Submission #7357: ShesChardcore's NES Pro Wrestling in 09:23.29

Hey yo. This submission of Pro Wrestling for the NES is roughly a 23s improvement over the currently published TAS (https://tasvideos.org/3565S ) The savings are due to pinning the first 8 opponents instead of using count outs for the entire run and a minor optimization during the count out section for all 8 of those fights. Total IGT is 5:28

I was looking into this game to improve the current RTA strats and I noticed that the current 1 loop record by Apollo22237 had a couple of 21s IGT winning by pin fall and that the TAS used count outs for 22s. I know we don't optimize for IGT but I told myself that if I could manage to get a 20 I would TAS out the entire run. I ended up getting a 19 on Star Man, refined it to 18 through the TAS and went from there. Thus, this TAS was born. This run was a lot more complex than I anticipated.

There are a few important things to consider:

Wrestlers have 239 health (cpu's is byte 0x0077) to start, and they can recover health via a timer byte (0x0076) that increments up by 6 every frame that they are not doing anything offensive or defensive, either standing/walking or laying. The byte does not increase if they are doing a move or you are doing something to them. When this byte reaches 256 they heal 1 hp and while that does not sound like much, it completely ruins some of the strats which are incredibly tight in the early fights. The opponent needs to be under 62 hp to get pinned successfully. A lot of the movement strategy in the TAS is to manipulate the heal byte but also to manipulate grapple outcomes.

I still don't fully understand the grapple mechanics but suffice it to say that we have to avoid grappling on certain frames that have the cpu's move get picked instead of ours (though we can occasionally delay our own move by 1 frame and win, not sure why.) Aside from the damage we also use the chosen move to control the position of the wrestlers to manip the ref position as best we can. When we pin, the ref has to run over to us to count it.

There are weak moves (body slam and hammer throw) medium moves (back suplex and special moves specific to each fighter) and strong moves (brain buster and pile driver) but we can't use the strong moves until the opponent is weakened. The brain buster sucks because the animation lands the enemy farther away than the pile driver (so we can't pick up or pin on the first frame) and also does less damage.

The most important thing to consider is that damage values change fight to fight (not randomly at least) so stuff gets complicated in a hurry. In some fights the move damage is actually higher than normal but once we get past Panther 2 it becomes mathematically impossible to pin anyone in 22s or less. Believe me, I tried. Closest I got was a 25 on Panther 3.

There is also a "get up" timer (0x0078) based on remaining health and the damage from the move, when it hits 0 the opponent gets up. This is occasionally faster than picking him up ourselves and lets us set up the brain kick (Hayabusa's special move)

Speaking of Hayabusa, he is the only choice for this run due to the brain kick. He's also one of 3 people who can use the pile driver (the rest have their down+b grapple overwritten by a weak special move) and the other 2 (Karn and Slender) are useless.

We open the fight by moving down and running towards the opponent. I intentionally miss the flying knee to get behind him quickly and land in the grapple facing left. This has 2 purposes. One, we land in the very beginning of a health timer cycle. If we grapple a frame sooner he will heal 1 damage from the first move and the strat would be dead. Two, position. The animation for the back suplex has us spin behind the opponent to use it so we suplex in the direction we're facing in the grapple. This lets us chain the moves in the direction we want.

The back suplex does 33 damage and two of those opens up the pile driver which is 54. 33, 33, 54 and 54 is 174 damage. 239-174 = 65 so we have to add in 4 more damage to pin him without letting him heal at all.

After the first back suplex, he walks toward us and tries to throw a kick which we interrupt by punching him, which does the 4 damage we need and lets us get in position for the rest of the moves.

One last thing to note is the use of short runs. By initiating a run and canceling it 5-6 frames later we can get into the grapples a couple frames quicker which is helpful for speed and grapple manips.

Similar concept but different execution. Karn has different melee animations since those are his special moves. It changes the strat and positioning a little but he goes down fast.

Here is where the damage value differences start. The bad news is that Panther only takes 3 damage from the punch. The good news is that he takes 30 from the brain kick (star/karn only took 22) so we can burn him down quickly but we have to be fast.

I open with the flying knee as it has a very fast recovery animation and does damage in the teens. Waiting for him to get up is faster than picking him up (partially due to the low damage of the knee) so we brain kick him as soon as possible and throw in a punch on the way into the grapples for good measure.

Amazon sucks. He takes 30 damage from the back suplex instead of 33 which actually matters more than it sounds like. He takes 30 from the brain kick as well. So I use a new flying knee position to land in position for an immediate brain kick and follow up with 2 more. For the last Pile driver I dash around behind him for position purposes.

He takes 37 from the brain kick. The pile driver is 43 so this is "oops, all brain kicks" and loop 1 is done.

The damage starts to be all over the place. Brain kick is 19, back suplex is 37, pile driver is a whopping 60. This match gave me hope (that was later destroyed by Amazon 2)

Very similar to 1 but the AI operates a little differently on loop 2 so we can't just copy and paste the inputs from the previous fight.

The last pin victim. By this point the damage values are atrocious but we can do juuust enough to squeak by faster than a count out.

Before the match starts there is a 3 frame window where you can do inputs. You can kind of see the slight movement before the bell. During this window you can initiate a run so you start running immediately when the match starts. I cancel the run right in position to initiate a grapple and throw them out of the ring myself which is roughly 0.3s faster than getting thrown out yourself. This lets you get a rare look at the plancha (or hilariously the "plunger" in the manual) and we have other fun along the way including Hayabusa's kicks being so powerful the wind knocks his opponents back, a head kick through the ring post and even a little teleport.

I had a blast with this. The game was way more complicated than expected and most of the strats would be nigh impossible for RTA. Hope you all enjoyed it!

Submission dedicated to Scott Hall.

Truncated: Claiming for judging.

Truncated: Accepting to Standard as an improvement to [2165] NES Pro Wrestling by goofydylan8 & Brandon in 09:46.10. I think that the entertainment factor is a lot better in addition to the time saved, now that it isn't just ring-outs. Nice job!

EZGames69: Processing...

EZGames69: Actually gonna let someone else do this one.

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