NOTE TO ENCODERS: Don't get confused if you see a black border around the game feed when making the video. The resolution of this game changes during gameplay and is noticeably smaller when we are playing on a board.
Table of contents
Goals
- Beats the Game
- Starts from SRAM
- Plays on hardest difficulty
- Has an insane amount of RNG manip
- Takes damage to save time
- Takes a death to save time
- Second quest/Post game-completion
- Genres: board game, party game, platformer.
This TAS aims to beat the story mode on the Super Hard difficulty, which is the hardest possible difficulty. Super Hard is not available from a clean cart, so here's the confirmation movie that completes the story mode on the Hard difficulty to unlock it. Note that playing on an already completed file lets us skip many cutscenes throughout the run, saving about 10-20 minutes of lore, which isn’t very interesting from a TAS point of view. Also, since Super Hard CPUs act less passively in minigames, they can lead to faster completion times. Therefore, Super Hard could actually be the fastest difficulty, though further testing should be done.
References
This submission will assume that you are aware of the rules of Mario Party as well as some of the strategies that can be used in order to win in a casual setting.
This video by ZoomZike goes into this game with great detail. If you're reading this, ZoomZike, we love your videos! Continue like that!
The Super Mario Wiki has good information regarding the duel mode.
As far as reference runs go, the only relevant speedruns that we found are the following:
- The RTA speedrun world records on super hard are:
- 4:57:37 by dalerben61 on console
- 4:43:41 by Fuzzyness on emulator
- The RTA speedrun world records on the easy difficulty (with a premade save file) are:
- 4:30:27 by dalerben61 on console
- 4:11:08 by dalerben61 on emulator
Note: using the rules of RTA timing (time starts on confirming the settings, time ends on the last hit on the Millenium Star), our TAS has a final time of 1:20:40.
The only TAS that focused on fastest completion that we could find was done in 1:39:06 by dalerben61 on Easy difficulty, using a clean cart. This TAS was actually a test run which left much room for further optimisation. It will still be the one used for the comparison with the current submission.
Due to the fact that the Millenium Star final boss has more health points on the Super Hard difficulty, the fight is roughly 50 seconds longer compared to the fight on the Easy difficulty.
- At the time of writing this, the real-time record for the Millenium Star fight is at 1:25.89, tied by multiple people.
- The fastest TAS that we found beats the boss in 1:25.69.
A Note on the RNG of This Game
While this game can seem to have an unbiased representation of any given RNG value at first glance, there are moments when it seems to have big biases for a very small set of particular values before switching to something different, sometimes for up to 100 frames. This is especially noticeable when it comes to dice rolls and minigame choices. So, while it may seem like the RNG of this game is fine in regular gameplay, the algorithm used by the games certainly did make RNG manipulation quite difficult for this TAS.
Indeed, the RNG manipulation forced us to redo entire board turns to scout for better luck on the next turn. On average, each singular turn was redone about 3 times, and some up to 10 times.
Note that on the game board, the RNG can only be manipulated by delaying the game, either by pressing Start to briefly pause the game during a CPU’s turn, or delaying an A press to close a textbox during your turn. Note that pausing the game loses a minimum of 12 frames, so while it is often used in this TAS due to it being the only technique available at certain moments, it is by far the worse one to use.
We noticed that inserting lag frames did change the RNG for minigame spawns positions and CPU strategies, while preserving the RNG results for dice rolls and minigame wheel choices. We tried to use this information to the best of our abilities, but we still have a very limited comprehension of the inner workings of the RNG and how to control for lag.
Strategies
Battle Royale Maps
For Battle Royale maps, the strategy involves using a Wacky Watch as quickly as possible through a hidden item box, to turn a 15-turns game into a 7-turns game, saving about 10 minutes per board. While getting a Wacky Watch from Toad on an item space is possible, the hidden box has a shorter animation.
First Star Spawn
Surprisingly, the first thing of importance that gets generated for a Battle Royale game is the spawn of the first star. It happens before the pre-game ceremony, after closing the textbox to start the game which says, "Ready for the Battle Royale? Then let's go!". Note that not all possible star spawns are available for the first one, and the number of possible first star spawns varies between maps.
