This movie completes the "regular" mode, single player, as fast as possible. Well...not quite.
In Pictionary, you can press start to skip a minigame if you think you know the answer. For real-time runs, this is really interesting: continuously demonstrate perfect play until enough of the picture is revealed that you can regognize it. But in a TAS, we can always recognize it! Just look at RAM offset 0x0448, using this table file. Therefore, we could skip the minigame on the first frame and type in the correct answer. This would eliminate all gameplay in the run, which would look something like this.
Since that would be really boring and lame, I propose the following stipulation for this category:
You may not press start at any time a minigame is on-screen.
That way there's still plenty of gameplay and strategy in the run. But even so, all the gameplay in this run consists of optimal suicides (which is faster in each game than successfully completing it); I'd like to make a no-damage run or something similar, but the firefighter game is proving extremely difficult to no-damage, or even fully reveal the picture. Virtually impossible, you might even say.
Let's talk about RNG. I manipulated the first word to be "NO", which is the fastest to type. I thought I would be able to manipulate that word for each game, but it turns out the words are generated in a pre-determined sequence, so I just stuck with what I got.
There's also other weirdness at play. Previously, I would have told you this, regarding the spaces and their corresponding minigames:
Yellow = Attack of the Paint Zombies
Pink = Leapin' Energy Capsules!
Brown = The Warehouse Shuffle
Green = Four Alarm Rescue
Red = Drawing game, or random from above in singleplayer
But in my run, it somehow ended up more like this:
Red = The Warehouse Shuffle Yellow = Attack of the Paint Zombies Pink = Leapin' Energy Capsules! Brown = Four Alarm Rescue Green = Random Red = Random
That's right. These colors aren't only inconsistent, but inconsistent within this run. One of the following must be true:
- RNG determines which color means what - colors corresponding to games you've already played transform into random ones.
I decided not to think about it too hard, because it let me play the paint bucket game (which is about 200 frames faster than the next slowest one) three times.
The word sequence combined with the additional weirdness makes this RNG manipulation of the worst kind: wait a frame to press start, then spend an entire weekend making a TAS to see what happened.
Also worth noting: there is a 128 frame rule between correctly guessing a word and the board appearing. I'm not sure how close I am on those frame rules, but keep them in mind if you ever want to improve this time. A shorter final word would offer the most improvement, since ending the movie isn't subject to any frame rules.