An odd Nintendo puzzler in the same vein as the old PC game Clockwerx and seen once again later as an extra in the GameCube game Animal Crossing. The goal of Clu Clu Land is to uncover patterns of golden ingots buried under the ground by passing over them, which involves moving your character by having her grab onto pegs and spin around them. This run controls two players simultaneously for more speed and entertainment.
  • Aims for fastest time
  • One player controls two players
  • Plays each stage once
  • Manipulates luck
  • Hard resets (power off and on) midway through
  • Genre: Puzzle
  • FCEU 0.98.15 used to record

General Notes

  • In a normal playthrough of the game, it would start with the stage sequence (stage 1 .. stage 5, bonus); however, after beating the first bonus stage, the sequence permanently changes to (stage 2 .. stage 5, bonus, repeat). As the purpose of this run is to play each stage (including the first stages) once, hard resetting is used at the end of each loop before the last (in which the bonus stage is played) to ensure this goal. Deciding just when to reset can be rather arbitrary, however (Should the viewer get to see the score tally? Should we just reset right after a stage is beaten? etc.) It was eventually decided that each reset should be immediately after the "blinking" effect of beating a stage ends (i.e. after the last blink ends; checking this out in frame advance should make my meaning clearer), so as to keep a timely pace without leaving the viewer bewildered; seeing the stage just instantly vanish when it's beaten would be confusing, while waiting on the score tally both misses the point of this run (fastest time in gameplay with no regard to score earned) and can cause the viewer to get impatient waiting for the next stage to start.
  • Luck manipulation in this run is used either to determine which stages appear in what order (by changing when Start is pressed on the title screen) and to cause enemies to move in certain ways (they can be ignored for the most part, but it seems that both pushing/coming into contact with a stunned enemy and trying to pass over an ingot will sometimes prevent the ingot from being uncovered the first time around).
  • Most of the time, you can grab a peg immediately after letting go of another (to turn in the opposite direction immediately, etc.) However, the timing for this varies somewhat each time you do it (on stage 1 at least; with other stages it either works in a given instance or it doesn't), grabbing a peg straight out of longer turns doesn't work reliably (e.g. in the later stages it is somehow impossible to grab a peg immediately out of a U-turn), and sometimes just trying to perform this trick at all doesn't work regardless of the turn you're coming out of. This seems to just happen randomly on stage 2 onward and I'm not sure why; sometimes I have to avoid this by using slower routes or spinning around on a peg for what seems at first to be a needlessly long time (I usually won't mention these in stage descriptions as it occurs in almost all of them).
  • When going on straightaways, you can grab pegs and immediately let go after the player "snaps" in alignment with them to gain some speed (sometimes you can do this straight out of a turn, but doing that always loses speed instead).
  • There are some odd inconsistencies between the players; sometimes player 1 is just a bit ahead of player 2 when they take symmetrical or otherwise similar routes, and vice-versa.

Loop 1

(Only stages with anything that may raise questions aside from the above direction-changing glitch are mentioned; I'll answer questions about missing stages as they come)
Stage 1 (robot thing): Pretty odd route here with lots of moving around between blocks (in the interest of effectively dividing labor between players), I'm not sure what sort of improvements to this route there could be.
Stage 4 (letter H): I don't suspect there'd be any improvement if player 1's last two ingots (near the top-right corner) were done in a counterclockwise loop instead of clockwise.
Stage 5 (maze 1): The enemy from the near right black hole gets in player 2's way and forces about 8 in-game seconds lost from having to pass over a bar twice.

Loop 2

Stage 2 (mime face): Lots of spinning here thanks to the good ol' peg glitch; I'm not sure what other approaches could be taken to the mouth at the bottom.
Stage 4 (5 rectangles): Three 360-degree turns here because some bars inexplicably refuse to show up the first time around. Also, I'm not sure if there's any benefit to going straight down from the first two rectangles (i.e. riding the wall to get to them)
Stage 5 (spider?): Same deal as the robot stage, though perhaps even more confusing.

Loop 3

Stage 3 (wombat or whatever): Not sure how else I could deal with the stopwatch that appears; player 1 has to change his route at the end to stall a bit so player 2 doesn't get frozen before completing his route. The enemies thankfully stay put, though.
Stage 4 (four courners): Player 2 finishes slightly before player 1; I don't believe this has to do with the different way they handle the last two corners, just that player 1 started sagging behind a bit long before then.

Loop 4

Stage 2 (spade): Having the two players bump into each other near the beginning probably wouldn't make much difference (especially since the peg glitch bites extra hard here).
Stage 4 (eight squares): This stage took a few tries to manipulate enemy motion (which seemed oddly enough to arise simply fram natual differences in button timing, if only I could have that sort of luck in the maze); most of the time an enemy spawned in the bottom-left black hole which would've forced player 1 to pass over a certain ingot twice.
Stage 5 (maze 2): Some odd detours here because of the peg glitch and an effort to avoid hidden elastic barriers (they turn up if you go straight into them, but not if you turn on one of the pegs they're attached to)
Bonus stage: Perhaps my favorite in this run partly thanks to the music. I end the movie as soon as possible, and there's probably a whole bunch of oddball routes I don't know about, but alas.

adelikat: The response to this game has not been good. Therefore rejecting this submission for poor game choice. The technical quality was good and using 2-players was nice but it failed to entertain the audience.
Good luck on future TASes.

