I'll be honest, if anything would get me in trouble with staff conduct, this game's name is the funniest possible action to cause it. Also as a disclaimer: despite first impressions of the game's name, there's not a single ounce of adult content to be found since it's just a single screen platformer.
Introduction
Crapbert Buttslut in the Muthafuckin' Damn Stone-Circle of the Devil (Polish name: Zbylut Owrzodzieñ w Kamiennym, Kurwa, Zajebanym Czarcim Krêgu) is a 2012 single screen platformer for the ZX Spectrum. This game was developed by HOOY-PROGRAM for the WAPNIAK 2012 game competition, where it won 1st place. Crapbert finds themselves in hell and must collect all of the vodka and devil stones to open the doors out of hell while avoiding the denizens of hell.
I first learned of this game from a Retro Pals user gauntlet stream where this was submitted as one of the games. Aside from the game's name, what stuck out to me was how the in-game music was incredible. This made for a fantastic AFD submission, since generally I like to make my submissions as serious TASes of silly games.
Hey, at least I didn't make a TAS of Pussy: Love Story from Titanic, another real ZX Spectrum game. I'm not wise enough to do puzzle platforming right now.
Run notes
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.11
- ZXHawk core
- Emulated machine: Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2a
Additional notes
- Controller choice
- I used keyboard inputs since it takes an additional 7 frames to switch to joystick controls. That being said, selecting that choice was done on the joystick which is odd but whatever works.
- Faster jumping
- For 3 tile high jumps, it's possible to jump sooner than intended by 10 frames. It's a frame perfect window but it's doable real time by simply holding the jump button since the game checks on both button press and button hold. This saves a fair amount of time as long as certain enemy movement cycles don't burn that time up.
- Sync stability of levels
- For the most part this game runs at a constant 25 FPS in levels which generally makes resyncing later levels after finding improvements earlier pretty easy to implement. However, there are some levels with fewer objects where it's possible to run the game slightly faster, potentially resulting in needing to fix a small desync in a few levels if an improvement is found before them.
- An interesting bug found with TAStudio, or problems with certain game names or maybe just long file name paths
- I ran into a weird bug with TAStudio. When trying to reuse a macro for loading ZX Spectrum tapes I ran into an error. Apparently there's a problem with this game's database name that made it impossible for BizHawk to make a macro folder for. It takes the database name found in the "gamedb" folder to determine what to make the macro folder directory. However, this is the database entry name that caused the issue:
Zbylut Owrzodzien w Kamiennym, Kurwa, Zajebanym Czarcim Kregu (2012-09)(HOOY-PROGRAM)(48K-128K)(PL)(en)[WAP-NIAK][aka Crapbert Buttslut in the Muthafuckin' Damn Stone-Circle of the Devil]
Because of that I couldn't do the normal thing of selecting an input macro to load. Instead I just copied the raw input file text from the macro and did a copy-paste into the TAStudio editor which worked fine for my purposes.
Special thanks/apologies to
- Retro Pals, whose showcase streams are a neat way to discover interesting games
- DigitalDuck, for their neat ZX Spectrum TASes and showing off what the Speedtrum Specrunning has been up to in the world of ZX Spectrum speed running
- Samsara and the rest of the TASVideos staff, for being cool folks that put up with some of my bull crap
Tegron: This game, as well as TAS itself, are truly amazing despite the issues faced during creation. There’s a lot of optimization in the level progression, well done!
Accepted to Standard
