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Wow, you work fast! It's rare these days that a submission actually makes me drop everything else to watch it, but this one did.
Absolutely fantastic work once again. Some of the new glitching is outrageous. I can't say I entirely understood what happened in Twinkle Palace, but damn did it look crazy. Other than that, the execution looks excellent once again, and I'm so glad the wait for the zombie caravan could be eliminated.
Great work once again! Yes vote.
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This game actually has some quite interesting looking level design, which kept me intrigued during the course of the run. The TAS itself looked quite well optimized, and was entertaining enough for me to vote Yes. Good work.
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This game is so easy lmao, just look at how many items there are everywhere.
This run is clearly highly polished, with little downtime and a lot very precise moves. In the start, I was worried it'd just be like a regular warpless run, but stopping every 10 seconds to pick something up, but that fear was assuaged quickly. All items were picked up very fast without really stopping the flow of watching, and the constant antics kept me entertained as a reuslt.
Great work, yes vote.
I love how the game never expected you to reach more than 9 lives.
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Yo, what was that cave strat, god damn.
Excellent work once again. I'm incredibly glad to see all the new tech come together in this run, and the end result is once again fantastic.
That said, I personally do disagree with hitting the Armor Knight in Stage 4 to get past him quicker. Because it's the only instance where a non-essential enemy is hit, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Since all it costs is 11 frames, I do believe you should just wait for him to pass.
Still, solid yes vote. This was a fantastic year for NES Castlevania.
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Oh, this is fantastic, and a welcome surprise at that. This is one of the games I was genuinely still waiting for a TAS for, and you didn't disappoint. I didn't know the wrong warp also worked on DSi. Just one question, what's up with that weird wiggling when you drop into the water near Shantae's house? Is there a reason to it?
Anyway, fantastic work, and thank you for sweetening my evening. Yes vote.
Pirate's Curse when
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The warping was kinda cool, as was the dancing around the bees in some places, but beyond that, there is very little exciting in this run. It'd help if the game was less monotonous and had any sort of appeal whatsoever. The most pleasant surprise was hearing there is actually more than one music track.
Meh vote, and that's being generous, tbh.
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Alyosha wrote:
Unfortunately this run desyncs on console.
About 1/4 of the time I correctly get the holy water, but then I get hit at the random spawning monsters about 1 minute later. In 4 trials of successfully getting holy water I get hit by the same enemy in this area and fall in the pit.
This is presumably an issue with MMC5 IRQs, which have not been tested to the same level of precision as MMC3 IRQs.
Disappointing, but thanks for making the effort to get it to work on 2.8 for testing anyway scrimpeh.
Ah, that's a shame, although honestly I'm not that surprised. Still, thank you for trying, and thanks again for all the effort you've put into this!
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Alyosha wrote:
I was able to get up (almost) dracula without too much trouble (only one enemy is visibly different between the resync and the orignial, I flying skull in level 3) with no added frames.
However I got a desync on the scroll glitch right before dracula. It looks like a controller input is missed and causes a desync in the tiles generated in draculas room. I don't know how to fix precisely, if some other approach can be used, or if dracula can be fought another way.
Here it is if you want to try, I think this is as far as I can go with my limited game knowledge:
https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/638018112292344995
Thanks a million!
Through changing the timing of a pause, I was able to circumvent the dropped input and made it to Dracula. I'm up to the next DPCM glitch in Dracula 1, which I'll try to circumvent somehow as well. I'll keep you updated.
EDIT:
User movie #638018112292344995
Okay, this should be it, I think?
I'd appreciate if a moderator or judge could replace the submission file with this one. This file has only minimal changes to the original submission. I have one "free" tile I can let the game despawn, so I move that despawning into the place where the dropped frame occurs. That way, I don't actually avoid it, I just circumvent it.
Huge thanks again to Alyosha for doing the work of resyncing this up to Dracula!
Update 2:
BizHawk was nagging me to add a cycle count to the movie, so I did. The final submission file is therefore this: User movie #638018370717274227. The input should be unchanged to previously, the only difference is the header information.
