Hello everyone! This is a finished TAS of Club Penguin: Elite Penguin Force: Herbert's Revenge for the Nintendo DS. Please read my comments as I go through the game.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: DeSmuME_0.9.9_x86 (32-bit) (I used this version since in 9.10 there was a save data error and I couldn't TAS it there... and not 9.11 either since that version wasn't out yet when I started making this TAS.)
- Emu Settings to Sync:
- Enable Timing Bus Checked
- Dynamic Recomplier set to 100
- Graphics Renderer: SoftRasterizer
- Heavy glitch abuse
- Abuses MANY programming errors.
- Contains speed/entertainment tradeoffs
- Abuses warps...
- Genre: Adventure
- Genre: Puzzle
- Genre: Storybook (aka. Point and click)
About the game:
This is a game based on the online Flash game with the same name, released in May 2010. It's a point and click adventure puzzle game thingy were you become and agent of the EPF, a "secret" organization where you defend the Club Penguin island from evil forces, in this case, from Herbert "Senpai" P. Bear, a very grumpy polar bear. This game tells the story of Herbert and your times as a PSA agent, where you play 10 missions to know Herbert's lore and wreck his plans once and for all. This game focuses more on the touch controls, so all the action in the game happens on the bottom screen. This honestly is one of my favorite games of all time... really, not kidding. I love the music and dat amazing dialogue, and honestly I think this is an obscure gem for the DS console. I love Club Penguin (even though Disney is bitch to the game currently) for very personal reasons, and even though I have 18 and a half years old now, I still play it sometimes.
About the TAS:
Well, where do I begin... I started this TAS on December of 2013......... yeah, I've been working on this TAS for more than 14 months, that's... a lot of time. Tecnically this TAS is my very first project ever on this site. Originally, this was a solo project, but then Jackhammers and wrenches ruined my motivation... until one day, one nice gentleman known as solarplex helped me with various sections of the game that I simply couldn't optimize. He helped me so much to a point we decided to work toghether on the project until now. :D
After a lot of issues with time and desyncs, after a year and 4 months, my greatest TASing project is finished.
<insert comments here>
Tricks and Glitches used:
Here I'll cover the most important tricks in the movie.
- HUD Off Glitch: The most abused one of all, you click on a HUD menu and then with timing you click on an area or NPC and the menu will get stuck. This saves many frames on many cases.
- Puffle Scrolling Glitch: When the Puffle menu is opened, you can move the cursor with the D-pad and get out of the camera's view, when the menu is closed, move the D-pad and the camera will scroll really fast. This is not used too much for having a slow execution.
- Phone Call skips: This one is simple, on a fade in transition, you can click on a phone call and it will skip the call entirely.
- There's more stuff available in the Game Resources page, although it needs an update and it's not very well explained. (aka. bad english)
Mission 1: The Elite Penguin Force
This is where it all began. It's very straight forward, you have various test to prove your skills and I glitch through it in a breeze. A lot of the glitches and tricks were found here. I later made a 19 frame improvement to this mission thanks to HUDing Off in the grappling hook room. You will see that in the Puffle Room I throw a snowball in the box to hit the target, basically this is a proof that this game has a very glitchy HUD.
Mission 2: Secret of the Fur
Here you have to bring G (aka. the blue penguin) 3 samples of various things, there's no way to skip that part. I Puffle Scroll to get fuel faster. At one point, I screwed up ont the route and I had to resync and fix the mistake I did, this resulted in a 2102 frame improvement over the previous mission 2 TAS.
Mission 3: Questions to a Crab
In this mission you first encounter Herbert, and you have to stop him for the first time. I glitch trough the cave entrance and I talk to the bear for the first time with a funny conversation. After I give the Puffle enough Puffle O's, I use a small trick to exit the cave quicker. When I go back to the mountain, I use the Map to go to the Pizzeria ta get a pizza, this is faster than going to the Ski Lodge first.
