Double Dare is a 1990 NES game based around severely dated trivia and a collection of minigames. In this submission you get three runs for the price of one with the primary submission being a pure speedrun beating the fastest available version by 33.5 seconds, the second being a maximum score run, and the final being and all physical challenges run.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: fceux 2.1.6 with TAS Editor
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Heavily manipulates luck
  • Plays on hardest difficulty
  • Embarrasses the hell out of the Cooties

General Comments About Double Dare

Double Dare is a game based on the classic Nickelodeon game show hosted by Marc Summers that aired from 1986 to 1993. To cash in on the franchise Nickelodeon asked Rare to create the game, and they thankfully accepted. The culmination of their work is this game you see before you.
For those of you who live under a rock (or even more so those of you who weren't alive to view this show, in which case get off my lawn as there was a Double Dare 2000) the rules of Double Dare are as follows.
There are two teams of two that try to compete to win the most money and prizes. The game starts with both teams simultaneously competing in a physical mini-game "Toss-Up Challenge" to determine who wins $10 and control of the board so to speak. The winner of the game is then asked a question worth $10 dollars and have a choice of answering the question or if they do not know the answer, or believe the other team won't know the answer, have the ability to "Dare" which means give the other team a chance to answer the question. This other team then has a chance to either answer the question now worth $20 or "Double Dare" the question back to the other team. Finally the original team has a choice to either answer the question, now worth $40, or do a physical mini-game called a "Physical Challenge" that was also worth $40. These physical challenges were normally repeats of the same game concept but with silly themes introduced and of course copious amounts of slime. This process continued for 10 questions, was followed by a second "Toss-Up Challenge" to determine who starts the second round, and then 10 more questions worth twice the amount present in the first round.
After the twenty questions were complete the team with the highest dollar amount was chosen to compete in the obstacle course which contained 8 mini-games that must be completed. For each of the games complete you won an extra prize like some badass Skechers Light Up Shoes, or some kickin' roller blades. If you were able to finish all of the games in the time limit you won a grand prize which was normally a trip but this was a semi-rare event.

General Comments About Run

The game followed the exact same process and thus for the plot just read the above. As stated above I beat the fastest run of this game [dead link removed] that I could find by over 30 seconds.
I choose to play the game on the hardest difficulty level which results in having far less time to answer questions (which doesn't matter since it never takes longer than a second to answer by far), the computer is much better at the toss-up challenges, and finally they are much more likely to answer questions correctly.
To win the game in the shortest amount of time you must manipulate the game to have the shortest Toss-Up Challenges and even more important to ask the shortest questions. The amount of time it takes for a question to be asked can vary by well over a second so it is integral to getting the best time to manipulate these questions. In the run I choose the exact correct frame to answer questions to prompt the shortest possible question saving a great deal of time. Manipulation of the Toss-Up Challenges follows a similar pattern except it is decided by the frame that you press start on. The absolute shortest mini-game selection is the Gorilla banana toss that is used for the second toss up challenge. The second fastest, about a second shorter, is the golfing mini game that is used first. The first Toss-Up Challenge is manipulated to be the golfing game because the hard difficulty results in the other team winning the Gorilla game if it is the first Toss-Up challenge.
Finally in the obstacle course there are a few control options present. To run you must alternate between pressing left and right on the D-Pad allowing for inhuman running speeds. This pattern is also present in most of the events to go faster through them. On events where you must climb up the same rule applies but you must alternate between up and down. Finally in certain cases after you finish a challenge but before you get the flag you can only walk using right on the D-Pad as alternating will cause you to stutter step.

High Score Run

After finishing the run I figured this game really deserved to be beaten so I went for a High Score run found here. This run is completed in 14 minutes 10 seconds which is about 8 minutes slower than the any% run. In this version an extra layer of complexity is added as in addition to manipulating the shortest questions you must also manipulate the enemies to Double Dare back instead of answering correctly. In many cases there is only 1 frame in roughly 20 where you can choose to dare and have the opponents Double Dare back due to the difficulty level being set to hard.
Other than this manipulation the run strategy is identical.

