Posted: 8/7/2014 10:03 AM
Post subject: Battletoads [Arcade]
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Patashu
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Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 4016
I think we've had a TAS of literally every other Battletoads game in existence except this one. This one is harder than all the others combined! (Especially if you play on 6/6 difficulty, which turns up aggression and damage) PJ is practicing to 1CC/speedrun this, so he's posting his route as he goes along: Link to video Link to video Link to video
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Posted: 8/7/2014 5:11 PM
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Warepire
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PJ ranted during one casual play-through that 3 player on the hardest mode makes the game almost impossible to 1CC due to the damage dealt. If the game is completable in this mode, I'd for one love to see a TAS of it. I personally think that this is the most entertaining version of Battletoads when played with speed in mind.
Posted: 8/7/2014 5:13 PM
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PJ
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Joined: 2/1/2011
Posts: 181
Location: Western NY
I think a TAS of this should be 3-player and max difficulty. It doesn't scale up the number of enemies or enemy health, and it cuts literally minutes off of the extremely tedious final boss. Plus, this is the only game that lets you actually use all 3 toads simultaneously, so you may as well. :P A TAS would probably be pretty trivial to make since there is basically no randomness in any of the spawns. It would just be a matter of figuring out how to kill the mobs optimally. Edit: I didn't see Warepire's post! We must've been typing at the same time. Haha. But yea, 3P and 6/6 difficulty is pretty ridiculous. The main issue is Karnath. I haven't figured out how he chooses his targets (though I've only been able to play 3P once), and on 6/6 difficulty it is already pretty hard to dodge if you know where he's going. For a real-time run, the players would need to be more or less perfectly synced to have any chance, but I think a TAS would have a lot of room for playaround during that fight. The other concern is that many enemies are programmed to hard counter after a certain number of consecutive hits, so I'm not sure how that'll work with 3P. The large rats in stage 3 do a kick counter after every 2 hits, but there might be a way to work around that (e.g. one player triggers the kick counter and then another strikes from behind during this?). I would try if I could figure out a good way to control multiple characters on my own. :P The large rat boss of stage 3 counters on every 3rd hit (kind of), and Big Blag counters after every 2nd hit.
Posted: 8/8/2014 3:53 AM
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Patashu
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Great job PJ, you already found an enemy despawning glitch. Link to video
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Posted: 8/8/2014 4:13 AM
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feos
Site Admin, Skilled player (1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11268
Location: RU
NES TAS of 2011
It despawned!
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.
Posted: 8/8/2014 4:33 AM
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PJ
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Joined: 2/1/2011
Posts: 181
Location: Western NY
I don't think it quite despawned. Well maybe it did. Idk. Here's another example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G05_trMyYWQ&t=3m58s If you throw a green rat at a pink rat just as he is spawning on this bridge, he does weird stuff. Sometimes he disappears, sometimes he falls through the floor, and sometimes he....he teleports off to the left somehow. I don't understand it. I haven't been able to get this to happen anywhere else in this level, but at least it saves time here!
Posted: 9/29/2014 11:57 PM
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Patashu
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Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 4016
Awesome news! PJ got a 40:22 1CC on max difficulty, using Pimple and all speedrun strats (including fastest Big Blag and fastest Robo Manus). Watch it here: Link to video
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Posted: 9/30/2014 1:56 AM
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PJ
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Posts: 181
Location: Western NY
Haha, thanks Patashu. I'm super happy with this run. Just one minor correction: I did screw up a few strats in this run, but the main one was in stage 5 (two waves before I died). Ideally you would kill that purple frazzle without accidentally grabbing the crate; the crate is used in the next wave to kill everything before the gun despawns, and the gun is used to kill the 4 wrenchies before I moved. What you see in that run is what happens if you mess up. :P There are also a few smash hit redirects you can do in stage 4 that I narrowly missed. Not a big deal on those. I found a lot of significant things for a 3-player run. First off, the gun does 4 times the damage of a smash attack on the huge rats (General Vermins), so in 3P, we will make sure to have as many guns as possible for those fights, even if it means having one or two toads carrying a gun through most of the level. I also found out that with 2 players, you can hit the snowmen in stage 2 before getting blown back by the wind. Since they take two hits to kill, I imagine with 3 players you can skip all of the scripted snowman fights. I'd really like to make a 3-player TAS of this, but I definitely lack the proper resources to make it work at the moment.
Posted: 9/30/2014 2:29 AM
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Patashu
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PJ wrote:
I'd really like to make a 3-player TAS of this, but I definitely lack the proper resources to make it work at the moment.
What kind of resource would you need? If it emulates in a TASing emulator fine, you don't need three controllers or anything like that, you can use multi-track recording where you do input for P1, load state, do input for P2 while input for P1 is playing back, etc.
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Posted: 9/30/2014 2:30 AM
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PJ
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Posts: 181
Location: Western NY
Oh that exists? That is pretty much exactly what I'd need. Haha.
Posted: 9/30/2014 2:34 AM
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Patashu
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Posts: 4016
PJ wrote:
Oh that exists? That is pretty much exactly what I'd need. Haha.
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10015 Here's an arcade (FinalBurnAlpha) TAS that used multitrack. Apparently a script was used, so try it and see if it works. http://www.fceux.com/web/help/taseditor/index.html?Toolbox.html ctrl+f multitrack <-- here's how you do it in fceux/taseditor, for reference.
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Posted: 9/30/2014 3:43 PM
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feos
Site Admin, Skilled player (1236)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11268
Location: RU
NES TAS of 2011
The game doesn't work in FBA, dunno if they ported it to MAME-rr as well. http://code.google.com/p/mame-rr/source/browse/lua/
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.
Posted: 9/30/2014 4:20 PM
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PJ
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Joined: 2/1/2011
Posts: 181
Location: Western NY
Yea I haven't tried this on FBA before. It works exceptionally well with MAME-rr though. Without some arcade version of TASeditor or the multitrack thing though, idk how it'd be possible to do it.