Shanghai Solitaire, also known as Mahjong Solitaire, is a famous puzzle game that was released for a lot of platforms. DS version has a touchscreen, so you are no longer forced to move a cursor around in other to select the tiles.
Game objectives
Emulator: DeSuME-0.9.6-win32
Aims for fastest time
Uses easy difficulty
YouTube Link
I uploaded both runs of easy difficulty and normal one. This submission uses the easy difficulty. If you prefer the normal one to be published, please tell me.
I thought DS version would be the most suitable because the stylus allowed playing much faster than any other version. Since there is no USA version of Shanghai Solitaire released for DS, I used Japanese one.
The game has three difficulties and I played on all of them to find which one is the most entertaining for TASing. I made and watched a run of normal difficulty that has 8 stages, and thought some people would say that it is boring. Then I played on the easy difficulty that has only 4 stages. The run was too short for me, but it would be a good demonstration of how Shanghai Solitaire TAS would looks because it wouldn’t be boring and has a standard layout. That’s why I chose the easy difficulty.
Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 2224
Location: Georgia, USA
Nifty! I watched both Youtube links, and I agree that Easy mode is the better choice. You don't get any more entertainment from seeing more puzzles solved in Normal mode.
There's an unfortunate tradeoff here, though. Although the stylus makes the puzzles quick to solve, it also means that you can't really see individual moves in progress. In a game with a moving cursor, you'd at least see the movement of the cursor and be able to follow along with the moves (such as in the Solitaire run). Even in Pipe Dream and Minesweeper, you can still follow along somewhat, but not with this run.
I think one question is appropriate here: what was the challenge in making this run? Presumably, if the stylus can select pieces each frame, and the puzzles have a fixed number of pieces, then this run is already optimal.
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically.
Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.)
Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html)
Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature!
Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
There's an unfortunate tradeoff here, though. Although the stylus makes the puzzles quick to solve, it also means that you can't really see individual moves in progress.
I think that for this reason, a sub-optimal (speedwise) run would be warranted for this game, perhaps only clearing one pair of tiles per second.
On the one hand, I thought the Easy run was kinda funny. On the other hand, this just screams bad game choice like every other board/card game TAS that doesn't involve heavy luck manipulation.
Sorry, this gets a no from me.
Ryuto, could you explain why this submission was cancelled?
mklip2001 wrote:
I think one question is appropriate here: what was the challenge in making this run? Presumably, if the stylus can select pieces each frame, and the puzzles have a fixed number of pieces, then this run is already optimal.
Optimization is not easy at all. It's actually very difficult.
It is not just stylus-stylus-stylus-... . Using the stylus alone only accounts for removing 2 tiles every 4 frames. The biggest challenge to optimizing it is finding long sequences of stylus-A-stylus-A-stylus-A-... With this, you can remove 2 tiles every 2 frames. However, you can only do this as far as there is a chain of selectable tiles, since after using the stylus, direction+A can only select a tile nearby. The optimization challenge is to minimize the number of chains.
Personally, I'd prefer a Hard mode run. I don't care that it's 12 stages long; it's no longer than 3 minutes. I find the Easy mode too short and rather trivial (for the fact that it's Easy mode and it's only 4 stages, not because of optimization).
I was also disappointed at the lack of stylus-cursor playing during downtime. It would be cool for a TAS to do some tricks.
If you had explained why optimization was non-trivial and what you needed to do to save frames, it wouldn't be as negative. :)
I had no clue until FractalFusion's post about it.