"Physical Challenge" Challenge

Finally to add some diversity to this run I decided to do a run that proves sometimes it is OK to be a brainless jock by answering zero questions and simply winning it all through brute strength as can be seen here. This run included the layer of complexity present through manipulating the opponents to dare but then added two more aspects to manipulate. First I had to manipulate the physical challenges to loop through all of the challenges before repeating for a second time. Second I had to work to find the ideal strategies to win each challenge in the shortest amount of time while attempting to add some form of entertainment during the stages where you must run around.
This run ends up being 22 minutes and 44 seconds which is an extra 8 minutes longer than the High Score run and 16 minutes longer than the any% run. This begins to be a long run but as it is under 30 minutes I felt was still short enough to be entertaining.

Other comments

Yes this run is started as a April Fool's joke but remains on the feed as a legitimate, if unlikely, movie.
I doubt this would get accepted and am OK with that.
Possible Improvements: This game would be a prime example for someone to bot. For the activities at the beginning, middle and end have already been beaten to what I believe to be the fastest time so the only optimization is the combination of questions that end up with the shortest time. Manipulation of questions is entirely dependent on the frame you press A so cycling through all options would be ideal for a bot.
I edited out the majority of the submission text as the portion was being satirical of the site over the past couple weeks but no one found it funny and people were seeming to get upset with me for my ideas so it is easier to just delete it so I don't have to deal with defending a joke.
Thanks for watching.

FractalFusion: This game is mostly just a quiz show. Most of the run is boring, and the brief action sequences aren't much better. I'm rejecting the run.

