Posts for Supper

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As far as JP/US differences go, this game is particularly interesting in that, while the US version contains changes that make it much more suitable for speedrunning in absolute terms (80% of the unskippable voiced dialogue is gone and FMVs can be skipped), it also makes the game much harder by greatly increasing enemies' speed and attack power -- here's a comparison video I made a while back showing some of the differences. This is probably more of an issue for real-time runners, since AFAIK enemy HP and defense values are unchanged, and in fact a no-skip TAS would probably benefit from the changes in some cases due to faster boss attack cycles. Anyway, nice work! I'd never have thought the game could be done this fast, cutscenes or no. Shame about the boss battles, though... I haven't understood or cared about branch definitions in a long time, but I think there'd be significant merit in a no-skip run. I hope this won't be published in such a way as to preclude that.
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ruadath wrote:
For what it's worth, I started working on this (Lunar 1 SegaCD) about a week ago. Random number stuff has been figured out, and step counting methods + encounter skips too. Expect a WIP in a few days time.
Cool! I recently took this game apart a bit while working on a patch to revert the difficulty increases and other changes in the US version. It sounds like you've already figured out the useful stuff, but my notes are here if you want to look through them. Sorry they're so messy -- they were only really meant for my personal use. For that matter, are you using the US or Japanese version? The difficulty changes in the US version are quite tame compared to what happened to other games in the series, but some of the bosses do have significantly higher HP (especially the Black Dragon). For a TAS, I'd expect boss battles to basically come down to repeatedly casting the same spells until the boss dies, which would make the Japanese version slightly less repetitive and more entertaining IMO. Your call, though.
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I don't really have much to do with this site these days, but I just thought I'd mention that while trying this game out after watching the run, I accidentally bumped into an invisible phone: This is on the middle of the fourth floor, just to the left of James' room. I doubt it saves any time, but it might be worth taking a look at. And since I watched (most of) the run: regardless of the whether the route is optimal or not, I'd have to give this a no vote. The game is so bad it's kind of amusing just for the sheer magnitude of the poor design decisions (walked down a perfectly innocuous flight of stairs? THEY'RE BROKEN, GAME OVER!) but doesn't make a good TAS.
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I guess this is what Tim Follin sounds like when he gets a bad sound driver. You can tell the composition's good, but man, those plinky FM instruments! Pretty repetitive, but held my attention. Nice Batman-Robin hijinks during the level downtime. Did the designers really go to the trouble of giving every enemy a different name? I give it a yes.
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Dwedit wrote:
Why does the music sound so similar in style to Genesis Action 52?
This game and Action 52 both use the GEMS sound driver. It was apparently designed to be easy for composers with little programming knowledge to use, so it showed up in a lot of games. Excellent improvement, obvious yes vote. A shame you can't glitch into more boss chambers.
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I'm glad people got some amusement out of this. Maybe someday I'll actually submit a real TAS.
Personman wrote:
Waiting for the full version, I want to more accurately relive my days of being able to pass this in GH3 :D
I'll pass on that, but luckily for you someone's already done it!
jlun2 wrote:
Now try composing your own song. ;)
At the rate I compose, I probably wouldn't have finished until next year's April 1st and it wouldn't be as funny anyway. Actually, I usually don't even use trackers, which is probably why I kept messing this up while I was making it. If you watch closely enough you can see me going back and redoing parts that weren't right multiple times.
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I laughed hardest at the "narration" at the beginning. The absurd answers later on are somewhat amusing, but at that point it starts to feel like a slower version of the Family Feud TAS. If you want to do all three rounds, I think you should try to do a similar "story" to better differentiate this from that run. I also think doing only one match would work best; nine straight rounds just like this one would get boring unless you came up with something extraordinarily creative. On another note, I love this game's ridiculous facial expressions. Your character just looks so smug every time he gets the answer "right."
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I wound up enjoying this more than I expected. This looks like it would be incredibly dull and frustrating in real time, but a TAS breezes through all the ridiculous invisible items and constant enemies. Stage 6 is like a cruel running gag on the player -- you expect it to end at every new screen, but it keeps on going and going until it's just absurd. Falling through the floors was nice, too -- is there no possibility of some interesting out-of-bounds exploit with that? Overall, I was entertained.
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I played through this a while back. The "humor" (if you can call it that) wasn't really my cup of tea, but I liked the ending. I'd want to see this, and I think the game itself is bizarre enough to attract interest despite the fact that it's essentially a bog-standard RPG. Also, I had the same disappearing text problem when I tested Yume Nikki some time ago. It seems to occur sporadically in RPG Maker 2003 games. I think you can keep it from happening if you restart Hourglass when it shows up, but I haven't really checked.
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I'm going to be away for the next couple of weeks, so here's a WIP. I'm up to the third boss, which I'm currently redoing because I found a way to beat it much faster. There are some spots in the tutorial and one of the underwater levels where there might be simple improvements, although I haven't checked for sure and I have no idea if it would be possible to hex them in. Currently, I'm about 50 seconds ahead of the test run, and probably much more than that after the next boss. I've also been looking for useful RAM addresses, with little success. I found a few locations that clearly have something to do with Sonic's movement (they're 0 when he's standing still and they're usually other things when he's moving), but I can't make heads or tails of them. Whatever the system is here, it's beyond my very limited knowledge.
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It's r35 on XP SP3. I do know about disabling multithreading, but I decided I'd rather have the sound than the stability, plus there's the rather large problem that disabling it crashes the game at the main menu. Disabling DirectSound seems to work, though I haven't tried it out much. I'll probably just go on as I have since the issues aren't preventing progress, just making things take a bit longer.