Pre-game Ceremony
During the pre-game ceremony, everyone rolls a dice to determine the order of players. The time that each CPU takes to hit the dice is random and should be minimised. This can be manipulated by delaying closing the textbox that comes before the dice rolls. To manipulate what place Luigi gets, we simply delay Luigi's dice roll. As long as Luigi hits his dice before all the CPUs do, no time is lost doing so.
Manipulating the Hidden Boxes
In this game, there are 3 hidden boxes (item, coins and star) that can spawn on any blue space that can't switch to a star space. For the purposes of this TAS, we want the item box to spawn near the beginning of the board, and the other two to be far enough so that we won't land on them during the game. The spawning locations are generated upon starting the first board phase. We can delay the closing of the last textbox after the first star spawn is shown to manipulate the spawn of the hidden boxes. A Lua script was used to help with this section, by incrementally delaying the frame at which the text box is closed and by manipulating the dice roll of the first CPU to check if the first few spaces had any item boxes.
The content of the item box is determined upon stepping on the blue space that contains it. An item box has a 5% chance of giving a Wacky Watch, so pausing the game was necessary to manipulate those.
The Board Phase
The board phase of the Battle Royale is pretty simple, as dice can be individually manipulated. Reducing the number of spaces that are travelled per turn is obviously faster. However, due to the variance of the waiting period to get low rolls, it is not always faster to roll the absolute minimum.
The following spaces are avoided at all costs, due to them causing a useless, time-wasting event:
- Bowser Spaces
- Chance Time Spaces
- Game Guy Spaces
- Battle Spaces
- Happening Spaces
- Star Spaces
Furthermore, for Bank Spaces, it is actually 100 frames faster to land on the space when the bank is empty compared to passing over it but triggering the animation to pay Koopa.
For Item Spaces, these spaces are used as a last resort if we need some extra green spaces to manipulate minigame types or to avoid tiebreakers at the end of the game (since a character does not get coins when landing on them). On any turn that isn't the last one, the fastest scenario of Item Spaces is to let a CPU land on it, then lose an item minigame. This loses about 5 seconds compared to landing on a default blue space. However, landing on an Item Space on the last turn simply gives a textbox saying that it's the last turn, losing only half a second. This is why all Item Spaces are landed on in the last turn in this TAS.
The minigame wheel
This phase starts by first assigning the blue or red colour for the players that landed on green spaces, if there are any. This step takes 50 frames if it happens, and can be manipulated by controlling when the minigame wheel appears by pausing right before.
Note that the set of minigames appearing on the wheel is generated at the same time as the colour assignment.
When you press A to make the wheel start spinning, the already assigned minigames list on the wheel is shown, and the minigame as well as the animation used to pick the minigame are chosen. Delaying that A press allows us to choose a different outcome with the wheel.
When a game is chosen, it will not show on the minigame wheel again until the list of remaining minigames gets short enough, or until you leave and rejoin the game. Boards do not last for enough turns for a refill to happen. Also, it takes at least 17 seconds to reset the game list via saving and quitting, which is way beyond the time gain that you'd get out of replaying some minigames a second time which would never be above 10 seconds. Therefore, for each board, seven different minigames will be played.
Minigame choices
Here's a table showing the 15 fastest minigames, and a short explanation of why or why not they were considered. Note: obtaining a draw in a minigame saves 138 frames on the result screen, as no panels have to be flipped to show the coin gains.
