Comments
United StatesKarisa2 years ago

Not sure where this should go. It's not really a "guide", but "resources" doesn't have a category for game-related data either...

Level info spreadsheet

I've had the level data extracted from the game for years. Finally decided to give the level headers a more readable format instead of raw hex data. I know no one is speedrunning this game right now, but might as well leave the link here?

The RNG weights in particular can be useful for speedrunning-- efficient stacking can be different with more hard blocks vs more friend blocks. Can't do much about those annoying double-star/double-hard pairs, but at least you can know the levels where they're common, and try not to stack too high so you don't die to bad RNG?

Spreadsheet includes:

  • Dedede fist delay per level. 0 means no Dedede. This is temporarily set to 3 in crisis mode, if it's nonzero.
  • Initial star count. Only relevant for Round Clear.
  • Speed, 0-7. The exact effect of this is undocumented, but it generally increases block falling rate. Difficulty seems to be part of the formula-- setting speed to 7 in a Normal level won't change anything, and Time Attack Insane always has much faster falling blocks regardless of speed.
  • Fixed pairs at the start of the level (each level defines 0-4)
  • RNG weights, for falling pairs and Dedede. Note that Dedede will always spawn friend blocks in the corners, and in any column that does not contain a friend, even if friends have 0 weight.

Challenge mode overrides the header data, so it was hidden from the spreadsheet.

The weights for an unused/unfinished(?) "null" block (which acts like a star, but doesn't increase star count, and uses the graphic of the tile above Kirby's head), were also hidden since they're always 0.

(Full notes spreadsheet, if anyone's interested in the technical data. I was considering creating a ROM hack of this, but stopped because this game is obscure enough I didn't think anyone would play it.)

United StatesKarisa2 years ago

GBAs just include a GBC processor inside the case for backwards compatibility; they're completely different hardware.

If a GBA emulator (for example, mGBA) has GB/GBC support, it's actually just independently emulating GBC, so in my opinion it'd be considered a less accurate GBC emulator. Is there a general ruling on the site about that?

United StatesKarisa2 years ago

Given the very short run length of Round Clear Normal, and the number of ties, I'd like to propose using more precise timing. Sub-2:20 seems like a good cutoff.

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