This TAS is the summary of what would happen if a professional baseball player was hired to save the president's daughter ⚾

Emulator

  • Dolphin 5.0-21460
  • DualCore off
  • DSP HLE
  • JIT Recompiler
  • Change Discs Automatically on

TAS Objectives

  • Complete the game using only grenades to kill enemies and also in mandatory parts of the scenario
  • Deliberately taking damage to manipulate the game's difficulty and use fewer grenades
  • Manipulate RNG of drops to get grenades
  • Use pistol to get items and also drop grenades from boxes/vases/barrels
Note: Del Lago can only be killed with harpoons, so no grenades were used on him for that reason.

About the run

This TAS consists of completing Resident Evil 4 on the Nintendo GameCube using only grenades to kill enemies and bosses, as well as to pass mandatory parts of the scenario. The rules are simple: all enemies must be killed by grenades and all mandatory parts of the scenario must be completed only using grenades, while the use of pistol is allowed to break boxes/barrels/vases, get treasures, break padlocks, etc.
This TAS was made in NEW GAME, without using any memory card. This means that Leon starts the game without any grenades and I had to drop the necessary grenades throughout the game. Money in this run is only important to buy bigger suitcases, so once I get the biggest suitcase available, I no longer care about collecting pesetas.
This TAS can probably be much faster, using other strategies, manipulating RNG's better. I didn't focus so much on optimization.

Adaptive Difficulty

Here comes one of the most important things in this TAS. Resident Evil 4 has something we call Adaptive Difficulty. Basically, adaptive difficulty increases the difficulty of the game if the player is playing well (killing enemies, dodging attacks, taking little damage, etc.) while it decreases the difficulty if the player is playing poorly (taking a lot of damage, dying several times, missing shots, etc.). This means that, if the player is playing well, the bosses and enemies become stronger, with more HP and if the player is playing poorly, the opposite happens.
The address responsible for the adaptive difficulty is $80284760. The default value for this address is 5500, which would be the game's normal difficulty. This value varies, as I already said, depending on how the player is playing. The highest value this address can reach is 10999 and the minimum is 1000. During the entire TAS, I was monitoring the value of this address to never let it rise too much, but also not to drop too much and waste time for nothing. Because of this, you will see Leon taking damage dozens of times throughout the entire video. All damage is intentional to manipulate the value of that address.
But why is it so necessary to manipulate the adaptive difficulty in this TAS? It's necessary because, if I simply ignore it, the game ends up being very difficult and the bosses require absurd amounts of grenades to die. That way, I wouldn't have enough grenades to get to the end of the game.
You may also be wondering why I didn't lower the value to the minimum (1000) and maintain that value throughout the game. The explanation is that the bosses (Del Lago, El Gigante, Bitorez Mendez, Verdugo, etc.) reset this value to 5500, which is the default, if the player reaches the boss with a lower value. If the value is greater than 5500, then it is not reset. In other words, if I arrive at Del Lago with this address worth 1500, automatically, at the start of the battle, the value is reset to 5500. So, there would be no point in me taking damage to keep the value at a minimum because the value would reset to 5500 anyway and I would waste time for nothing. Therefore, I had to maintain a base value and only lower it when it was really necessary.

Observations

  • This TAS was recorded using an HD texture pack, but the movie works perfectly with the game's original graphics. If this TAS is accepted and the encoder want to post with the HD textures, this video has the download link for the textures and the instructions.
  • The final in-game time is 2:13:03.
  • The only address I followed during the TAS was $80284760, as already mentioned.

Special Thanks

  • MasterReset7 for the idea of ​​completing the game using only grenades. Without him, this TAS would probably not even exist.
  • Noise de Gole for support and ideas.
  • Aldelaro5 for THIS
  • You for watching!

eien86: Claiming for judging.

eien86: The choice of goal in this submission is one that can totally be accepted in the current (new) set of rules in the site. It is an odd choice, and its original definition (grenades and pistol only) was not precise enough to justify some decisions made in the movie (e.g., not stopping the ceiling with a pistol). So after some discussion I believe the author had a clear vision for this movie and just wasn't precise enough in expressing it in the 'Goal' field.
The correct goal for this movie is "Uses only grenades for enemies; pistol for everything else". This title is, of course very long, so I think "grenades only for enemies" should suffice.
In terms of optimization, it's hard to tell, but it seems a satisfactory effort was made to achieve the stated goal as fast as possible. Added to that, the community reacted positively to this movie and voted accordingly.
Accepting to Alternative
EZGames69: Processing, Dimon12321 is handling thr encodes for this one.


