What a long anticipated TAS - and the wait was worth it! This was great. Not only is there so much speed tech and routing potential in this game, but every level ends up taking a different approach and being broken in a different way - huge variety. There were even *two* team blasts in an RTA optimized TAS, plus room for playaround! Yes vote.
The Dodonpachi glitch has been documented and revealed here:
http://electricunderground.io/the-secret-dodonpachi-scoring-glitch-revealed/
tl;dr it's a frame perfect glitch that doubles how much your combo is worth and can be done 4 times in stage 6. Is it possible to counterstop the game in TAS conditions now...? Possibly!
Here's a programming/dictionary challenge:
Target is a word game where the creator scrambles a nine letter word and designates one letter as the target. The solver's goal is to find all words that include the center letter, are 4+ letters, aren't plurals ending in s and aren't proper nouns. Obviously there will always be a nine letter word, but some Targets have more or less other words to find. What puzzle has the MOST and what has the LEAST?
Okay, so the state we'd be in is that we'd have a TAS that's beaten by RTA in its category, that would be obsoletable only by a full game run (or by a new understanding of the glitch that is not RTA-matchable).
One way to measure it is to put both the emulator and an input viewer in OBS and make a recording. When an input is registered, frame advance until the game moves as well - that's the input latency.
This is the technique used in https://youtu.be/mjAoH_iCCq4
The core conceit of this TAS - that we skip most of the game's intended content by just deciding to not fight the Shadowlords, actually - is amusing, and I giggled when I realized it happened, and the RNG manipulation of Escape is also cool. But actually WATCHING the TAS is not a great experience - it's slightly tolerable at 2x speed muted. So the definition of a Meh vote, but nice job putting this game in its place.
Can you skip the Shadowlord fight on every version of this game, or is this NES exclusive?
Is this new?
Link to video
"At the beginning of this video shows an instant kill glitch I discovered. If you transform on the same frame a boss takes damage from the green mech arrow you get an instant kill. I get the kill on the last boss notably in this run which saves a ton of time. The run will now evolve into trying to get this glitch as much as possible and where it counts the most."
It might be worth swapping it out for the button file that does the frame perfect pause, just so it's slightly more difficult
The8bitbeast never mentioned a "frame perfect" pause, but instead "about a 10 frame window".
To be clear, the 'frame perfect' part is that you have to press the pause button, release it the next frame, then press it again the frame after that (which is slightly hard for a human to do). The actual window itself is 10 frames wide, this is correct.
Whoops! You accidentally the Game.
This has to be the most hilarious method of triggering credits I've ever seen in any game ever, and it's been extensively tested and documented, so excellent job to everyone involved.
That said, the end result is trivial for a real time runner to get (as evidenced by 40 people matching the time). It might be worth swapping it out for the button file that does the frame perfect pause, just so it's slightly more difficult (only 2 people match the time now). Though if it did get rejected for triviality, what happens to the old run? It would be permanently obsolete but also unimprovable. So I'm very interested to see how TASVideos judges handle this edge case.
What a pleasant surprise! A pleasure to see this game demolished with ACE. Yes vote!
I'd love to see any% no major glitches and 100% improved too, but I understand those will be much bigger undertakings.
This discussion reminded me of an idea that I think has been thrown in the past. Why hasn't anybody created a game that's quite directly based on TASing?
I remember seeing such a game posted on the forums in the past - I can't remember what the game was called, but the premise was that you had a 'car' with rockets on both ends, gave you a scrubbable timeline you could add/change inputs on arbitrarily, and it showed the predicted trajectory of your current inputs. It was called something like rctr ('rocket car').
Trick 4: Air Jumping. When Hardy walks off a platform instead of jumping off...he can jump during the fall while still in mid-air. This is utilized a few times for better jumping positions and to make jumps that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Again, likely a programming oversight.
This is a common mechanic in platformers, introduced whenever the game designer wants jumping to have more lenient windows, and it's called 'coyote time'. (Although using it to make otherwise impossible jumps could be an oversight, especially if it sequence breaks.)
Another mechanic like this is called 'jump buffering', which allows for jump to be inputted before you land, and to execute on the first possible frame.
Target is a word game where the creator scrambles a nine letter word and designates one letter as the target. The solver's goal is to find all words that include the center letter, are 4+ letters, aren't plurals ending in s and aren't proper nouns. Obviously there will always be a nine letter word, but some Targets have more or less other words to find. What puzzle has the MOST and what has the LEAST?