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A TAS of game of the Rad Racer / Super Hang On type has to do a great deal to get out of my no vote territory. While I can enjoy playing those games I don't think that they make good TASes. This is because they appear, to a viewer, to show the same level played repeatedly with minor occasional variations. This game has some things in its favour; some cool tricks which added variety not found in level design, some amusing Easter eggs, and being a good run of a difficult game. This takes it out of my no vote territory, I was able to watch it, but I still found it too repetitive. This gets a meh vote from me for game choice, but you made a solid effort which is not bad for your first time!
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Fantastic run. It had many great moments, but, in particular, I liked the use of damage and inhalation boosting throughout. Voting yes on this fine piece of work.
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I don't really read science fiction. However, I do absolutely love this short story. It is from a collection of short stories called Cosmocomics by Italo Calvino. Each story begins with a scientific 'fact' (many have been refuted since this was written) that the author uses as inspiration for a folk style tale. The story linked above is based on George Darwin's view that the moon was once very close to the Earth and has very gradually been pushed away. It imagines our ancestors traveling in boats to meet the moon and using ladders to climb on to its surface. It's a really quite beautiful story. I suggest that you read it.
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I finally got around to watching this. I have played through this game since your last DKC2 submission so I enjoyed it much more this time around. Anyway, I enjoyed every frame of this. It's not often that we see a submission from you Comicalflop, but it's a rare pleasure indeed. Yes vote.
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I TASed both this route and the route that you suggested. Like you said, that route seems like it would be faster (because it is easier), but Field 24 is a boss field and takes far too long to beat making that route ultimately slower.
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Voting yes. The lag reduction makes a huge difference to the entertainment factor here. This is the first run of this game that I have particularly liked. Also, this game has so many beautiful levels and worlds that an all-levels run of some sort should be considered.
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Voted yes. Surprisingly fast paced. I didn't know of this mini-golf game. It seems like it could be better than Zany Golf. I'll have to try it out some time.
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I watched all the WIPs that you posted and was very much looking forward to this. I didn't think that you'd be able to beat this game so quickly. My favorite parts were flying into the exploding building in Zephyr and the series of great jumps and glitches in Winter Tundra to get to Ripto. Yes vote, of course.
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Heisanevilgenius wrote:
This feels strangely unoptimized to me. Maybe it's fast, but some parts have this weird feel to them like it was slower than it had to be. Like the part with the two giant jumping fish, the character stops, then launches herself towards a door when it sort of looks like it would be faster to just run straight.
I'm not voting because I don't feel I understand the game mechanics enough to be able to make an informed decision.
That Field is probably the most straight-forward to optimise in the run. The giant fish jump up the slope and walk down it. To move to the left I must wait until they have jumped. If I can't get past the second fish before it reaches the top of the hill I must hang in to the ravine to avoid it when it walks back down.
Walking speed is very slow in this game, unless I'm covering very short distances (or, as is more often the case, traveling too quickly leaves we in a suboptimal swing position by the time the hooks latches on). To remedy this I can use the tension in the wire to get a speed boost. To do this I latch onto the ground and walk away from it. I then release the direction and jump. The jump pulls me towards the hook and when I land I release the hook and jump again to throw myself to the left. The further to the right I am when I jump the more velocity I receive. When bypassing the first fish I delay slightly so that I just pass under the second fish when it jumps. The resultant velocity decreases every frame and so Umi is not traveling fast enough to pass under the fish as it comes back to the ground which is why I need to boost a second time.
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Bisqwit wrote:
Intuitive impression: Fields 00, 35 might be improvable by some frames. Other than that, it's good. I'm fond of watching this game type being played.
I realise that Field 00 looks sloppily played. I hated the idea that I'd have to grab the ledge on the first swing. However, as far as I could see it was unavoidable as I couldn't get the optimal pendulum motion from jumping from the ledge without falling into the water or taking a strat that was ultimately slower. I put it down to having too much vertical velocity when the tension kicked in causing a weird bounce (something that I was able to put to good use in Field 23).
Having said that, as Randil put it, this game has a huge scope for improvements. It is incredibly difficult to optimise and there is a huge amount of ways to play every level. I hope that this game sees some competition because I'm sure that there is a lot that has eluded me.
Many of you wrote:
We want more Umihara Kawase!
Agreed. Originally, I had considered trying to improve the current sightseeing TAS, but now I think that a long run of this game would be a better use of my time. The good news is that in order to make this TAS I had to test run many different routes and so I have good solutions for many of the longest route Fields already. I could make a sightseeing run comparatively easily.
The longest routes are both 22 Fields (rather than the 9 in this run):
00, 01, 02, 03, 04, 08, 09, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 24, 29, 30, 39, 44, 45, 46, 53, 54, 55.
