Paperboy TAS by Randil
Technical information:
- Emulator used: FCE Ultra 0.98.16
- Genre: Action.
- Uses death as a shortcut.
The goals I had for this run:
Goal 1: Perform a "Perfect delivery" all seven days of the week, and on Sunday play the "Training course" flawlessly, thus hitting every object.
Goal 2: Perform "Goal 1" as fast as possible.
Goal 3: Have different subgoals each day. These subgoals may not interfer with goal 1 or 2. I will explain the subgoals for each day later on in these comments.
I chose to have sub-goals for each day in order to add some moe entertainment to the run.
Game description:
The goal in Paperboy is to deliver papers to subscribers. You start the game with 10 papers, and along the way you can get paper refills, giving you additional papers. Your job is to deliver at least one paper to each subscriber, that's the ones having white houses.
There are also some non-subscriber. Since these guys don't want your papers, you can be very mean to them. You can crash their windows and hit tumble their trash cans with your papers.
You get points for delivering papers and smashing stuff. If you destroy something for a subscriber, he will cancel his subscription, so that's why I don't destroy any windows on white houses.
After you've delivered papers, you can play a "training course" level if you want. I skip this in this run, except for sunday, because it wastes a lot of time playing it every day. I choose only to play it once, on Sunday.
Comments on the run:
First off, some general notes on the run:
- The deaths in this run are intentional. I die at the end of each day to avoid playing the training course. Dying is the only way to avoid playing this training course, and this saves several seconds per day. Playing the training course all days would get repetitive after a while, since there's not much to change from one time to another.
- Turning right or left does not affect time. So I can turn left or right as much as I want without loosing time.
- You may notice that the wheels on the bike aren't turning. This is done by pressing up+down. This does not affect time, but is just a visual "glitch" I chose to go with throughout this run.
- You can hit a target more than once. It's actually possible to hit the same target up to three times, getting points for each hit. This is used a lot in the run.
- It's possible to hit people and other moving objects, but you don't get any points for these.
- On frame 13561 in the run I throw a paper that disappears in mid-air. This paper was thrown just to show of this weird "bug", or whatever you want to call it.
Hit detection:
This game has really bad hit detection. You will notice this very soon in the run. I abuse this quite a lot, making this run more entertaining. I found memory addresses showing your position with the bike, so this was heavily abused.
Paper refills:
Manipulating paper refills is not possible without wasting time. The paper refills placement is decided the frame that you start the level. So in order to manipulate where they appear, I would need to waste frames to manipulate luck, opposing goal 2. Where paper refills appear don't save any time anyway.
Subgoals:
- Monday: Crash more things than usual.
- Tuesday: Crash more things than usual.
- Wednesday: Crash more windows than usual.
- Thursday: Crash more windows than usual.
- Friday: Hit more moving objects than usual.
- Saturday: Ride closer to objects than usual, playing daredevil.
- Sunday: Playing as "lawful" as possible, thus not destroying anything for non-subscribers.
The making of this run:
This run was fun to make. I used the memory viewer quite a lot, and also the "auto-hold" button. I had up+down on auto-hold throughout the run, making this run a lot easier to make. One day usually took 1-2 hours of work, so this whole run took somewhere around 10-15 hours to create. Of course, tools such as frame-advance and savestates were used a lot in this run too.
Thanks to:
- Everyone in the Paperboy Thread for encouragement, feedback and ideas. This wouldn't have been possible without you, so big thanks.
- Everyone in IRC who encouraged me.
- A huge thanks goes to Maximus for his TAS movie splicer. This turned really helpful when I once forgot to throw a paper, and didn't want to redo the whole day. Keep up the good work with this tool, Maximus! :)
Suggested screenshot: Frame 18990. This shows this game's really bad hit detection.
That should be all. I hope you enjoy this run!
Bisqwit: Accepting for its humor relief value and overall good quality.
Bisqwit: Processing.