Explanation of Billy Hatcher TAS Levels

World 1 : Forest Village : This world is not really open and doesn’t have many setups for tricks and glitches, which makes it really hard to optimize. But hey, we still skip many puzzles, and the levels are really fast.

1-1 (Save the Elder): This level is one of the hardest to optimize, most of the tricks don’t have any setup. Superbounce, text skip… The goal is to hatch the Elder Egg (the gold one). This egg grows faster with pineapples and cherries, so I manipulate the fruits to get them.

1-2 (Kill the Boss) : RNG manipulates the group of 8 bouncing enemies.

1-2 Boss : Just have to make sure that he’s in the middle of the stage at the end of each phases, or else he would walk, which is really slow. Also, I hit him at the first frame with a kick because if I dash in his direction, he will just spawn at the other end of the stage.

1-3 (Reach the Emblem) : I have to change my egg because I’m actually going to use the red one in another level (4-2). When you hatch an egg you already hatched before, the game skips its presentation (“Cipher, Powers of fire and passion!”). See 4-2.

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World 2 : Pirates Island : This world is really funny, open, tons of tricks with setups, cannons that we can abuse to skip some part of the levels. All the missions are done really fast.

2-1 (Save the Elder) : Really hard RNG manipulation here. I need many pineapples or cherries : 2 big fruits and 4 small fruits. At the same time, I have to kill 2 groups of enemies the as fast as I can, and the enemy that gives 2 big fruits have 3 HP (I deal 1 HP per hit).
Here’s what’s going on : http://puu.sh/8A0CV.png

2-2 (Kill the Boss) : The cannon is not supposed to be used like that, I skip some part of the level with it.

2-2 Boss : This boss is killed really fast because I get a max sized egg earlier than intended by the developers, and large eggs deal more damage. I basically skip the second half of this fight.

2-3 (Race) : To get optimal time at this race against Clippen, there are only two things to do :
Break this : http://puu.sh/8A0R3.jpg
Wait for Clippen at the end of this slope : http://puu.sh/8A0U6.jpg
That’s all. I have to say, I’m not really entertaining while waiting for Clippen, because there’s honestly not much I can do, I can’t go too far and the place is empty It’s just for 5 seconds anyway.

2-4 (Save a friend) : Nothing to say really. Short and fun level, taking a risky route.

2-5 (Reach the emblem) : I’m not supposed to land there with the cannon at the end, skipping a whole puzzle. Also, I skip half of the level with a simple jump that I do in like all the other levels of this world.

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World 3 : Dino Mountain : This world is huge and has tons of slopes. Which means that we can skip most of it, and that’s great. Tons of setups for tricks too, but the levels are still really long.

3-1 (Save the Elder) : Dat KICK MLG 2014 WHERE ARE YOU AT ? Really great RNG in this level. The reason I don’t move is actually RNG manipulation, if I even just slightly move then I wouldn’t get full cherry. I skip the second half of it with the superbounce against the tree.

3-2 (Kill the Boss) : Longest level of the game by far !  Full of superbounces and normal jumps that skip full sections of it, I think we only see like 50% of it. I have to wait for each dino to die before moving to the next part of the level, which is why I always wait a bit after each attack.

3-2 Boss :  This boss has an odd behaviour, basically he won’t always attack you since he really like making circles around the arena. But if you wait for him at certain points, he will attack you sooner. Other than that, he’s pretty boring. Really long fight, can’t have that much fun since I have to be at certain position to manipulate him.

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World 4 : Blizzard Castle : Big world, but we only see a very small part of it in this TAS since we can skip most of it thanks to some nice jumps and tricks.

4-1 (Save the Elder) : The jump at the beginning of the level skip a big part of it, also the jump on the ring with fire underneath isn’t supposed to be possible. Oh, and no, you can’t fast recover at the end of the slope because Billy isn’t in the right position and would get stuck in the slope. It’s way slower to set billy in the good direction than to just recover.

4-2 (Kill the Boss) : Here’s the level where I use Cipher again (1-3) ! As you can see, there are no text when I hatch him ! Other than that, I skip a slope at the beginning with a jump, and that’s about all there is to this level. The waiting for the platform at the end doesn’t matter, I have to recharge Cipher anyway.

4-2 Boss : Again, a REALLY REALLY fast kill. I’m not supposed to get a max sized egg right at the second phase but at the fourth one, but thanks to RNG manipulation it happened (position of the ice balls to break to get the fruits, and the fruits themselves, I needed 2 watermelon and a random fruit). I also use the double damage technique to kill him faster. This fight is supposed to be way longer.

4-3 (Reach the emblem) : The biggest flaw of this TAS. In this level, you have to take a snowball and collect enough snow to use it as the head of the snowman. As you can see… I failed and made a slender snowman. I’m really sorry everyone.