Baxter: Accepting for publication to the Vault.

Brandon: Publication underway.

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #1518: pdk's NES Clu Clu Land in 11:06.17
Mitjitsu
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Like I said in IRC, I'm gonna give this one a try, I could never understand how to play the game so I quickly got bored, I'll see what god makes off this game. EDIT: I eventually figured out how the game worked once you'd done the first 4-5 levels. I actually had a mess around once the playback had finished and it was suprisingly difficult, but I voting "meh" because every element about the game is overly repetive with no varitation in whats happening. I felt like I was watching documentry play rather than Tool-Assisted play.
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I am really on the borderline for this one. I think the movie does get really repetitive (sp) and, due to the game not the runner, rather dull... which would garner a no vote. However, the runner's gameplay was perfect and having played this rom a while back and noting how difficult the controls are, I would vote yes. Sadly, the positive and negative, atleast for me, cancel into a meh vote.
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
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JXQ
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I don't have a Clu Clu what's going on in this movie, but it was strangely compelling to watch, though a bit on the long side for its content.
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pdk
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maybe it'd do good to have a trimmed-down (i.e. skipping the long-ass score tallies) avi, a la ninja gaiden 2's recent publication?
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Because this game has no ending, it seems to end really abruptly and for no reason... I fast-forwarded through most of it and didn't really see anything interesting, then I tried to play and ran out of lives in the first level. Not a good game, not a good game to attack.
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pdk
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ending seemingly midway through is done for the same reason as runs such as track & field do it; no sense in keeping an endless game going after you've achieved your purpose in it
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pdk wrote:
maybe it'd do good to have a trimmed-down (i.e. skipping the long-ass score tallies) avi, a la ninja gaiden 2's recent publication?
I did not do any video editing on Ninja Gaiden 2. What do you mean?
Sir_VG
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I think he's referring to the cutscenes, but he forgot they're actually skippable in the game.
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pdk wrote:
maybe it'd do good to have a trimmed-down (i.e. skipping the long-ass score tallies) avi, a la ninja gaiden 2's recent publication?
The score tallies are not skipped in Ninja Gaiden 2, though they are quite a bit quicker than in NG1. I made available a version of the run that did not skip (press start) the cut-scenes between levels. Is this the source of the confusion? Of course, I haven't bothered to download the .avi but I think I'll take Bisqwit on his word about that. :) What are you talking about? Okay, I'll watch your run now.
pdk
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i assumed that the story sequences had been edited out of the avi (i haven't watched the run yet or played ng2 that far to know that they're skippable) for convenience, alas
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The game didn't quite do it for me. It was hard to play and easy to watch, but I couldn't say it was entertaining. I'm not sure what to vote, yes or meh. :\ Also, the AVI is never edited by publishers, it shows all the same things the movie file supplied does.
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Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Sir_VG
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moozooh wrote:
Also, the AVI is never edited by publishers, it shows all the same things the movie file supplied does.
Outside of adding subtitles, of course.
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Subtitles have nothing to do with editing. They're just additional text overlaying the image.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
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Goin' with meh on this one. There's nothing horribly interesting going on.
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Sorry, have to vote no. Wasnt entertained.
Nitrogenesis wrote:
Guys I come from the DidyKnogRacist communite, and you are all wrong, tihs is the run of the mileniun and everyone who says otherwise dosnt know any bater! I found this run vary ease to masturbate too!!!! Don't fuck with me, I know this game so that mean I'm always right!StupedfackincommunityTASVideoz!!!!!!
Arc wrote:
I enjoyed this movie in which hands firmly gripping a shaft lead to balls deep in multiple holes.
natt wrote:
I don't want to get involved in this discussion, but as a point of fact C# is literally the first goddamn thing on that fucking page you linked did you even fucking read it
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Might have liked it if not for the huge delays between levels. Meh. :(
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I'm not sure if the movie is really perfect... but I think this game is certainly entertaining enough (indeed too bad about the long cutscenes between the levels)... anyhow, voting yes.
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Long cutscenes make this somewhat boring to watch, and even though the routes look good I'm not sure if they're optimal. Although frame shaving for this game wouldn't help much, it just wasn't entertaining (or varied) enough. Sorry, voting no.
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Gameplay was real nice. Really smooth. Great to see this game done. Unfortunately, I find the game is better playing than watching. Like said before, the game is repetative. I'm giving this a Meh.
adelikat
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I voted meh. It was an awfully repetitive game. I didn't vote no because it WAS 2 player which made the puzzles shorter and more interesting. It also added complexity to the optimal paths. But it still didn't hold my interest too well. It seems like one of those games that is only interesting to those that know it well enough to already know the level layouts. Unfortunately, not many people know the game.
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Morrison
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I thought this movie was quite good. Sad to see that it wasn't published. :(
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om, nom, nom... blech, stale!
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [2161] NES Clu Clu Land "2 players" by pdk in 11:06.17
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The screenshot appears to be from an A2600 game.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.