(Link to video)
This submission is for Break Time: The National Pool Tour. Of the pool games on the NES, this one is probably the worst. The physics are terrible, aiming can be ridiculous at times, and there are many unskippable "cutscenes." Sounds like a perfect Char TAS!
The main mode in this game is the titular National Pool Tour mode. You're tasked with beating 5 opponents across the country in a best of 3 9-ball match. Ergo, we only have to win 10 racks to finish the game.
The rules of 9-ball are simple. You must hit the lowest remaining numbered ball first. After that, everything is legal aside from a scratch. If you make a legal shot and sink the 9 ball off of that, you win instantly. On the break, the 1 ball is always in the first position so it'll be the first ball you hit. Should you sink the 9-ball on the break, you also win instantly. You can probably tell where this is going.
First off, we have to enter our name. You can menu to end and leave your name blank, but this is a time loss as the game will have to render your name numerous times as "PL-1" instead of "A" which actually would cost frames in the run, so picking a one letter name is optimal.
Secondly, we have to win a "shootoff" (also known as a "lag") to gain control of the break. A few frames are spent in the beginning to give us good shootoff RNG. The idea is that each player shoots off the far rail and tries to come as close to the near rail as possible. Ties in this game go to the player, which is nice, especially on the final opponent who hits perfect lags every time.
Thirdly, the shot. If we were to shoot straight at the rack, hilarious results would ensue due to the bad physics (try it sometime. It's awful.) So we don't do that. Luckily, the setup for sinking the 9-ball on the break is very short, and guaranteed to work as long as you hit it properly. Missing the aim, the english, or the power will result in occastionally bad, sometimes awful outcomes.
So we go forth and dispatch our billiard foes. After the final stage the game mentions going for a world championship but that doesn't actually exist in this game, and it makes me wonder if a sequel to this was planned at one time. Good thing THAT never came out.
Enjoy?

feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: I realized I know nothing about pool so let some other judge handle this.

slamo: Claiming for judging.
slamo: Setting to Delayed, per this post.
slamo: Replaced the movie file with the shoot-offs completed, and resuming judging.
slamo: Looks optimized to me, you can't get much better than winning the game instantly on every break. The gameplay is slightly on the non-trivial side because of the shoot-off manipulation, and it was probably not that simple to find the aim/english/power combination that sinks the 9 ball every time. Accepting!

despoa: Processing...

TASVideoAgent
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Hopper262
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That sure is... something. As often happens with Char TASes, I couldn't bring myself to sit through the entire video so I didn't vote, but I'm entertained by your quest to give the playthrough more optimization and polish than the developers gave to the game. I hesitate to bring this up because the "action" is slow enough, but is select+start a glitch, or an in-game code which disables the in-game mechanic of lag-for-break?
ShesChardcore
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Hopper262 wrote:
That sure is... something. As often happens with Char TASes, I couldn't bring myself to sit through the entire video so I didn't vote, but I'm entertained by your quest to give the playthrough more optimization and polish than the developers gave to the game. I hesitate to bring this up because the "action" is slow enough, but is select+start a glitch, or an in-game code which disables the in-game mechanic of lag-for-break?
I don't blame you for the lack of voting. Even dating back to my RTA career I made a habit of putting time into games that were either outlandish, boring or had maybe 2 people who cared about them. It's a wonder why I never hit Twitch partner. This credo spilled over into my TASing haha. Re: select and start - I don't know why it works. I just know it works and people will get to watch less of the game which if they're not enjoying it is a net enjoyment gain technically.
Joined: 6/30/2010
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This is just one trick done for every match, between the slowest level transitions ever. I fast forwarded through everything but the actual gameplay and was still bored. This might be a cool technical achievement and very much TAS-only, but it's also awful to watch and an obvious "no" vote.
Current project: Gex 3 any% Paused: Gex 64 any% There are no N64 emulators. Just SM64 emulators with hacky support for all the other games.
Personman
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Posts: 465
Yes vote for the puns in the opponent names. Thank you for your hard work and dedication. How many publishable NES games are left at this point?
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
ShesChardcore
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Personman wrote:
How many publishable NES games are left at this point?
Too many.
Expert player, Reviewer (2389)
Joined: 5/21/2013
Posts: 414
Some more info about the shoot-off skip: it turns out you only have to hold Start to skip it, Select is not necessary. This skip is not mentioned in the game's documentation, but Start is used in-game to open up a prompt to exit the game. It's possible that this skip is just some bug with how the screen transitions interact with the exit menu, and it's also possible that this is some leftover debug code. Since Select is not necessary, this is looking less like a code and I'm leaning towards the former. I'll look into it more.
ShesChardcore
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slamo wrote:
Some more info about the shoot-off skip: it turns out you only have to hold Start to skip it, Select is not necessary. This skip is not mentioned in the game's documentation, but Start is used in-game to open up a prompt to exit the game. It's possible that this skip is just some bug with how the screen transitions interact with the exit menu, and it's also possible that this is some leftover debug code. Since Select is not necessary, this is looking less like a code and I'm leaning towards the former. I'll look into it more.
Depending on what you find I'd be glad to rework it without that skip/bug/whatever if needed and just win the shoot offs instead.
Expert player, Reviewer (2389)
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I looked into the code a bit. There is exactly one frame before every shoot-off (3502 for the first one in this submission) where it runs a subroutine (0xB1AC) which checks to see if the Start button is pressed (by checking bit 3 in 0x58) - if the button is pressed, it returns from that subroutine which begins the code that starts up the break (0xC253), otherwise it continues with the shoot-off and doesn't start the break until after it's done. This specific subroutine seems to be only called in the frame before the shoot-off, and is not called for any other part of the game, as far as I have searched. It's not used for any other instance where the Start button can be used, such as the title screen, main menu, or when exiting the game. This leads me to believe this is some sort of undocumented code to skip the shoot-off. For this reason, I'm requesting that the shoot-off skip is not used for this run. I'm setting the submission to Delayed until this is sorted out.
ShesChardcore
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slamo wrote:
I looked into the code a bit. There is exactly one frame before every shoot-off (3502 for the first one in this submission) where it runs a subroutine (0xB1AC) which checks to see if the Start button is pressed (by checking bit 3 in 0x58) - if the button is pressed, it returns from that subroutine which begins the code that starts up the break (0xC253), otherwise it continues with the shoot-off and doesn't start the break until after it's done. This specific subroutine seems to be only called in the frame before the shoot-off, and is not called for any other part of the game, as far as I have searched. It's not used for any other instance where the Start button can be used, such as the title screen, main menu, or when exiting the game. This leads me to believe this is some sort of undocumented code to skip the shoot-off. For this reason, I'm requesting that the shoot-off skip is not used for this run. I'm setting the submission to Delayed until this is sorted out.
Thank you for diving into that. Here is a replacement file with shootoffs added: https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/638004096375355758
Expert player, Reviewer (2389)
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Thank you! I've updated the file.
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [4854] NES Break Time: The National Pool Tour by ShesChardcore in 15:23.08