Submission #8920: LoganTheTASer & nymx's ZXS The Golden Baton in 04:40.61

ZX Spectrum
baseline
(Submitted: GoldenBatonThe.tzx Digital Fantasia)
BizHawk 2.9.1
14053
50.080128205
2847
PowerOn
Submitted by LoganTheTASer on 3/3/2024 4:33 PM
Submission Comments

About the Game

The Golden Baton is a 1983 text adventure released by Digital Fantasia, and is the 1st instalment in Brian Howarth's Mysterious Adventures series. Your mission is to recover the Golden Baton, a priceless artefact that holds within it a kind of life force that maintains the equilibrium between good and evil. Stolen from the Palace of King Ferrenuil, the kingdom is already beginning to feel the effects of drought and pestilence.

About the TAS

This TAS aims to complete the game as fast as possible.

Why Such a Massive Improvement?

This is an improvement of 11,596 frames (3:51.55) over the previous TAS. This improvement was made possible thanks to a new discovery where pressing enter without typing a command gets rid of the picture. This does make loading between typing non-directional commands a bit longer, because the game's keeping track of everything you see and own with text, but it doesn't have to load the pictures, saving up to 10 seconds or more per directional command. We press enter just before typing our first directional command (N/E/S/W/U/D/GO/CLIMB), which happens to be the 1st command in this game. Input ends on frame 14262 when we input the command "GET BATO" (GET BATON).
That's all from me. Thanks for reading.

nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: I'm dropping off of judgement here, because I found a large cut of frames. I'm going to set this submission to "Delayed" so that I can review the movie file once more. I'll post in the thread when I'm finished reviewing.

eien86: Claiming for judging.

eien86: The BATO's been retrieved!
This is a well optimized movie that finishes the game in almost half the running time of the current publication. Most of the improvements came from the discovery that scene loading can be skipped. The movie was then further refined by the intervention of its former judge, Nymx, who is now the co-author. There is not much to add: after briefly playing around I couldn't improve this movie by a single frame.
Accepting to Standard
Note To Publisher: who ever grabs this for publication, please hold until i can replace with an update from Logan.

nymx: 3 frame imprvoement has been applied. Good to go publisher.

despoa: Processing...
Last Edited by despoa on 3/16/2024 8:24 AM
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