Submission #421: hopper's NES Where's Waldo in 02:28.93

Nintendo Entertainment System
(Submitted: Where's Waldo)
baseline
FCEU 0.98.12
8936
60
141
Unknown
Where's Waldo (U).nes
Submitted by hopper on 11/15/2004 12:45:33 PM
Submission Comments
Uses FCEU. Uses no warps or passwords. Doesn't abuse programming errors. Takes no damage; doesn't use death as a shortcut. Aims for fastest time. Played at hardest level.
The NES version of the popular book series, but with Waldo's position randomly generated to increase replay value. Most reviews are critical of this game, but it's actually a lot harder than you might think (especially The Subway). The concept of an infinitely replayable Where's Waldo book was a good one, though it would benefit from using more colours, or adding movement to some of the tilemaps. Level music also would have been a nice touch.
The auto-calculated length for this submission lists as 6 seconds faster than any previously accepted game completion run, which ought to be worth something.
Waldo's position is random, but since most levels are beaten in roughly a second, using up a second to produce a different position wouldn't make much sense.
The Subway is a very challenging level and, although the route doesn't seem very direct, I tried almost every reasonable way of changing the tracks (there are hundreds of ways to rearrange the maze) and this proved the shortest. Because the maze can be generated in a nearly infinite number of ways, this is the only stage that may be improvable by more than a few milliseconds. Replaying the previous level a number of different ways didn't produce a different maze, so a completely new time attack may be necessary to produce a different maze, but finding the optimal route would, again, be very time consuming, and there's no guarantee that it would be any faster.
This movie isn't very long, but what there is of it was created with emulation slowed to "frame by frame".

Phil: Nothing impressive in that video. Btw, I think I will go to bed.
Last Edited by on 1/1/2022 6:13 PM
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