4-4 (Save a friend) : You are NOT supposed to go this way. Like, not at all. Really short and fast level.

4-6 (Race) : Nothing can be done to optimize this race, so I’m just having fun.

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3-8 (Reach the emblem) : When Billy is too busy making snowman, Bantam collects the emblem. Bantam : Leave it to me ! Again, skipping most of the level by jumping everywhere and doing an egg ricochet.

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World 5 : Circus Park : 90% of the puzzles of this world will be ignored, since most of them are based on RNG or can be skipped with a jump.

5-1 (Save the Elder) : We can (barely) skip a huge part of this level by bouncing on another egg.

5-2 (Kill the Boss) : The RNG mission. There are 3 rooms with mirrors, if you hit the right mirror (which I always do, of course), you can go to the next room. If you hit a wrong one, you have to kill a bunch of monsters to then hit another mirror. But puzzles are boring, so I skip this level by going out of bounce. At the end, I take damage from the fire to then hit the switch.

5-2 Boss : It’s all about having a good management of the fruits. Not much to explain asides from that, not a hard boss and nothing surprising.

5-3 (Reach the emblem) : At the beginning of the levels, you have to make all the tiles go blue (pink > yellow > green > blue). The initial pattern is completely random and only depends of the frame in which the level is loaded, so it’s really hard to optimize it because there are so many setups possible. But this one was the best by far though. You then need to hatch the monkey egg and activate all the interrupters. The emblem then appear and you’re supposed to use a slope to get it, but I just do a roll jump.

5-4 (Reach the emblem) :  I think you’re supposed to kill all the enemies to solve all the puzzle and then get the emblem but… really only the two last enemies actually matter. And you don’t even need to break the cage to kill them !

5-5 (Reach the emblem) : Really short and funny level, skipping most of it with a simple jump. And you get fireworks !

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1-6 (Reach the emblem) : Another level broken by just jumping at the right places.

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World 6 : Sand Ruin : I love this world. It’s big, it’s really glitchy, tons of tricks possible, many clips too… Those are the most broken levels by far.

6-1 (Save the Elder) : The ring at the beginning is used to skip a good part of the level. Many routes were tested for this level, but the one in the run is the fastest by a good margin.

6-2 (Kill the Boss) : The 25th of December 2012, one of the hardest skip of this game was found. The torch can be used to make a superbounce, but it’s actually hard to get the angle and the speed, and there’s a good luck that you can get burn by the torch itself, or just get projected in the sand. In this run though, I actually get the superbounce from under the torch, which is even harder but faster. Thanks to that superbounce, you can skip half of the level. But I decided to also skip the other half, because this level is really long. The reason why the second skip works is because the sand has some weird properties when it’s in contact with a wall, and you can clip in it.

6-2 Boss : This boss was actually hard to optimize. He sends you the shadow of the past boss to attack you, but they behave a bit differently. For instance, for the boss of Forest Village, it’s faster to let him attack you, while in the 1-2 fight it was slower. Sometimes, he also clone himself, mixing himself with fakes (who can still damage you !), and you have to let the clones attack you to then counter attack them until you hit the real one. The clone on the extreme left always attack first, so I manipulate the RNG to make this one the real one.  Thanks to the hit with the small egg and the hit with an early egg size 3, this boss dies one phase sooner than intended by the developers.

6-8 (Race) : In this race, your opponent will slow down every time he meets an obstacle. So you have to break every obstacle in his path to finish the race sooner.

6-3 (Reach the emblem) : You can only complete this level with 25 emblems, and it’s required to go to the last boss. Right at the beginning, a clip to go underground without pushing the button. While the camera doesn’t show anything, I actually do a sign bounce and then the camera comes back. Then it’s just a bunch of jumps to skip the second half of the level to get in the pyramid with one of the hardest clip in the game : you just have to walk against the wall and boom, you clip. Super hard. You then get access to 7-1.

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World 7 : Giant Palace : I lied before : THIS is the most broken world of the game.

7-1 (Kill the Boss) : This level used to be so hard, and really THE longest level of the game.  There’s this room where you guide shadow crows into the light that is super hard to optimize, a door to skip that is also hard to get the right angle and... and then egg ricochet was found, allowing us to go to a part of the level where we're definitely not supposed to go yet which allows us to go to the boss door directly.

7-1 Boss : Nothing to say. Really, these two forms are boring, I try to do stuff but… Eh. So meanwhile, try to analyse the symbolism of the… big shadow crow… which is just a dark heart… and is beaten by Billy SSJ or something like that… because reasons…

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Ending : Best. Credit. Song. EVER.