed to reset the cheat variable with the inputs 'B', 'F' or 'Q'. also it is not allowed to use the ESCAPE menu to reset the counter. Level skip it's still allowed without using savefiles.

The last important thing is if we allow to reset the counter be using a non intended combination to get the counter to the FEELGOOD value. This is important because it might be the only way to get Lasers AND Keys at the beginning of the level. On the other hand Rapid AND Keys doesn't require to reset the counter, since the setup allows us to go from the QUARK value to the BLAKE value without reseting the counter.

Regardless of the last paragraph, there might be a setup for Lasers AND Keys without using the FEELGOOD reset, but it might be less consistent.

PD: We already used the FEELGOOD reset 'by accident' in the past with the 'L' 12 times setup for the Keys xD

Melonax requested images material from the game. I recover sprites of monsters and items, as well as the backgrounds of the game while ago, here are some shared drive folders with those files:

Items and stuff: https://drive.google.com/open?id=15JkHtpeBTfrROiJMYyDJA123YOQErZgB

Enemies: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1At1qu1Ab2aNlSctccjyx6Rau8Gph8kd9

Random images: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NXHKenAXCmS8bFw4lLN-llFjjATMd2Da

Backgrounds and environment: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1a4qpNlrdQNoO6zFZ1rL0-8ox7k1Gx19Q

Enjoy, Pandora

If you want to talk or discuss about this game in Discord, you can join the Pandora's Box (https://discord.gg/XCXwuZ6) and use the "Hybrid Heaven" category.

Hello. If anyone want to discuss or talk about this game on discord, you can join the Pandora's Box (https://discord.gg/XCXwuZ6) and use the "hocus pocus" category.

hello. Are you still using the Yagamoth discord for routing and stuff?

The only run I've seen from this game is an "Any% Special Moves".

Here:

UPDATE:

I went deeper into the previous experiment, now testing for tap + hold all the keys up to 3~4 taps in general. I found some interesting stuff.

Full Experiment:

And of course the short version with summary:

TL,DR: There's now two more reliable methods for obtaing the Keys, and they are more consistent:

• tap 'F8' 2 times, then hold it for ~1 second
• tap 'C' 3 times, then hold it for ~1 second

I did the times saves with my best segments, so I either got a nice level 2 or just mistimed.

On level 5 I probably miscalculated something xD.

And yeah level 9 is nasty now >__<, but If it's executed well is one of the best timesaves.

niiiice. I'll see if I can upload some pictures I'm doing of the new routes. so far I got this for Moderate:

Level X , Old Route ---> New Route - Estimate timasave (seconds) Level 1, No bonus ---> Keys -- 14 Level 2, Rapid --------> Keys -- 4 Level 3, Rapid --------> Rapid - 0 Level 4, No bonus ---> Keys -- 23 Level 5, Laser --------> Keys -- 12 Level 6, Laser --------> Keys -- 14 Level 7, Laser --------> Laser - 0 Level 8, Laser --------> Keys -- 10 Level 9, Rapid --------> Keys -- 19

Total estimate timesave: 1:36

The route overall has the same difficulty as before, some levels are easier and others are harder.

Today I made an experiment/hunt glitch to try to find a setup to get both keys at the beginning of the level. I expected that this setup existed because there's also glitches for Rapid and Laser shots, but just never did the proper testing, until now.

Here's a video with the full experiment (very long and I forgot to put my keyboard display, but I uploaded anyways as a documentation of the test):

And here's the short version with just the results and some explanations:

With this we can avoid A LOT of almost every level.

I'll be working on re-routing the different categories.

TL,DR: just type 'L' 12 times and you'll get both keys

Ok, here are my final thoughts in the subject:

• I think it's better to not add more categories since the comunity is quite small to have so many of them (currently there are 3 difficulties times 4 episodes, so 12 individual levels. Also 3 difficulties for full-game. With the new glitch we'll almost duplicate the # of categories).

• In my opinion, we should just maintain the same name categories and just change the rules to allow the level skip but ban the usage of savefiles, cheats, and accidental bonus of both keys. With that, in individual levels: Episode 1 will be the same, and the others will be open for new runs with the level skip (yeah no more level 1 of episode 2, 3 and 4)

• If you agree with the points above, we still need to discuss one last thing for all-episodes: do we need to 'see' the credits of all episodes? or just 'beat' every level? This makes a huge difference, because if we decide the second option, then we can use the last level of Eps 1,2 and 3 to set up the glitch for the next episodes, just quitting right before the credits of the episode. While in the first option, we need to set up the glitch on level 1 ep 1 after every episode.

I tried the glitch and couldn't find a way to get out of bounds.

effectively, The character auto-stands up in narrow places. I scan the whole area 1 and 2 for exploits, found nothing. I'll probably explore the other areas during the weekend to see if we have something promising.

great discovery!

This could be a first step for setup out of bounds stuff. Johny look quite stuck there anyways xD. I'll try to look for more places where this works.

btw, I know that your character auto-stands up when is going backguards while crouching and the legs aproach a ledge (if you go foward, it performs a flip animation in the ledge). So maybe the explanation to this is that the clone man pushed your character legs out of bounds (so, into a 'ledge') making him auto-stand up.