TASVideoAgent
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Dimon12321
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That was an addictive TAS. I have watched the whole premiere! Your main goal is to pass the game by killing enemies with grenades only. That's a reasonable challenge and a boost to entertainment, albeit debatable. However, the usage of pistol as the only alternative weapon feels like an unnecessary constraint because, basically it doesn't matter which weapon you use to destroy boxes, barrels and shootables, as long as you don't injure enemies. Removing this constraint would result in a more technically advanced TAS. 1. You could have bought a TMP and a stock to shoot the lock from the other side of the door, like it's done in any% TAS. Here's the moment. 2. You could have bought a Striker to perform speed boost glitch (Ditman glitch). You spend a lot of time looting - that would save some time in some sections. Also, you could have skipped Salazar boss fight using it. Did you test the imprecise jump-down glitch in the mining trolley section to jump out-of-bounds of the trolley, bypass the ride and run to the point where you jump across the pit? The original TAS didn't know about it, but it might save some time. Did you track down the value of your rank (difficulty meter) or, at least, performed calculations through your walkthrough? I certainly remember a video which showed your rank in real time, but I can't find it. It's possible to use RAM search to look for addresses which react in the same way. What perplexes me is that you take damage quite often. It looks like you were trying to make bosses have as less health as possible. Wouldn't it be faster to manipulate 1-2 more grenades, instead of losing time by taking damage and using herbs? Anyway, I appreciate the effort you've put into this TAS. My biases are rather theoretical. I think it makes sense to still accept the run (to alternative) and, yes, I enjoyed watching it, so I vote Yes!
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Experienced player (627)
Joined: 5/2/2014
Posts: 21
Dimon12321 wrote:
That was an addictive TAS. I have watched the whole premiere! Your main goal is to pass the game by killing enemies with grenades only. That's a reasonable challenge and a boost to entertainment, albeit debatable. However, the usage of pistol as the only alternative weapon feels like an unnecessary constraint because, basically it doesn't matter which weapon you use to destroy boxes, barrels and shootables, as long as you don't injure enemies. Removing this constraint would result in a more technically advanced TAS. 1. You could have bought a TMP and a stock to shoot the lock from the other side of the door, like it's done in any% TAS. Here's the moment. 2. You could have bought a Striker to perform speed boost glitch (Ditman glitch). You spend a lot of time looting - that would save some time in some sections. Also, you could have skipped Salazar boss fight using it. Did you test the imprecise jump-down glitch in the mining trolley section to jump out-of-bounds of the trolley, bypass the ride and run to the point where you jump across the pit? The original TAS didn't know about it, but it might save some time. Did you track down the value of your rank (difficulty meter) or, at least, performed calculations through your walkthrough? I certainly remember a video which showed your rank in real time, but I can't find it. It's possible to use RAM search to look for addresses which react in the same way. What perplexes me is that you take damage quite often. It looks like you were trying to make bosses have as less health as possible. Wouldn't it be faster to manipulate 1-2 more grenades, instead of losing time by taking damage and using herbs? Anyway, I appreciate the effort you've put into this TAS. My biases are rather theoretical. I think it makes sense to still accept the run and, yes, I enjoyed watching it, so I vote Yes!
Well, a brief explanation of why I didn't do the things you mentioned is that I didn't do this TAS trying to be as fast as possible with just grenades. My real focus was just on finishing the game using grenades and because of that I limited myself to just using the pistol. A TAS seeking to be as fast as possible would have to have very well-planned planning regarding all variables and it would certainly require a lot of work. About the mine cart glitch: yes, it works, but I didn't do it because I dropped a lot of hand grenades in that part. And about the difficulty, yes, I followed the "rank" value the entire time in TAS, so none of the damage was "random". And there would be no way to leave the bosses with the minimum HP, because most of them reset the value. I even made this very clear in the submission itself. So, to keep the bosses' HP to a minimum, I would have to spend a long-time taking damage from the bosses themselves. The only boss that really had the minimum HP was Verdugo and in him I had to wait for the door to open, so I didn't waste so much time taking damage from