Will send comments later on when we do audio commentary.

MURPHAGATOR! here, Im going to give some background information about this run. This happened shortly after PJ and I finally got our superguns, opening a whole new world of timewasting impossible video games for us to run. That said, this particular run was performed at SGDQ 2014 after we ran it for the marathon. As with most brawlers, there is a lot of randomness to doing runs, and reacting to situations is as important as having a gameplan. However, since netplay for this game is finnicky, basically all the planning and practice had to be done on site. Having 4 players dramatically increases the number of enemies the game spawns and increases some of their health values, so significant planning based on single player routes wasnt really possible. Additional time to play and do attempts would have allowed us more planning in the best time to use super attacks, where everyone should be, and to take riskier boss strategies instead of taking the ones that reduced risk, but such is the nature of organizing four people in a very limited timeframe.

Anyways, some basic information about each character thats useful for why certain strategies were used.

Captain Jose - played by MechaRichter. Jose is the 'balanced' character of the cast, being good at most things and great at none in particular. His fire kick attack is notable since it will instantly kill enemies who burn. His other special attack is mediocre since it requires running to perform and is fairly slow to startup. His super is useful since the explosions linger, and his OTG attack is extremely fast.

Twinbats Ryno - played by MURPHAGATOR!. Ryno is the 'speed' character of the group. He has the ability to walljump and to effectively double jump using his flying attack. He has by far the best special attack in thunder kick. This attack does big damage, is very fast, and can be performed at heights and distances that the AI is very poor at responding to. It also can hit most enemies when they are on the ground. His super attack is generally not very useful since only the last attack does damage, and that attack tends to miss when there are large groups of enemies or when other players are attacking enemies. Rynos OTG attack is also extremely fast.

Beanball Rogar - played by PJDicesare. Rogar is the 'power' character of the group, but has some attacks with unusual properties that let him get away with very odd tactics. His belly shove attack does extremely high damage to enemies who cant be knocked down. His belly splash attack leaves him completely invulnerable while he recovers from it, which lets him setup situations like the one against ghost buffalo at the start of the fight. His special attack, foil buster, grabs an enemy for good damage, but sometimes likes to grab nothing and go through the animation anyways. He can also purposefully miss the grab initiation part to setup infinite combos. His super attack is extremely useful since the only hit does good damage, has no gaps on the screen, and lasts a long time so other players cant really make it miss.

Stick Strawberry - played by Klaige. Stick is focused on his long reaching attacks. The last hit of his standing attack string, in particular, reaches both in front and behind him about 1/3 of the screen length. His poke attack does fantastic damage if both hits connect, but is somewhat limited by the range required for both hits and its short vertacle hitbox. His special, royal stinger, does good damage like the other specials, but has a high tendacy to be interrupted during the startup due to the height and angle he approaches at, and has a long delay between the rapid hits and the bomb dropped at the end. His super attack is the best of the bunch, summoning a dragon that can hit multiple times for its full damage and covering the whole screen for an extremely long duration.

Onto stage specific stuff.

Stage 1 - introduces most of the common foes that persist through the game. Theres honestly not a lot interesting during the stage itself.

The boss, Windy Plane, is mostly harmless, but whenever he is knocked down or a part of him breaks off, he counterattacks with an uppercut that is completely invulnerable, so we have to back off until he completes the uppercut.

Stage 2 - San Fransico, California. The first appearance of the cars, which are silly and overpowered. Also the jackolanterns, who cant be hit on the ground but otherwise are pretty basic grunts. The formation baseball also shows up here. He can do some pretty insane patterns where he punches backwards and hits with the startup of the attack, so he is a big potential risk. Theres also smoke clouds and mini bikes which are both instantly killed by any attack, even ones that normally dont do damage. Finally, the squids, who are complete jerks who have tons of health and interrupt everything given half a chance.

Mad Lax rounds out the stage. This is the first boss where the standing attacks can be effectively used to lock down indefinitely, so he is mostly harmless.

Bonus stage - mash hard to squeeze ball.

Stage 3 - Las Vegas, Nevada. The casinos introduces some interesting enemies. The playing cards act differently by color, but are all instantly killed by fire or forward throw attacks. The robots cant be knocked down in any way.

Deffending Slot is the boss here. Mostly he can be handled the same way as Mad Lax, but instead of having random enemies spawn, he is automatically knocked down and made invulnerable at several points during the fight. In theory, we could let him attack in hopes of getting the slots attack and start doing big damage moves, but the timeframe restriction to get this run made it an infeasible decision for us.

Stqge 4 - Houston, Texas. The horror theme modifies the basic baseball sprites but they act the same way. Most of the living objects are one hit kills, with the exceptions of the armoir and the fridges. The flying jackolantern is a huge pain to attacks, but thunder kick can hit him regardless of height. The spinning room is extremely obnoxious since when the explosive baseballs spawn it becomes nearly impossible for everyone to dodge the explosions.

Ghost Buffalo leads the spooks. He has 4 distinct phases, between which he teleports to a random location. Rogar takes care of the first form nicely, the rest are spent scrambling for someone to score a good hit.

Stage 5 - Miami Florida. This stage is interesting since at the time of the games creation, it is the only one of the stages which did not host a major baseball team. This stage introduces the drill baseballs and electric baseballs, both of whom have quite a bit of health and can dish out major pain. The flip side is that the drill baseballs can drop health if hit after they throw the drill, and if killed before they escape, their corpses can be thrown as very powerful weapons. The crabwalkers are also introduced here, but they are mostly harmless. The fire kick here might be the greatest strat we found in the entire game.

Mechanical Alligator is the head of this group. His primary attacks include spinning in place and one of the fastest ground punches possible. Thunder kick gives this boss a pretty tough time, especially with help from OTG attacks from the others.

Bonus stage - punch the ball! PJ purposefully sandbagged here to allow Klaige to get the 1up. We required that we 1cc the game for submission, so based on our lives we felt this was the best play.

Stage 6 - Chicago Illinois. Chicago is the home of crime dogs who like to shoot guns and bite. Most of these guys health values are just above what the standing attack string does, so we try to use OTG attacks to finish them off. They are also one of the few enemes that thunder kick doesnt hit when on the ground.

Makeshift Villain is the alpha dog in the territory. This fight looked pretty sloppy because we dealt so much damage at the start of the fight that it triggered his last phase (where he goes completely nuts) earlier than intended.

Stage 7 - New York. This whole stage is complete chaos. We try to make the most of our super attacks to kill the biggest waves, including intentionally dying to get more uses. The boss rush here is odd since it consists only of the formation baseballs and Windy Plane.

King Babe is the big boss man of the game. If this guy gets loose its an automatic disaster. His hitboxes are all completely unfair, and his targetting is so agressive and random in 4 players that regrouping is almost impossible. Fortunately, he has no way to escape getting full comboed by the entire team.