This is an Any% TAS of Kart Challenge (Playstation, PAL).
- Plays on hardest difficulty (Professional)
- Beats all 4 courses at breaknecking speeds
- Played with removed memory card to save time on loading screens
- Rerecord count: 22476
- Time spent on the TAS: about 12 hours
- Frame count: 41239
This is a budget racing game released only in PAL region in the year 2000. It only has 1 car and 4 tracks. I'm playing in Single Race mode with 3 lap settings. There's an option to choose more laps, but I don't see the point of doing that. It'd be too repetetive to watch.
I play on the Professional difficulty, as it's the fastest way to beat the game (all driving assists are turned off, allowing me to take the corners at faster speeds).
As there wasn't a single full playthrough of this game on Youtube, I figured out something must be done.
So here's this TAS. I played with analogs for smoother steering. I made the TAS in the classic way (dualshock controller in my hands, game running at 50% speed, save/reload/pause hotkeys bound to my controller). I would say it's fairly optimized for the amount of time I put into making it. There's potential to save about 0.5~1.0 second per race if I put a lot more time and effort into the project (cutting the offroad sections better, taking slightly better lines, keeping more speed through slow corners).
I skip the qualifications of each race, as they're pretty pointless. The opponents get overtaken in the first corner anyway.
There's one notable tech used in this run. Letting go of acceleration for a few frames, and then turning sharply can cause the kart to slide, which gives me better cornering. I use that in many sharp corners (you can hear the wheels squeel). The slide will end if I stop steering, but it will continue if I keep the analog slightly tilted. The wheel squeeling can also be heard when steering on offroads, but that doesn't really mean anything.
A general idea of going fast in this game is to conserve your speed. So, taking the sharp corners as wide as possible is usually the way to go. There are a few corners where I have to let go of acceleration to avoid crashing, and 2 corners in the third track where I actually have to break to make it out alive. It's pretty sad that you have to break in this racing game.
Staying on the grass/sand too long gives you a speed penalty. You can stay offroad for a short while without an issue. The game considers the car offroad if half of the car is visually outside the track.
The hitboxes of the walls are pretty horrible. If you see me taking a corner far away from a wall, that's because I would hit an invisible wall if I drove any closer.
There's 2 camera modes. I used the default one. Not sure if switching to the other view would affect the lag.
Possible improvements:
There is 1 small mistake I didn't notice until I finished the TAS: in lap 3 of the first track, I spend too much time on the grass and get a speed penalty, losing about 3 mph of speed. This is not a big deal, maybe 3 frames lost. I didn't want to redo the whole TAS just because of that. And I believe on lap 2 of the last track, I took one slightly unoptimal line, losing probably 1 frame. Again, not worth redoing the track. After I finished the TAS, I discovered I can skip the medal screens faster by mashing the Start button. Sadly, I found out about it too late, and redoing the whole TAS just to save 1-2 seconds on non-gameplay segments didn't sound like fun.
Dunno what else to write here. I've been dabbling in TASing for a couple years, but never actually finished anything because I was too ambitious and couldn't stay motivated for more than 1-2 week, eventually dropping every project I started. So since then, I've decided to make TASes that are considerably lower effort, but still kinda cool. I hope that's understandable. I'd rather make a "suboptimal" TAS than squeeze out every possible frame and lose motivation 25% through.
Enjoy the TAS, it's not super long. Have a nice day.
I play on the Professional difficulty, as it's the fastest way to beat the game (all driving assists are turned off, allowing me to take the corners at faster speeds).
As there wasn't a single full playthrough of this game on Youtube, I figured out something must be done.
So here's this TAS. I played with analogs for smoother steering. I made the TAS in the classic way (dualshock controller in my hands, game running at 50% speed, save/reload/pause hotkeys bound to my controller). I would say it's fairly optimized for the amount of time I put into making it. There's potential to save about 0.5~1.0 second per race if I put a lot more time and effort into the project (cutting the offroad sections better, taking slightly better lines, keeping more speed through slow corners).
I skip the qualifications of each race, as they're pretty pointless. The opponents get overtaken in the first corner anyway.
There's one notable tech used in this run. Letting go of acceleration for a few frames, and then turning sharply can cause the kart to slide, which gives me better cornering. I use that in many sharp corners (you can hear the wheels squeel). The slide will end if I stop steering, but it will continue if I keep the analog slightly tilted. The wheel squeeling can also be heard when steering on offroads, but that doesn't really mean anything.
A general idea of going fast in this game is to conserve your speed. So, taking the sharp corners as wide as possible is usually the way to go. There are a few corners where I have to let go of acceleration to avoid crashing, and 2 corners in the third track where I actually have to break to make it out alive. It's pretty sad that you have to break in this racing game.
Staying on the grass/sand too long gives you a speed penalty. You can stay offroad for a short while without an issue. The game considers the car offroad if half of the car is visually outside the track.
The hitboxes of the walls are pretty horrible. If you see me taking a corner far away from a wall, that's because I would hit an invisible wall if I drove any closer.
There's 2 camera modes. I used the default one. Not sure if switching to the other view would affect the lag.
Possible improvements:
There is 1 small mistake I didn't notice until I finished the TAS: in lap 3 of the first track, I spend too much time on the grass and get a speed penalty, losing about 3 mph of speed. This is not a big deal, maybe 3 frames lost. I didn't want to redo the whole TAS just because of that. And I believe on lap 2 of the last track, I took one slightly unoptimal line, losing probably 1 frame. Again, not worth redoing the track. After I finished the TAS, I discovered I can skip the medal screens faster by mashing the Start button. Sadly, I found out about it too late, and redoing the whole TAS just to save 1-2 seconds on non-gameplay segments didn't sound like fun.
Dunno what else to write here. I've been dabbling in TASing for a couple years, but never actually finished anything because I was too ambitious and couldn't stay motivated for more than 1-2 week, eventually dropping every project I started. So since then, I've decided to make TASes that are considerably lower effort, but still kinda cool. I hope that's understandable. I'd rather make a "suboptimal" TAS than squeeze out every possible frame and lose motivation 25% through.
Enjoy the TAS, it's not super long. Have a nice day.
Memory: Claiming for judging.
Memory: Nothing particularly stood out as suboptimal. Better racing lines are probably possible but not worth rejecting over. I kinda liked the sense of speed you got from this game. Accepting.
despoa: Processing...