That is correct, in fact I don't know if I could beat his time by much even if it was 100% frame perfect. The nature of this game is that every battle is fixed, so if you have the right strategy, you can be on par with any TAS.
I don't like the sound of that. I've only had time to translate up to Heckran in the boss battle section (it's too rough to bother uploading yet) and so far there's been a lot of him saying "If Crono doesn't get a critical hit, reset" and "this may take many attempts."
I assume resetting is out of the question, but do you think there's any way to manipulate it so specifically that Crono gets a critical hit before the Nth turn in, say, the Dragon Tank fight? These things are planned out down to the last detail, so if anything is off, it'll probably go to kuck.
Edit: Of course, this only pertains to boss battles. The leveling strategy should still work regardless.
I don't think a current-generation emulator would be out of the question... for TAS purposes, I mean. If it's possible to write an emulator for the hardware, what sort of performance would we really need when running it?
Everyone should learn about Universal time. I mean, really. This is the future already. The age of isolated city-states running on sundials has passed!
Now where is my silver jumpsuit and jetpack?!
Would it have been possible to use the shield as a weapon? ...Or would that knock the options out of alignment too quickly?
I was amused, overall. Mainly because it's a Konami game, and they do good music. That's not much of a basis for voting, so I'm not going to.
I'm wearing pants, but no socks.
Would an all-perfect run be more entertaining? Or should I just do an any%?
I don't remember the game anymore, other than that it was really friggin hard to get perfect scores.
The all-perfect may be repetitive, or the any% could be too minimalist, but I'll be looking forward to whatever you come up with. :)
Voted no on the movie... it was pretty good, considering that it was 26 minutes, mainly autoscrolling. It looked pretty sloppy, but it's impossible to know if it could be done any better without personally testing everything.
As for this thread... "love the religious people, hate the religion" as they say.
Ahh... no worries. I'm just irritable and sleep-deprived.
Anyway, in the span of about 26 hours, I've translated a pretty big chunk of the text... really badly! Section 5 I'll vouch for, (except for a few parts, involving beetles) but don't expect much from the rest of what's been done so far.
Section 5, the walkthrough, isn't quite completed. There are five or six pages still to be done, but taken altogether, you should have a pretty clear idea of how to do this run.
here you go.
Any one have any idea how much leveling up he does exactly? I really want to learn more about this new strategy, and maybe make another tas some time.
I posted this yesterday (though it seems nobody actually read it before asking questions.) :/
Monsters of battle | XP | TP
2 dokkan + 2 dinosaur men (47 times) 26790/846
2 dokkan + 2 dinosaur men (30 times) 20880/660
Nizbel-R 880/15
Azala, Black Tyrano 1800/25
6 Nus 744/90
Underground desert's monster (7 pairs) 8028/315
Merufikku 2600/100 [I have no idea what that is.]
Total: 61722/2051
Required: 61241/2046
Admittedly, I don't know what dokkan or dinosaur men are, but it's an encounter that occurs right before Nizbel-R.
I'm halfway through the mini-walkthrough the guy wrote. That'll explain everything.
I don't know how interesting this would be. I remember playing it quite a bit when I was younger and finding glitches... the bad kind, which made keys disappear and forced me to restart.
Kinda what you'd expect- sloppy programming for a cheap game based on a movie.
Without glitching the hell out of it, I think the entertainment value would be like oatmeal. Satisfying, but nothing special.
Not to pooh-pooh your idea out of hand, but have you considered Soldiers of Fortune instead? Same console and genre, but has a two-player mode and some sort of shopping system (IIRC) which might make things more interesting.
(Then again, if True Lies has a 2p mode that I don't remember, then I'm putting my foot in it now, aren't I? :) )
Drat. Well, section 5 will answer all in time. I'll try to get through that on sunday. There's quite a bit to trawl through, but most of it is useless information, so it's light reading.
It's not insta-death... I mean, it usually is if you're not doing a newgame+, but there's apparently an insane amount of leveling before fighting Nizbel and Azala. I'd also assume that there are a lot of minor tweaks along the way, equipment/items that might not seem useful in a conventional tas, etc.
...And then, of course, if you beat the shell, then the shell can't kill Crono.
Man, this game is getting weird. "Power blast" while hanging from a rope... lmao.
Other than the constant squat-wobbling (squabbling?) and generally uninteresting/uninspired use of waiting periods (like rolling into the corner- or did that serve a purpose?) it was fantastic.
Yes vote, naturally.
From section 5 (a walkthrough):
Leene's square, after getting Marle: Talk to the merchant in Leene's square instead of the chick near the fountain. Closing the terminal immediately takes a little time, but it's faster because the speech of the girl on the fountain prevents you from moving.
-Someone wanna test this? Here's the Japanese if someone wants to make sure I've got it straight:
（噴水のそばの人から話を聞くとマールの台詞が終わるまで動くことが出来ません。一方、
商人から話を聞く場合は、画面を閉じたらすぐに移動可能なためほんのわずかですが時間
が短縮できます。）
Guardia forest, after getting Lucca: Intentionally kill some rolypolys. hero of the day had used 'tactics', but learning 'flame wheel' [pretty sure; not certain that he's talking about Crono+Lucca's 'fire spin' tech] takes extra 50 seconds at most. Immediately afterward in the unavoidable battles against mianu x 4, [naga, right?] hench x 3 [lit: magus' manservant], and diablos x 2 battles, the time spent pays for itself.