| Minigame | Approx. duration (frames) | Can get a draw | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Snowball Summit | 980 | Yes | Fastest minigame because it has a really short intro cutscene. |
| Ice Rink Risk | 1030 | Yes | Getting a draw involves getting the last 2 people to die on the same frame. |
| Coconut Conk | 940 | No | Fastest minigame by gameplay. Slightly faster if the player is in the team of 3. |
| Treadmill Grill | 1030 | Yes | Really long intro cutscene. |
| Spotlight Swim | 1020 | No | Player must be on the team of 1 and lose. |
| Tidal Toss | 1080 | No | Pausing is the only way to affect waves if a CPU is in the middle. |
| Crazy Cogs | 1240 | No | Really easy to TAS if Luigi is on the team of 1. Hell otherwise. |
| Bounce 'n' Trounce | 1310 | Meh | Setting up a draw almost negates the time saved from getting a draw. |
| Hand, Line and Sinker | 1320 | No | Fastest minigame to not be included in the TAS. |
| Toadstool Titan | 1330 | No | Like Ice Rink Risk, but slow. Done in 1 board. |
| Picture Imperfect | 1650 | No | Everyone wins if they draw, which does not save time. Toad face is the fastest pattern. Has a really long end cutscene. Not done in this TAS. |
Character spawn positions, certain gameplay elements (such as the treadmills in Treadmill Grill) and CPU behaviour in minigames is random. The initial state can be manipulated before the minigame starts by delaying the start of the minigame.
On some boards, some minigames can be done in any order. Therefore, it was worth it to look at the RNG of the next turn to know which minigames would lead to a better future outcome. For the early turns, we pretty much TASed every possible minigame to know which one led to the fastest next turn. This was one of the reasons why some turns had to be TASed multiple times.
While the Easy mode TAS used Cheep Cheep Chase to get quick draws, it cannot be completed fast enough when you play against Super Hard CPUs. Therefore, this minigame is not done in this TAS.
Minigame Strategies
Snowball Summit
The strategy is to make a closed loop of snowball throwers-targets. In this case, everyone loses as fast as possible, making the game end in a draw. The game is over when at least 3 people are considered defeated.
Something about this game that we did not understand is the variable amount of time for someone to be considered defeated when they fall off the summit. That delay can sometimes be as long as 2 in-game seconds, and it's only something that we've been able to manipulate through trial-and-error.
Ice Rink Risk
For this one, we manipulate the initial CPUs movements so that everyone clumps in front of the shell, and then make sure that nobody dodges the shell. It is often necessary to let the last CPU jump so that we have enough time to set up a draw, as getting a draw in this game requires the last people to be hit by the shell on the exact same frame.
Coconut Conk
We want to manipulate Luigi to spawn in the middle and the bottom CPU to do something stupid so that it fails to dodge the first coconut. Sometimes, a small delay before starting the ground pound is all it takes to make the bottom CPU go crazy, making it for a decently fast kill.
Treadmill Grill
This one is by far the most luck-dependent minigame in this TAS. The amount of luck required is very high.
- Luigi needs to spawn on the left side (for some reason, the right side doesn't work)
- Both middle conveyors need to go to the left at the fastest speed, and for long enough.
- The conveyor on which 2 CPUs fight must have the one on the right win. If not, they get stuck in the middle, and the loser of that duel must not attempt to jump to save themself.
- Once there are 2 people remaining and the player comes to deliver the winning punch, the CPU has a chance to jump to try to save themself. We don't want that.
- Once the 3rd CPU is defeated, we have until the minigame ends to run off the treadmill to cause a draw. Some runs of this minigame died because the treadmill would just switch direction before Luigi got to fall off, preventing a draw from happening. This game is fun and not at all frustrating.
Some maps were not able to achieve such luck. As a result, some boards had to go for a strategy that lost about half a second to almost a full second on this minigame.
Spotlight Swim
Press down to lose. That’s it. It is only viable to play this minigame with Luigi as the loser, as super hard CPUs dive almost perfectly to avoid being caught.
Tidal Toss
In this minigame, the only way to manipulate the waves produced by the middle player is pausing the game.
The accuracy of the CPUs’ jumps is also random. In order to fix that, we sometimes have to push them to mess up their timing, sabotaging the team in the process.
Here are the 2 best patterns to have for this minigame:
- Big wave
- Short wait + small wave
- Big wave
- Big wave
- 2 small waves
- Big wave
Crazy Cogs
You'd think that this minigame is very hard to TAS, but it's actually among the easiest. CPUs tend to run in the same direction for long periods of time, so their movement can be easily predicted. Therefore, this minigame is really only about manipulating the Bullet Bill spawns.
