Opossum Country is a 2020 horror homebrew game for the GBC, submitted to the Scream FM game jam and ultimately won the jam. It follows a food delivery guy's journey to a secluded and mysterious settlement filled to the brim with opossums. As he finds a creepy girl in a large caravan, the mystery of 'who does this food belong to?' becomes 'what the hell is this place; how do I get out?'. This TAS aims to complete the storyline in as little time as possible.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.8
- Aims for fastest completion
- Manipulates RNG
Comments
The game has very linear gameplay and there's not really anything we can do besides follow the story and collect the only three necessary items, those being a phone, chainsaw and gun. After talking to everyone in the correct order, we can journey into the woods, use our shotgun to shoot off a lock guarding the area the girl went in, journey up to the radio tower before deciding we don't like the sight of bodies ripped in half and rushing back down. Then the game ends on us face to face with the girl again, except she, too, is being ripped in half by an opossum.
RNG manipulation
From what I could tell, the amount of opossums and the patterns they followed depended on the frame they were loaded in. This also seemed to include the frame the tree was chainsawed. Luckily enough, all we need to do is shoot the lock 2 frames after it can first be shot and all the opossums for the rest of the run do exactly as we want. The only minor timeloss is when we exit the radio tower and we have to wait 3 frames before the opossums part, allowing us to move without having to battle one. This seems unavoidable but the pattern is still a desirable one.
Potential improvements
One thing I really wanted to include in this TAS was a trick dubbed lock skip. It ends up warping you all the way to the screen above and skips two entire rounds of walking through opossums. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I tried to replicate the example in the video and tried out other input combinations, nothing worked. I did start to wonder whether or not this trick is exclusive to the web version but I have my doubts since I assume the game runs the exact same. After enough time spent trying different inputs, I decided that if it was possible, I wasn't going to be able to get it and that it wasn't worth it in the end. Of course, if someone does decide to try to work it out, I'll be more than willing to add it.
ThunderAxe31: Claiming for judging.
ThunderAxe31: Un-claiming.
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Everything looks good and fair. Adding cycle count and accepting.
despoa: Processing...
ViGadeomes: Changing the movie file into GBA mode to enable console verification with agreement from the author.