Toki: Going Ape Spit is one of those games that’s fascinating in how bad it is. I was introduced to this by Mike Uyama at AGDQ 2013. This quickly became the game everyone was playing in the practice room because it was so bad, and so hard it was like a personal challenge. Even with maximum lives, most people didn’t get past the first couple worlds on hardest difficulty.
This movie takes advantage of a strange glitch to warp to world 8-3 from the title screen. One side effect of this glitch is that the difficulty is set to normal instead of hardest, so this movie will differ significantly from the one already on the website beyond the usage of the glitch to skip most of the game. The difficulty settings for Toki completely change the experience of the game as not only does it change enemy health and pickups available, but certain obstacles and enemies only appear on higher difficulties.
This Movie includes the following categories:
- Aims for fastest time
- Luck manipulation
- Abuses programming errors
- Takes no damage
- Uses "warps"
Toki does not control well. He is slow, his jumps are awkward, and spitting your weapon slows you down unless you are in the air.
As for the actual glitch used in this run, it appears to be a programming error with the way the title screen demos are made. A frame perfect pause input on some of the demos will unpause them and give you control from that point in the game, but that only works on demos much earlier in the game. In this instance, the last demo is of world 8-3 and it appears to have been desynced from the inputs slightly. You can see that Toki moves a little bit strangely, and then right before the stage timer runs out the demo will pause. At this point, hitting start will unpause the game instead of skipping the demo and Toki will immediately die to a time out. This respawns us at the start of 8-3 with full control on normal difficulty with 1 extra life and no continues. This leads to a very unusual warp that requires we have to sit on the title screen for a while and skip the earlier demos in order to get there.
From this point on, There are only 4 stages, and 3 bosses left.
Level 8-3
This is the only level featured from the “dark” world. Each world has a gimmick and this one is simply that the levels are dark until you spit your weapon. In highness’ movie, he uses phoenixes and their flames to bounce up to a high platform and skip about half the level. This enemy is not present on normal difficulty, so we have to take the intended route through the stage. As an added bonus, though, a bird that drops powerups is present that would normally not be there on hardest so we are able to pick up a flamethrower for stark.
Boss: Stark
Stark is a pain, in between phases he shoots fire from the phoenix enemies that seemingly fly in random patterns and home onto you. You can bounce on them, but they tend to fly in ways that bouncing on them will get you killed. Having the flamethrower trivializes him, though, as it does damage on every frame and he is quickly melted before we have to deal with that.
If I had manipulated him to spawn on the right side so his death animation would be shorter, then I cannot kill him in one cycle and wind up losing several seconds due to the transition.
Level 9-1
This level is quite difficult on high difficulty, but less than half the enemies are present on normal. There is a secret exit to this level only accessible by bouncing repeatedly on an enemies head, but the required enemy doesn’t have enough health on normal to reach it and we stop short when it dies. Once again we are required to take the intended method. Jumping at the end to fall down the pit at maximum speed saves about a second and a half over walking down.
Level 9-2
For all intents and purposes, this is an autoscroller. You can lose frames if you don’t do the jumps well, but it is very easy to optimize.
Level 9-3
The main challenge in this level is trying to move through all the barriers and get under the pounders without losing cycles. The big spikes are only skippable if moving at full speed while approaching them. If you lose any frames on the approach you cannot get over them, so a few have to be killed.
Boss: Stark
Stark is back and we don’t have as overpowered of a weapon this time. He also has more health, so we have to be a bit more careful. This time, he cannot re-appear on the left, though, so we are able to keep our distance and guarantee 3 damage hits with our spread shot.
Boss: Membrane
Membrane is very annoying as the hitbox on his body is very strange and can fail to register hits sometimes. The hands he spawns also tend to block for his body and also generate large amounts of lag while he’s spitting out spikes, fruit, and powerups. I have to take care not to let too many spread shot projectiles be on the screen or subsequent shots will only shoot 1 or 2 projectiles.
I wasn’t able to force him into a pattern where I could kill him before he flies left and you can see a bit of the lag generation that attack causes. He dies before he gets most of the way through that attack however and Toki: Going Ape Spit is finished in record time.
Known improvements:
There are a few minor mistakes in the movie, but every attempt of mine to remove them has resulted in the next level's loading screen taking more frames than the number saved. Being relatively new to TASing and never having done anything with Genesis before, leaves me without the ability to fix these.
- 8-3 the exit is entered later than possible with the duck input.
- 9-2 The jump onto the second vehicle is a few frames late.
- 9-3 The movement while bouncing on the two enemies before the spikes could save a few frames by not deviating as far left once it's been baited to walk off the cliff.
On top of a few other single digit frame losses
Truncated: What's this, an unclaimed run? Taking care of it.
Noxxa: Fixing judging status for
Truncated, who forgot to set it to claimed :)
Truncated: There is precedent for accepting this kind of run, since the type of glitch is nearly exactly the same as with
Arkanoid. That run also desyncs a demo to cause the death of the player, and continues from the stage where the demo played.
The movie itself is reasonably well made, and different enough from the existing run that I think that both can be featured here. The three minute long stretch of time at the start where nothing happens doesn't help it in entertainment value obviously, and I'm suggesting that, like the Arkanoid run, it's placed in the Vault.