00, 01, 02, 05, 06, 07, 09, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 24, 29, 30, 39, 44, 45, 46, 53, 54, 55.
I'd probably just go with the one I find most entertaining.
@ Derakon: To answer your question, I get most of my Umihara Kawase information from this website for both games. It'd be great if our Umihara Kawase articles could be improved using some of this information.
@ Canar: You can't play every field without redoing some (some fields allow you to get back to field 00), which would probably end up being less entertaining than a normal longest route run.
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Excellent! It's strange that I was thinking of what a TAS of this game would look like just the other day. It's great to see that you've picked it up. Thanks for sharing the WIP and I'll definitely be watching any more that you release. I hope that you continue and finish this.
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Wow! That's awesome. I hoped that you'd do a 100%. Optimising this looks incredibly hard so it'd be great if you could pull through and obsolete my crappy movie ;-)
Everything looked very well played and I hope that you release more WIPs.
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Pretty borderline, but the ability to throw projectiles in order to hit enemies considerably further on in the level (a lá SMB3) was cool and pushes this into Yesvoteland.
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It's great to see that this fine game got TASed. The earlier portions of the run were a bit stop/start, but when the action got flowing this was a pretty good watch. Yes vote.
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I've been checking this out recently and am getting the same crashes as AngerFist. Now that you've recently finished a new version of pcsx, mz, can we expect to see a new version of FBA sometime? There are several games I'd like to see/do. Arcade oozes tas potential.
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I tried hexing in the improvement but I couldn't sync the .gmv. What was strange was that playing Hole 2 in a different way made the tee-off appear 1 pixel to the side in hole 3, which in turn caused the tee-off in Hole 4 (Pinball) appear 4 pixels to the side. This could be a real game-changer for the pinball and breakout holes (good or bad; the options I now have in pinball are awful, but this strat could allow me to change it in a positive way).
In any case I'm going to cancel this to allow myself to investigate properly. I'll have the 2 second improvement in Hole 2 and I may shave a few frames off others if I can work out how the tee-off randomness works. I apologise to Flygon and Kyman for the time that they wasted encoding this.
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Flygon wrote:
TODO: Get Mukki's permission to embed the YouTube video into the submission text
Granted! But I'll probably need to update the file first.
Twisted Eye wrote:
Questions about the run:
1. The second hole, with the hamburger. You delay to bounce the hamburger, but this is unnecessary--you can press A while the ball is rolling. In fact, while testing this to make sure I remembered correctly, I accidentally got a hole-in-one from firing the ball randomly, with the hamburger sitting still before I fired.
Thanks for pointing this out! I'll test this out tonight and update the submission file.
Twisted Eye wrote:
2. The level with the fans...it looked really good, I just wonder what can be done about shortening it to the hole-in-one. I'm sure you tested a lot. Just keeping the fans going won't do it, but maybe if the ball is manipulated closer to the fan before the final hill then you can get more speed to get it down and blown across to the hole. I just can't guarantee that it's faster to do that way though.
It is possible to get a hole in one on this level, but the final fan has to be used very carefully to pull it off, and even then the ball was traveling at a snail pace when it reached the hole. It turned out faster overall to go over par and hit another powerful shot.
Twisted Eye wrote:
3. The pinball machine and the blockbuster hill both looked pretty slow in spots, but I know how hard those are to work AND how dang slow this game moves, so there probably isn't much that can be done.
I actually finished this run about a week ago, but I didn't want to submit because of the slow spots in these levels. I tried out various ways of speeding them up but was unable to. In the pinball level the range of points that you can hit with the flippers is very narrow. I hit the first switch after releasing the ball onto the table, holding the plunger one frame more or less causes a miss. For the second it rolls down the flipper and I flick it onto the second switch, annoyingly it usually goes down the gutter from here so the best I could do was land it near the flipper (it wouldn't land bang on). For the third one what you must remember is that my main concern is not getting it caught between the bumpers for too long. If you've played the game I'm sure you know how long it can get caught for. I tried various methods and that was the fastest I could get.
On breakout the pad does not give you much precision i.e. moving the pad one pixel left or right can cause the ball to go in wildly different directions. At the end of this part of the hole I chose to hit the block on the far left so it went up to the top and back down across the other blocks. This certainly looks slow, but hitting this block on the underside places it in a very unfavorable position.
The combinatorial explosion is pretty heavy in pinball and breakout games in general. I retraced my steps back as best I could, slightly altering what I did to try and foster better results, but it was the fastest I could get.
EDIT: TwistedEye's idea saved ~ 2 seconds. Very Nice! Unfortunately, this game is not particularly hex friendly so it'll take another few hours to Frankenstein all this input together. Sit tight.
