my first TAS.
im really happy i could finish this today. Pop'n Music is one of my favorite rhythm games, and im happy to be the first person to do a TAS on the first game. (well, the PSX one.)
i originally started this TAS in April, but due to some difficulties (recording mode was on and i lost half of the gameplay, leading to making a new movie) it couldnt be finished until now.
the goal of this TAS is to finish a whole game cycle, with no misses, perfectly, with 9 keys on hard, as fast as i can. someone is probably going to ask "how come most of it is all GREATs and you dont get a lot of FEVERs?", but the reason why is that Pop'n Music will only give FEVERs when you fill the main meter on the bottom all the way up. its all GREATs before there. very funny, but understandable.
very delighted to share this TAS.
- rem
MAIN INFO:
- EMULATOR: BizHawk 2.9.1 (x64)
- SHA1 CHECKSUM: 5c51a4cf72c450f163b790bf3af7560bf861a7d2
- AIMS: No misses, as fast as possible
- GAME DESCRIPTION: pop'n music is a rhythm game released in 1998 (console) by KONAMI/BEMANI. the main gameplay consists of the player pressing buttons to the notes, with each note having a sound that goes with the song. it is very similar to KONAMI's other rhythm game, Beatmania.
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Removed unnecessary input at the end. Also changed name entry to only contain one S, which cost extra frames because the game won't let you advance until you've entered the current letter, and the empty space is a few steps back in the list. But I changed directions and entered the 3rd letter 35 frames sooner than this movie did. The rest of the screens appear by on their own, no need to input through them.
feos: Even given the 3-fold nature of the branch label, I still don't understand the goal of this run.
It doesn't seem to aim for speed because it's very suboptimal in menus, and menus are a major part of optimizable gameplay here. The other part is song duration, and the song in the second level that this movie plays seems to be the longest.
Spikestuff posted a detailed review (huge thanks!), and I tried to apply their advice up to the second level, while also picking the shortest song there. I didn't bother actually playing that song, but my movie that reaches the loading screen right after it, does so 910 frames sooner than this submission, which is quite significant even if we ignore the menuing. I select stage 2 song 203 frames sooner, so the difference coming from song duration is 707 frames.
Maximum score seems to be one of the goals, but it doesn't contradict optimality, because songs have fixed durations, and you get 100k in each song if you play perfectly.
If the movie aims for playing the hardest songs, then it's incomplete because the hardest song in level 3 is "FUNKY TOWN'75", while this movie plays "spicy piece" instead. And aiming for the hardest songs doesn't belong to the Standard class, so it'd have to be entertaining to be published, but rhythm games don't seem very entertaining to the general audience.
If we attribute note count to either core or difficulty, only the second stage plays the song with the highest available note count.
Rejecting for suboptimality and an unclear goal. I hope you will redo the movie to be more in line with our optimization standards, and my movie is meant to help with that.