The Game & Watch brand is a series of handheld electronic games developed, manufactured, released, and marketed by Nintendo from 1980 to 1991. Between July 2009 and April 2010 Nintendo released nine separate Game & Watch ports for DSiWare. Donkey Kong Jr. is one of them.
  • Hardest difficulty
  • Genre: Platform

Technical Information

This run is done on BizHawk 2.8 DSi mode with firmware from a PWC 2010 event device. The system is formatted before the start of the movie. As such, the movie starts from setting up the system.

Goal Choice

Donkey Kong Jr. arguably has the least ambiguous ending point out of all G&W games (except other Donkey Kong related games). In fact, its ending point is probably not any more ambiguous than that of Donkey Kong Jr. on NES. Therefore, I recorded this movie, which continues the game until one more full loop is done after the difficulty stops increasing in Mode B.
How do I know when the difficulty stops increasing, you may ask. Good question!
The mechanism for difficulty in this iteration of the game seems to work similarly to that of the version of the game included in Game & Watch Gallery 4 on GBA as explained by ThunderAxe31 here.
00143938 w u 0 Main RAM Score
00145F45 b u 0 Main RAM Max En.
00145F46 b u 0 Main RAM Speed
00145F47 b u 0 Main RAM Spawn
00145F48 b u 0 Main RAM Unknown
00145F50 b u 0 Main RAM Sub loop
The 4 values that affect the difficulty change as the player gets higher score. After reaching a score of around 990, the maximum encounter stays at 9 (it is 10 on GBA, but not that the difference is really visible in an "any%" TAS), the enemy speed stays at 8, the enemy spawn rate stays at 128, and the unknown value stays at 112. While some of these variables might be at a higher value at some point during the gameplay before reaching the last score threshold, this is the combo that remains unchanged after that and is hence the highest difficulty of this game.
I could have killed two more enemies in the last subloop of the penultimate loop seen in this movie to make the game reaches that difficulty level and technically finishes a loop while being in that state, but I decided that it's better to finish a full loop afterwards so the score threshold is reached during the scoring process after the penultimate loop in the movie instead.

Special Thanks

  • ThunderAxe31, for the research done on the GBA iteration of this game.
  • EZGames69, for the GBA submission.
  • CasualPokePlayer, for adding DSi support to BizHawk which allows this movie to be made.
  • Arisotura, for DSi support in melondDS and melondDS in general.
  • YOU, for reading the submission text and watching the movie.

feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Interesting movie with quite a few things to address.

Scoring

Apparently this wasn't explained, even though it's the main optimality faction in the movie. Here's a screenshot from the game manual:
There are only a few places where you can jump over enemies, because most of the time you just grab the vine and not gain score. There are only a few cases where you can kill 2 enemies at once, and even fewer cases when you can kill an alligator at the bottom.

Optimization

I checked every loop and I was only able to gain more score while a bit of saving time only in 1 sections. In 4 sections getting higher score led to severe time loss.
I wasn't brave enough to test where losing score would save time, let's leave this for future TASers.

Difficulty

I jumped on a vine and kept hanging there for 2k frames while point memory. I was able to get fewer spawns and slower enemies by setting lower values, but couldn't make the game more difficult by setting higher ones than this movie reaches.

Ending

It is correct that when aiming for maxing out the difficulty in a game without an ending, one has to actually complete the most difficulty loop. We don't really care about how the score is displayed at that time, especially when the internal counter keeps going after the visible counter has looped back to 0. How one decides to time the ending of the movie is probably not critical, especially when the exact point when the loop is considered beaten has to be defined by humans.

DSi NAND

If every DSI has unique NAND and there's no definitive version what many authentic devices share, I don't think there can be a strict rule of which exact NAND you end up using. Of course one can argue that the NAND has to not be patched by humans to give unfair advantages, but if we don't have anything to match those against, how exactly do we ensure it's clean? At the very least this run synced on 2 different PWC NANDs I was able to find, none of them having the same hash as in this movie, before or after formatting.
Yeah you have to format the NAND using melonDS, since bizhawk can't write to NAND. Just launch to DSi firmware, enter settings, and format system memory.

Accepting

Accepting.
Spikestuff: Publishing.


TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #7340: Fortranm's DSi Game & Watch: Donkey Kong Jr. in 03:49.80
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I wrote a long comment and it unfortunately got lost when I tried to post it, and I'm too tired to re-write it neatly, so I'm going to summarize it instead: - Out of the many, many versions of this game (I know of at least 5), the DSiWare version seems to be the worst one to TAS due to the long initial system setup. - I'm not sure if a DSi firmware originating from the Pokémon World Championships should be allowed. - I'm not sure if allowing an emulator that injects its own user name and message during initial system setup should be allowed. - The goal choice feels arbitrary to me. I get that saving Donkey Kong can be a legitimate goal, and I also get that achieving a maximum score (999 or 9999 depending if we care about the in-game score of the leaderboards added to the DSiWare version) can also be a legitimate goal. Having a weird combination of both of these goals in a row just makes no sense to me, especially when considering that each stage of freeing Donkey Kong does not change anything other than the number of points awarded. My personal preference is a maximum score goal since gameplay progresses by the same amount regardless of how points have been obtained. - There appears to be missed opportunities for points, such as a missed fruit drop at 251 points, and a missed key swing at 854 points due to a forced jump at 846 points that could have been avoided by killing the enemy earlier. These may not be actual mistakes, but they look like it. - I'm really not a fan of Donkey Kong Jr. constantly moving back and forth the screen for no reason. It makes it hard to appreciate the action. Voting Meh more due to my love of the Game & Watch series making me over-analyze this movie rather than the performance itself.
Fortranm
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SmashManiac wrote:
- I'm not sure if allowing an emulator that injects its own user name and message during initial system setup should be allowed.
To be fair, a more glaring issue concerning the technical validity of emulation here would be the fact that a DSiWare like this is present right after the system is formatted. :P
MESHUGGAH
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Short and fast. Yes vote. Personal opinions reflecting SmashManiacs post: 1. Long initial system setup: I guess it's ok, I chuckled at melonDS melon tastes great, so it has minimal entertainment value 2. PWC firmware: I guess it's ok. Unsure how specific firmware are allowed or not. 3. Emulator injecting its own username and message: Same answer as step 1 + If the TASer selected these setups and they are allowed, I guess it's ok. 4. good point, agree with you 5. too fast to give my opinion on this one 6. It was okay for me. These game and watch games don't have other opportunities for waiting than: - Stand in one place - Move somewhere
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
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To comment on the PWC firmware and formatting, in the future it will likely be implemented to automatically remove all extra titles off the NAND so the only title is the injected DSiWare title, so doing this formatting and still dealing with weird unformattable titles like the PWC things shouldn't be an issue. Of course, that would be a 2.8.1/2.9 thing, so not so useful now. Consider right now completely wild west for DSi TASing, the site parser doesn't even parse this movie correctly, and we have to contend anyways with per-console unique BIOS/NAND the DSi gives due to Nintendo deciding to go ham on encryption and no way to use DSi emulation without these firmwares.
Fortranm
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SmashManiac wrote:
The goal choice feels arbitrary to me. I get that saving Donkey Kong can be a legitimate goal, and I also get that achieving a maximum score (999 or 9999 depending if we care about the in-game score of the leaderboards added to the DSiWare version) can also be a legitimate goal. Having a weird combination of both of these goals in a row just makes no sense to me, especially when considering that each stage of freeing Donkey Kong does not change anything other than the number of points awarded. My personal preference is a maximum score goal since gameplay progresses by the same amount regardless of how points have been obtained.
For clarification, the goal choice is simply to beat a loop on the highest difficulty ("ending after a loop ends with the highest difficulty" vs "ending after a full loop is done on the highest difficulty" can be a point of contention, of course). A maximum score is reached because of how difficulty works in this game. It is part of the means, not the ends.
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Fortranm wrote:
To be fair, a more glaring issue concerning the technical validity of emulation here would be the fact that a DSiWare like this is present right after the system is formatted. :P
I believe you can put pretty much anything on the SD Card prior to initial booting, so that part didn't bother me.
CasualPokePlayer wrote:
Consider right now completely wild west for DSi TASing [...]
Yeah I figured. That's why I wanted to point out oddities related to the system configuration so judges don't overlook them.
Fortranm wrote:
For clarification, the goal choice is simply to beat a loop on the highest difficulty ("ending after a loop ends with the highest difficulty" vs "ending after a full loop is done on the highest difficulty" can be a point of contention, of course). A maximum score is reached because of how difficulty works in this game. It is part of the means, not the ends.
OK... you just opened up a can of worms. XD First, it's not clear when this max difficulty threshold actually occur, or if there is one at all. Reading your submission notes, it assumes that it occurs when reaching 990 points like ThunderAxe31's analysis of the Game & Watch 4 version you linked to, but it's not something that can be easily verified. Second, if your goal was indeed equivalent to "end a loop after reaching 990 points", then your movie is clearly not optimal. One of the iterations you free Donkey Kong at occurs at score 986, while the x2 multiplier is active. Technically, the points you get from that action made you reach the required score threshold then, which caused the loop to end past that point, so it sounds like you should have stopped playing right there. However, I'm assuming you meant that you wanted to reach the max difficulty threshold first, then free Donkey Kong afterwards, but if that's the case then there is the issue that you already brought up in your own submission notes, namely that you only needed to jump over 2 more enemies to gain the 4 points needed to reach the required score, again saving you the trouble of picking up 4 extra keys and wasting time watching cutscenes. So, uh, I'm really not sure what you meant there. ^_^'
Fortranm
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SmashManiac wrote:
First, it's not clear when this max difficulty threshold actually occur, or if there is one at all. Reading your submission notes, it assumes that it occurs when reaching 990 points like ThunderAxe31's analysis of the Game & Watch 4 version you linked to, but it's not something that can be easily verified.
We can poke the RAM address for the value of score I mentioned in the submission text and set it to, say, 9999, at the start of the game and the difficulty related values will immediately be changed to the ones you get after the ~990 threshold. It is fair to say that is the "final" difficulty of the game as far as we can tell.
Fortranm
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Btw, the rerecord count is 0 on the submission because I replaced the header file with one from Bizhawk 2.8 since I made the movie on an interim build beforehand. The rerecord count on the original movie file is 6278, if that matters.
CoolHandMike
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Not really sure what is even going on in the game. You jump up and touch the cage and get points? Could you give more detail about how this game works and why this is fast?
discord: CoolHandMike#0352
EZGames69
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CoolHandMike wrote:
Not really sure what is even going on in the game. You jump up and touch the cage and get points? Could you give more detail about how this game works and why this is fast?
If you’ve never played a game and watch game, you move on every button press.
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't 12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!" Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish [Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing
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CoolHandMike wrote:
Not really sure what is even going on in the game. You jump up and touch the cage and get points? Could you give more detail about how this game works and why this is fast?
For reference, here's the manual for the original Game & Watch Donkey Kong Jr. (New Wide Screen), of which this port is based on.
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [4784] DSi Game & Watch: Donkey Kong Jr. by Fortranm in 03:49.80