him. The frequent damage was to maintain the value at the base of 5500 and sometimes lower the value. It's not that simple to farm grenades, because the game doesn't have as many barrels/pots/RNG boxes as it seems. From the castle to the end of the game I must have destroyed practically all the RNG barrels and vases. In this case, if I wanted to drop more grenades, I would have to kill the enemies with a grenade to drop two grenades, however, this would increase the rank value and consequently I would have to take more damage to maintain the base value. Otherwise, I would have to use more grenades on the bosses and in the end, I would probably waste the same amount of time. Anyway, I liked these observations and maybe in the future I will think about doing a TAS trying to be as fast as possible using grenades and without limiting myself to just using the pistol. Thanks!
Spikestuff
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Branch on site, and branch on video don't match as a note. "grenades and pistol only"
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account. Something better for yourself and also others.
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Spikestuff wrote:
Branch on site, and branch on video don't match as a note. "grenades and pistol only"
Resolved!
Dimon12321
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To summarise. The goal of the TAS is to bring more challenge by using grenades and a handgun as only tools to pass the main story. - Grenades are used to kill enemies and bosses as well as to destroy some breakable objects. - Handgun is only used to destroy crates and objects (mainly those which cannot be destroyed by grenades). It forgoes major timesaves for the sake of using grenades and a handgun only. The run demonstrates luck manipulation by getting grenades (and some other items) out of enemy corpses, by shooting crates with a handgun to get grenades and by dealing critical hits to enemies (mainly, to unlock the way further). The entertainment value is questionable, despite bringing challenge. Usage of grenades is weird at times. For example, when Leon and Ashley are locked in the room with a ceiling moving down, it takes a lot of time to wait for the ceiling to reach the height to make it possible to destroy "energy sources" with grenades, instead of using a handgun instantly. Several places feature using grenades to demonstrate throwing skills, although it results in spending extra time gathering grenades from crates and corpses later. A major portion of entertainment is brought by the game itself. It is still very interesting to watch. Voting Yes, because it's Resident Evil 4/Mario/Sonic etc. The optimisation of TAS is also a little questionable. Since grenades are used as the only combat weapon, the author has to rely on adaptive difficulty to make necessary-to-kill enemies have less health and, maybe, improve the odds to get grenade drops. This is achieved by taking a lot of damage throughout the game. Watching this may make one doubt the optimisation of TAS. It looks very fragile, amateur-like and prolonged. Since adaptive difficulty (ranking points) doesn't ease by any circumstances which are achievable without major time spending, it is difficult to calculate the window of possible optimisation of taking less damage and replenishing grenade supplies. Overall, it makes ends as the author kills Sadler with his final grenade. Firearm misfiring lowers the rank. I believe it's related to the accuracy rate and, even though, the author doesn't shoot that often, it could still be useful. It could be utilised at the elevator section before the first boss fight. Maybe, somewhere else. The route is optimal, considering the constraints of using only your handgun. The only point left unclear is whether circumventing the mining cart section (by jumping OOB and reaching the spot of jumping) really saves time or not. I assume, it does save time, but it can be chalked up to bringing more entertainment. In fairness, the game is big and long to achieve perfection in terms of item drops/collecting, total duration of injury animations and optimal enemy/boss health amount. The amount of work is astonishing. I'm glad I'm not a judge. This case is not even remotely trivial.
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Former player
Joined: 6/30/2010
Posts: 1107
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
I found this TAS more enjoyable than I expected. It is an interesting challenge for sure and it requires a lot of creativity and luck manipulation to work out. So yeah, this gets a "yes" vote from me.
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.
eien86
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Hi IgorOliveira666, I am not convinced your movie actually optimizes for the goals you imposed on it. Here are the notes I took, could you please comment on them and correct me if I interpreted things incorrectly? (apologies for the use of third person):
