PinkyNoice's Comments
Barbie: Magic Genie Adventure is a licensed GBC game. In this game, an evil genie named Kardal has stolen the magic lamps from four of Barbie's friends. As Barbie, players attempt to recover the lamps by visiting five mystical cities filled with mystery and danger. Along the journey, Barbie gathers magic powers and abilities to help her on her quest. The goal is to find all four lamps. Once Barbie has found all four lamps, she'll need to confront Kardal from inside his palace.
OtakuTAS's Comments
Joined this project, after PinkyNoice's submittal as a new TASer. Cleaned up several hundred frames of his work and got it nearly polished, however life got too busy, so I then recommended a few more fixes that didn't fit my schedule to put in place (such as fixing the extremely suboptimal dark room including a very specific fix on the NPC), and Retro came in to finish it off.
My work was way too complicated to address in this description, so I recommend reading through the forum thread Forum/Topics/24541 across my dozens of posts to see the full extent of my work. Many many hours were spent on improving this (probably easily spent more than just redoing it completely but that was not my goal in mind as I love to help new TASers!), and I'm glad to see it work out.
You can also check out my published TAS of the minigames on a harder (hardest) difficulty: [5267] GBC Barbie: Magic Genie Adventure "Activity Mode, Genie Master" by OtakuTAS in 02:28.50
RetroEdit's Comments
A position tracking script and a light mod script were used to assist in making the TAS: https://github.com/RetroEdit/barbie-mga
The light mod script actually modifies the game, so if you're making a movie, you need to double-check that it still syncs without the script. In practice, it seemed to sync regardless, but it's always worthwhile to be careful. It's really only relevant for the two screens of Dragon Nursery.
Most of the game is spent on the magic carpet flying between sections. In these sections, you want to take care around walls; you can tactically gain or lose small amounts of position to arrive at your destination more quickly.
Many of the minigames appeared to be autoscrollers that couldn't save much time. It might be possible to modify the RNG, but modifications to earlier parts did not appear to alter minigame RNG. A few minigames deserve particular attention:
- Pegasus Flight School is on a two-frame cycle. Modifications to earlier parts may desync it, but often this seemed to be solved by inserting or deleting a frame in the prior menu press.
- Magic Rainbow Potion is a rotation-based matching puzzle, and probably the most challenging minigame. Some solutions were explored by hand, but this movie's solution is not mathematically proven to be optimal. In this minigame, each move costs 7 frames, and each rotation costs 16 frames. You can only rotate clockwise. You can get extra lag frames if you do the operations in a poor order (I think it's related to too many animations on-screen; for some solutions, lag seems unavoidable). The current solution has 11 moves, 10 rotations, and 0(?) lag frames for a total of
11(7) + 10(16) + 0 = 237 frames.
End
ThunderAxe31: Claiming for judging.
ThunderAxe31: File replaced with an improvement movie that implements the BIOS and saves 183 frames of actual gameplay.
ThunderAxe31: File replaced with a 340 frames improvement and adding RetroEdit to the authors list.
Hello and welcome to TASVideos, PinkyNoice! We usually don't require extreme levels of optimization for accepting a submitted TAS. As long as there aren't obvious possible improvements that can be noticed by watching a movie casually, it's alright. In order to achieve this, I recommend using the TAStudio tool of BizHawk, which makes it easier to insert and change inputs to every specific frame. This time two fellow TASers contributed on their own initiative, but remember that you can always ask help anytime, if you'll ever need it again! Start a discussion on the forums or in our Discord server anytime you have a doubt. You may even contact me in private for anything. See you around!
This TAS ended up very optimized, and the ending point is appropriate (similar precedent here). Accepting.
despoa: Processing...