Bounce 'n' Trounce
g0goTBC used to say that physics in this minigame is something that even someone with a PhD in physics would not be able to understand. However, someone else in our team actually has one, and we were able to understand the physics of the game. I guess the joke fell a bit short…
When someone is touching the ground, they are immune to other characters’ knockbacks.
When multiple people are colliding while spinning, the priority is given to the highest person.
The power of the knockback is based on the difference of vertical velocity. The bigger the difference, the bigger the knockback.
Someone is considered defeated when they hit a certain height, slightly below the platform.
This minigame is very chaotic, so it was optimised through trial-and-error until something good came out of it. There definitely isn't just one good strategy for this.
Toadstool Titan
This minigame is like Ice Rink Risk, but slower, and with no possibility of a draw.
We first manipulate the good block to be in a block that someone would hit on their first hit. Then, we manipulate a CPU to get the mushroom as fast as possible. After this, it's a matter of manipulating the other CPUs so that the mega CPU can win in 1 charge as fast as possible.
Post minigame results screen
After the minigames, we can waste frames in the results screen to manipulate the dice roll of the first player for the next turn instead of having to pause. This is why we never make the player play first on any board.
"5 Turns Remaining" Event
If the Wacky Watch was used on the second turn, at the beginning of the third turn (out of 7), an event plays to warn that the game is almost over.
During this event, a prediction is made for who will win the game and a reward or a punishment is given to them. The outcome of the prediction is random, and is skewed in favour of the people that trail behind. The fastest outcome is when Toad invites the Millenium Star to make a prediction, and then awards the predicted winner 10 coins. We manipulate the RNG so that the player wins the prediction prize. Believe it or not, these 10 coins are what makes the player win every Battle Royale map in this TAS.
Post-game Ceremony
Once the last turn is over, a ceremony is played to award bonus stars, then crown the winner.
The game awards 3 bonus stars at the end of the game. One for the character that has won the highest number of coins in minigames, one for the players that have reached the highest number of coins at any point during a game, and one for the people that have stepped on the highest number of happening spaces. However, if there is a 4-way tie for a star, the game does not give the star, skipping the 4 seconds animation. Let's see how each of them were taken into account in the routing.
For the minigame star, we can have everyone win the same number of minigames by cleverly picking the minigames. Every board picked a combination of these minigames, with either a draw (D) or a win (W):
- Snowball Summit (D)
- Ice Rink Risk (D)
- Coconut Conk (W for team of 3 including player)
- Spotlight Swim (W for team of 3 excluding player)
- Tidal Toss or Toadstool Titan (W for team of 1 excluding player)
- Treadmill Grill (D)
- Crazy Cogs or Bounce 'n' Trounce (W for team of 1 including player)
Note that Crazy Cogs is slightly faster than Bounce 'n' Trounce, and Tidal Toss is slightly faster than Toadstool Titan.
For the happening star, it's very simple. We are already avoiding happening spaces due to the long cutscenes that are caused by landing on them. Doing so, we get a 4-way tie.
For the coin star, we do not think it is possible to efficiently skip it. Indeed, making all characters end the game with the same number of coins is ridiculously hard considering the "5 turn remaining" event and the red/green spaces necessary to get 1v3 minigames. On top of that, skipping all bonus stars would mean that all characters have the same score, and the presence of the obligatory tie-breaker event would only save 1 second (instead of 4 for each of the two other ties). This is not worth the set-up for this situation.
Indeed, when crowning a winner, if 2 or more people that are tied, a tie-breaker die roll happens. The CPUs take a random amount of time to hit their dice, similar to pre-game ceremonies. This dice roll takes around 3 seconds. This tie-breaker roll does sometimes happen in this TAS. Here are some alternatives to avoid this that you might think of, but that don't work:
- Winning instead of drawing a minigame, and vice-versa. Doing so would cause the minigame star to be awarded, which loses 4 seconds.
- Using a green space instead of a blue space. In all the maps where a tie-breaker happens, the only viable green spaces are item spaces, and those maps’ layout do not allow landing on them on the final turn. Landing on an item space is only worth it on the final turn, otherwise it would take a minimum of 5 seconds.
