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Alright, so this one is faster than RTA most definitely. I didn't end on the final hit on Gum Monster, so that time still isn't accurate, but whatever it's still faster than RTA. This is a 22:41 according to RTA timing. 10 seconds ahead of the WR! So, yeah. Anyways, blerrrffff, copy paste the original submission text HAHA.

I initially recorded this movie in SNES9X, before finding out you can't submit movies like that. Oops. I redid the whole movie in Bizhawk instead. Unfortunately, my computer is pretty trash, so I don't have a video encode of this run (unless someone wants to make that for me). EDIT: Don't worry, memeboi of the past. You had to redo the movie anyways. I'm encoding it as I type this. LOL!!11!!1

Anyways, Pac-Man 2. This is definitely a game. In this game, you don't control Pac-Man directly. Instead, you guide him through the use of your slingshot. You can press Y to make him look up, backwards, down, and forwards. Pac-Man's mood changes in this game, too, based on your actions (or whatever happens to him). Happy, angry, wacky, and sad. Unfortunately, the latter two aren't seen in this movie.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.5.3
  • Beat the game fast
  • SNES version
  • Mood manipulation

Getting the Milk

The first objective of the game is to get some milk for Pac-Baby. This is quite a simple mission, as the milk is over to your right. However, the first trick comes right at the beginning here. You need to shoot the windmill so Pac-Man will run away. You have to wait until Pac-Man is a good distance away from the windmill. Then, you force him to look down. You have to shoot the windmill three times, so getting Pac to look down is just enough time for the windmill's blades to... fly off, somehow.
Once Pac-Man is done running, he'll play an animation. You can skip it by shooting him.
The next trick is the Cow Kill. See, when you hit the cow, it bellows an apparently scary moo. Normally, Pac-Man gets frightened by it, and runs away. However, if Pac-Man is standing right up close to the cow, it will swing its tail and whack Pac-Man. This kills him, and he'll respawn at the beginning of the area.

Getting the Flower

Pac-Man must climb the mountain to get flowers for Lucy. Why he doesn't just go to a flower shop or something is beyond me. Anyways, windmills are lame. So, I use bees instead. If you shoot the tree at a specific spot, a bee hive will fall out. These bees normally kill Pac-Man. Luckily, I make sure that Pac-Man notices the bees each time I do the trick. Pac-Man will run away until the next screen, making this section a lot faster.
Once we make it to the mountain, we see the first uses of Power Pellets. Power Pellets transform Pac-Man into Super Pac-Man! In this form, he can eat ghosts! Wow! Also, he can be used to skip otherwise long and tedious areas, which is mostly what we'll be using him for.
After a ride in the minecart, we stumble across the first ID card. The ID cards are mandatory items that Pac-Man needs for the end of the game. Unfortunately, the game makes little to no mention of them, so they're easy to miss.
After Pac goes for a quick fly in the hangglider, we come across the next trick. When Pac-Man is on the mountain, a balloon will fly up. If Pac-Man notices it, you lose time and potentially your run if Pac-Man gets sad. If Pac-Man gets super sad, he won't notice the flowers at the top of the mountain. So, the balloon spawns on screen, I make Pac-Man LOOK, LOOK to the left, he walks over and despawns the balloon, I turn him around. Now, the balloon won't cause any problems!
When Pac-Man leaves the station, I shoot the chicken coop to make the chicken escape. This prompts Pac-Man to start chasing the chicken. Unfortunately, if you don't shoot Pac-Man, he'll bump into a tree and anger the bees, which then kill him. You have to shoot him before he bumps into the tree.

Getting the Guitar

The ghosts have stolen Pac-Jr's guitar. Pac-Man has to go and retrieve it for him. The next ID card is in the area with the cat.
When we enter the city, I shoot Pac-Man twice. This is to get him angry. If he's happy, he'll notice the slot machine in the next screen. This wastes time, although the animation is quite funny.

Defeating the Gum Monster

The evil ghost witch has been making a monster out of ABC gum. It's up to Pac-Man to stop her! The last ID card is on the rooftop.
There really isn't much to talk about on these later levels. It's just a lot of the same things. In the hot dog stand area, you have to let the whole animation with the cat play, which is definitely annoying, but in this objective, saving Power Pellets is mandatory.
I hit the ladder in the sewer area because I think it makes a neat sound. :)
When inserting the ID cards, it actually doesn't matter which order the numbers are in. I chose 4,5,1. But if you wanted to put in, 1,5,4, that would also work.
The unfortunately misspelled Gum Monster is a bit of a tricky battle. You have to shoot it so that it... sinks into the gum. Ghosts will swoop in to help it rise up. Super Pac-Man eats these ghosts. The Gum Monster then swats away Super Pac-Man, but you can shoot the arms to stop him from doing that.
Anyways, the Gum Monster gets defeated and Pac-Man saves the day! RTA timing would end on the final hit of the Gum Monster, but in this TAS, I advance the ending to the credits. EDIT: yeah actually in this one i end around the final hit on gum monster so lmao

Other comments

Making this TAS was very fun, and I feel like I may start running Pac-Man 2. I know what to do, so it shouldn't be so tough. Maybe when I find a real cartridge of this game, I'll put some time into runs.

