Submission #3565: goofydylan8 & Brandon's NES Pro Wrestling in 09:46.10

Pro Wrestling is a game where you must fight your way to the top winning sixteen battles before finally "A WINNER IS YOU" and you are crowned V.W.A. V.W.F. Champion! In this case Fighter Hayabusa realizes the only winning move is not to play and decides to wander around outside the ring to win without pinning a single opponent.

I was recently looking through some of the games I had experimented when I first started TASing and remembered that I had finished a full run of this game but never submitted. I re-watched it and figured there may or may not be an audience for this game so I decided to submit. One positive that can be said for this is that yet another run from the SDA list can be eliminated.

In the game there are a few ways to win a fight. The first, and obvious, way is to pin your opponent. The other way to win a fight is to have your opponent be out of the ring when the 20 second timer finishes counting down.

In the SDA run shown here the runner used the strategy of roaming outside of the ring as it appeared to be quicker and there would be more room for error as you do not need to get the exact frame required to enact some of the moves in the game. As shown he gets an in-game time of 6 minutes which is almost exactly 10 minutes and 0 seconds under TAS Video timing.

I then began testing out and seeing if possibly a traditional fight run could be faster than the out of ring strategy. In the game there are quite a few attack options that deal varying amounts of damage to the opponent. With that the stronger attacks will only work if you have already inflicted damage to the opponent until his HP hit a certain number. From these calculations I found the ideal fighting pattern and did a run using that strategy. It resulted that the fastest I could get it was around 80 frames or 1.33 seconds slower per round than the out of bounds ending.

The result is this run. I end with an in-game time of 5:52 which is the absolute minimum possible in-game length possible and an 8 second improvement over the SDA run. I also have an real time of 9 minutes 46.75 seconds so a roughly 13 second improvement in real time.

I tried to make the fights entertaining by varying movements and fighting style out of the ring so that it wasn't just standing still for almost ten minutes. I tried to make each level have a slightly different strategy for the movements while wandering the outside of the ring so hopefully it is not too repetitive. As a side note after pinning your opponent there is an amount of time where you cannot attack or even move which explains a large amount of time where my character is stationary.

Brandon made the final fight shorter by cutting the input off as soon as possible while making sure his opponent couldn't get back in the ring. That's where the 214 re-records came from.

I recognize that this is not the most interesting strategy on earth but it is the fastest. I just like the idea of submitting the fastest possible version even if its chances of success are minimal.

Here is the WIP of the pinning strategy. Each battle under this category would follow this exact order of moves so that run would be slower than this version and actually less entertaining as the movements would be exactly the same between battles.

I hope you enjoy.

DarkKobold: You did everything you could, but the fastest strategy of ring-out just gets extremely repetitive. While I applaud your quest to have a TAS for every NES game (all 700+), most remaining just aren't publishable material. Rejecting for poor audience response to the game choice.

adelikat Unrejecting this submission for consideration into the Vault tier

Truncated: Accepting into vault.

Brandon: Replacing movie file / accepting co-authorship / publication underway. Thanks! :)