This submission is for Super Dodge Ball for the NES. You travel the world mercilessly slaughtering opponents with various special shots in an effort to become the best dodge ball team in the world.
This is an improvement over the original publication from 2006 [742] NES Super Dodge Ball by Dasrik in 05:47.16 (though that was a former moons run) by utilizing better strategies and manipulations. I am including Dasrik as a co-author even though I reworked everything, as I built off their inputs initially after converting everything to Bizhawk so they still made a contribution to this TAS.
Their write up covers all there is to know about the game, so I'll just add my notes.
The long and short of it is that Sam is amazing. The Blaster ball, even with diminishing returns, causes a ton of damage overall. However, as you get deeper into the game, the difficulty increases and the AI dodges/catches much more often, so the bulk of the time save is optimizing the AI manipulations. This is generally done by doing things at different angles, on different frames, and so forth. There are a lot of little delays throughout the run to get everything lined up properly, but this is very much worth it to be able to get more hits in on more enemies more frequently as evidenced by the time savings.
Time was saved on every level, ranging from a small amount of frames in the early levels to almost 5 seconds on Shadow team. Iceland also saw a drastic improvement.
Samsara: "The long and short of it is that Sam is amazing." Correct! Judging.
Samsara: Yep, that's a sportball!
There's a huge amount of humor to be mined from the fact that the exact same strategy works around the world, even down to Literally Your Own Team. Like, you'd think the other teams would be studying game tapes and putting together a counterattack or something, but nahhhhhh. It's like they all think "Okay, the last guys lined up for the Blaster and all got knocked into next Tuesday. Let's all line up for the Blaster and aim for Monday."
Great work on the manipulation, and accepting as an improvement to the published run!
despoa: Processing...