-Wow. Again, the Japanese:
（hero of the dayさんが使用していた戦術です。かえんしゃりん習得のために50秒ほど余分な時間がかかりますが、直後のミアンヌ×4戦、魔王のしもべ×3+ディアブロス×2との強制
戦闘においてそれ以上の時短効果をもたらします。）
Halamantariel wrote:
If (s)he's right, that'd explain the low time for a console run...
Yeah, that would corroborate what I've translated so far.
Well, don't I feel stupid. Most of section 2 (which I have entirely translated) details the three prime spots for xp/tp grinding. He discusses the pros and cons of each... and then gives a [expletive deleted] table with all the MASSIVE PROFANITY information right BLINGWAD there!
So, here it is. The table at the end of section 2, which tells you exactly how to do all your levelling. The dokkan/dinosaur men are in tyrano lair (i assume) and the 6 nus are in enhasa. Just to be clear.
His end goal seems to be getting everyone to level 34, hence the 'required' field at the bottom of the table.
Monsters of battle | XP | TP
2 dokkan + 2 dinosaur men (47 times) 26790/846
2 dokkan + 2 dinosaur men (30 times) 20880/660
Nizbel-R 880/15
Azala, Black Tyrano 1800/25
6 Nus 744/90
Underground desert's monster (7 pairs) 8028/315
Merufikku 2600/100 [I have no idea what that is.]
Total: 61722/2051
Required: 61241/2046
I'll get back to y'all after I get to the bottom of whether he revived Crono or not- I know he mentioned "Crono's turnover" which might have meant death or revival. It's not exactly clear.
Also, he did the greendream sidequest because the monsters down there give good xp/tp... apparently.
Oh, and he used a stopwatch after the last save point.
Edit: isn't it odd that he listed the same encounter twice? He mentioned that spot right before nizbel2, and that there was a separate encounter to the right of that... is that what he meant in the repeated second field?
Edit again: Here are his "lap times". Maybe these will shed some light on his seemingly insane strategy....
yakra battle: 00:13
dragon tank 00:25
factory [...tracks? Sorry.] 00:42
heckran battle 00:53
guran and rion battle... masa+mune? 01:06
Nizbel 01:23
Magus' keep 01:36
Magus himself 01:55
Tyrano Lair 02:09
Nizbel-R battle 02:41
desert in the depths of the earth 03:04
The End of Time 3:16
Inside Lavos (final save) 3:31
The End 3:49
If you have a complete translation (even sloppy), can you post a txt file of it somewhere, please?
I'll give a shot at the relevant sections, and release them as I go... assuming no-one more knowledgeable beats me to the punch.
I'll translate and upload section 2 (xp/tech earning) by morning, at any rate.
Edit:
Excite wrote:
...has been acquired at this point though 1234 of gnu's HP is high. The gnu is suppressed immediately after beginning of the combat...
Must be something goofy with your connection. Try this link then.
http://ultimagarden.net/report.html
At this time, it's the first link in the table.
Success! Thanks.
...Uh. Okay. I've gone through the abstract, the ToC and first section, and I get the gist of almost all of it so far, though I haven't gone into it deeply (ie, using reference material beyond my dictionary.) I can paste my translation if anyone wants it, but it's probably not much better than what you'd get with babelfish, if at all. I stopped at section two (on the acquisition of experience/tech points) because I'm in way over my head at this point.
It doesn't look like there's any one trick that got him through the game, and this thing's a damn textbook. Probably worth reading, if anyone intends to do a new TAS.
Edit: Excite isn't working. It either can't find the page, or my browser is being a jerk again. Same with babelfish. Hopefully someone else will have better luck...
I'll see your OMG and raise you a WTFBBQ!?
<- Magus is also shocked.
I tried the text file that SirVG linked, but it was blank.
http://ultimagarden.net/report/inichi_chrot_ta.txt
Is this linking to a blank page for anyone else? I'd like to at least try to read it.
Rushing Beat Syura. I pulled off Flynn's "super saiyan" trick about five times... resorting to save-statery twice, I think. R+QCF+X. It's hard to pull off in a pinch, and I kept thinking it was X+QCF+A which, if anything, will perform the 2-stock special attack.
Argh.
I think I'll try again with the Ozymandias path, and maybe Orbot. And no taking damage on purpose so I can do the stupid trick. Maybe I can get the other ending, too...
Japanese RPG + Tekken.
One problem I find with the Tekken series is that they are too limited and too small. There's not enough variety, and the stories are really minimal. One small problem with (Japanese) RPGs is that the fights usually seem a bit abstract and detached. They are more like a turn-based board game than real fights (which in fact is the idea, but I think it gets a bit boring after a while). An RPG with Tekken-style fighting would solve both problems.
So... all the characters would basically play like Sabin from FF3? Or maybe more like Zell from FF8, in his limit break?
River City Ransom EX (GBA) is different enough from the NES version for there to be both; they play very differently. It remains to be seen if the GBA version is actually any better for a TAS, though I would guess that it isn't.
I don't know if Final Fantasy II went anywhere, but that seems like a good example of a NES "classic" that should be done on GBA instead of/in addition to NES.
I would think that, as long as it is enjoyable to watch, it would make it through. But then again, these days it seems more important to have pure speed.
Yeah, probably. I guess it comes down to whether or not the runner's logic is distinct enough to properly judge and compare against competing movies of the same game. Pits vs walls meets that requirement. I haven't seen the low-glitch tas yet, but I'm sure it'll be fine.
