Submission #6862: anonymous user's DS Zhu Zhu Puppies "First Day" in 01:23.58

This is a TAS movie for the first day you play Zhu Zhu Puppies for the DS. It uses a glitch with pausing to complete objectives early. It completes the first day in ~1:20secs.

The objective of the game is to care for a pet puppy themed around the "Zhu Zhu" franchise of toy animals.

In this submission, I go from the language select screen to a completed first day. I use a glitch with the pause menu to disable a block which forces you to wait for dialogue before progression. Using this glitch allows me to complete the first day in 1:20.

Menu

The menu is very straightforward, just press the buttons as quickly as possible. It is optimal to click Miss Priss as she is already selected when you open the "Adopt" screen.

Gameplay

Once past the adoption screen, you need to take advantage of the menu glitch in order to skip dialogue which would lose multiple seconds, and complete all the objectives such as scratching the puppy, feeding it and letting it go potty.

This movie could be improved with a slightly quicker pause skip in the kitchen.

Samsara: Oh, sick, I've been waiting for a Zhu Zhu Rocket TAS. Judging.

Samsara: Well, this turned out to be a more interesting case than I was expecting.

Marking the category as "first day" implies that there is an in-game mechanic for separate days. There isn't. It's real time in the same way that Animal Crossing is, depending on the DS's clock for each day. A day in this game is literally 3 minutes or less of simple tasks, and then... I dunno, you can play with your dog for a bit if you're a kid and your grandma accidentally got you this instead of Nintendogs, but this is a TAS, not a child. That was one of the weirder things I've typed for a judgement that wasn't explicitly a joke.

The main issue here is content. Given that the game is infinite, the most suitable endpoint is when there is no new content. I tested four subsequent days in this game and found that all three of those days past the first have new daily tasks. To the best of my knowledge, the DS's system time in DeSmuME can't be changed in the middle of a TAS. It can be set prior to a run, so in theory you could set the system time to 11:58 PM, cross over into the next day, and allow for two immediate days of content, but the problem is that there is a third and fourth day of new content. Without the time being able to be changed midrun, this pretty much guarantees that an "acceptable" TAS is going to be 48 hours long at minimum, since you'd have to keep the game running until the day ticks over and then reset. Every new task past the fourth day is going to add another 24 hours onto the run.

This is bad enough by itself, but there's also an in-game shop. Buying all the items from the shop could be considered an objective end to the game. The problem is that each new day adds new items to the shop, and you only earn 10 coins a day. By the 4th day, you need at least 70 coins to be able to purchase everything in the shop, bringing the minimum time of the run up to 144 hours (accounting for the first two days being done back to back with a preset system time). There's definitely more shop items, too, but I feel my soul slowly dying the more time I spend investigating this game, and I can't find any information about this game online other than "don't play it".

Either way, I'm rejecting this run for being incomplete, as it does not finish all new content, but until DS TASing has a stable and deterministic way to change the system time in the middle of the run, I don't think we can even publish a run that does.