Duel Maps
Duel maps are a lot simpler than Battle Royale maps due to the fact that we can win a duel before hitting the 15 turns limit by having the opponent run out of health. Furthermore, we do not have to worry about minigames or bonus stars on this board.
Pre-game ceremony
The ceremony starts with a "Millenium Star flip", which decides which character goes first. That flip has a random duration and result which can be easily manipulated by delaying closing the textbox that comes before. Note that having the player going first saves about 1 second in this ceremony, as the players do not have to switch sides after the star flip. Also, the person that goes first will always start on the left side of the map, while the second player will start on the right side of the map.
The character of the duel partner is determined by the player’s character. The fact that the Goomba is attributed to Luigi is what makes him the optimal player character for this speedrun. Luigi and Yoshi both have a partner that has an attack of 2 (compared to 1 for the other characters), and the Goomba’s animations are faster than Boo’s (Yoshi's partner).
After the partners’ introduction, each player gets to decide the partner’s position: front or back. The choice is random for some CPUs (with typically a strong preference towards one option), though some of them will always pick one of the options (DK always puts the Whomp behind him, for example). This can sometimes be manipulated by delaying the textbox that closes before you get to make your partner’s position choice.
Board phase
For this section, the goal is simply to destroy our opponent.
A good strategy for this mode is to power-up your goomba so that he does 4 points of damage per hit as opposed to 2, though at double the coin cost. Not only does this typically reduce the number of turns to deal 5 HPs worth of damage to the opponent, it also reduces the number of battle animations that take place, which are quite long. Power-ups can be obtained through either a power-up space or a happening space.
Minigame spaces and Game Guy spaces are constantly avoided, as minigames are pointless in this mode when you're trying to go fast.
End game ceremony
There really isn't much to talk about here. It's just a matter of closing the textboxes as fast as possible.
Stardust Battle
Due to the fact that this boss fight has a timer with frame precision and that this minigame is decently competitive in the minigame grinding scene, we decided to optimise the in-game time at the cost of losing a couple frames to lag. Lag reduction had to be done in the second phase of the minigame, and unloading stars was a decently effective way of saving lag frames. 4 frames were saved in this minigame against the fastest known IGT.
Board-By-Board Analysis
Overall Comparison with the TAS on Easy Difficulty
This table shows the time difference between this submission and the already-existing TAS on Easy difficulty. Note that the boards are timed from the fadeout after showing Peach's castle to the fadeout after selecting to not save on the post-game results screen. This ignores the time saved from playing on a premade save file. The given times are in seconds.
| Boards | New Submission | Easy Difficulty TAS | Delta | Notable differences |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chilly Waters | 0:09:36 | 0:11:01 | 0:01:25 | The Easy mode had to change a few settings in the pause menu. Long minigames were played in the Easy mode TAS. |
| Gate Guy | 0:03:02 | 0:03:04 | 0:00:02 | New route. |
| Deep Blooper Sea | 0:09:46 | 0:10:30 | 0:00:44 | The new TAS dodges the shop completely. |
| Arrowhead | 0:02:48 | 0:02:49 | 0:00:01 | Exact same strategy. |
| Spiny Desert | 0:10:00 | 0:10:48 | 0:00:48 | Much better star spawns. dalerben61 did Mario's Puzzle Party for entertainment in the Easy mode TAS. |
| Pipesqueak | 0:02:53 | 0:02:57 | 0:00:04 | New route. |
| Woody Woods | 0:10:00 | 0:10:42 | 0:00:42 | We dodge the shop completely. |
| Blowhard | 0:03:14 | 0:03:00 | -0:00:14 | Super Hard CPUs are too smart. |
| Creepy Cavern | 0:09:47 | 0:10:15 | 0:00:28 | |
| Mr. Mover | 0:02:50 | 0:02:49 | -0:00:01 | Same exact strat. |
| Backtrack | 0:02:50 | 0:02:50 | 0:00:00 | Same exact strat. |
| Waluigi's Island | 0:10:07 | 0:10:15 | 0:00:08 | Due to a desync, this board had to be done twice in the Easy mode TAS. As such, there was a clear step-up in the TASing abilities of dalerben61 when it came to this board. |
Chilly Waters
For this map, the first 3 available star spawns are the ones on the left side of the map. In theory, the middle-left star spawn has the fastest animation. However, due to the amount of time that it takes to manipulate this outcome, the bottom-left spawn ended up being faster.
