Jet Set Willy speedrunning videos

[jetsetdanny]

Congratulations on your SUB-20 run, RB! 👍 You've just made history 🙂. You can be very proud of it, indeed!

Your masterful delivery of JSW combined with your idle chat make for an intriguing combination 🙂. I think they just prove that such mastery can only be achieved when your actions are so automated that you are able to do something else besides executing such a lovely run. I've heard some comments to that effect from one of the top ski jumpers recently (ski jumping is a sport I particularly like to watch) and I couldn't agree more.

A couple of comments:

I think that when you lose a life in the Nightmare Room, you don't have to jump; if you just walk right you will still get killed, I would think. The lack of jump could save you a split second, perhaps.

Wouldn't losing the last life in "Out on a Limb" (by kamikaze'ing the second item) be more efficient than losing it in "Under the MegaTree"? Just wondering.

Thanks also for your explanation. A question: how do you pronounce Any%, I mean the % symbol?

[RuffledBricks]

Thanks for the compliments Danny, much appreciated.

5 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

I think that when you lose a life in the Nightmare Room, you don't have to jump; if you just walk right you will still get killed, I would think. The lack of jump could save you a split second, perhaps.

You would get killed from walking right, but it would be from falling too far rather than hitting Yellow Maria. I never bothered doing a comparison of which was faster because quite frankly I think jumping into Maria looks cool and I didn't want anyone to take that away from me.

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Wouldn't losing the last life in "Out on a Limb" (by kamikaze'ing the second item) be more efficient than losing it in "Under the MegaTree"? Just wondering.

We did look into this, and the OOAL deathwarp seemed like a good idea right up until we discovered you could shortcut in OABOTD by dropping into it from above. Therefore, because we're exiting OOAL via the bottom rather than the right, the deathwarp doesn't actually save you as much time as it would in UTM or Cuckoo's Nest, especially since we now have the quicker way of jumping past the skull.

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Thanks also for your explanation. A question: how do you pronounce Any%, I mean the % symbol?

"Any percent."

[IRF]

52 minutes ago, RuffledBricks said:

We did look into this, and the OOAL deathwarp seemed like a good idea right up until we discovered you could shortcut in OABOTD by dropping into it from above. Therefore, because we're exiting OOAL via the bottom rather than the right, the deathwarp doesn't actually save you as much time as it would in UTM or Cuckoo's Nest, especially since we now have the quicker way of jumping past the skull.

I wasn't aware of the shortcut in 'Out on a Limb' which allows the top-right set of leaves to be bypassed, until I saw your video.

However, I would tend to agree with Danny about the potential time saving from kamikazi-ing this room, especially as it is possible to collect both items in a single jump - see attached RZX recording.

I've checked the timings and in both your recording and mine, it takes 28 seconds from entering 'Out on a Limb' to the moment when Willy drops down into 'On a Branch over the Drive' - but in your recording, you had already lost all of your spare lives by that point, whereas I had a full complement of lives when I started the recording (losing one in the process of collecting the two 'Out on a Limb' items).  Plus I had the in-game tune playing, whereas you didn't.  So taking those factors into account, I think you would save a good few seconds.

I don't know how many seconds of playing time you saved on each occasion that you used the kamikaze method, but some of them might be outweighed by the time saving available in OoaL?

**

A couple of other things that I did wonder about: firstly, why visit the Beach and Yacht area before collecting the Tool Shed item on the way back?  If you do the Tool Shed first, then the time spent on the Beach/Yacht would run a bit quicker as you'd have one less life dancing on the status bar.  And since Tool Shed is en route in both directions, there's no reason why you couldn't have done the Tool Shed first?

Also, it seems an awful long walk all the way to the Offy and back again - isn't there a saving to be made by jumping off the top of the Watch Tower so that you only have to make that journey in one direction?

Out on a Limb.rzx

Edited March 10, 2021 by IRF

[RuffledBricks]

26 minutes ago, IRF said:

I wasn't aware of the shortcut in 'Out on a Limb' which allows the top-right set of leaves to be bypassed, until I saw your video.

However, I would tend to agree with Danny about the potential time saving from kamikazi-ing this room, especially as it is possible to collect both items in a single jump - see attached RZX recording.

