Aliens: Neoplasma

Aliens: Neoplasma was a game submitted for the ZX Dev MID Remakes competition. It takes place in the same universe as the Alien movies created by Ridley Scott. In this game, you play as a woman awaken from stasis to find her shipmates all dead and the ship overrun by aliens. As with most Aliens based stories, the AI on the ship has decided that the alien creatures are more important than yourself and is trying to get them back to earth at all costs. You are tasked with escaping the ship by running around and activating various terminals to open doors to new pathways through the ship; ultimately leading to the escape pod.
This game has two endings (of which this submission is the shorter 'Bad Ending'):
'Bad Ending' = Just escape without destroying the ship.
'Good Ending' = Overload the ship's reactors to cause an explosion to kill the aliens before they reach earth....and escape before the explosion occurs.

TAS Notes

  • Emulator used: BizHawk 2.3.2
    • Due to the 2.3.2 rerecord count bug, rerecords were set to 0/unknown.
  • I don't think this needs a branch, but if it does...someone who can, add something that works.
  • Due to this being a TAS and wanting to finish as quickly as possible, none of the terminal dialogue between the ship's AI and the player is readable.
  • It is impossible to finish this game without using weaponry
    • The machine gun is necessary to kill/bypass the aliens
    • Grenades are necessary to (temporarily) stop fans within the ship that would otherwise kill you
  • Use of weaponry affects movement speed in an odd way...more on this below.

Negative Recoil

Now it's not uncommon for programmers to strive for realistic physics in their games. It's not unheard of for them to ignore natural physics either. This game however has a very odd physics phenomenon.
While one would assume that running across a screen non-stop would be the fastest method of traversing the distance, that would be incorrect for this game. In fact, running while firing the machine gun is actually faster than running without firing. I believe this has to do with variations in the character's animation that affect the X-coordinate position on screen.
Thus, firing as much as possible during the run while still maintaining enough ammunition to deal with the aliens yields a faster movie than only firing when necessary to deal with aliens. For lack of a better term, I'm calling this "Negative Recoil," because the gun actually sucks the character forward instead of blowing her backward.

Other Notes

Some of this game contains backtracking as would be seen in a Metroid style game, but it's not that egregious. Unfortunately, there's no other power-ups other than acquiring weaponry.

Potential Improvements

Utilizing the negative recoil boost; I believe it may be possible to use different/better ammo management to allow for more boosted running throughout the game. Making a better movie than this submission, however, would require significantly more route testing on what ammo re-supply locations to use for obtaining the ammo needed for said boosting. Any supply stations that would need visited that are not already used in this run would require additional detours, and the resulting time loss would need to be more than made up for via Negative Recoil boosting.
As this potential for improvement is currently only theoretical and this run is complete and otherwise well optimized as-is; I believe this version was satisfactory for submission.

What about a 'Good Ending' run?

The difference between the two endings requires detonating the ship's reactors to kill the aliens before they reach Earth. Where the path diverges is only after the last (10th) terminal activation.
Thus, a 'Good Ending' would simply require some minor backtracking through the ship to the reactor rooms (not seen in this TAS) to flip 4 switches before heading up to the escape pod (instead of immediately escaping after the 10th terminal). This would add probably 1-3 minutes of time yielding only a very minor difference in the end-game scene/story. The ship would explode in a flash and the end dialogue would be different.
If this 'good ending' run could garner moon tier support, both endings could theoretically be published on the site. But I personally, don't think there'd be enough of a worthwhile visual difference in the runs to warrant having both. Others may feel the difference in end-game story would be enough to warrant both.

Suggested Screenshot

Frankly, I think the intro screen is the most visually eye-catching part of the game. If that's not acceptable for a screenshot because it's not part of actual game-play, I'd suggest anywhere that the player deals with multiple large aliens on one screen (I'll lookup specific frame examples of this later).

Note to potential publishers:

The loading portion of this TAS contains the typical screeching data sound associated with loading from tape on ZX Spectrum. BizHawk's audio settings within the ZX Spectrum core contain an option to alter the tape audio volume. Reducing this to the lowest setting will allow for the loading portion of the TAS to be done silently instead of with the screeching data sound. I don't believe changing this setting would affect the sync of the submitted .bk2; but if it did, copying the input and pasting into a new tasproj file that is initialized with the tape volume minimized should work.
It seems that maintaining the tape loading sounds is preferred from an accuracy perspective.
I feel like I'm forgetting something....Not sure what. I'll add it if I think of it (or someone points out what I've forgotten).

feos: Judging...
feos: Replacing with a 448 frame improvement.
feos: The movie looks good given straightforward gameplay, and the questionable part has been fixed, so I consider it well done. There wasn't a lot of feedback, and even though the music is good, there's no variety in gameplay. While it's incredibly impressive as a Spectrum game, it's otherwise similar to the NES version, which has Vault ratings. As a homebrew game, it really stands out on the modern Spectrum scene. Accepting to Vault.
fsvgm777: Processing. Also replaced the movie file with one that resets the re-record count to 0 (unknown). Total time remains unchanged.


TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #6590: DrD2k9's ZXS Aliens: Neoplasma in 17:23.31
CoolHandMike
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Yes. Big fan of Alien and Aliens so pretty cool to see a game like this. Surprisingly solid music tracks too.
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Watched it yesterday and it was mildly entertaining. I very rarely watch movies in their entirety, and I didn't get bored here. Gameplay combined with music was very meditative (much like in NES James Bond Jr that I tased a while ago). Voting yes.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
nymx
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Yeah, this game is surprising for that system. I too was impressed with the choice of game. Great job. Yes vote.
I recently discovered that if you haven't reached a level of frustration with TASing any game, then you haven't done your due diligence. ---- SOYZA: Are you playing a game? NYMX: I'm not playing a game, I'm TASing. SOYZA: Oh...so its not a game...Its for real? ---- Anybody got a Quantum computer I can borrow for 20 minutes? Nevermind...eien's 64 core machine will do. :) ---- BOTing will be the end of all games. --NYMX
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Can jumping down here save time if you spare some health earlier? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBzkBiGycuw&t=150
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
DrD2k9
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feos wrote:
Can jumping down here save time if you spare some health earlier? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBzkBiGycuw&t=150
Hmm. I'd be amazed if it didn't. From a quick estimate just looking at location, I'd guess probably around a 600-800 frame savings over this submission. When I originally tested jumping down from there, I died. And given that I don't lose any health before that point, I assumed that falling from there was an instant death situation. I didn't consider that the death resulted from starting the game with less than maximum health. So to utilize that shortcut, I'd have to pick up some health prior to that point. But the extra time for the health pickup (approximately 40ish frames) would be much shorter than the detour around this shortcut that is used in this submission. As this is rather close to the beginning of the game, much of the later stuff would likely desync requiring the remainder of the game to be essentially redone/resynced. I'm willing to redo this run adding in the shortcut. Most of the run would otherwise be the same visually. So...should I cancel this submission....or have you put it on a delayed judgement until I can update the run?
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Depends on how much time it's going to take.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
DrD2k9
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Here's an update utilizing the shortcut shown above. Due to changes in RNG, doors and some weapon firing/movement patterns were not as cooperative and thus I did not quite make the 600 frame savings estimated. This file is still 448 frames faster than the original submission. If I didn't perfectly re-sync the inputs after the shortcut, it's possible I may have missed an occasional frame or two somewhere.
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. ---- [4106] ZXS Aliens: Neoplasma by DrD2k9 in 17:23.31