Due to the fact that there is a shop about 10 spaces into this map, and that character cannot land on the same space in the final 5 turns without spawning a duel minigame, dice rolls had to be very strict. Any character passing in front of the shop would lose 3 seconds. That forced us to avoid this at all costs.
This map had a good balance between green, red and blue spaces. We were able to easily fit the 7 fastest minigames into the route.
Due to the unfortunate placement of the bank (on the 5th space) and the shop (on the 10th space), the map forces us to make everyone land on the bank one by one.
On the last turn, DK had to step on an item space to prevent a tie-breaker, and Luigi landed on a red space instead of the item space due to better dice + minigame wheel RNG.
We used a slower strategy in the Treadmill Grill minigame. While TASing Chilly Waters, we were not yet aware of the fastest strategy, so it might have been possible to implement it.
Gate Guy
The strat used in this TAS saves 2 seconds over the route used in the previous easy difficulty TAS by reducing the number of spaces travelled, letting Luigi be first, and never letting Wario reach the barrier.
A while after we were done with this board, Lightmopp found a faster route that saves an additional second by ending the board in 2 turns. A video of the new route can be found at the end of this submission.
Deep Blooper Sea
The star spawn was picked to lure CPUs into a given direction. With the star placed in the bottom-right corner of the map, barely any manipulation had to be done for CPUs to head there, avoiding the shop completely. To give an idea of how much time is saved compared to manipulating the CPU behaviour, I'd suggest watching the Woody Woods board.
Once again, dice rolls are very strict due to the location of the star. There's absolutely no leeway.
Since there are no red spaces on the bottom-right path for Luigi to land on, there was no way of getting Crazy Cogs, so it had to be replaced by Bounce 'n' Trounce.
Due to the fact that the bank was slightly closer to the start than Chilly Waters, we were able to have Mario and Wario step on the bank on the same turn, eliminating an additional 50 frame time loss from the green colour attribution of the minigame wheel.
Wario got the honour of using the Wacky Watch for this map. It saved about a second over manipulating the dice RNG of the first 2 turns for Luigi to get the Wacky Watch.
Arrowhead
The strategy used in this map is the same one used in the Easy mode TAS.
A theoretical strategy that could save time would be for Yoshi to roll a 10 and access the same power-up space through the middle of the map, but the Super Hard AI thinks that this is too dumb of a play to be considered.
Also, let me (g0goTBC) rant for a bit here. The center of the map is asymmetrical. Yoshi has the ability to roll a 10 and end up at the power-up space in the bottom-right corner of the map. However, if Luigi tries the same thing in the opposite direction for a faster 2-turn kill, it doesn't work! Luigi has to go through an extra space in the middle of the map, therefore requiring Luigi to roll an 11 to reach the top-left power-up space. Who designed the map like this !?
Spiny Desert
Spiny Desert has quite the tricky layout, with a shop in our face at the start, the only accessible red space being on the second space of the board, 2 star spawns to manage at once, and 2 intersections back-to-back after the ring of quicksand.
Note: the spawn right before the start of the map does not seem to be available for the first star spawns.
The star spawns that were chosen accomplished 3 things at once. First, the spawn animation of those 2 particular spots is faster. Second, for some unknown reason, they made all the CPUs not buy anything from the shop. Third, they made all the CPUs turn left at the first intersection.
Luigi had to land on the first space on the first turn and there wasn't a fast way of spawning an item box on that first space. Because of this, a CPU had to use the Wacky Watch for this board.
Since only 1 red space was available, Crazy Cogs had to be replaced with Bounce 'n' Trounce.
A tiebreaker had to be done for this map. You'd think that Peach would be kind enough to land on an item space on the 7th turn to make things easy and convenient, but she didn't want any of it.