adelikat: Unrejecting this submission for consideration into the Vault

adelikat: Accepting for publication to the Vault

Ilari: Processing

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #3550: goofydylan8's NES Double Dare in 06:26.48
Post subject: Re: #3550: goofydylan8's NES Double Dare in 06:26.48
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TASVideoAgent wrote:
I urge the staff of Tasvideos to be brave, true and screw the rules.
Your main issue is you dont understand that if you got a good case, rules can be dodged, they arent there to restrict you, but to define a general direction. This site is maintained by volunters, they dont want to host a speedrun of every games made but instead take only the "bests". (for now at least) Its their choice and you cant blame them if they dont want to code a whole new site just for you (or even of others) tastes. Your whole reasoning is flawed because you think swordless has been "brave" or whatever, its simply wrong, many other tasers made the rules bend, he made a good tas, among the "bests" you can hope, hence why its on the site, and it has _nothing_ to do with rules, but with the quality of the run he submitted. Basicly you are challenging the site with what you called yourself boring, be my guess, the result was already know before you submit, this attitude doesnt help _anything_ and rules are also there for that Now yeah, since it sound to be originally a prank, dont take anything i sayd too seriously, but it was just to answer to your "concerns" with rules.
Joined: 6/20/2008
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There was some kind of controversy? Hooray, I guess! I watched the run, and it straddles the entertainment/boringness line so effectively that I find I must abstain from voting. I did enjoy, however, that the toss-up challenge game that gave me and my sister the absolute most trouble ever is the fastest choice for a TAS.
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legitimately shitty TAS have been accepted like the KOF2001 tas,even though it is a great game choice and many other fighting game TAS just don't stand a chance because the retards who don't play these games want to judge it(it's boring hurrr durr only combos and manipulation)...if you don't play the game refrain from judging it(if i were to vote for any RPG ,in almost all cases,it would be a surefire NO or meh at the very least...btw,if you want to see a good fighting game TAS go to http://www.youtube.com/user/ImbuedGold SNK games TAS most have quality superior to stuff here,some games are a bad choice altogether but in general they are all good. http://www.youtube.com/user/superdrecordes1 his latest dramatic battle alpha 3 run is wonderful. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VljxeVtemtQ this is much more representative of KOF and it still can be improved
TAS i'm interested: megaman series: mmbn1 all chips, mmx3 any% psx glitched fighting games with speed goals in general
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Priam wrote:
There was some kind of controversy? Hooray, I guess! I watched the run, and it straddles the entertainment/boringness line so effectively that I find I must abstain from voting. I did enjoy, however, that the toss-up challenge game that gave me and my sister the absolute most trouble ever is the fastest choice for a TAS.
The gorilla is pretty terrible. I don't know who tested it but you have to hold left for the exact correct number of frames and get the exact right angle or you won't get it correct. Also you have a 5 frame window to get it right.
Post subject: Re: #3550: goofydylan8's NES Double Dare in 06:26.48
adelikat
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TASVideoAgent wrote:
I <b>deliberately</b> picked a boring game <b>just to f**k with tasvideos.</b>
I honestly can't tell if any of this submission is satire, sarcasm or genuine. However, I feel the need to comment on this one. Sometimes borderline games, boring games, etc. get rejected. But nobody is removing them, or annoyed at their existence. Providing us with a serious submission of a game? That's welcome. I want more submissions! Thanks. You say you want a TAS of every NES game? Bring it on.
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects
Post subject: Re: #3550: goofydylan8's NES Double Dare in 06:26.48
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adelikat wrote:
TASVideoAgent wrote:
I deliberately picked a boring game just to f**k with tasvideos.
I honestly can't tell if any of this submission is satire, sarcasm or genuine. However, I feel the need to comment on this one. Sometimes borderline games, boring games, etc. get rejected. But nobody is removing them, or annoyed at their existence. Providing us with a serious submission of a game? That's welcome. I want more submissions! Thanks. You say you want a TAS of every NES game? Bring it on.
I have to say it is a solid blend of all three. The first half of the post is legitimate. Everything up to the question is a real analysis of the game and explained the process I did to TAS the game. I legitimately tried to TAS this to the best of my abilities and excluding a bot this run is as fast as it can get. I enjoyed making this run and even more so the bonus versions included. I liked that I was able to beat all possible records but thought it didn't show enough manipulation so I decided to try to go for a high score run. That added a new aspect because on hard the opponents are "smart" and answer the question in most situations. I liked the run and was going to submit at that point but then realized it was 14 minutes of answering questions and if people were willing to sit through that much I might as well show off the rest of the game. This led to the "Physical Challenge" run posted. This was actually the least fun movie to make because I already had figured out it was possible to manipulate short questions and getting the opponents to double dare. The mini-games are slightly difficult but due to the long time are fully capable of being completed in real time. The impressiveness is completing them in the shortest amount of time, but because it was fully optimized there wasn't really any play around aspects to show and it just ended up being a long movie in my opinion. Starting with the questions is the satire/sarcasm portion of the submission I had come up with when I was going to submit on April 1st. I didn't have time but wasted time writing it so I decided to leave it in. Apparently my satire wasn't explicit enough so here I am being the joke explainer. From "No doubt" to "boring games can't be accepted" is AngerFist's exact post from the Swordless Link run copy+pasted over changing all references to the Japan vs US debate to one about interesting versus boring games. I thought I was clever... Solid chance I was wrong. I do like the idea of finishing off the NES catalog and having a TAS for each game. The bad game choice due to uninteresting gameplay portion is roughly 75% sincere 25% sarcasm. I was the one who started the post a few weeks ago about how I disagreed with the uninteresting gameplay rule but I have since grown to accept that the rule exist for a reason. This doesn't mean I am going to stop TASing uninteresting games. I have sort of lucked out that my past few games have had an audience. I have recently realized the complete NES goal is a much greater task than I ever would have guessed. I did not realize that in Japan it was popular to take a manga and then port it to the NES as a simple text click through but there are a lot. I am sorry if my intentions with this run were unclear. I was just trying to have fun while submitting a legitimate, while most likely going to be rejected, run.
