Crash Boom Bang! (originally known as Crash Bandicoot Festival in Japan) is a party game on Nintendo DS released in 2006. The main goal of the Adventure Mode is to finish all six game boards and trigger the ending and credits. After two admittedly embarrassing attempts at creating TASes for this game as crude jokes, this one actually made it through.
Software & hardware
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.11 (default settings)
- Core: MelonDS
- Firmware: sha1:EDE9ADD041614EAA232059C63D8613B83FE4E954
- ROM checksum: 46038CC2A73AFCF29D3ABCDF8D4751888FBF19B9
Game objectives
- The objective of the run is to reach the credits as fast as possible
- The secondary objective of the run is to avoid any optional minigames or AI item uses
- Re-records: 9973
- The final input of the run (skipping the ending cutscene) happens on frame 56275
About the game
Crash Boom Bang! (henceforth abbreviated as 'CBB') is an infamous entry of the Crash Bandicoot series. It was originally released in Japan as Crash Bandicoot Festival to commemorate the series' 10th anniversary -- and what a tragic anniversary it would be! CBB is primarily regarded as one of -- if not the worst game in the series, being a clunky and unimaginative Mario Party clone. Naturally the player ought to roll a ton of dice and partake in many minigames to get through the game's six stages and finish the storyline. Every stage has its own objective and all four characters (the player and 3 AI characters) each roll a die at the start of a round and play as many rounds as it takes to complete the current objective and advance to the next stage. Completing the objectives, winning minigames or landing on certain square award you Wumpa points, however the player can always advance in the story (even beat it) regardless of their placement. Once a stage objective has been completed, the characters have to face off in a mandatory minigame (except in stage 6) before counting up the point tally and moving on to the next stage. The following details are important in following what the TAS does and accomplishes:
- Stages 1, 4 and 6 are linear stages. That means there is a goal square that -- once reached by any character -- immediately concludes the stage. The characters follow a set direction with occasional split paths.
- Stages 2, 3 and 5 are non-linear stages. That means four key items are scattered across the map and all four must be found to finish the stage. The key item layout is random, though they tend to spawn on grey squares. They can spawn on other squares too (especially in stage 5) but can only be obtained if a Spatula item is used on that square beforehand. All characters can freely choose the direction they are going in and there are a lot of split paths.
- All stages have up to two sub-maps that can be reached via an event square or using a Travel Pass item.
- At the start of every round every character has the opportunity to use an item. The only items that will be used in this run are the Travel Pass and the Spatula, the latter of which being in the player's inventory by default.
- Every stage is made up of grey squares (ordinarily have no effect), battle squares (trigger a minigame), item squares (which give you an item) as well as squares that increase or decrease your Wumpa points. Additionally, if two or more characters land on the same square, they will play a minigame against one another. Even if the player is not part of the minigame, they are forced to spectate, thereby wasting a lot of time.
RNG manipulation
A great deal of dealing with CBB is handling the RNG. The following instances are all affected by RNG but are not all manipulated easily:
- The key item layouts/locations in non-linear stages
- The results of dice rolls
- The use of items by AI characters at the start of rounds
- The paths AI characters take when moving on the board
I could work out the following ways to manipulate the RNG:
- Key item layouts seem to be set from the moment the game is booted up and are based on the internal clock of the DS. I could not figure out if there is an additional pattern to this i.e. if the key items rearrange if you spend more or less time in the prior stage. From what I learned they stay the same. The only way to (relatively) quickly trigger the game to reroll the key item locations is by either quitting to the main menu and re-entering Adventure Mode, soft-resetting or hard-resetting.
- Dice rolls are determined by an irregularly changing RNG value. The dice numbers for all four characters are determined on the frame the die appears on-screen. The obvious way to manipulate this is by simply stalling until a desired dice roll is available. Additionally, the moment you load into Adventure Mode from the main menu the game assigns an RNG seed to your dice rolls, allowing you to also predict the sequence of dice rolls. This seed changes every single frame, so once again waiting a set number of frames can yield better outcomes. Major thanks to toca for writing a RAMwatch script for me to see dice numbers and creating this spreadsheet to predict dice rolls by pasting the RNG starting value into it. Without his work this TAS would simply not have been possible at all.