Pipesqueak
The difficulty of this map comes from the fact that DK has a Whomp with 4 HP that he always places behind him. As such, attacking DK from the front ends up being the fastest option for this map.
The strategy used in this TAS is slightly different from the Easy mode TAS. Dalerben61 used a route where DK goes first and is defeated on the top of the screen. The new strategy makes Luigi go first to ambush DK at his base, reducing the total number of tiles travelled. Using the pipe to reach the reverse space in the bottom-right corner on the first turn ended up being barely faster (fewer than 20 frames) compared to landing on 2 reverse spaces.
Woody Woods
For this map, we use the star spawn with the fastest animation, since it doesn’t seem to affect anything on this board.
Note: the star spawn in the bottom-right corner does not seem to be available for the first star.
Since there is a shop to the left of the first intersection, we manipulate every CPU to go up at that intersection.
Due to the fact that landing on 2 red spaces would make us lose the game from not having enough coins, Crazy Cogs is again replaced by Bounce 'n' Trounce.
A tiebreaker is avoided by making DK land on an item space on turn 7. This greatly restricts the dice rolls during the whole board.
Blowhard
This is the only map where the Easy mode TAS ended up faster than this submission. The Easy mode TAS used a strategy which won in 1 turn by luring Peach in front of Luigi's base. While this strat is extremely fast and makes this board look almost trivial in Easy mode, Super Hard CPUs cannot make such dumb plays. Instead, she understands that her Toad partner is not strong at all. She tries to get to her base as fast and as safely as possible, forcing us to take a very awkward route through the map for a 2 turn win.
Another thing that makes this map awkward to route is that the fan placed in the middle of the map switches your partner from front to back and vice-versa every time you step on it. Adding the fact that there's no reverse space on this map, it is very hard to attack your opponent twice in a row.
Fun fact: the route used in the TAS was only 1 second faster than an alternative route where Luigi went first, and defeated Peach in 3 turns, without any power-up.
Creepy Cavern
We used the star spawn with the fastest animation, since it doesn’t seem to affect anything on this board.
There is a Whomp about 10 spaces into the map. We have to be strict about the dice rolls of the 3rd and 4th player, so that we can skip the Whomp dialogue for these characters. Making the 4th player only roll 1s also prevents them from reaching the first intersection.
Due to the bank’s placement, we can get 2 people to land on the bank at once to combine the colour attribution in a single turn. Doing more would force a third player to talk to the Whomp.
We are spoiled with a lot of green and red spaces in this board, so we picked the 7 fastest minigames to play.
Similarly to Deep Blooper Sea, due to the fact that we get 2 people on the bank space on turn 2, we avoided the tiebreaker event without any weird set-up.
Mr. Mover
Probably the most trivial duel. Make Mario land on the power-up space where both sides meet. Join Mario there. Defeat Mario on the next turn.
Backtrack
This map is notorious for being luck-based in real-time settings, as the map is just one star-shaped loop. As such, there's no way of controlling where you are going other than by hoping that you get favourable rolls. However, if you can get lucky with the rolls every time, this map is not too bad.
Waluigi's Island
This map was by far the trickiest to route due to how barren the beginning of the map is in terms of usable spaces to manipulate minigames. There is one singular red space on the first space of the board, which can only be used to get one 1v3 minigame. There is also a single item space, which requires taking a full lap around the ring with the bomb to reach on the last turn. The next available red space requires a 9 seconds detour to reach by taking the top path in the action time wheel, so it was out of the question. From those constraints, we were forced to reduce the number of 1v3 minigames by swapping 2 minigames to the fastest 4v4 alternative, resulting in a net loss of around 5 seconds.
- Crazy Cogs -> Bounce 'n' Trounce
- Tidal Toss -> Toadstool Titan
An alternative strategy that was considered was to use an item space to force a 1v3 on turn 6 with Waluigi. This would save time by Waluigi not being able to reach the intersection before the action time, but watching the full cutscene of an item space. This turned out to be about half a second slower than our current strategy of playing Toadstool Titan instead of Tidal Toss.
We get the star spawn with the fastest animation, as changing the spawn location did not seem to have an impact on the behaviour of the CPUs.