Mission 4: Mysterious Tremors
Herbert makes a drill to make some funny things going on in the island. Not much to say here rather than the TAS route is very linear to get all of the items you need.
Mission 5: Spy and Seek
You place 3 devices to track Herbert. The places are kind of far to each other and where you get items are VERY specific. After inflating ducks, fixing minecarts and fliying kites, you got to place a visor thing to the Wilderness and spy Herbert's funny tricks. He gets a Spy Phone again, and he lefts.
Mission 6: Waddle Squad
I have to protect a (fake) golden puffle and I help my teammates in the process, first Rookie with a big magnet, and also Jet-Pack Guy with some fuel. After I set a trap at the Night Club, Herbert's sets a trap on Agent X, and then X saves the day by some ridiculous occurrances.
Mission 7: The Veggie Villain
Herbert destroys the PSA, so the team TRIES to stop him, by confusing the game's route script, cleaning DVDs and getting some corn seeds. Then it's revealed that there's an even more secret organization called the EPF, and every one celebrates the occasion by eating popcorn.
Mission 8: Suspect at Large
X dresses up as a crab and X has to go to Herbert's secret lair to find his plans. Very hard to route and optimize, and it's the 2nd longest mission in the game and the hardest mission to TAS.
Mission 9: Herbert's Plan (aka. Desync King)
My teammates are kidnapped and I have to save them... without Map!!! Why? I dunno the game doesn't give me a map this time for some reason.
Optimizing this one was easy... but syncing it was hard... but in the end, it synced in, I glitched through it and it was done fast. I also skip a microgame by pressing Start. NOTE: This is the only microgame on the entire game that can be skipped. Any other microgame is mandatory to complete it.
Mission 10: The Ultimate Mission
You work toghether with Herbert to clean his mess... HIS BIG MESS... It took some time to make an optimal route for this one, since you have to get many items. There's also various microgames I optimized myself, like a disguise game and a beard painting game. After all stress and madness calls down and Herbert dissappears, X recieves one final call... for an Underwater Party! The final cutscene appears and the credits roll.
My goal:
Hoping that this TAS gets accepted, not for Vault but for Moons, or even Stars! (since this TAS looks kind of recommender for newcommers i dunno)
Possible Improvements:
- Title screen cutscene can be done faster by pressing Start instead of the Touch screen.
- RAM Watch: since finding RAM addresses for this game is a nightmare.
- Possible memory corruption: See game resources for da video.
Special Thanks:
- Patashu, Got4n, TASeditor, Mothrayas, HHS, Samsara, jlun2, grassini, ars4326, and xy2_ for posting in the thread.
- adelikat and the Desmume Team for making this emulator and making the .dsm format so I could edit the inputs via Notepad++.
- The Notepad++ devs.
- God, literally.
- And a SUPER MEGA ULTRA GIGA SPECIAL thanks to solarplex, for being the best person to collab with but also for being a great guy.
Suggested Screenshots:
Suggest more screenshots if you want!
What's next?
I move on... to make more projects, but for now, I want to take a rest, because I'm tooo freakin' tired of making this, really, 14 months WTF is wrong with me!? Now if you excuse me, I'm waiting for next week to get a FREE puffle. See ya later and have a good day.
Tompa: Let's get this judged, shall we?
Tompa: At times, this was more enjoyable to watch than I expected. Seeing the menus and text go by quite fast until it suddenly says "Mission accomplished" without me understanding a single thing of what happened, considering I do not know the game. This confusion part is always a nice touch to a TAS, especially for a game like this which is otherwise not really as impressive and interesting in a TAS-perspective.
The run recieved mostly positive responses anyway. I'll be accepting this for the Vault.
Spikestuff: Syncs. GREAT! NOW I'M PUBLISHING A CLUB PENGUIN GAME.
Did you grab the wrong ROM?
feos: I don't see a hashsum provided, so... no idea. But looking at the discussion, I think I used the right one.
<--(the one I recommend the most)
