emulator: snes9xw improvement 7 with WIP timing
TMNT 4 is a pretty fun beat-em-up game starring the infamous Ninja Turtles. Played with Raphael, with a totally different strategy for the most part (than Mazzaneko's previous runs). Still only 1-player, though.
  • plays in hard mode
  • aims for fastest time
  • doesn't get hit
  • manipulates luck
I set dash to manual in the options, which saved huge amounts of time by letting me start running anywhere in only a few frames, especially because the strongest attacks require running. I also change the control scheme so I get a separate button for the special attack, and turn off automatic back attacks so I can have better control over which way I'm facing when I perform an attack. And of course I set the difficulty to Hard.
Raphael has shorter attack range than Donatello, but the difference is not as much as it seems like it should be and wasn't a major problem. Raphael also walks much faster, which was fairly useful for up/down maneuvering even though all the turtles can run horizontally at the same speed.
Raphael's special does slightly more damage than Donatello's (16 instead of 14, which is just barely enough to kill purple clan guys in 1 hit). That includes run+special (the flying ground kick move), which is the same damage but doesn't eat away health to use. Raphel's peak air slash move only does 8 damage compared to Donatello's 14, so I lose several seconds on the Baxter battle when he's in the air. Donatello's specials are long enough that they can hit twice in a row. As Raphel, I use run+special for the same purpose, but since there's no running in surfboard levels I also lose a few seconds on the Super Krang battle because of having less special attacks available. (It might be faster to get killed to refill my life meter there, but I decided not to do that.)
Raphael's most damaging attack is his somersault-charge, which does 20 damage per hit and is how I beat Super-Shredder so fast (because I got it to hit him twice in a row each dash). Donatello's somersault charge only does 16 damage. For a frame of reference, each bar of boss life is 32 hit points. (I used the cheat finder feature of Snes9x to search for a value in the game's RAM that decreased when I hit the boss, and monitored that value to determine the damage of each attack and the remaining health of the boss (because the life bars aren't accurate enough), in case you're wondering.)
Raphael's regular attacks do damage in the sequence of 5, 4, 3, 8, so his combos start strong and get weaker until the final hit, whereas Donatello's attacks do damage in the sequence of 3, 4, 6, 8, starting out weak and getting stronger. (EDIT: Apparently it can also be 5, 4, 5, 8 depending on the timing, but this is not enough to make a difference in the overall strategy.) Super-Krang was by far the hardest part of this run, because to prevent him from doing his majorly time-wasting attack, it's necessary to bring him to a certain amount of health in a number of hits that's exactly a multiple of 6, which is why I used a normally-suboptimal sequence of attacks on him. (The hard part was figuring out what triggered him to do that attack based on trial and error and what Mazzaneko managed to do. It was easy once I figured out the rule (that he'll perform the attack if he has less than about 1/3 of his health at the end of every 6th time you hit him) and knew all the damage values.)
Luck was manipulated in several places:
  • In the first battle with Shredder, the blocking guys appear at totally random locations nearby. It was a little difficult to get right because by the time I moved where a guy was going to appear, he'd already decided to spawn somewhere else instead.
  • In the ship scene, I jump to manipulate that cannonball to fall exactly on the rock warrior to kill him.
  • In the battle with Bebop and Rocksteady, they have many annoying time-wasting moves that are randomly triggered, which I avoided.
  • In the final battle with Super-Shredder, he has 3 different attacks which are chosen very randomly. I had to manipulate him to do his ice attack each time, which required delaying the end of the previous level by 1 frame for his initial attack, and repeatedly redoing the running start toward him with slightly different timings for the two subsequent attacks.

Phil: Analyzing ...
nitsuja: Did you finish analyzing it yet? I guess so since you published it...


TASVideoAgent
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woooooooooow....
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
Cooljay wrote:
Mayor Haggar and Cody are such nice people for the community. Metro City's hospitals reached an all time new record of incoming patients due to their great efforts :P
nesrocks
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Joined: 5/1/2004
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Location: Rio, Brazil
what in the hell? lol ok... the other movie can be cancelled i guess.
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1311)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Yeah, I was just doing some tests, then I realized how much faster it was going and thought I might as well finish and submit it. Hopefully Phil sees this before finishing encoding the other one... BTW, I'm pretty sure this can still be improved, but I'm not sure how or willing to try running this again. I guess Mazzeneko will have more of a challenge beating it if he wants to. I was trying a 2 player run originally, but it was taking forever and also turning out much slower because of the very slow screen scrolling and extra enemies.
Active player (411)
Joined: 3/16/2004
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Location: America, Québec
I am going to watch both movies and study them. But this one is alot more faster. ~10 minutes faster than 1st submission.
Joined: 12/20/2004
Posts: 226
This run had a surprising amount of variety for a beat em up. Also you managed to destroy everything effortlessly. Voting yes for speed and variety.
Shingen
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Joined: 11/23/2004
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Location: Urf
MUCH better than the Don run. /yesvoted
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Joined: 6/26/2004
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Location: Kuopio, Finland
Yeaps, it's much faster. definetly YES
- mazzeneko
Former player
Joined: 4/16/2004
Posts: 1286
Location: Finland
Amazing! I found this to be the most entertaining and surprising run in a long time, good job!
