Posts for NMcCoy

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Posted: 3/15/2007 6:17 AM
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NMcCoy
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Posts: 64
What happens if Mother Brain hyper-beams you in the middle of a Crystal Flash?
Posted: 2/28/2007 12:42 PM
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NMcCoy
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Here's me picking up on my existing savefile of Kirby Super Star and getting to the end of Great Cave Offensive. I'd completely forgotten the layout of the thing. Truly some outstanding mediocrity to be had here. http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/4150/NMcCoy-KirbySuperStar-Meh.smv (Why is Kirby Super Star still the most awesome Kirby game in the series? The newer Nightmare in Dream Land engine just doesn't have as good a feel to it, IMO. Admittedly, I don't own Squeak Squad, and I've heard it's got some of the versatility in powers missing from the GBA games.)
Posted: 2/10/2007 1:23 AM
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NMcCoy
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Enthusiastic yes vote. As I recall, v1.0 had a scoring bug that made it impossible to obtain 100% on certain stages.
Posted: 2/6/2007 8:29 AM
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NMcCoy
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I think it'd be really funny if, during that empty time after the first Great Commander battle, you make the Arwing sort of look down as it spirals toward the planet and then shrug. "Huh. Don't know what his problem was. Oh well." Kinda the impression I got from that battle. Anyway, keep up the awesome work! I love this game, and I love this TAS.
Posted: 2/6/2007 7:50 AM
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NMcCoy
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All interesting thoughts. What about range of play (admittedly, more a factor of game type than design choices within a genre)? That is, get-to-the-end-of -the-level-as-fast-as-you-can or find-and-capture-the-n-sacred-foos-in-a-vast-world sort of gameplay? One of my future game designs uses an essentially-infinite procedurally generated world that can be freely explored - this doesn't seem readily TASable to me, as there will be far more discovering of hidden stuff by players in general than by TASers. On the other hand, another idea is for a sort of racing game where the only control input is a single button - think the grinding minigame in the GBA Kirby games, but with physics and interesting levels. This seems like it'd run out of "TAS explorability" rather quickly, like SMB1 did. Ideally, IMO, a game would be complex enough to have a lot of potential improvements, but simple enough in its mechanics to be sure that a given tactic is fairly optimal. In 2D games there is generally one "forward" direction and so improvements are easy to measure. 3D games seem much more difficult in this regard. EDIT: In general, I'm getting the following trends of opinion so far: A TAS-friendly game is one that has a dramatic (not necessarily large, but dramatic) difference in TAS vs. realtime play, one that affords a lot of "art" in both the pursuit and execution of the strategy, and offers many clear "goal opportunities" for pursuing(all stages/minimal stages/100% collection/never uses primary weapon/etc.) King's Bounty and Monopoly exemplify the first goal to an absurd degree. OoT I think demonstrates the second quite well. The Castlevania games that offer replays with alternative characters seem like good candidates for the third.
Posted: 2/5/2007 9:41 PM
Post subject: Making a TAS-friendly game
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NMcCoy
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Let's say you were a developer of a game and you wanted to make it enjoyable to make a TAS of the game - to the extent that the game engine would have a built-in TAS mode (handling frame-stepping, savestates, etc. internally). Given this, what engine mechanics and gameplay features would make the game most worthwhile to TAS? (I've already decided that any console games I make with a heavy amount of text/cutscenes will have a "hidden" speedrun mode that allows any text and cutscenes to be skipped, in addition to having a definitive game timer that shows both real and gameplay time. Perhaps some easter eggs for detected sequence breaks, or even stuff "left in" the game with no known means of access at ship time...)
Posted: 10/29/2006 4:56 PM
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NMcCoy
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You definitely have my vote for a Metronome-only Battle Tower run. I'd suggest the additional restriction that you can't Metronome the same move twice. Bonus points for metronoming things like Def.Curl/Rollout, SunnyBeam, etc., and brilliant use of very situational moves like Skill Swap, Protecting against an Explosion, and so on. Basically, make the whole thing look as implausible as possible, and focus more on entertainment than OHKOing everything.
Posted: 8/1/2006 1:59 AM
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NMcCoy
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mwl wrote:
I'm not a big fan of 100% runs in general, though. There are way too many things to keep track of, especially in this game, not to mention that there is no difference in the ending sequence.
Majora's Mask does have a difference in the ending sequence - you get one scene during the credits for each mask you've collected. Whether a given game is more or less entertaining with 100% or any% completion really depends on the game. Yoshi's Island has an utterly amazing 100% run in progress, but on the other hand it's pretty great to see half the temples skipped in this OoT run (and thus a Light-Arrows-On-B run would be really cool to watch IMO). I wonder if the Majora's Mask run would be done without ever using the Inverted Song of Time?
