This is an unlicensed demake of Resident Evil (1996), ported to the NES called "生化危机 Bio Hazard" (sic) (生化危机 is Mandarin for "Resident Evil") by Waixing. The game's physics and aesthetics are based off of the GB game "RE: Gaiden". Commentary can be found here: [dead link removed] though will likely be updated based on submission reviewer comments.
Thanks to xxezrabxxx for his quick encode of the video and hosting it.
Emulators have considerable trouble emulating this game, with crashes occuring often. Note that the game itself does not crash anywhere near as frequently (I have two copies of the game), suggesting some improvement could be made to the rom dump, emulator, or both.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: FCEUX 2.2.3
- From wikipedia: The player's character is a member of a special law enforcement task force who is trapped in a mansion populated by dangerous mutated creatures. The objective of the game is to uncover the mystery of the mansion and ultimately escape alive.
The aspects of this game are very similar to optimizations of typical Resident Evil game, the player has a limited inventory space and requires the player to use items to unlock doors, solve puzzles. There are finite ammunition drops and weapons placed throughout the game but an added difficulty in this game is that unlike the standard game, ammunition is not combinable (15+15 != 30), nor is it droppable (nor is any other item). This requires ammunition to be planned very precisely and is a central feature of this movie.
Most instances of avoiding crashes are done by rerouting my path, as the game uses taxicab geometry this does not lose time, however there are some cases were this doesn't work where I pause for (typically) one frame.
Cheers,
crazyjesse
ThunderAxe31: File replaced with a spiked version that removes 2070 blank frames at the end.
For a first submission, this is quite good. This is the kind of game that needs a lot of researches done beforehand just to figure out how to beat it, let alone routing a speedrun. For the making of this TAS, a lot of game-specific knowledge has been put to use, pushing to the game limits, as far of current knowledge. I couldn't spot any suspicious point, so I consider this well optimized.
There are a couple of remarks I want to make about the game choice. We usually don't accept game ports, unless there are major gameplay differences from the original version. In this case, we're looking at a de-make version of a 3D PSX game, Resident Evil, so of course the gameplay results completely different than the original. There is strong similarity of in-game story events, but that alone can't be remotely considered an issue.
Another aspect is about the ROM chosen, and the current emulation available. Hacked versions of the original game ROM are available, for circumventing some emulation difficulties of most NES emulators. For emulating this game, there are known issues even with FCEUX, which is notoriously able to emulate many games that other emulators can't. In fact the author mentioned that some minor slowdowns were included in the run, in order to prevent the game from crashing. Since these resulted in very minor time losses, they can't be considered as an issue. In most cases, we would reject a movie made with a game that features serious emulation issues, and exceptionally prefer a hacked ROM version for fixing the issues. In this case this is clearly not necessary, so the original ROM is preferred like usual. I also want to note that emulation issues can be considered as a reason for rejection, but only in case the run takes advantage of those emulation issues in order to perform time saves that would not be possible on the original hardware. This also doesn't seem the case here to me, as the gameplay looked pretty much the same as what should be on real console.
As for the entertaining aspect, this is in my opinion a very interesting game. However, I can't ignore that the audience reaction wasn't very enthusiastic, which is kind of understandable, since most of the optimization can't really be noticed by watching casually.
With all that said, accepting for Vault.
ThunderAxe31: As much as I'd like to see this TAS published, I'm sorry to say that I had to rethink of my previous judgement for this submission. I wanted to check if some zombies could be skipped, and I was able to do that in six different cases, as I show in
this movie file, specifically at frame numbers 6000, 8400, 9000, 21100, 22800, 23400. This is an issue because not only it would save an appreciable amount of time, but it's also easily noticeable when watching the movie. Together with other micro optimizations through movie, it's possible to save over 1000 frames over this submission. It mortifies me, but I have to revise this to rejected.
Please don't feel disheartened now. I've already seen TASers beginning to from rags and getting to riches, we all start from zero. Even though rejections usually happen less often than acceptances, no one is blaming you. Actually, I apprecciate this movie because it introduced strategies and tricks for a game that has never been TASed before, so it's objectively a contribution. I hope to see you keeping TASing, especially because you're the only person who's interested in bootlegged NES RPGs, beside myself. I can tell that you're going to be able to get there, I know because I've already seen you improving a lot during last week! See you later.
