Super Metroid: Redesign (SMR for short) is a brilliant hack of one of my favorite games — Super Metroid. It features a huge, elaborated and well-thought new world map, lots of gameplay changes and so on.
This was my ongoing project a while ago, which I decided to put on hold due to three major reasons:
- Super Metroid 14% TAS gained higher priority;
- Saturn resumed working on it as well, and it was unlikely that I could keep his pace of production up and still deliver unexpected results (in any case, it would be wiser to analyze a complete movie once it's done to avoid making the same mistakes in planning and/or execution, if some new details would be uncovered in the process);
- The WIP I produced had to be redone, anyway, since I had made several seconds' worth of mistakes over the span of my v1 WIP, and it turned out that v2 wasn't fully optimal, either. The new version would be made on Snes9x 1.5 due to superior emulation.
Drewseph's beta-TAS made on SMR version 2.0 (somewhat outdated route-wise) can be found
here.
Status: on hiatus; to be restarted.
The goals: will have to be recalculated upon Saturn's submission and new information; as of now, it remains sub-1:00 by in-game timer.
The progress: the old WIP and other things can be found
here permanently (well, at least until I submit it).
Project page — all the useful info on this run is/will be there, including progress reports.
Discussion thread.
DDP is the legendary manic shoot-'em-up made by Cave, a company that has been the headliner of the genre ever since. It's the second game of DonPachi series, and arguably the most popular one: there are Saturn and PlayStation ports, and the arcade PCBs are rather widespread (if a bit pricy). DDP is followed by DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou (whose PS2 port has been
semi-TASed by none other than
Morimoto himself), and the recently released
DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu.
DoDonPachi's scoring system is rather simple in theory:
- Don't die and don't bomb, thus abusing the "maximum" bomb multiplier.
- Kill enemies in rapid succession, never letting the chain drop until the end of the stage.
- Minor: pick up every item/star without interrupting the previous goals.
- Minor: cancel as many bullets as possible with large explosions.
- Minor use laser over blooming flowers.
However, with all the supposed simplicity, it's also filled with lots of obscure tricks and strategies the world record holders use, which still haven't been made public. Some of them are completely unknown to the western players, even though DDP has seen very fierce competition due to its popularity.
The current world record with A-L ship type is 748,414,350, by SOF-WTN. According to the experts, WTN dies on the true last boss once (
not particularly surprising), which would have otherwise put his score to ~760 million.
The current TAS record with the same type is
759,281,170, by Takuro. It's been noted that it contains serious (as far as TASing goes) chaining mistakes netting about 30 million points.
As such, a good goal would be to break 800M points (though realistically there is no known way to get above 790M). A lot of shmupping enthusiasts would be very pleased to see such a run, though I guess it won't be easy on the eyes. If the goal is reached, it might be possible to make a 2-player follow-up run where one player scores as per the optimal route, and the other flies around just dodging the bullet swarms, baiting enemies in favorable positions and generally disrupting aimed bullet patterns.
Status: waiting for FBA to fully support the game.
The goals: 800M+ points, speed disregarded if/when it hinders optimal scoring tactics.
The progress: gathering information.