Note: the 2 spawns near the beginning of the map do not seem to be available for the first star spawn.
CPUs really wanted to spend their money on items on this map, but we didn't let them do that.
Known Improvements
We used a slower strategy in the Treadmill Grill minigame in Chilly Waters and Waluigi’s Island. While TASing Chilly Waters, we were not yet aware of the faster strategy, so time could have been saved there. The use of the slower strategy in Waluigi’s Island was due to bad RNG that we could not avoid.
We later found a faster route for Gate Guy that saves around a second.
Any way to manipulate the RNG on the board that does not require pausing would save an indescribably gargantuan amount of frames. Alternatively, we would welcome a deeper understanding of the Random Number Generator. Indeed, minigame choices and dice rolls seem to oscillate between a small set of values for long periods of time before switching regimes, which led to some long RNG manipulation periods.
We tried to minimise the (many!) lag frames as much as we could, but we rarely understood what caused them in the first place, so there’s probably work that could be done on that front.
Future Work
Seeing how this TAS turned out, there are 2 ideas that we think could be explored a bit more.
- One idea would be to make an "all minigames" TAS of Mario Party 3, which could be a nice playaround/demonstration of the minigames that this game has.
- This is technically the first TAS of a main mode of a traditional Mario Party game (sorry, Mario Party Advance). This TAS only optimises for time and skips a lot of game content, creating a "most uneventful playthrough". An example of a more entertaining TAS would be an All Boards TAS of Mario Party 1, where 100 stars would be gotten to unlock the final board of the game, therefore requiring more actions to be taken during the gameplay. Of course, such a TAS would take years to make, as the final time of such a run would probably be around 3-5 hours, but it could still be a cool TAS to watch.
FAQ, or Questions We Think You'd Ask
- Why do you let CPUs use the Wacky Watch?
It often saves time on the RNG manipulation to let the CPUs use the Wacky Watch, even with the time loss due to the CPUs not clearing text boxes instantly.
- How did you get the coin star in Creepy Cavern? Mario had more coins!
For the coin star, only the highest coin count that someone achieves at any point during a game is considered. The highest coin count that Luigi achieves is 67, at the end of the 6th turn.
- Why did you not do the fastest minigame on every turn?
A minigame cannot be replayed unless you save and quit (which takes around 20 seconds to do), or unless you play enough minigames for the pool of unplayed minigames to be small enough. In both cases, the list of available minigames would be resetted, but both are impractical to achieve. As such, 7 different minigames are played on every board.
- Why do you stagger the character’s position on the board?
If a character lands on a space occupied by another character in the final 5 turns, it will spawn a duel minigame. This was easy to forget since it never happens in this TAS.
- Why do you not always get perfect luck?
Getting perfect RNG everywhere would require too much waiting time to be worth it. As such, it is not faster to get perfect RNG everywhere.
- Why do you choke free wins in the minigames?
Each draw saves up to 2 seconds compared to a win in the results screen, since panels don't need to flip to show coin variations.
- Why do you lose minigames?
We do it to either end a minigame early, or balance out the minigame wins to skip the minigame star at the end of the game.
Special Thanks
- Mannix86, for providing moral support in Discord calls.
- The people who are involved in the development of N64 emulation. Not a single desync happened during the making of this TAS, and we're very thankful for that.
- Nicoplaysthings, for providing a better resource about the duel mode.
Darkman425: Mario's got his own third party? Gotta be the judge of that.
Darkman425: I have determined that the third party is Hudson Soft.
The heavy RNG manipulation on display here and the difficulty of actually getting it to do what you want seems to be a tremendously tough obstacle to overcome. What has been done in this TAS is still incredible with how much planning was needed to beat the RTA record by a few hours. The work in evaluating times to complete the quickest minigames, the luck to get the Wacky Watch as soon as possible, and the work to get as much optimal board positioning is incredibly impressive and fast.
Accepting for Standard. Removing the Super Hard from the branch since I don't think it's quite needed in the branch name, though the publisher can add it back in if they feel it's right.
EZGames69: Processing...