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Video with timer and TAS studio on Twitch https://www.twitch.tv/videos/647632504
Neutopia is similar to Zelda 1, I hope this TAS brings more attention to the game. This TAS beats the current WR by 7:32. Frame 1200 is a good screenshot of the title screen. I only used a gamepad and Recording mode for the crab fight and the puma head fight, everything else I did with mouse clicks. Making this was a lot of fun, but took a lot longer than I imagined.
My aim was to see how much time could be saved with the bell glitch and efficient combat. Normally the bell freezes the game and plays a melody for 2+ seconds, then opens any locked doors. The speedrun uses the bell 13 times in the final 2 dungeons. Frame 113923 is the first use of the bell glitch. All you do is run into a wall and press 2 on the right frame.
On frame 37574 there is an attack through the screen transition, for fun. I use item drop and enemy movement manipulation in several places in the run. I used the same strategies for the boss fights that I use in RTA, except Dirth, the final boss. Attacking Dirth while standing in inside his hitbox as he appears made it possible to kill him in only 4 cycles.

feos: Replacing the movie with one that trims the blank input at the end.
feos: Judging...
feos: Replacing with a resync that removes the intro delay.

feos: Hello sveniroth and welcome to TASVideos!
I think we all can agree that this game is a very good fit for TASing, and your commentary video helped me a lot to get the idea of what's going on.
However, I still have to reject this movie even after removing (most of) the intro delay, because there's a lot of optimization potential in this game that's not fully used in this submission. See some notes and example movies here: Forum/Posts/496985

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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #6777: sveniroth's PCE Neutopia in 40:15.43
EZGames69
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Here's a file that removes 23,937 frames of blank ending input: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/63961926697912281 Also I'll be making a quick encode for this TAS
[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
nymx
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Menuing??? Do I see a problem already? Why is there so much time spent waiting to press "Start"?
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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Why the japanese version and not the englisch? Is the japanese faster?
Last TAS finished: Final Fantasy Adventure (4.0 Warp Glitch Run) WIP in the moment: Tail Gator (GB) Matty
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nymx wrote:
Menuing??? Do I see a problem already? Why is there so much time spent waiting to press "Start"?
Yes... echoing this. Cause you can hit "run" on frames 109 and 112. edit: desync hits around 21140 frames in with the adjusted opening input, I'm not going to bother to go over it.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account. Something better for yourself and also others.
RetroEdit
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MattyXB wrote:
Why the japanese version and not the englisch? Is the japanese faster?
Likely because text-scrolling is faster, as this tutorial video for the speedrun mentions near the beginning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud5SYP88LO8 Not that the text-scroll differences matter for the purposes of timing comparison on this site, as they are excluded when doing timing comparison for TASes here. (related movie rule)
EZGames69
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[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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This is a good first attempt TAS. However: - You can start the game faster than you did with your waiting (this has been mentioned already, it's worth re-mentioning however). - Running towards the wall where the game corrects you is slower than doing the movement beforehand. - You need to damage abuse more as the game heals you at points on your journey, you need to do this. - Go over your input. ^ This is the RAM address to health is 0x14C5 ^ In your commentary you stated that you did two bosses manually (as in with a joypad, compared to mousing with what I assume was TAStudio). That's fine and all but this becomes a red flag when you mentioned in that same commentary that you didn't go over it to be sure that it's fast.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account. Something better for yourself and also others.
sveniroth
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- You can start the game faster than you did with your waiting (this has been mentioned already, it's worth re-mentioning however). I like listening to the intro music, I didn't realize skipping intros and endings was expected in a TAS. - Running towards the wall where the game corrects you is slower than doing the movement beforehand. I was afraid that might be the case, oops. - You need to damage abuse more as the game heals you at points on your journey, you need to do this. However, if you take damage boosts your fire wand gets weaker. ------------------------------------ Right now I am making a TAS for the any% no fire wand category. I am doing lots of bomb drop manipulation and using bombs in combat, something that is pretty much impossible in RTA, so it's a lot of fun. It's 52 seconds faster so far at the end of sea sphere, but that lead will likely be lost in the sky sphere. I'll be able to take more damage boosts since I don't need life for the fire wand, but using only the sword makes combat much slower, the puma head fight in particular will cost a lot of time, it will take 6 cycles with the steel sword instead of the 1 cycle quick kill you can do with the fire wand.
sveniroth
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MattyXB wrote:
Why the japanese version and not the englisch? Is the japanese faster?
Yes, Japanese is faster.
Spikestuff
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sveniroth wrote:
- You need to damage abuse more as the game heals you at points on your journey, you need to do this. However, if you take damage boosts your fire wand gets weaker.
The first segment where you're walking on the overworld and blast a hole into that mountain and proceed to get healed says otherwise to what I meant. If fire is important. Then its use is dependent on the section that you're doing then. For the opener that isn't the case, late sure. But at the start of the TAS I disagree.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account. Something better for yourself and also others.
nymx
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sveniroth wrote:
- You can start the game faster than you did with your waiting (this has been mentioned already, it's worth re-mentioning however).
I understand that this is your first submission and there are things you wish to emphasize. Your favorite parts of the game can always be researched by viewers, if they want to know more. This situation has shown up before where non-gaming parts have not been optimized. A TAS is a timed event from the moment the game is powered up for a console. The long menu waiting only subtracts from your timing. I must say that SpikeStuff's efforts to resync, after removing the long wait, indicates that RNG and other factors prevent you from turning around a revision quickly. If you think it is a timely possibility, I would set your submission to "Delayed" and try to correct this.
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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Turning is a HUGE deal in this game. You want to bump every possible corner that's in your way, because it makes you move diagonally for a bit. I saved ~200 frames on the first 10k frames of your movie by bumping corners harder. Link to video http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/64568652445548068 With regular turns, you want the first frame that puts you on a new grid tile. If your turns match the grid, you get no position changes. If you turn too early, your position gets auto-corrected and pulls you back to fit into the previous tile. If you turn optimally, you will be pulled forward on the new tile, with a bit of diagonal movement. Link to video http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/64590099561445513 I did a couple more damage boosts than you, because I was mostly testing the turns, but yes, there's a ton of health that's not being used on damage boosting all over the place.
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I kind of wish the commentary was still available. The version with the tas studio comments helps a little in understanding what's going on, but I feel like commentary explaining the routing would be interesting. Yeah I mean, it looks pretty suboptimal, and doesn't help it's several minutes slower than RTA, but still https://www.speedrun.com/neutopia