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Desert Bus High Score Attack

Ah, Desert Bus. And yes, that's 41 days, 17 hours, 15 minutes and 6 seconds. From the ever-useful Wikipedia:
Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors is an unreleased video game planned for release initially on the Sega CD in April 1995 and to be followed by PC, 3DO versions later that year.... Desert Bus is the best known minigame in the package, and was a featured part of Electronic Gaming Monthly's preview. The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph, a feat that would take the player 8 hours of continuous play to complete, as the game cannot be paused. The bus contains no passengers, and there is no scenery or other traffic on the road. The bus veers to the right slightly; as a result, it is impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, they will score exactly one point. The player then gets the option to make the return trip to Tucson—for another point (a decision they must make in a few seconds or the game ends). Players may continue to make trips and score points as long as their endurance holds out. Some players who have completed the trip have also noted that, although the scenery never changes, a bug splats on the windscreen about five hours through the first trip, and on the return trip the light does fade, with differences at dusk, and later a pitch black road where the player is guided only with headlights. Penn says, "The best part of that I think was an idea that was not mine, not Teller’s, and not Barry Marx, who designed the game with us. It was an idea by Eddie Gorodetsky, one of the producers on Two and a Half Men, really funny guy. I think that Eddie G. is one of the funniest guys in the world." Penn Jillette commented in his radio show that the overly realistic nature of the game was in response to Janet Reno and the controversy surrounding violent video games at the time.

A Bit of Context

In 2007 I made a long-run movie of Rampage that completed the game with only the A button. It was over 6 hours long. One of the replies, from Blublu, was "How delightful. What next, Desert Bus?" Oh, I suppose you regret those words now...
At the time, such a run was unthinkable. Mostly because there was no reliable Sega CD recording. Also, there were no simple bots for Gens, and I'm certainly not cool enough to hack into the C/C++/whatever code. So the idea lay dormant over the years, until the coming of Gens 10. Sega CD support! I was instantly brought back to this grand idea. For the Rampage run I had used "Sticky Keys" to hold down the turbo A button, however this run required a bit more. I tried in vain to make various hotkey programs sync up to a movie. No luck. Eventually my wish for Lua support came true though, with Gens 11, and I quickly began this quest.

The Surprising Result

The most interesting result was that contrary to the Wikipedia entry above, one cannot go on forever scoring points. While one may continue playing for who-knows-how-long, the maximum number of points you can get is 99.
I had initially tried to get 100 points as the highest score I had seen was 6, so that seemed reasonably high, but oh my surprise when it stopped at 99. I re-set my goal to 1000 in-game hours to see if that maxes out too, but it does not do so (at least at 1000). Here's a screenshot of my final score:

adelikat: Encoding. ...Yeah right! Great April fools submission, and a neat concept, but its time to reject this.

Unrejecting this submission for consideration into the Vault tier

Nach: This run got a decent response despite the ridiculousness. It also shows off great TASing potential in its own unique way. Accepting for the vault.

Nach: Apparently I missed the rule regarding vault must be distinguishable from standard plays. Based on that criteria I am correcting my mistake and rejecting this.
In regards to the constant repeating, if this was going to be published, I figured we'd work out where to cut the movie before then, as it does run out of new content fairly quickly.

