Game: Slaughter Sport (Japanese version is called Tongue of the Fatman)
If you know how to write japanese game names in japanese characters, please write it here with a short description, so that japanese speedrunners can find it here.
- Emulator: Bizhawk 2.5.1
- Genre: Fighting
- Aims for fastest time
- Unlocks a player character with a code, so it is almost like a New Game+ run. It is different than cheat code, because the code is shown to the player in normal gameplay and it is a part of the story. The fatman boss gives the player the ability to transform into fighters that the player has beaten. In the end the player is transformed into the boss himself, the fatman. It is a plot twist like, spoiler: Diablo. And now the player can play as fatman. It is the most popular category for speedrunners. The name of the Fatman is Mon'du.
The best fighter is of course the fatman who has an instant kill move. The stomp works forwards and backwards and it is used in every fight as quickly as possible, whichever way is faster. It is difficult to connect, because most of the time the enemy is in a state that makes them invulnerable to the stomp. I recorded the whole run five times from the beginning to find the best fight cycles.
I lose HP in almost every fight, because I have no time to dodge attacks. Money is gained when either of the fighters take damage, which helps buy powerups, attack power or healing between fights. Happily I did not need to heal between fights and I can buy some powerups. Most of them do normal damage, but some are useful for manipulating enemy movements. All nine fighters are unique and demand special attention.
Some of the fights are 100% perfect, because I connect the instant kill move instantly. The problem is that even with perfet fights, you can get a bad cycle for the next fight. Some enemies fail to cooperate most of the time, so it takes a lot of testing to get a good cycle for all of the fights combined. It gets very difficult when you have different options for powerups that can make some fight faster and change the whole cycle. It gets tiresome trying to find the perfect hit for an enemy that is in a bad cycle. Doubling the rerecord count from my previous run gave me 1 frame improvement. Expect similar profit in the future. I have done.
There are 2 x 8 enemies + fatman boss.
Fight times in frames
91 fighter
108 woman
90 bat
115 skeleton (i used slow spell to improve the fight 22 frames, but buying the spell cost 9 frames and $1000)
139 chicken (i can get 129 frames, but then the next enemy is in a bad cycle)
60 ghost
102 bull
100 spider (used slow spell to save 24 frames, can be done faster but then the next fighter is in bad cycle)
(now the fights repeat with stronger version of each fighter)
74 fighter II (cycle is at a perfect point where the fighter jumps instantly)
121 woman II (this is the worst fight of the run, but i failed to find better cycle without ruining other fights)
90 bat II
71 skeleton II (bought and used $2000 attack cancel spell, so that the enemy instantly jumps instead of attacking)
139 chicken II
60 ghost II
108 bull II (i used slow spell and wasted 6 frames to manipulate the next fight)
89 spider II (this is the fastest spider cycle that i have found, it can be done in the first spider also, but then the other fights are slower)
29 fatman
Other
Screenshot frame: 305
Thanks
Thanks to TASVideos. Special thanks to world record speedrunner P1ZZAC4T for the idea.
Speedrun WR is 2:14: https://www.speedrun.com/tongue_of_the_fatman_genesis
Memory: Judging
Memory: Reset to new
Samsara: I dunno how a perfect likeness of me made it into a video game but dang, guess I better judge it!!!
Samsara: First off, how dare you, I told you not to submit those fight videos I did. I sent you them in good faith that you wouldn't show them to the world but here you are!!!
Jokes aside (apart from the game, which is a joke in and of itself), there's a couple things we need to talk about with this submission. Namely, code usage and tier.
Given the voting for this run (both in terms of amount of votes and the votes themselves), it's pretty clear that this would be a Vault run. Under our current ruleset for Vault...
"A movie that uses codes (even secret ones) to play an unlockable level set, use a built-in hard mode, or enable cosmetic changes improving the game, is eligible for this tier. Other unlockable content not present from the game start is disallowed, unless it is required for full-completion."
Now, I specified "under our current ruleset" because it is entirely possible this can change in the future. The beauty of this site is that weird borderline submissions like this often lead to productive discussions on our rules, and indeed that's what happened with this one! I brought up the idea that we could further allow character unlock cheats in Vault if they lead to fastest completion, as they do here... But.
That leads to a dangerous precedent going forward. Allowing character unlock cheats in the name of fastest completion could end up with a sweep of obsoletions that, frankly, would end up being too trivial under normal circumstances. It's only a small step down from allowing ALL cheats in Vault for fastest completion, and... Yes, I'm aware that the slippery slope logic is a fallacy, but I think it actually does apply here since it's a completely logical leap to make. Allowing me Mon'du is basically saying "Yes, by all means, use the intentionally hidden overpowered character to beat the game as fast as possible". What would stop someone from arguing "Yes, by all means, use the unlimited health cheat to beat the game as fast as possible" after that?
You may think that we could just say "Allow only character unlocks in fighting games" or something, but that leads to an even bigger problem down the road, which is the fact that our rules are already so labyrinthine that I'm surprised we're not asking people to assemble a silver monkey. We're defining a general ruleset here that applies to as many games as possible. Adding new clauses means we have to weigh them against everything. We could allow character unlock cheats in Vault, but that would mean redefining the Vault rules entirely as a result due to what we would be allowing in the long run. I don't think we're ready to do that. None of the staff do.
And that's why the discussion we had went the way it did. We admit that we're not completely clear on cheat usage, so I'd like to take a moment and define the cheat usage rules here as best I can, including what we just came up with. As it stands, for speed records, cheats that make the game easier are explicitly not allowed. This applies to all of Vault and applicable Moon/Star runs, and covers everything from unlimited health, to level select, and most importantly in this case, unlocking overpowered characters. Cheats that make the game harder, including unlockable hard modes, are allowed in all tiers. Cheats that unlock hidden levels are also allowed in all tiers as a means of just being able to play more dang levels.
What we decided on, for right now, is that cheats to unlock characters, even suboptimal ones, are not allowed in Vault, meaning that only the default unlocked characters can be used. To explain this... Vault right now is a bit of a double edged sword in regards to character usage. Using an overpowered unlockable character for fastest completion is against the rules to begin with, as we explicitly disallow SRAM and cheats are really just non-save-anchored SRAM if you sit down and think about it. With suboptimal characters, that also goes against the rules of the Vault, as a suboptimal character would inherently not be fastest completion.
Changing those rules for Vault would require looking at Vault in an entirely different way. Mainly, we'd have to look at it from a perspective other than all-or-nothing, which is too radical of a change for us to be making at this point in time. That's not to say we will never make this change: Judging (as I am wont to do) from the conversation, it's almost certainly a given that we WILL in fact be discussing this more in the future, but that would likely take a good number more edge-case submissions like this or a massive overall look at the rules in general. I can see this getting accepted when that happens.
To actually talk about the run, it's clear a lot of work went into making it as fast as it could be, carefully manipulating patterns through earlier fights and ensuring that the overall is the fastest it can be... And I actually really like the run. It's my kind of weird, ridiculous, overly fast nonsense, and it stands out from other fastest completion fighting game runs by the fights being near instant and the downtime being at a minimum. It's just that the audience doesn't agree with me... And honestly, given my tastes in entertainment, I'm not at all surprised by that.
Watch this space in the future when we redefine the Vault, but for now, I'm rejecting this run for cheat usage. A run using one of the default characters would be acceptable, but for right now, me Mon'du is not.