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No doubt that this run really sucked. It's simply boring. But you definitely shouldn't vote no. Why? I deliberately picked a boring game just to f**k with tasvideos.
Boring video != no vote Entertaininhg video != no vote So, why bother having a vote button? Why not simply accept every run? Oh, btw, some games never end, so good luck trying to speedrun them indefinitely. I'll be waiting.
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One more thing. I'll only support you, goofydylan8, for a TAS of every game, ONLY if a TAS of those boring games meant "Tool-Assisted Superplay". Seriously, a Tool Assisted Speedrun of every game is just stupid, since not every game has an ending, and some games are actually more of a "non-game", like "Electroplankton" for the NDS. Also, yeah, I mentioned the NDS instead of the NES, since I believe this site shouldn't be biased towards all NES games only. This isn't NESVideos, after all. So either TAS every single game that's TASable, or don't do it at all. Btw, if the staff of Tasvideos screwed the rules, I'm going to TAS a non-game immediately. Please ignore this.
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jlun2 wrote:
No doubt that this run really sucked. It's simply boring. But you definitely shouldn't vote no. Why? I deliberately picked a boring game just to f**k with tasvideos.
Boring video != no vote Entertaininhg video != no vote So, why bother having a vote button? Why not simply accept every run? Oh, btw, some games never end, so good luck trying to speedrun them indefinitely. I'll be waiting.
You apparently chose to ignore the response I sent to Adelikat where I explained that the line you are referencing was a joke.
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goofydylan8 wrote:
You apparently chose to ignore the response I sent to Adelikat where I explained that the line you are referencing was a joke.
Since it doesn't seem like you read my second post, I'll pretend it never existed. Anyway, what are you trying to achieve? Have a Tool-Assisted Speedrun of every NES game published, or a Tool-Assisted Superplay of said games?
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jlun2 wrote:
goofydylan8 wrote:
You apparently chose to ignore the response I sent to Adelikat where I explained that the line you are referencing was a joke.
Since it doesn't seem like you read my second post, I'll pretend it never existed. Anyway, what are you trying to achieve? Have a Tool-Assisted Speedrun of every NES game published, or a Tool-Assisted Superplay of said games?
My goal would to have a speedrun of every game that either end screen/ending or a final goal to achieve. This is going to require a lot of traditionally "boring" games like Double Dare, Uncanny X-Men or Terminator 2 to have movies created for them but it will also create many more entertaining runs for the site and ultimately complete the goal of beating every game in the fastest way possible. I would like the idea of Tool-Assisted Superplay for the trivial games that could be made entertaining or the games that don't have an ending but that would be a far less reasonable goal. Making a good play around is far more difficult than simply making the fastest way to beat a game (in my opinion) because you can brute force or watch memory to make a game fast but to make it entertaining takes a special eye for what is fun to watch. I do not believe I have that skill so I wouldn't be able to take part in this portion of the NES Completion Challenge, but if others would like it try I would fully support it. Also I don't even care if these runs are published. I would appreciate if the site was more lenient on the uninteresting game play rule but if they want to try and keep the published runs sacred that is for the community to decide. I just want the runs to exist and to be accessible in some way.
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I know the month's April but having tried to TAS this game back in my early YouTube days I just don't find it a good choice.
I like Doraemon
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I appreciate that you took the time to work out three completely different strategies. The any% run is really the most interesting out of the 3, though, given how long the delays are between question rounds. Even then, the game's not that interesting... but it is better than I expected, I admit. Maybe it's because Rare did the music. The manipulation looks pretty good. I wish the final obstacle course could be more exciting, but that can't be helped. I'd say this gets a Meh.
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
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mklip2001 wrote:
I appreciate that you took the time to work out three completely different strategies. The any% run is really the most interesting out of the 3, though, given how long the delays are between question rounds. Even then, the game's not that interesting... but it is better than I expected, I admit. Maybe it's because Rare did the music. The manipulation looks pretty good. I wish the final obstacle course could be more exciting, but that can't be helped. I'd say this gets a Meh.
Thanks for the real input on the run. If the waiting between questions could be skipped I would like the physical challenge run but it just takes so long.
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Just to let you know, both the high score run and the physical challenge run desync for me. I'm using FCEUX 2.1.6 svn0 and I tried both Old PPU and New PPU.
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om, nom, nom... want more!
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FractalFusion wrote:
Just to let you know, both the high score run and the physical challenge run desync for me. I'm using FCEUX 2.1.6 svn0 and I tried both Old PPU and New PPU.
That's strange. I must have done something wrong. Oh well, they weren't being submitted and wouldn't have been accepted anyways.
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. ---- [2174] NES Double Dare by goofydylan8 in 06:26.48