Although this movie has an odd choice of goal, one can appreciate the extra challenge it brings. The community has reacted mostly positive to it, indicating they found it entertaining. TASVideos certainly is open, today more than ever, to weird funny alternative goals other than finishing the game as fast as possible. Notwithstanding the above, we always require that movies are decently optimized, even for the more relaxed category we accept. This doesn't imply that the movie has to be perfect, but that the author has done their best to polish both the routing and the execution of the movie. My opinion can be prefaced by the author's own admission:
IgorOliveira666 wrote:
This TAS can probably be much faster, using other strategies, manipulating RNG's better. I didn't focus so much on optimization.
Although I see a somewhat polished execution, I believe routing has failed to remain consistent with the movie's own goals. For example, although both pistol and grenades are allowed, only enemies are killed with grenades, whereas the pistol is used for scenery only. However, such distinction is not clearly made in the movie's goal. It ought to be renamed to "Grenades for enemies, pistol for scenery". Even if the goal was changed, a particular violation of this rule was indicated in the findings by Dimon12321:
Dimon12321 wrote:
[...] Usage of grenades is weird at times. For example, when Leon and Ashley are locked in the room with a ceiling moving down, it takes a lot of time to wait for the ceiling to reach the height to make it possible to destroy "energy sources" with grenades, instead of using a handgun instantly.
We would need to accept that the energy sources in the ceiling are (un)living and breathing enemies to not use the pistol on them. This is a hard pill to swallow, as these are, albeit active, part of the scenery. Another observation by Dimon:
Dimon12321 wrote:
[...] The optimisation of TAS is also a little questionable. Since grenades are used as the only combat weapon, the author has to rely on adaptive difficulty to make necessary-to-kill enemies have less health and, maybe, improve the odds to get grenade drops. This is achieved by taking a lot of damage throughout the game. Watching this may make one doubt the optimisation of TAS. It looks very fragile, amateur-like and prolonged.
I would agree with this. Playing the game sloppily just for it to drop the difficulty and allow you to kill enemies with fewer grenades goes a bit against the spirit of the movies we produce. In a sense this might be, indeed, the fastest way to beat the game with grenades. However, it makes you wonder whether more clever ways can be found.
Experienced player (627)
Joined: 5/2/2014
Posts: 21
eien86 wrote:
Hi IgorOliveira666, I am not convinced your movie actually optimizes for the goals you imposed on it. Here are the notes I took, could you please comment on them and correct me if I interpreted things incorrectly? (apologies for the use of third person):
Although this movie has an odd choice of goal, one can appreciate the extra challenge it brings. The community has reacted mostly positive to it, indicating they found it entertaining. TASVideos certainly is open, today more than ever, to weird funny alternative goals other than finishing the game as fast as possible. Notwithstanding the above, we always require that movies are decently optimized, even for the more relaxed category we accept. This doesn't imply that the movie has to be perfect, but that the author has done their best to polish both the routing and the execution of the movie. My opinion can be prefaced by the author's own admission:
IgorOliveira666 wrote:
This TAS can probably be much faster, using other strategies, manipulating RNG's better. I didn't focus so much on optimization.
Although I see a somewhat polished execution, I believe routing has failed to remain consistent with the movie's own goals. For example, although both pistol and grenades are allowed, only enemies are killed with grenades, whereas the pistol is used for scenery only. However, such distinction is not clearly made in the movie's goal. It ought to be renamed to "Grenades for enemies, pistol for scenery". Even if the goal was changed, a particular violation of this rule was indicated in the findings by Dimon12321:
Dimon12321 wrote:
[...] Usage of grenades is weird at times. For example, when Leon and Ashley are locked in the room with a ceiling moving down, it takes a lot of time to wait for the ceiling to reach the height to make it possible to destroy "energy sources" with grenades, instead of using a handgun instantly.
We would need to accept that the energy sources in the ceiling are (un)living and breathing enemies to not use the pistol on them. This is a hard pill to swallow, as these are, albeit active, part of the scenery. Another observation by Dimon:
Dimon12321 wrote:
[...] The optimisation of TAS is also a little questionable. Since grenades are used as the only combat weapon, the author has to rely on adaptive difficulty to make necessary-to-kill enemies have less health and, maybe, improve the odds to get grenade drops. This is achieved by taking a lot of damage throughout the game. Watching this may make one doubt the optimisation of TAS. It looks very fragile, amateur-like and prolonged.