- Enemy item usage is determined on the frame the last textbox before the item prompt is dismissed. Waiting can yield different results.
- Enemy pathing appears to be determined by when the die is thrown. The numbers are already set from the moment the die appears on-screen but delaying the roll can change AI behaviour. Landing at intersections on the map and choosing your direction sooner or later can also sometimes affect which way the AI turn.
On the topic of waiting to advance RNG values for better results: CBB has an in-built maximum waiting period. In most cases the game will force a decision to advance even with no player input e.g. on split paths, on dice rolls, on the item choice or plainly when waiting on text boxes. That means every instance of RNG manipulation has effectively a hard limit as to how long I can wait to fish for better results, though ideally I would like to not wait anywhere at all of course. Any waiting in the TAS is a result of RNG manipulation. At the end of the day this run aims to complete the game without triggering any minigames except for the mandatory ones, without letting the AI use any items to avoid the additional animation, without triggering any other lengthy animations that would otherwise be avoidable, without taking more than two rounds on non-linear stages to obtain all key items and with taking no more than the minimum amount of rounds to reach the end of linear stages.
The aforementioned RAM values toca made available to me for the TAS are the following:
| Address | Type | Domain | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0x0B43D4 | 4 byte | Main RAM | RNG value |
| 0x0CC5AE | 1 byte | Main RAM | Crash dice number |
| 0x0C9124 | 1 byte | Main RAM | Coco dice number |
| 0x0C9750 | 1 byte | Main RAM | Pinstripe dice number |
| 0x0C9D7C | 1 byte | Main RAM | Pura dice number |
| 0x0A8C6C | 4 byte | Main RAM | Game-internal frame counter |
Minigames
As mentioned, I will not be spending nearly as much time engaging with the minigames as one normally would playing CBB. However, there are a few noteworthy things: Minigames award you Wumpa points at the end in two waves. First the points will be awarded based on the score placement (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th) and secondly the game awards extra points depending on how high your score is (e.g. 50 Wumpa point for every point you scored in the minigame). If all four characters end a minigame with 0 points, the second round of points is skipped entirely, saving a few seconds at once. In the minigames where I can directly affect the AI characters (i.e. at the end of stages 1, 3 and 4) I will essentially bully the AI so nobody has point by the time the timer runs out. In stages 2 and 5 it is virtually impossible to prevent anybody from scoring in any way, therefore the extra points cannot be skipped.
Stage by stage comments
Stage 1: Port Town
This is a short linear stage. The quickest way to finish it is by first rolling a 6 and taking the shortcut route across the boats and then following with a 5 or 6 in the next round. Pinstripe happened to get both numbers in quick succession without much manipulation.
In the minigame I run around the arena and squish the AI or move in their way to prevent them from scoring a single time.
Stage 2: Desert
Frankly, I just got lucky to have a good key item layout in this stage from the get-go. In round 1 Pura is the only character to collect a key item. Meanwhile Coco was sent to the sub-map. In round 2 Coco rolls a 2 to get back to the main map, landing on another key item while Pura and Crash collect the remaining two items. I could not find a situation where the stage could be finished in one single round, through hypothetically it is possible with this key item layout.
In the minigame I opted to not do anything as anything else I tried ended up one of the AI with a higher score.
Stage 3: Big City
I got a lucky layout yet again. In round 1 Crash and Pura obtain the first two key items. In round 2 Pinstripe and Coco follow suit and collect the remaining two. Crucially, I landed on an item square at the end of round 2, which awarded me with a Travel Pass. That item will prove to be extremely useful in stage 6.
In the minigame I carefully maneuvre myself around the arena to make sure the AI get hit by the Viscount's attack to lose points. I accomplish this by standing close to the Viscount to trigger an attack and by baiting the AI into attacking me instead of dodging the attack. Once time runs out, everybody's score is at 0.
