Submission #7987: Cephla's NES International Cricket "Fast Game" in 01:14.03

International Cricket is a 1992 NES cricket game released exclusively in Australia. It features 3 game modes: fast game, single game and world series. This TAS aims to win a fast game in as little time as possible.

The fast game mode has two random teams play one innings each so once a team is all out, that's it. That's basically all that's different with the fast game mode, though. I didn't seem to be able to get anyone out via leg before wicket which seemed to be quite heavily used in single game which may have made things a bit harder.

Before even starting the game, I go into the options menu and turn off 'bowl screen'. This is a screen that appears every time your team bowls and it tells you what type of ball you can play. Switching it off loses ~200 frames but that time is gained back during our bowling innings. At first I was unsure whether it was actually worth removing it but after doing numerous quick attempts with and without it, without it always won.

After selecting fast game > one player, I choose Sri Lanka to bat first because it saves ~3 frames over coin toss and it doesn't matter which order we bat it.

The fastest way to get through the batting portion of the run is for every batsman to be bowled out. You'd expect the bowler to be on target more often but you'd be surprised (or at least I was) by how few times the bowler actually hits the stumps. This brings us onto the magic of the run that is rng manipulation. Both the bowler's delivery and the opposing batsman will bowl or bat based on the frame the pitch is loaded in or the frame we decide to bowl. This means we have to delay almost all balls to get the bowler to hit the stumps so all we need to do is get out of the way.

However, we do actually need to score at least one point to win. The fastest way to do this isn't to smash the ball into the boundary. Nope, we just need to get a no ball which is automatically one point for us; no need to actually play the game like we're meant to. A no ball is fast and all but we can go one step further and have the bowler get a no ball and hit the stumps. This prevents the game loading in the pitch and having to wait for the wicket keeper to catch it but he may miss it and we'd have to wait even longer. Unfortunately, doing this on batsman 5 means we have to go through the 'HOWZAT' 'NOT OUT' screens which do lose a bit of time. For some reason, I found that this wasn't the case on batsman 6 who had the next ball load in immediately after the stumps were hit. I was only able to force a no ball + stumps 2x in a row on batsmen 1-4 which is why it isn't done on 5. We continue being bowled out first try for the remaining 6 batsmen.

This such an rng-fest and it was absolute hell to TAS. We have a total of 5 ways to bowl: A | A+U | A+D | A+L | A+R so there are five button combinations that need to be tested on each and every frame. This is made worse by the fact that what button combination we select is only a guideline for the bowler. We don't actually get to decide where the ball lands. Couple this with the batsman doing a different thing for each ball and you have an incredibly difficult situation to manipulate.

For batsmen 1 and 10, I had to resort to running them out because there wasn't a single frame and set of inputs that would bowl them out. This secondary way of getting them out involves the batsman hitting the ball back straight towards the bowler. They also need to hit it back fast enough that the batsmen think it's safe to run so that they can actually be run out. There did seem to be a speed at which they rarely hit it that meant that they didn't run unless R was held 5 frames after the pitch was loaded in. This fortunately wasn't the case. In some other attempts, I once got the batsman to hit a ball so that it went straight towards the bowler and it hadn't hit the ground, meaning they could be caught out and there'd be less time having to wait for the 'you're out' screens to load in.

Better RNG is obviously the spot where this run can be improved. However, everything is decided literally on a frame-by-frame basis. So let's say you spend one more frame on the title screen. Nothing (should) change. That said, I did get different results almost every time I tried again. There's no doubt the rng can be improved but I reached my limit and just wanted to be done with the game after getting to the end of this match and so here we are. There are also probably a million different variables I haven't considered.