Posted: 7/23/2006 9:07 PM
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NMcCoy
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Is that Hebrew or Tengwar?
Posted: 7/23/2006 9:59 AM
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NMcCoy
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...But it'll desync when you try to make the avi then... -_- What part of "causes desyncs" do you not understand?
Posted: 7/21/2006 8:22 PM
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NMcCoy
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Shouldn't this have been used for pushing the blocks?
Posted: 7/21/2006 11:42 AM
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NMcCoy
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Something I've noticed is that (especially with Yoshi) the sideways skid is not reset immediately when you turn the other way, so that countersteering after sliding around a turn can actually pull you around it tighter. Yoshi's physics are quirky in other ways, too... He slows down little enough in dirt (especially when hopping over the first bit) that it might be faster to cut across some corners even without a mushroom. Not that it really makes up for his overall lack of top speed, but it's something to think about, anyway. Is the sideways slide simply added to your velocity? It might be possible to exploit some F-Zero-like "snaking" if that's the case.
Posted: 7/19/2006 6:57 PM
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NMcCoy
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No, it's the one right above Cantril and below Cops Lick.
Posted: 7/19/2006 5:21 PM
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NMcCoy
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It's not a factor of the interface to the computer so much as an inherent limitation of the usual key-reading mechanism itself. Which keys block others will vary based on the internal wiring of the keyboard. If you map your face buttons to modifier keys (shoft, control, and alt) most keyboards will allow you to press any two other keys in combination with all of those without blocking, I think.
Posted: 7/18/2006 7:06 AM
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NMcCoy
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Keep in mind that if you're playing through on the hardest route then you simply won't be able to destroy his brain in 1 cycle before he re-forms. Make sure to be ready to finish him off after the fake credits, too. And it'll help if you save your missiles for his next-to-last form (you don't need to worry about the last fight as you'll win automatically when you're forced to use your Limit Break.)
Posted: 7/18/2006 6:57 AM
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NMcCoy
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I wasn't suggesting we try to apply this method to anything other than Mariokart. This does give me another idea for a more general tool, though - A "conditional input" bot that works in parallel with user input, so you could make it do things like "press A whenever this memory value is less than 32" or even "keep a running 5-frame 'ring' of savestates, and when my character's hit recovery timer is nonzero then rewind two frames and repeat those frames' input except with the shield button held".
Posted: 7/18/2006 4:52 AM
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NMcCoy
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You know, this might make a decent distributed computing problem... If we can host a "current best" somewhere for each track (with the timezone data that generated it) we could then make clients that downloaded that data, mutated it, then uploaded the "solution" to that set of zones if it beat the current best time. The server could fairly easily verify that the set of inputs resulted in a faster time than the current record. It'd be pretty awesome to have a "bot brute-forcing Mario Kart" screensaver. The concept of sort of the "ultimate" tool-assistance - a bunch of computers trying to find the absolute best time for a game with little to no human intervention - rather appeals to me.
Posted: 7/16/2006 7:04 AM
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NMcCoy
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I understand that.. It's because the bigger bomb bag was obtained from Bombchu Bowling. The original bomb bag wasn't, though, so the game won't drop spare bombs, I think.
Posted: 7/16/2006 5:38 AM
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NMcCoy
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I thought we didn't get the bombs, just the bomb upgrade... As I understood it, we have bombs equipped but we can't equip them if they're de-equipped, and since we don't have the original bombs the game won't give us any more.
Posted: 7/16/2006 2:28 AM
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NMcCoy
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IIRC, the bombs we have aren't replenishable as we don't have the bombs, just the bomb bag.
Posted: 7/14/2006 12:21 PM
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NMcCoy
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You can also do it anywhere if Navi has something for you to HEY! LISTEN!! to.
Posted: 7/14/2006 4:45 AM
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NMcCoy
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I think he's using an infinite bombchus code for demonstration purposes - that's how such codes typically look while in use. I'm pretty sure the sword trick works the same in OoT, so this should be applicable. The real question is does the trick work with bombs? We might have a use for those spare bombs now...
Posted: 7/13/2006 11:39 PM
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NMcCoy
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I think that Link can't get damaged again until he stops flashing from the previous hit.
Posted: 7/12/2006 7:19 PM
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NMcCoy
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It doesn't seem clear to me that the boosts are intentional in SMK. There's nothing in the manual about it, and the way they behave looks like it could well be a glitch.
Posted: 7/12/2006 5:58 PM
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NMcCoy
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Huh, so the powerslide boosts have been in since the beginning and were just undocumented (and perhaps unintentional?). Kinda like wall-jumping in the Mario series. (I wonder if wavedashing will become an official technique in Super Smash Bros Brawl?)
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