- Aims for fastest time
- Abuses programming errors
- Takes damage to save time
- Colors a DNA
- Staves off alien invasion using only the power of multi-layered time paradoxes
- Drives author to verge of suicide
- Drives encoder to verge of suicide
Emulator used: Gens9f - Gens10a + ecco2 autofire&hitbox display.
For those of you who are not familiar with the game
I have provided this gmv: http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/928439988/Upthorn-Ecco2_Texty_2.gmv which sonars two more dolphins, and delays presses at every dialogue screen in order for the text to be readable.
Ecco: The Tides of Time is the sequel to Ecco the Dolphin, and has been one of my favorite games for a long, long time. Like Nitsuja did with the original, I made the mistake of thinking that this game would be easy to TAS, got disabused of that notion rather quickly, and only managed to complete the TAS by writing a few special types of autofire into gens. Ecco is a dolphin that controls like a tank with a jet engine. He can get up to very high speeds, but his turning radius is large to begin with, and is greater than the size of the screen at top speed. Additionally, hitboxes are quite difficult to determine just from the game graphics, there's an entire set of levels that involves navigating along mostly dry-land while the gravity changes almost at random, and many levels are sprinkled liberally with obstacles or enemies that will kill you instantly upon contact. Additionally, this time around Ecco must jump through hoops in long 3D levels, and rebuild the Asterite from a single pair of globes.
Neither of the really impressive glitches that Nitsuja used in the first movie remain, but there are still a few subtler ones, and I do make use of them.
Since I don't really know what more to say about this game, I'll just submit and answer any questions that come along.
Oh, for just a taste of what TASing this game was like:
16:04:21 * Upthorn almost done with ecco 2
16:33:52 <Upthorn> wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
16:35:03 <Upthorn> when I said "almost done" there was exactly 1 second of gameplay left.
16:33:52 <Upthorn> wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
16:35:03 <Upthorn> when I said "almost done" there was exactly 1 second of gameplay left.
As you will note from the timestamps the last 60 frames of gameplay took TWENTY NINE MINUTES to complete.
NesVideoAgent: Hi! I am a robot. I took a few screenshots
of this movie and placed them here.
I'm not sure I got the right ROM though. (I tried
ECCO - The Tides of Time (U) [!].gen, which was the closest match to what you wrote.) Well, here goes! Feel free to clean up the list.
Truncated: I'll do the honors. It seems this movie is very popular with the audience. I found it very good too, minus perhaps some of the ball catching, but the rest of it made up for that.
Raiscan: I'm currently trying to encode this, after which I will process. Imagine it to be like Gunstar Heroes but worse :(
Expect it to take a few more days, but rest assured I am making good progress. Heads up: the output will likely be mkv and be greater than a 4:1 size ratio...
Expect it to take a few more days, but rest assured I am making good progress. Heads up: the output will likely be mkv and be greater than a 4:1 size ratio...
Raiscan: Processing.