Blaster Master Miscellaneous Finds

Blaster Master Miscellaneous Finds
by ZeroNoin

Water and Lava Damage Boost Pause Buffer


Crawling Off Ledges
Something interesting about crawling in side-scrolling areas is it shifts your character's position down 4 pixels.
Using this can actually make falls of a distance of 4 blocks survivable.
Normally when you fall a distance of 4 blocks, you take 8 bars of damage, so it is not survivable.
But if you crawl off a ledge into a fall of 4 blocks, you take 2 bars of damage, so it is now very survivable.
This can be utilized in a the PAL version, in the Key climb in Area 4, in the first skip in Area 7, and potentially in other situations.

Water and Lava Pause Softlock
For some reason, after a death from falling into water or lava, if the game gets paused just before the transition to the next life or continue, the game softlocks as it will not progress to the transition.
There seems to be an 8-frame window where Pause can be pressed to make this happen.

Hover Damage Fall Skip
Getting hit by an enemy while hovering can be devastating because of the fall the damage forces.
The more specific mechanism here is that Hover does not function during invincibility frames.
Invincibility frames continue counting down while the game is paused.
A method for countering the forced fall is to pause the game quickly after being hit to get rid of the invincibility frames.
Hold A when unpausing to continue the ascent.
Note that if you pause while overlapping an enemy, you will need quickly to unpause and pause again until the enemy is away from hitting you again.
Video - https://youtu.be/xP1BOh7dP70