I've checked the timings and in both your recording and mine, it takes 28 seconds from entering 'Out on a Limb' to the moment when Willy drops down into 'On a Branch over the Drive' - but in your recording, you had already lost all of your spare lives by that point, whereas I had a full complement of lives when I started the recording (losing one in the process of collecting the two 'Out on a Limb' items).  Plus I had the in-game tune playing, whereas you didn't.  So taking those factors into account, I think you would save a good few seconds.

I don't know how many seconds of playing time you saved on each occasion that you used the kamikaze method, but some of them might be outweighed by the time saving available in OoaL?

So here's why it's not really worth it.

Firstly, looking at this comparison here, the amount of time saved with the OOAL deathwarp is ~8 seconds:
 

By contrast, if you look at deathwarps in either UTM or Cuckoo's Nest, both of those save you closer to ~9 seconds:

(The UTM deathwarp is ever so slightly quicker than CN, although in terms of what makes the run easier on a practical basis I definitely prefer the CN one.)

They are also earlier on in the route, so you gain slightly more overall benefit from having one life less between Cuckoo's Nest and OOAL. As mentioned before, you only get six deathwarps across the run, so you want to use them where they're going to provide the most benefit.

Secondly, getting the OOAL deathwarp as close to an 8 second timesave as it is requires a pretty much pixel-perfect jump onto the leaf below the first item, so that you can then get both the items in one leftward jump. If you don't hit that, two things are likely to happen:

1) You do the leftward jump, miss the first item, and have to go up and collect it again, negating the timesave completely.

2) You switch to doing a vertical jump instead to grab the first item, then do a left jump to get the second item. The addition of a vertical jump would add between 1-2 seconds to the room, making the timesave on the deathwarp less efficient.

So not only is it not as good a timesave as UTM or CN, but it also is much harder to implement for not as much gain (other than looking cool). And that's why we don't use it.

 

[RuffledBricks]

To address your other points:

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A couple of other things that I did wonder about: firstly, why visit the Beach and Yacht area before collecting the Tool Shed item on the way back?  If you do the Tool Shed first, then the time spent on the Beach/Yacht would run a bit quicker as you'd have one less life dancing on the status bar.  And since Tool Shed is en route in both directions, there's no reason why you couldn't have done the Tool Shed first?

Honestly, I would've agreed with you on this one for a long time. For ages, I did Tool Shed before the Yacht because I assumed the timesave from the lost life would make the overall experience quicker. However, Mick_jo told me his split for that section seemed to be quicker when he did the Tool Shed last, so I did a comparison:

And he seems to be right. It seems like that back-and-forth into the Tool Shed if you do it first negates any speed benefits you get from running the Yacht section with one fewer life. So for this last run I decided to revert back to doing the Tool Shed last.

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Also, it seems an awful long walk all the way to the Offy and back again - isn't there a saving to be made by jumping off the top of the Watch Tower so that you only have to make that journey in one direction?

If you can explain to me how the rest of the route could be adapted to accommodate this switch in warps AND save time then I'd love to hear more! But logistically I can't see any way of using Offy Warp that wouldn't add more distance to the run overall than what we currently have.

[jetsetdanny]

RB, thanks for your replies and for these awesome comparison videos 🙂.

You mention a "back-and-forth into the Tool Shed" and one can see it done in your video, but it's not necessary - you don't have to exit the room, you can jump through the stairs without exiting the room, which will save some time. Please see the attached RZX recording.

tool shed jump.rzx

[jetsetdanny]

On second thoughts: 

But then you would have to cross the room again from the top to go to the Yacht, so it's probably no good...

[RuffledBricks]

3 minutes ago, jetsetdanny said:

RB, thanks for your replies and for these awesome comparison videos 🙂.

You mention a "back-and-forth into the Tool Shed" and one can see it done in your video, but it's not necessary - you don't have to exit the room, you can jump through the stairs without exiting the room, which will save some time. Please see the attached RZX recording.

tool shed jump.rzx 18.07 kB · 0 downloads

Way ahead of you on this one:
 

 

[jetsetdanny]

It's nice to be talking to a pro 🙂.

[RuffledBricks]

Did some messing around and turns out the rope warp in The Beach actually is a little bit useful:
 

Looks like I'm gonna have to redo my Any% run now to get that elusive 19:47 time in...