The GamePinball is one of the very first games to be released for the NES, counting even today with a competitive RTA speedrunning scene.
The point of the game is to use the paddles to bounce the ball around and score as many points as possible. Getting the top score gives you bragging rights with your friends and family.
The Competition
Produce a "Game A" TAS that scores 100K in score as fast as possible.
The Rules
TASVideos rules for movie submission apply
Glitches, if you find them, are perfectly acceptable
The last input frame (not the frame where 100k is displayed) counts as the final point of the movie
Teaming up with others is allowed and encouraged
Only one submission per user/team is allowed
Idea exchange in forums/discord is allowed
Sharing or uploading WIPs before the deadline is discouraged. The goal of the contest is to get as many diverse approaches as possible
You may use any supported emulator you like, as long as you don't exploit any emulation inaccuracies to improve your score.
The Example
The current RTA WR by JackPro achieves this goal in 01:17.467:
Link to videoThe Bot
I will not participate in the competition directly. Instead, I will be using JaffarPlus to produce a fully botted solution. I will be revealing this solution at the end of the contest. Those who beat its score will receive a special mention.
The Awards
The list of participants and their awards will be officially posted in the forums for all to forever bask at your glory. The following awards will be given:
1st Place - Eternal glory
2st Place - Long-lasting glory
3st Place - Normal duration glory
Simplicity Award - A special mention for the movie with the least (non-empty) input frames
I beat Jaffar - A special mention for those who beat the botted solution
The Registration
You must be a registered user of the site.
Respond to this topic -- this is for all of us to know you're participating!
Submit your movie by uploading it to https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Upload and send me the link via PM or Discord. IMPORTANT: You must make sure the 'Hidden' option is checked so that others cannot see your movie.
You may re-submit as many improvements as needed until the deadline.
The Award Ceremony
We will host a Twitch award ceremony to showcase all our submissions and give out awards. We will have live commentary and special guests! Stay tuned for the official announcement.The Dates
Now - Contest Begins (Registrations Open!)
Saturday, February 28th AoE - Deadline for Submissions
Joined: 10/17/2005
Posts: 685
Location: Seattle, WA
It's fun to have these little contests around that are guaranteed to be short runs. Makes it easier to go "heck, I've got an afternoon, I'll throw my hat in" and feel less pressure to devote all that much brain power for a long time.
Throw an entry together, y'all
I’d like to enter the NES Pinball TAS competition.
Pinball is not the type of game I usually TAS, so I’m treating this mainly as a learning experience and a personal challenge. Still, I’ll do my best to optimize the run within the competition rules.
Thanks, and good luck to all participants.
Joined: 2/11/2019
Posts: 21
Location: 🇳🇿 New Zealand
I have something going for this one. It's nice that there's only really 2 buttons to worry about during gameplay here. (Start button + plunger timing is trivial)
Don't mind me, I was born on Friday the 13th.
(I'm not TASing that NES game, okay?)
Ah, the RTA WR run was routed via a TAS... No wonder it was good.
Anyways, here are a few things I noticed while working on a few movie iterations:
Strategies redacted in case the original post gets edited.
Good luck everyone!
As this is a competition, I’d suggest not posting such strategies before the end of the competition.
Once it’s done, then posting them is fine. But the whole point of the competition is to see the different strategies people come up with on their own (or as a team). If everyone were to start their runs with this strategy, because you’ve posted it here; it could potentially cause someone to miss a different starting strategy that would actually yield reaching the goal even faster.
I’d suggest editing your post to remove the info until after the competition.
Unfortunately, due to IRL reasons I won't be able to host the live award ceremony. Nevertheless, I will be posting the winners and awards (including their encoded movies) in this topic soon. Stay tuned!
The competition is over... congrats TwistedEye, DigitalDuck and TakuikaNinja for showing your awesome TASing skills!
The fastest submission was from TwistedEye:
Link to video
The following video shows the submissions from DigitalDuck and TakuikaNinja head-to-head:
Link to video
And here are the awards:
OMEGA 100K TASer, Owner of All Pinball Machines: TwistedEye (3298 frames)
Joined: 2/11/2019
Posts: 21
Location: 🇳🇿 New Zealand
Welp, at least I got more points in the end. XD Congrats to DigitalDuck!
Here's the list of tips I had up before being redacted:
There's a precise plunger setting/strength which yields 10810 points after exiting the top chamber. I haven't spotted any RTA runs which use this, so having a TAS showcase this would be interesting IMO. Actually routing the movie after that is an entirely different problem.
The seal bonus is only activated when the ball touches the topmost dot, so it can be triggered instantly by having the ball located such that it overlaps the topmost dot when it reappears. Getting the bonus this way unfortunately misses out on the points from actually collecting all of the dots, however.
The non-WR RTA runs appear to use the pink circle spawned from the slot bonus as a means of setting up launches from the left paddle to get the ball bouncing between the 1000pt gate and the 100pt bumper. Getting a good sequence of 1000pt+100pt bounces (but sometimes 2000pt when going down?) after ending inputs is definitely the key to getting a good time here.
I tried really hard to route a movie with that "10810 intro" but it turned out slower than what I already had, i.e. the version I submitted in the end. Now I see that sacrificing points for a faster exit is the superior strategy.
Don't mind me, I was born on Friday the 13th.
(I'm not TASing that NES game, okay?)
I was only going for the simplicity prize - surprised to get an overall win too. I'm guessing the bot solution is some heavy RNG manipulation and then ending the movie after like four seconds...
EDIT: I guessed wrong...
Unfortunately, I am a derp and totally forgot about TwistedEye's solution, which happened to be the fastest, buried deep in my discord PMs. To rectify this grave mistake, and to avoid redistributing awards, I created a new extra special award according to his insane TASing skills.
Apologies to everybody involved!