I would agree with this. Playing the game sloppily just for it to drop the difficulty and allow you to kill enemies with fewer grenades goes a bit against the spirit of the movies we produce. In a sense this might be, indeed, the fastest way to beat the game with grenades. However, it makes you wonder whether more clever ways can be found.
Well, I can try to explain. Firstly, talking about the objects on which I used grenades instead of the pistol, I did this to increase the challenge of the TAS and to show the public that it is possible to pass these specific parts using only grenades, without the aid of weapons. In fact, my initial idea with this TAS was not to use a pistol or any other type of weapon other than grenades. And yes, it is possible to complete the game using just grenades, without the aid of a pistol, however, I didn't do it that way because it would be too slow. I would have to use my own grenades to drop other grenades and I would have to take damage all the time to control the difficulty level. The reason I chose to use the pistol was exactly to avoid this and make the TAS more dynamic, but the main objective is to complete the game using only grenades, not only on enemies, but also in mandatory parts where we have to break objects or things in the type. I think I forgot to include and make these details clear in the description and I also think I made a mistake in the branch of this movie, and I apologize for that :( But now talking about optimization, I didn't really focus on optimizing that much, however, I didn't do it sloppily. As I already said, the damage I received was calculated and I had to manipulate the difficulty level. It's not a question of wanting to use as few grenades as possible, but rather that the game doesn't provide as many grenades in barrels/vases/RNG boxes as it seems. Could I have avoided taking so much damage? For sure! However, I would have to farm more grenades and probably farm by killing enemies and manipulating drops. Or, otherwise, I would have to go to off-route places to find more RNG objects to drop grenades with the pistol. So, realize that, one way or another, I would have to "waste" time, either taking damage or farming grenades. It's very difficult to know which strategy would be faster in this case and as I wasn't as focused on being as fast as possible, I opted for the easier strategy of taking damage and using less grenades. And another issue is that, many times, I didn't farm grenades, even though I could, because I didn't have space in the suitcase. I could have farmed a lot of grenades in the cabin, for example, which would have prevented me from taking too much damage in the future, but, as I didn't have space in the suitcase, I couldn't do that. Maybe I should have thought better about the routes for this TAS. I did my best with what I had. Finally, I don't know what the ideal branch would be for this movie. I believe that "Grenades for enemies, pistol for scenery" would not be correct, because I ONLY use the pistol to farm grenades and I use the grenades themselves in the scenery. Maybe "grenades for enemies/scenario & pistol on objects" or something like that would be better, but I'm not sure. EDIT: I edited the description and I believe the objective of this TAS is now clearer. Sorry about that! Now all that remains is to correct the branch, but I'm still not sure which one would be ideal.
Former player
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Posts: 1107
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For what it's worth, I did not mind the TAS taking damage so frequently. I actually found it quite amusing to see Leon constantly getting thrown around by enemies like he's in a wrestling match!
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.
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andypanther wrote:
For what it's worth, I did not mind the TAS taking damage so frequently. I actually found it quite amusing to see Leon constantly getting thrown around by enemies like he's in a wrestling match!
Agreed.
Experienced player (627)
Joined: 5/2/2014
Posts: 21
I changed the branch of the video on YouTube to "only grenades on enemies & scenery" and it seems like a good branch. I think this is what comes closest to explaining the objective of TAS (taking into account that the objective is to only use grenades on enemies and in some mandatory scenarios and the pistol only on objects/boxes/vases etc.).
Dimon12321
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Joined: 4/5/2014
Posts: 1216
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Claiming this one for encoding
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
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. ---- [6232] GC Resident Evil 4 "grenades only for enemies" by IgorOliveira666 in 2:12:05.52

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