ThunderAxe31: Claiming for judging.
ThunderAxe31: This movie can be improved significantly just by pressing buttons with more precision, as proved by Spikestuff by improving your movie by about 24 seconds. Pressing buttons as soon as possible is the basic of TASing, and it's required for making a movie that meets the minimum optimization acceptable. For this reason, I have to reject this submission.
memeboi470, I advice to try using TAStudio. Nowadays basically everyone use it for TASing. You can find it in BizHawk, under the Tools menu. This video guide may help you. Also, if you want, I'm even willing to aid you personally with a demonstration in streaming. You can visit our Discord server or add me as friend: ThunderAxe31#1512

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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #7703: memeboi470's SNES Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures in 22:48.11
Spikestuff
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I started looking at this game after the previous submission and completed a full run which is 1,590 frames faster than yours (when your input is truncated to final input). One major thing of concern is how your input is still coming off as RTA like which can be seen in the Gum Monster fight. You can defeat the boss with Pac-Man only crossing the Gum Monster once, and you don't have to react to the monster's arm, instead letting Pac-Man tank the hit. And the RTA like continues in that input when you look at it and see how you're shooting your pellets holding longer than necessary. Please, take your time and use the tools that BizHawk provides such as TAStudio, cause you'll be able to clean up your input, and also discover that the B button helps save a frame in the Main Menu.
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Spikestuff wrote:
and also discover that the B button helps save a frame in the Main Menu.
What do you mean?
alright
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Spikestuff wrote:
Please, take your time and use the tools that BizHawk provides such as TAStudio, cause you'll be able to clean up your input
Echoing this. Looking at the input directly, it seems like these runs are being performed in real time, just using rerecords. While that can be considered a TAS in and of itself, a true TAS will work frame by frame to ensure that every movement is precise and optimal. TAStudio is a godsend for this, allowing easy input editing and the ability to jump to any frame you want at any time. I would highly recommend downloading one of our published runs and studying how the author lays out their input. You'll almost certainly see things like single frame presses of buttons as early as possible in order to do things on the first possible frame, which is something that cannot be done consistently in real time over the course of an entire run. I've said this many times before to many different people over the years: The act of creating a TAS gives you infinite time and infinite retries to create a single run, so use both liberally! Nothing should be out of reach. Every possible idea you have can be tried, and SHOULD be tried, even the ones you know for a fact aren't going to work. You can try any idea at any time, you can tweak your approach in any way you want, and you can test several things far quicker and far more efficiently than even the most experienced RTA runners can. Something else I've said before is that all you need to create a great TAS is patience and Google: The patience comes from learning the tools, learning your workflow, testing and re-testing strategies, optimizing sections frame by frame over and over until you're confident they're done as fast as possible. Google is for everything you might have missed! Also, other search engines are available. You can approach a TAS from an RTA background, of course, and you can sort of treat the act of TASing the same way, but the only things that should be carried over are mental. An RTA runner will replay a game over and over and over and over again to try and improve their time: This should be kept in TASing, however the replay aspect should be micromanaged down as far as possible. Unlike an RTA runner, who can only "rerecord" to power-on and only knows if they've improved their time once they've finished the entire game, you can rerecord to literally any frame you want and figure out exactly where you're gaining and losing time at any point you want. Each screen becomes its own game to optimize in that way. You can clear a screen in 1800 frames, keep working at it, and find a way of clearing it in 1750 frames, then keep working at it further and possibly complete it in only 1700 frames, and you can move on to the next "game" whenever you're satisfied. This sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but it'seasy work. Zenlike, in a way. As you optimize your workflow, the process gets even easier, too, and you'll find yourself taking much less time overall while still putting in the same amount of effort, if not even more effort. I've knocked out entire optimized runs over the course of a single day before, and while that's an extreme case, it's also not an unrealistic one. I'll stop myself before I continue speaking in circles, but I'll leave with a parting thought on top of everything else: If this is a hobby you truly want to continue pursuing, and I damn well hope that's the case (as I do for every new submitter), it's worth it to stick around the community and learn things from people, being led by their examples and working with them to create better results than what one single person can do. The way we operate when it comes to new submitters and suboptimal runs isn't meant to be discouraging at all, it's simply meant to try and produce the best end results possible. We want people to improve and succeed more than anything, so I hope our words aren't coming off as cold and/or pushing you away. We're not coming from a place of mockery or insult when we talk about what we see in submissions, we're coming from a place of providing information, clearing up misunderstandings, and hopefully allowing self-improvement. In other words, don't give up. We're here to help.
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