#7199: Randomno, dekutony & solarplex's DS Club Penguin: Elite Penguin Force: Herbert's Revenge in 22:25.92

Heavy glitch abuse
Emulator settings:
- Advanced Bus-Level Timing OFF
- Dynamic Recompiler OFF
- Rest default

About

Herbert's Revenge is a point-and-click adventure puzzle game. It's the sequel to Elite Penguin Force, which is based on the Flash game Club Penguin. In 2015 dekutony and solarplex released a TAS of this game, and since then various improvements have been found. With DSHawk seemingly going nowhere, I started work on a new TAS in July. I reused solarplex's inputs in several of the minigames, and also dekutony's in a few.

Improvement table

mission	2015	2021	difference	cumulative
1	8135	5704	2431	2431
2	9646	7949	1697	4128
3	7393	3573	3820	7948
4	10332	7868	2464	10412
5	8929	7354	1575	11987
6	9467	7043	2424	14411
7	9420	8915	505	14916
8	12341	10732	1609	16525
9	11105	10020	1085	17610
10	12549	11363	1186	18796

New techniques

Pause click/simultaneous click

Essentially clicking two things at the same time or in immediate succession. This is used many times throughout the TAS, for example to leave rooms early or to click on things during conversations. Usually a pause is required to click the desired object.

Fade-in click

When you are fading into an area, you can interact with objects to trigger some of their properties, but not all. This can be used on some minigame triggers to "activate" them without actually starting them, so they can be skipped by finishing a different minigame. It is also often used to skip phone calls as the phone will not open during a fade-in.

Whistle close

When the puffle whistle closes, you gain control of the cursor. The main use of this is during room transitions to have control of the cursor when you enter the room (in instances where it would usually be disabled). It can also be used when spawning puffles, as most of the time if you use the puffle fast enough, the whistle will close during their animation and you regain control of the cursor.

Minigame exits

Pausing and exiting a minigame in most cases saves a few frames, adding up to a couple of seconds overall.

Whistle item pick-up

This is not any sort of glitch but simply picking up items while the puffle whistle is open, to make use of some time that would otherwise be spent doing nothing.

D-pad scrolling

In this game you scroll at a faster speed with the cursor. However, there is a small wait before you start scrolling with this method. I found in many instances scrolling with the D-pad was faster because of the instant movement, despite the slower max speed.

Mission comments

Mission 1: The Elite Penguin Force

I tested various strategies on the puffle section, and ended up with a roughly 90-frame improvement. After that is a major sequence break found by weils which uses the whistle closing technique. Doing it upon exiting the training room allows you to skip the conversations in the next room, and then re-enter the room you just left, triggering a later part of the mission and saving about 40 seconds.

Mission 2: Secret of the Fur

This mission starts to show off the new techniques well. It uses pause clicks throughout, but the biggest timesave is right at the end, clicking the X at the same time as inserting the white fur, to skip a lengthy cutscene.

Mission 3: Questions for a Crab

Another major skip here, utilising a fade-in click, two pause clicks, and a whistle close. The fade-in click retains the map upon entering the Wilderness. The whistle close is used to click the cave door early, where a pause click is used to again retain access to the map. The last pause click escapes Herbert's conversation to leave the Wilderness early with the necessary progress to complete the mission.

Mission 4: Mysterious Tremors

Roughly 15 seconds are saved by using the soda barrel to lift the gift shop, rather than the helium balloon. The rest comes from multiple cutscene skips, and some fast item pick-ups.

Mission 5: Spy and Seek

Quite a complicated mission to route, while incorporating some cutscene skips on the tracking devices, and skipping the welding minigame with the duck minigame. There is also a skip at the Plaza, which interestingly glitches the door to the Stage, a room which should not be accessible in this mission.

Mission 6: Waddle Squad

At the start is a small but significant sequence break in the conversation, one of the few of its kind in the game. The cogs minigame is skipped using Rookie's minigame. Unfortunately neither Jet Pack Guy's nor Rookie's minigames are skippable as you must be in the room for the objective to complete. The lengthy cutscene at the dock is skipped using a whistle close.

Mission 7: The Veggie Villain

This mission has few timesaves. Exiting the wrench minigame additionally skips a cutscene afterwards, saving more time than usual.

Mission 8: Suspect at Large

The puffle section near the start of the mission had several route options, and I'm pleased with the result. It also features the first "jigsaws" of the run, which are quite fun to TAS when you get the hang of them. Later in the mission I use a variety of tricks to save time.

Mission 9: Herbert's Plan

Considering the lack of new techniques in this mission the improvement was quite good. I considered some other routes rescuing the penguins but they didn't pan out. Right at the end is a pause click on the mission log to save a few seconds.

Mission 10: The Ultimate Mission

A lot of items to pick up here. I use several transition pause clicks, some of which save very little time. Both Dot and Gary's minigames are skippable here but neither appear to be worth it. I exit the Ski Village early twice, and try to optimise my puffle spawns as much as possible.

Special thanks

weils for constant support and suggestions.
Olivercomet for making EPFExplorer. While I didn't get much use out of it, it's a great tool to have.
nhaar for never watching the videos I made of skips. (nhaarBlackPuffle)
PASRC for making the encode and providing some technical support.
Anyone else who watched my stream or progress videos.