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Oi, thanks for the response, all. Appreciate it a lot.
@Fortranm
There was a lot of stuff found for the game since the old warpless run. Let me go through the big things I can think of:
* I haven't tested it, but the new holy water manipulation should be applicable 1:1 in the J version.
* There were a handful of stair glitches that should save time in the J version, even though character switching takes an eternity. With Grant, you can also abuse the edge of the screen to disalign from stairs, which might help in the ship level and possibly other places.
* Launches do not work in the J version. For that reason alone, I honestly think the warpless run should be redone in the U version (shame about the music), because you can do some very impressive superjumps to clear the vertical sections very fast. On U, the route would have to be re-evaluated to account for superjumping, as now going the cave route could be faster.
* The scroll glitch also works in J and should hopefully save time for Grant in at least one or two places in both versions. I'm not sure if scroll glitching Dracula the way I did in this run is as helpful in J, because Grant's throwing knife has slightly different characteristics. Dracula also behaves differently in J. That would need to be tested. You should still benefit from a much earlier input end though.
* The horizontal screen wrapping I did in Block A should also be applicable 1:1 to the J version.
I hope that is insightful. I hope I get to see a warpless improvement for Grant at some point, regardless of what version it's performed on. The old warpless run is definitely in need of an update.
@Alyosha
Thanks a lot for taking the time to attempt a resync! However, I think it'll only get more difficult as the run goes on. Once the run picks up Grant, Select no longer works as a free RNG manipulation button, since you perform a character switch then. You can however start holding Select during a room transition or similar and release it at a certain time. Maybe that helps. RNG is unfortunately based on idle CPU cycles per frame, so it will be difficult to adjust. It's 2 bytes located at $1F. Additionally the dropped input frames and different lag will also add complications. Still, good luck!
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Did they ever actually go to space in the show. I forgot...
Anyway, the published Goof Troop TAS is a great watch, and this TAS lives up to it in all the same ways. The coordination between characters to solve the puzzles was great, and I really enjoyed the little play-arounds during down time.
Yes vote.
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And people gave 4353S crap for ending input early...
I will say that was a much more interesting and exciting application of it though. Hats off to you. Yes vote.
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Hm, without knowing the game, I have to admit it was very hard for me to parse what's going on. Without reading the description, it's not clear which parts require tool-assistance (and, indeed, which parts even require control by the player). I have to admit that I was more interested by the novelty of a game I didn't know than the gameplay at hand. It's also fairly repetitive to boot.
It might be faster to guide the yellow ant manually instead of using auto path-finding, in all the scenarios. However, there is a trade-off since it takes time to transition to and from the surface closeup view.
Considering how simple the game appears otherwise (2k rerecords), it seems to me like it would've been worth it to test it more to give a more conclusive answer.
I have to vote Meh, sorry.
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Well, this was a fairly neat game. It's clear that a lot of effort was put into bunching up enemies to crush them together fast, as well as manipulating item drops for the Book of Death to spawn. However, it does seem a bit anticlimatic to, instead of dealing with the enemies, just walk for a while until the Book of Death spawns and instantly ending the stage with that. Also, as is the nature with games like these, the run is quite repetitive unfortunately. Not much you can do about that, but some levels do stand out as slightly more unique. While the rooms went by fast enough, the transitions between each room really started dragging on after a while. I think the viewing experience would be significantly improved from a supercut encode that shortens the transitions for the publication.
Overall, this run gets a solid Yes from me, despite the repetitive nature of the game. The gameplay and the strategies were interesting enough to keep my attention throughout. Keep it up.
About MSXhawk, I'm kinda unsure about the BIOS. I assume this run uses the FS-4000 machine, as MSXhawk wants that Firmware for JP games? I'm all very unclear on that.
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I played a lot of Flash games on Newgrounds back in the day. Over the years, many of them have blended together in my mind, but this is one I remember quite clearly. Maybe it's the Portal influence in the game. It's cool to see there's actually skips in it. Yes vote.
