Winx Club, it's a show about fairies, magic, and friendship. There's also several games in the franchise which are filled with some interesting glitches. Apparently the fairies finally realized they can just fly anywhere instead of being constrained to what is considered "in bounds" and "out of bounds".
- Emulator used: VBA-RR v24 svn480
Game objectives
- Complete the game as fast as possible.
- Takes damage to save time.
- Abuses programming errors
This game follows the main character, Bloom, through her journey of finding out she is a fairy, saving the world, etc. But all of that dialog is skipped so it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that you can get out of bounds on almost every map. Thanks to this, the route is quite interesting. While there are no "big" breaks to skip whole areas, it's possible to skip just about everything in some areas besides the bosses. I'll come out and say it right now, this isn't the most entertaining game. The character moves slowly, there is a lot of dialog, and all the fights are repetitive. Even so, it feels like a pretty good TAS with some wacky glitches.
Glitches
As a note here: The three guys who actually did all the work breaking the game are Akheon, Rocmox, and Kazooie. All I did was put together a route and TASed it.
Getting Out of Bounds
- While jumping over an obstacle in the way, press start. It's that easy.
- While climbing up or dropping off a ledge, press start. Yep.
Actor Transfer/Carry
- By pressing select several frames before the game starts to fade out for a map transition, it is possible to carry all of the actors from the map you are currently on to the next map. This will only work if the map you are currently on has more actors than the next map, or else the game will crash.
- An interesting side effect of this is that while the actors get transferred, the effects of their triggers do not. Let's say a bird on the current map is actor 14. The trigger for it to fly away will still exist in the same spot on the next map after it has been transferred, but it will instead activate what the expected actor 14 on the next map's trigger to be. This is used to get the key to Cloud Tower without going through even more dialog.
- Another effect of the glitch is that you keep your X and Y coordinates. This will place you out of bounds in most cases and allows you to walk straight to loading zones. Maps seem to loop on the X and Y grid, or atleast triggers, including loading zones. This is used multiple times.
Gardenia
The goal here is to collect 5 fireflies so I can get a level up. This will be the only level up, as it's only done to get the Pixie Rain attack which actually gets weaker as you level up even more. I get one firefly from a cutscene, another from a tree, and then go out of bounds and hit the next map's trigger from out of bounds.
On the next map, I get out of bounds and head to coordinates 0,0. All objects that aren't being used at the time are placed there, so there are 3 fireflies which I grab for a total of 5.
Black Mud Swamp
Just a bunch of actor transferring.
Alfea on the way to Cloud Tower
Normally you have to talk to a whole bunch of people and eventually get the key to open the trophy case to get a model of Cloud Tower to get to Cloud Tower. Instead, I go to Gardenia, actor transfer to Alfea, walk up to a bird, walk up to a fish, and I have the model. The bird has the same actor number as the code to the trophy case, and the fish has the same actor number as the trophy case itself. Wow, that was neat.
Red Fountain
We had originally thought that Red Fountain would be done completely vanilla. That was until I found the loading zone for the third map after actor transferring from the first to the second map. Then it was just a bunch of actor transfers and it all worked out.
Sparks
Oh boy was Sparks fun. Go out of bounds, dodge the trigger for a giant stone head on a wall, and actor transfer onto the next map. Suddenly I'm at the boss!
Cloud Tower again
This is actually the least broken part. It seems that no actor transfers or out of bounds were faster.
There are potential improvements to this. A glitch related to buffering text boxes or the pause menu many times allows for text boxes to be skipped is possible, which I was unaware of all the details when making the TAS. Currently it has no uses to be faster, but it very well could prove to be faster if looked into more. Also, time could be saved on most boss fights. There is some strange mechanic of the Pixie Rain attack that makes it take a seemingly random amount of time to charge up. I couldn't find a way to manipulate it, though it may be possible.
Special Thanks
- Rocmox: For providing me with maple syrup and advice the entire time.
- CyberKitsune: For helping me find memory addresses, writing a lua script to show the actor's coordinates and number, and for letting us use his TeamSpeak for chats about the TAS.
- Akheon and Kazooie: For laying the foundation for the TAS with their glitches and knowledge of the game.
Noxxa: The out-of-bound tricks and other glitches are nice, but can't save the run from being somewhat slow and dull to watch. Accepting for the Vault.
