Wall Jump Best Practices

[stella_blue]

I'm primarily interested in the barrel stages, but input on other screen types is welcome (although I consider the invisible wall jump on the elevator stage to be more of a gimmick than a useful defensive maneuver).

When I encounter a difficult barrel combination on the same girder as I am, I normally do one of 6 things:

• Grab the hammer, if applicable (duh!)
• Climb a broken ladder and let the barrels roll underneath
• Descend a ladder to a lower girder in hopes of steering barrels out of the way (or breaking up the group into a more manageable configuration)
• Perform an ill-advised broad jump/back jump/vertical jump combination (with a success rate so low that fear of public ridicule prohibits me from disclosing it here)
• Become stricken with "deer in headlights" syndrome
• Attempt to execute a wall jump ("attempt" being the operative word)

In the case of the wall jump, the player obviously wants to rebound with a parabolic arc wide enough to clear the oncoming herd.  So my question is threefold:

• Is there a recommended takeoff point, or is it more of an instinctual thing?
• If there is an optimal location to begin the jump, is it consistent for all girders?
• Similar to the above, any tactical differences for "left wall" versus "right wall"?

[Xermon54]

To be able to make the farthest wall-jump (because you will usually need to do a long wall-jump to jump over a long barrel combination), the best location (on every platform) are to stand to the edge of the last small platform of every platform.

As you can see in Donkey Kong, the platforms are consisted of very small horizontal line, put on each other, to make the platform go up. So, the last horizontal line of every platform, you need to put yourself pretty much 1 pixel to the edge of it (the edge of it is the opposite direction of the invisible wall) before starting the wall-jump, in order to be able to do the highest possible wall-jump without landing on a barrel while touching the wall (because if you do a "too far wall jump", you will fall too low while bouncing off the invisible wall, and you might end up landing on a barrel while doing that.

So, by standing on the edge of this first (last) horizontal line of every platform, you can't go wrong with that!

(it was hard to explain, so hopefully you understand! haha. I could've put a screenshot to help explaining, so if you need a screenshot to explain, just tell it! ;-)).

[Simpsons99]

Better yet Vincent   So videos of you pulling off these moves!   Then tell how you pulled them off!

[up2ng]

In the case of the wall jump, the player obviously wants to rebound with a parabolic arc wide enough to clear the oncoming herd.  So my question is threefold:

• Is there a recommended takeoff point, or is it more of an instinctual thing?
• If there is an optimal location to begin the jump, is it consistent for all girders?
• Similar to the above, any tactical differences for "left wall" versus "right wall"?

Great question.

It's the same for all girders.  Try jumping when you are "tangent" to the small ladder going down below your position.  Meaning, the inner edge of Jumpman should be right about at the outer edge of the ladder when you take off.  This should give you sort of a "standard" bounce over a typical bad barrel combo that doesn't stretch extremely long but is still too long to broad jump over.  Adjust a pixel or two inside or outside to compact or stretch your bounce.

This is one of many techniques that serious players should save state and practice for a couple of hours straight until you are extremely confident about how to perform the technique and can be confident that you can perform it well on demand in the midst of a deep, full game without worrying about messing it up and dying.

[hchien]

Woah, this is an extremely high level question... like DK 301.

Basically what Dean said.  I'll only add that when you want to do an extremely long wall jump you can stand a bit farther from the wall.  When you do this however, you can get hit by the 2nd barrel in the combo on the bounce back.  So for this to work there needs to be a bit of a space between the 1st and 2nd barrels of the combo.  This is a pretty rare situation though.  You probably shouldn't be worrying about this unless you are going for 1.1M+.  Even then these situtations are pretty rare.  I do the "standard" wall jump the vast majority of times.

[ChrisP]

You know guys, pictures tell a thousand words, and they do it much better!