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I got a small improvement to the scroll glitch. By pausing at certain times as you walk into a column, you can delay the scrolling engine from trying to load new tiles for a little bit, minimizing the number of turnarounds you need to do.
Input File
If the tile you want to despawn is placed at the lowest row of the screen, this can save up to ten frames.
Unfortunately, with my current knowledge of the scroll glitch, this is as good as it's gonna get, and it's still way too slow for more useful applications.
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KennyMan666 wrote:
Personally, I really loved Amphibia. It absolutely had problems to my mind, especially early on, but yeah, it really was very good and really made an impact in the places where it counts.
I didn't mind the beginning of Season 3 as much because the earth setting was way too exciting for me. I'd say the second half of Season 3 was weaker, because many of the plots were just about recruiting whatever ally of the day and moving on. They seemed more focused on just moving the story along, and were in turn quite dry on humor. It also didn't really matter much for the finale in the end. Taken by itself, the finale more than made up for it, though.
In other news:
scrimpeh wrote:
I never actually got around to finishing Gravity Falls. I'll need to get back to that.
So I finally did. Man, what an excellent show. It still holds up completely. Time for Steven Universe next.
I also finally got around to watching the first two seasons of Castlevania. Honestly really an underwhelming show if you're a fan of the game, as I might happen to be. The majority of season 2 is spent on this completely pointless Game of Thrones-esque scheming in Dracula's court with characters that have nothing to do with Castlevania, while the main characters get sidelined. I just want to see the cool bits where Trevor is fighting the demons. Is that so hard?
The demons were also kinda stock and lame. Where's all the cool wacky monsters that Castlevania is known for usually? Where's the Medusa heads and the Bone Dragons and the like?
Also where's Grant?
Between things, I also watched through the first three seasons of Gumball, which has been unexpectedly and completely brilliant. I forgot the last time a cartoon made me laugh as hard as some of the jokes in this show did.
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When I joined the site in 2010, I saw the published Castlevania run at the time as a beacon of optimization and technical perfection. A game that was studied so completely and a TAS that was realized so thoroughly that it would be impossible to beat. It was the movie that I wanted my runs to eventually be like.
Never in a million years would I have imagined what actually happened then.
Both of you absolutely tore this game to shreds at every possible juncture. Nothing is as I once thought it was. The boss strats, the orb grabs, the shortcuts, the gameplay in areas like stage 11. It's completely stunning to behold, and even though I saw the development of many of those strategies ahead of time in the Discord, it was still mindblowing to see it all come together. The faster scroll glitch setup is an absolute godsend. It allows using it for the most minute things that would never save time with the old method. As with the previous submission, I am in awe at how many places it can be used. Once again, the ingenuity is fantastic. I also loved the bone damage boost in Stage 17, the axe being used for Death, and so many other things.
I am also really impressed how it is now possible to bot a game as complex as Castlevania. This is also something I would've considered not in the cards when I was new. The result absolutely speaks for itself.
Absolutely phenomenal work. Challenger, eien86, I salute you.
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Huh, I didn't expect Super Contra to be missing stages compared to the NES version.
Anyway. This is what I want a Contra TAS to look like. Excellent work.
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keyword wrote:
There's a new glitch involving the pause menu. If you pause at the same time a enemy appears it'll still be active. If you get hit by it, you'll get unpaused as well. One of the interesting side effects is that you can quit out of a level while touching a warp star and perform a "wrong warp". None of the ones possible are useful though.
In 1-2, it'll take you to 1-1, and 4-3 will take you to the level 4 hub.
6-3 isn't possible since you can't interact with the star, and all other rooms with warp stars are single screens with no enemies.
Wow, that is a really cool find! I love seeing stuff like this.
Shame it's not useful, but maybe another use can be found for the glitch.
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tapioca wrote:
scrimpeh wrote:
They're both ports of the Doom engine, but entirely separate ones by different developers. I'm not an expert on Doom GBA but the clips in that game work because of rocket launcher knockback or something, which isn't a thing here.
