Game objectives
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.11.0
- Beat Kris' Story as fast as possible
- Get the best possible RNG
This is a TAS of Santa Claus is Comin' to Town! for DS. For this TAS I play through the first of 3 stories in the game being Kris' Story.
The stages for the game consist of a variety of children's mini games mostly consisting of Coloring, Crosswords, Puzzles, Mazes, Card Matching, etc. A few of these mini games are RNG based, but the RNG only matters for the mazes generated in game which only takes place in the early game.
Improvements
This is my first full game TAS, so what I feel should be improved is the RNG on the first maze of the game and the first platforming segment (#14280-14943). I'm sure there's more way I could save frames, but I have a good feeling all my inputs were Frame Perfect.
I need to get this out of the way first: this input file starts from a save state, which is normally not allowed. This includes this submission since from what I can tell this was only done to skip the Nintendo DS BIOS boot as the other 2 adventures are locked behind completing Kris' Story. You don't need to do that since you can go into BizHawk's DS settings when the game is booted up by going into "NDS -> Settings", selecting the "Sync Settings" tab, and having the "Skip Firmware" setting set to "True". This usually won't matter outside of RNG related issues with regards to the real time clock of the DS.
Speaking of which, depending on the game it's possible to check if the RNG is related to said real time clock by changing the "Initial Time" in the previously mentioned sync settings to see if this can give better RNG in parts of the game where it matters such as the letter placement in the first maze and the toy placement for the penguin shelf segment.
As for optimization, everything does look quite optimal in gameplay. I'd say this is fine enough since there's not really a lot to talk about for optimization outside of figuring out the best RNG.
Ultimately I have to reject your submission for two reasons. The first one is starting from an unverifiable save state rather than power on, which I've already discussed. The second one, and the one I'm setting as the rejection reason, is that this is incomplete. There are 3 stories in Adventure mode but this only completes one of them while leaving the other two untouched. I would like to see you complete this TAS to the end so be sure to keep on TASing. Just make sure that, if you continue to work on this game, your next submission starts from power on next time.
