I've been having some fun replaying Exile yet again, but now with beebjit's capture / replay feature.
Attached zips:
- An HFE of Exile release disc v1.
- The runthrough cap file.
(It's interesting that post-compresssion, there's a similar amount of entropy in the capture file as the actual game disc! Perhaps this says something about the complexity of the game?)
To run through it, you'll need beebjit-v0.9.8 and then a command such as:
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./beebjit -mode jit -swram 4 -0 ~/hfe/Exile_D1S1_80T_HG3_2066CA7D_1.hfe -replay exile_full_runthrough1.cap -fast -accurate -commands ''
!! THIS IS NOT A SPEEDRUN !!
This run, in real time, is a bit shy of 3 hours. I think you'd need to be mildly unhinged to try a speedrun because of the number of degrees of freedom the game has. You'd also need to decide which glitches / physics side effects are acceptable to abuse and which are not (I think Bill's Exile Solution is spot on: https://www.infradead.org/~wmp/exile_so ... ution.html)
A video of the JIT playing back the full run in ~5s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SuuF248XGQ
And a more sedate interp + debug mode where you can get the gist of the path taken across a few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrvjahoEa14
Of course, I'm already unhappy with this run:
- I started out by trying to leave as much as possible alive, but gave up on that towards the end.
- There are some pieces of incompetence that I didn't cut out. (A zero-death aka. zero-auto teleport run would be nice.)
- By far the easiest way to waste the green frogmen is with the alien weapon (seek 2170). But some of the published Exile solutions refer to a use of the red frogman (perhaps with a red maggot lure) to help you push the floating block into them and back into the fire. I've not had huge success with this, but it seems like everything in the game has a use so maybe I should retry it.
- I was too lazy to rescue the Pericles crew. Or fluffy; poor fluffy.
- I totally skip the western caves with the plasma gun / fire immunity. I think the intended solution is to get these to more easily explode the nearby fireball gargoyle, and to use the plasma gun to explode the bees nest more trivially (I use grenades at seek 5480).
- I didn't use the spaceship engine to blow up the clawed robots so they are harassing me all the time.
- There a big chunk of time loading up on energy from robot Chatter. It might be possible to avoid that by being more frugal with energy and collecting the energy pods instead of leaving them.
- I avoid the yellow cannonball turret later in the game by using the blaster to take out the cannonballs (seek 7835), but the more elegant (and surely intended?) easy path is to drop a couple of coronium boulders into the suck nest above it.
I'm happy with a few things about the run, most notably:
- It really makes the game easier if you collect one of the alien weapons as soon as possible (seek 1640).
Cheers
Chris