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 380
Location: Finland
I just can't get this movie to play without Snes9x dying horribly on me. Using improvement7, the movie plays fine for some seconds and then just crashes. I usually get to character select screens, sometimes even to the very beginning of the stage1. Mazzeneko's runs fine though. Maybe it's an option somewhere that I have overlooked but seems quite strange.
"Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home." ( Pratchett & Gaiman: Good Omens )
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Snes9x itself crashes? That's odd. Try it in the official 1.43 WIP, that will also play the movie fine. And try doing the restore trick (run snes9x with the -restore parameter). I wonder what could be different here... are you playing the movie on a different drive or is the movie file set to read-only or in a zip file or something? Also, make sure your download isn't corrupted, I guess. It can't be what the game's doing that's causing the crash... edit: Is your sound driver set to something else than Snes9x DirectSound? Try setting it to that, or see what happens if you uncheck "Sync samples with sound CPU" when you play the movie in the modified v7.
Joined: 5/27/2005
Posts: 465
Location: Turku, Finland
I'm definitely voting YES!! Your run is so much faster than the already published one. I'm quite sure that this run will get published.
Which run should I encode next? :)
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 380
Location: Finland
Nitsuja wrote:
edit: Is your sound driver set to something else than Snes9x DirectSound? Try setting it to that, or see what happens if you uncheck "Sync samples with sound CPU" when you play the movie in the modified v7.
Sync samples with sound CPU was the option causing trouble. After unchecking that it ran perfectly through. Thanks for the help. This is a lot faster run than the currently published one and in addition, manages to keep the game relatively fast-paced and interesting to watch, thanks to variety of moves used. I see no reason why this shouldn't obsolete the current run. YES.
"Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home." ( Pratchett & Gaiman: Good Omens )
Player (36)
Joined: 9/11/2004
Posts: 2631
Cowabunga indeed.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day, Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
Joined: 1/10/2005
Posts: 63
Pretty darn awesome!
Skilled player (1829)
Joined: 4/20/2005
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Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Amazingly done. Definite YES. :)
Joined: 11/15/2004
Posts: 804
Location: Canada
Wow! That was a lot faster! This is a much more interesting run. You throw more enemies into the screen and do a lot more slide kicking. The increased damage you can do by switching to Raph really speeds up the game and makes the game look effortless. Even the little things are done very well. It was clever to fall down the manhole before fighting the Mecha Turtle (I can't believe they didn't notice "slimballs" before they released the game), and Raph even spins his sai at appropriate times. You have a real sense of style. This run is artistic. (You know, no one has done a TMNT3 run yet...) I'm certainly voting Yes for this. Although... does it technically count as being played at the hardest difficulty when you set one of the options to make you that much faster? :P
TASing or playing back a DOS game? Make sure your files match the archive at RGB Classic Games.
Active player (438)
Joined: 4/21/2004
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I hope Phil will soon be finished analyzing this submission and encode it for us unpatient fans :)
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
Cooljay wrote:
Mayor Haggar and Cody are such nice people for the community. Metro City's hospitals reached an all time new record of incoming patients due to their great efforts :P
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Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
hopper wrote:
Although... does it technically count as being played at the hardest difficulty when you set one of the options to make you that much faster? :P
Actually this is more like a harder difficulty for all of the things changed. Raphael takes enormous damage from attacks compared to the other turtles (some enemies can kill him in two hits), so you have to be really good at avoiding attacks to survive with him. Donatello is more the turtle for beginners to use (as he has good defense, good attack, and good range, it's hard to go wrong with him). The double-tap run takes more skill to use than the hold-to-run, and the detection is actually a little messed up and unresponsive such that sometimes a triple-tap is necessary. And having back attack on would usually make it easier by fixing mistakes and hitting guys behind you when playing normally. It just so happens that all of these things that would make the game harder also give more control to make it more fast-paced when doing a time attack. (It is true that it wasn't necessary to change the control scheme, but that made the run so much faster to make on my keyboard setup that I think it was worth spending 1 whole frame before the game on it.) Anyway, thanks for all the compliments.
Joined: 1/1/2022
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Desynched @ the first shredder battle, but from what I've watched, you were playing great. I'll try to get it to work once again, but just so you know, yes vote from me.
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Angerfist: yeah yeah, be patient.
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HSZZZ wrote:
Desynched @ the first shredder battle
This probably means you have to turn off Volume Envelope Height Reading in the sound options and try again, or use the version of the emulator I link to in the submission text.
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Joined: 4/17/2004
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I was going to say that you don't end every level with as little health left as possible, but then I realized that the bonus levels would be extremely boring if you avoided all the goodies and didn't kill any enemies to minimize the countdown. So I think you made a wise choise and that this run should just be labeled "Ignores bonus effects". I voted yes, too.
nesrocks
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Only the first level he didnt finish with as little health as possible, but he probably only realized it later and didnt want to remake everything. He knows the mistakes on the run. And about changing an option to make raphael run manually: yes please keep it that way. I loved it. Yes vote.
Active player (256)
Joined: 4/24/2005
Posts: 476
It desynched for me in the Shredder battle as well, then I realized I had the wrong version of the ROM. Maybe that's the problem in your case as well. Are you guys kidding? Automatic running is probably what made the run Mazzeneko did so pale in comparison to this one. Of course it should be kept. Awesome run. Obvious yes vote.
[URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcuV2JdaBYY]Streets of Rage 3 (2 players)[/url]