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #2211: alden's SegaCD Desert Bus in 41:17:15:05.68
Joined: 5/17/2007
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lol, shame I don't have that much spare time :P. EDIT: I demand encode
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I'm stuck, I can't tell whether to say that I'll wait for the encode or just go for the "too long, didn't watch" route.
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How many rerecords does this movie have?
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This is pure genius... The game itself is a masterpiece of design - flawless storytelling, immersive environment, and perfect execution of the designer's master plan. No other game will ever come as close to perfect simulation of driving an empty bus from Tucson, AZ to Las Vegas, NV. I can almost guarantee that. The run itself - perfected execution, guaranteed that not a single frame can or will ever be saved. Alden clearly knew the game mechanics in and out, and used all the newest resources available, Gens with Lua, to execute a run that frame-wise surpasses not only every other video on this site, but most likely the combined total frame-wise effort of the entire site, assuming that every frame in a TAS is equal. And everyone is for equality, right? But there is more! The run works at multiple levels. You see, because, we, tasvideos.org/forum, are on alden's bus. We are all on the bus together! Can't you see it? And we are going somewhere. Yes, it is going to take some time, as all good things do. Alden is taking us somewhere. He is driving our bus, and we are all his passengers. And then, he is willing to take us back again. And then again in the other direction! The poetry of the situation is compelling and fraught with emotional undertones. I am moved in ways I can not explain. Thank you alden. Drive on, alden. Drive on.
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A way too blatant April fools joke ;) Nice going with the Wiki page though, haha.
Samsara
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Bringin' up this for the people that want an "encode". Edit: Now someone make a .gif encode of this.
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I was completely bored on day 40, voting 0/0.
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I'll try encoding a section of this run later to see how much it compresses.
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Man, I love April 1st. This puts "Desert Bus For Hope" to shame.. It is even worse that only someone crazy can even verify the input in real time ><
i see...
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I don't get what DarkKobold is talking about, I actually thought the run was pretty bad. I mean after the first watch through when the initial shock value is gone I was totally bored. I'm voting 9.5/9.5 though, because I don't get why there are numbers smaller than 9 on the rating scale.
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Not only does this game serve as an excellent reminder as to the power of scripting and therefore works perfectly as a demonstration, I think the right way to enjoy this movie is to turn it into a drinking game. Get some buddies together, grab a couple thousand six-packs, sit back, and enjoy the show. THE OFFICIAL DESERT BUS TAS DRINKING GAME - Watch the movie at 15x-50x speed, depending on how long you want to wait between shots - Every time a bug splatters on the windshield, take a shot. - Every time the lighting changes, take a shot. - Every time drinking and driving is mentioned by one of you, take a shot. - Every time anyone questions the intelligence of either the game or the run, take a shot. - Every time someone from outside your group tries to disturb you, take a shot. - Every time someone needs to use the restroom, whether they go proper or in their pants, take a shot. - Every time anyone gets up for a snack, take a shot. - Every time someone gets bored, chug. - Every time someone dies of alcohol poisoning, chug. - Every time a destination point is reached, chug. - When the end point is finally reached, chug any remaining beer in celebration.
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Wow! Aren't we a a little black & white. Some people rate this movie at 0, and some people rate it at 10. Nothing in between. I've long been expecting someone to submit this movie. I look forward to watching it in full and setting it as a background on my work desktop. I think this movie should be published. It documents an important piece of classic game history, and I don't think there exists any other website that has a full movie of a roundtrip in this game, let alone 50 of them. However, for encoding, I think you may need to apply very, very customized encoding settings. In particular, extremely low bitrate for both audio and the video, but with high rate whenever something significant happens (such as the aforementioned bug splatting on the windscreen). Oh, and AVI is definitely out of question (the index alone would take 1.7 gigabytes), it must be MKV. For audio, I suggest a 1 kbit/s OGG for most of the movie with 50 kbit/s at key events; For video, I suggest x264 at quantizer 40 or something for most of the movie with quantizer 15 or so at key events. And naturally, reference frames, motion detection, frames types etc. at maximum.
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Bisqwit wrote:
Wow! Aren't we a a little black & white. Some people rate this movie at 0, and some people rate it at 10. Nothing in between.
You act as if this is somehow surprising.
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So the goal is to reach 1000 in-game hours? I'd rather see the goal being achieving the maximum score, 1000 in-game hours is pretty damn arbitrary.
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Kyrsimys wrote:
So the goal is to reach 1000 in-game hours? I'd rather see the goal being achieving the maximum score, 1000 in-game hours is pretty damn arbitrary.
He did.
the maximum number of points you can get is 99.
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Remember to watch the run before voting. How many of you voters actually watched it to the end (considering it's been up for 5 hours) :P
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I disregarded that.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
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Shinydoofy, my favorite German encoder :) So, uh, could you get to encoding? I would like to watch this sometime before next April 1st.
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
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I'll place my vote in about 40 days. I have to admit, I saw the submission time and thought "...what? Oh, it's April 1st."
adelikat wrote:
It started off fairly tame, but as more balls entered the picture it sure got a lot more entertaining.
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"great" game and great movie >_<
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While one may continue applauding this movie for who-knows-how-long, the highest rating it can get from me is 0/0. It's so awesome that I shouldn't have watched it at all before voting.
<klmz> it reminds me of that people used to keep quoting adelikat's IRC statements in the old good days <adelikat> no doubt <adelikat> klmz, they still do
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Xkeeper wrote:
Kyrsimys wrote:
So the goal is to reach 1000 in-game hours? I'd rather see the goal being achieving the maximum score, 1000 in-game hours is pretty damn arbitrary.
He did.
the maximum number of points you can get is 99.
I didn't say he didn't get the maximum score, I said it should have been the goal of this movie. I mean that I think he should have ended input after reaching the maximum instead of going on to reach an arbitrary number of driving hours.
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I see that the Wikipedia article on Desert Bus has already been updated to note the maximum score, complete with a link back to this thread.
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upthorn
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The game is great and the run is clearly perfect beyond any shadow of a doubt, but it still goes on way too long to stay interesting the entire time. 5/5 So Alden, 6 hour rampage, 1000 hour desert bus... is Blue Sphere next?
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