Stage 4: Volcano
This is a relatively lengthy linear stage. The fastest it can be completed in is 4 rounds. As there are a minigame squares and lava spots (which send you to the sub-map), it is imperative to manipulate a fairly specific route to get through it without any hiccups. On top of that, the majority of grey squares on the volcano rather nastily trigger an event that knocks you down to the lowest level, so it is important to avoid those squares too. I have tried to go through multiple different routes, sending different AI characters up the mountain but the fastest result ended up being the one where I myself scaled it using Crash. I had initially experimented with using a Travel Pass to cut out a part of this map but I could not get the game to warp me to the correct side of the sub-map.
In the minigame I only move once to throw the AI in line to lose all their points to end with a score of everybody at 0. Without that one input, Pura will end the round with 2 points.
Stage 5: Deep Sea
Sadly I did not get a good key item layout straight away here and both quitting and reloading as well as hard resetting would result in layout where more than one item would require a Spatula. Soft-resetting ended up doing the trick as only one item would require the use of the Spatula. Additionally, toca and I worked extensively on finding a dice RNG seed that would allow me to finish the entire stage in just one round. Unfortunately it took a fair while until I could find a setup that would actually end up working due to bad AI pathing (hence all the waiting -- especially on the main menu). Despite waiting and stalling for a long while, finishing this stage in one round as opposed to two still ends up slightly faster. Switching back to map view after using an item introduces one lag frame, so I avoided that.
In the minigame I cannot prevent the AI from doing whatever they want, so I decided to simply collect the crystal and call it a day.
Stage 6: Tower
This is where the Travel Pass from stage 3 comes into play. This stage consists of the the lower floors (the starting map), the upper floors and yard outside of the tower. I utilise the Travel Pass to warp a character straight to the upper floors. From that point onwards this is a standard linear stage affair that can be finished in 4 rounds. It's noteworthy that the knights are always active and landing on one of their squares will send you outside of the tower. The staircases are only active on odd numbered rounds (1, 3, 5...) but are completely safe on even rounds (2, 4, 6...). Major thanks to J3TLITE for this piece of information. There is no minigame after this stage and the final input is when the ending cutscene is skipped by pressing the SELECT button.
Other comments
This is my first real TAS after I had only jokingly made a bad CBB TAS in 2022 and attempting it properly again in 2024 though that second attempt had to be abandoned because I had no real tools to ease TAS production. Things changed when toca wrote the RAMwatch for dice rolls, allowing me to actually develop some methods to creating this TAS right here and building up on the realisations and theories behind CBB's RNG the year prior.
This TAS is by no means perfect. With more RNG values to observe (e.g. values to predict item usage, AI path choices or map out better key item layouts) this TAS could end up even faster. One iteration I had initially completed was one where I did not optimise the minigame scores at all and manipulated the stage 5 key items with a hard reset to finish only 230 frames slower than this TAS right here. Several other versions with different dice routes through stage 6 also finished within 4-5 seconds of each other. Needless to say, there are a lot of factors that can play into how fast CBB progresses as any faster move can cause another waiting period later down the line. The RNG in the Japanese and European versions is likely to be laid out differently too, so those may be worth exploring in the future just in case there are more favourable outcomes.
Other potential projects to piggyback off of this TAS could also be a full TAS of all minigames or a New Game+ TAS.
Shoutouts and links
Thanks to...
- toca for making the RAMwatch, assembling several spreadsheets to help me plan out the run, creating the CBB RNG Knowledge Base, and helping me with this very submission
- J3TLITE for pushing the CBB speedrun and letting me know about the admittedly hidden mechanics of the stage 6 map.
- My Twitch chat regulars who made part of creating this TAS much more bearable
- inconsistent for making a DS input display which I used for the video of my TAS after toca modified it further
- feos for giving me access to my old TASvideos account after it laid dormant for 12 years or so and I apparently(?) deleted the email address it was tied to
- My Minigame Demonstration TAS of the minigames I deemed interesting enough to show off
- The CBB speedrun.com leaderboards
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: So this is very impressive. Having beaten the WR by more than half is just nuts! I don't know this game at all, but from what I'm seeing it would take a crazy amount of effort to make this happen. Congratulations on this effort!
Accepting to Standard.
EZGames69: Processing...