Introduction
Okay, so while I was judging Spikestuff's NES-e Donkey Kong-e TAS I got curious about what other games could be TASable with saving dot code scanned games to the e-Reader save file. Unfortunately a lot of e-Reader games don't have that option so currently the Pokémon, Domo-kun, Mario Party-e, and Game & Watch aren't currently TASable without Multi-Disk Bundler support for e-Reader card scanning or something like that. What I did find was two e-Reader games that weren't part of the NES-e line of e-Reader games that did save to the e-Reader. The first was an early promo card called Air Hockey-e where it's a simple air hockey game about scoring to 10 points against a computer first. The second one was a bit more interesting.
Kirby Slide was an e-Reader game to promote the then current anime Kirby: Right Back at Ya! as well as the Fox Box block of Saturday morning cartoons on the Fox channel. The game itself is a pretty straightforward 9 tile slide puzzle where the player assembles a picture of Kirby. It's an interesting historical curio that I find interesting to learn about, although TASing it is fairly rudimentary.
Run notes
- Emulators used:
- mGBA 0.10.3 - generated the e-Reader save data needed
- BizHawk 2.10 - main TASing tool
- Removes the save.bin file from the input file for copyright reasons
- Genre: puzzle
- A reasonable amount of luck manipulation for the fastest possible puzzle
Much like
#9852: Spikestuff's GBA Donkey Kong-e in 01:18.77, the input file in the submission has removed the SaveRAM data as it contains the entire Kirby Slide game data. Please check Spikestuff's submission on how to generate the save data needed to get this TAS to sync.
I have also made a Google Doc with pictures on getting e-Reader input files playable:
document link
The initial tile layout is frame dependent, so waiting before starting the puzzle is done for the fastest completion. To determine how many moves a given puzzle would take I simply used an online solver to cut out the guesswork. That was I could simply note how many moves it took to solve a layout on a given frame. While the shortest amount of moves I know of from a given puzzle is 11 moves, I went with the first 13 move solution that I could find. Each move takes 6 frames to input and I didn't find a faster input after 24 frames from the first 13 move solution. I checked up to the last frame where a theoretical 9 move solution would match the first 13 move solution found in terms of TAS input time and I'm reasonably confident that there's no potential puzzle layout shorter that is legally generated.
Since this is RNG related, I'm not sure if this would sync for anyone besides me. I have no clue if the RNG would be affected by any potential variation in e-Reader save data but I hope not since it's the one big potential desync reason.
Special thanks
- Spikestuff for showing off a neat technical party trick. Sorry that I proceeded to use it for what can be considered evil
- The TASVideos community for putting up with some of the more questionable submissions I have made over the years
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: I can't get this working, so I'll let someone else do it.