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Finished the test run. .wtf is here, encode is here (no MIDIs and sound is desynced, sorry). I take back what I said about the game running well because it's been crash after crash today. The basic issues seem to be: - Weird graphic artifacts sometimes block the screen for a few frames when loading savestates - Pausing with Hourglass sometimes freezes the game - Random freezes when loading states - Fast-forwarding MIDIs almost always causes a note to stick for as long as the game is running - Loading states when the final boss swoops at you often seems to cause a crash - Some weird problem I had a couple of times where the game would suddenly start running uncontrollably fast and stop responding to input. Usually seemed to cause a desync afterwards. - Just running the game occasionally seems to keep Windows from opening any new programs. It can't shut down either, so I have to manually cycle the power to get it working again. But other than that, the game seems perfectly TASable. The platforming sections will probably be a pain to get right, though. Spin dashing in particular is weird. It takes something like 15 frames to duck and start charging a dash, but you can fully charge it in about 6 frames (and it's really powerful). Hitting corners with it sends you flying, which you can abuse in the lava cave to skip the rotating platforms and rising lava. I'll get to work on this, but it'll probably be slow, especially since the game runs fullscreen and I can't play it and see the frame counter at the same time. I'm thinking of turning on Zero Ring Mode, but it would cost some time on the third-to-last boss -- any opinions on that?
Post subject: Eggman Hates Furries
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Eggman Hates Furries is a Sonic fangame by Oddwarg. It's basically a boss rush with some short platforming sections thrown in. It also has a story with its own... quirks... but all in all, it's entertaining, if a little frustrating. It runs pretty well under Hourglass. I've only had one desync so far, and aside from an odd problem with static playing over the last bit of the intro and MIDI notes occasionally sticking in fast-forward, the only major issue I've had is that it sporadically renders my computer unable to open any new programs or shut down properly. There doesn't seem to be any specific cause. At any rate, I made a quick test run of the first few levels -- .wtf and encode. The encode is missing MIDI music for whatever reason, and you should probably just skip to 2:50 because the intro's boring and unskippable. The physics are weird and floaty compared to regular Sonic games, and all the odd angles make it very different from the Mega Drive games and probably tricky to optimize. I'll finish up the test run and then see what I can come up with.
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sameasusual wrote:
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Come on, 75%, that's a passing grade!
I'm suddenly reminded of the Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin complains about 75 being only a 'C', claiming that if the (American) government were 75% efficient, we'd be estatic. Sadly, I could not find it to post here as an image.
Nice memory for details. Here you go: I'm guessing this is the most fun some people have had since April Fools.
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mklip2001 wrote:
I saw the YouTube video. Good job once again! However, is it possible to do zipping in the lower sections of the Crawl Space? It seems strange that you only hang out on the top areas.
The screen only scrolls horizontally, so while it looks like there are more classrooms beneath the floor, they're actually just bottomless pits.
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Could I vote no? Nice job wringing all those tiny optimizations out of such a short movie.
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Oh, cool. I didn't think the game would have anything like this. Thanks! Actually, rooms 46-49 all seem to behave similarly. They all use "classroom" music instead of "hallway" music, and all of their exits either lead to the top of room 14 or Warp Zone. Perhaps these were rooms that were scrapped at some early point? Most of the options are pretty obvious, but "Panel" seems to affect the x-position at which you arrive in the room. Each additional increment of the counter sends you another screen length to the right, and going too high causes you to immediately go out-of-bounds and get sent to Warp Zone. Room 90, panel 0 is a nice deathtrap. 128 is also funny, warping you into the bricks directly underneath the final boss. I wonder what 207, "Secret," is for? It just makes the screen flash black for a few frames.
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I think this could be viable. It might be tricky finding the best speed to go so that people can follow the action while still getting a good sense of WTF. This site has a long list of bugs that weren't on Graeme Cree's site; using as many glitches as possible off of both lists would be quite a task. Finding an old version isn't a problem; the Interactive Fiction Archive has patches to convert Infocom games from one version to pretty much any other here. This has got my interest. It'd be cool to see a playaround, even if it didn't get published.
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Flygon wrote:
Whelkman wrote:
And why are you avoiding the lightning bolts in the final stage? Isn't that the exact opposite of what they were trying to accomplish in the movie?
I think they actually damage you in the game itself, it's weird but according to one of the previous submissions of this game, it is true. I can't confirm this myself, but I'd trust an older submissions comments.
Hitting a lightning bolt instantly slows the car down to 30 mph. This actually causes a slight glitch at the end of the run where the car hits a lightning bolt after crossing the "finish line," causing the flaming tire effect to separate from the car.
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Blaise wrote:
dunna dunna dunna dah dah dunna, dunna dunna dunna dah dah dunna, no vote for that song being stuck in my head the rest of the day.
If you think that's bad, I transcribed that song for the piano after I made my run. Since then, I've hardly touched a keyboard without playing it. Anyway, as I've said, this game doesn't make the most interesting TAS. I don't think going for the highest score is good for it either, since that just means playing the boring minigames longer. I think it would have been more interesting to simply aim for destroying all enemies possible (which you did a nice job of, although I wish you would toy with them a bit more instead of just killing them immediately). This is really nitpicky, but you could have manipulated the first bully to start on the same row as you in the café minigame. I'm not sure if that would have saved time, since the bullies seem to come on a set schedule. Same goes for the ones you let come up to the counter before using the Super Shake. This is just my personal taste, but I would have preferred some sort of structured movement during the minigames, like synching Marty's guitar playing to the music. I'm also a little disappointed you didn't make use of "oil warping" -- if you hold up/down/right and slide over an oil slick, you'll either wipe out or teleport to a random on-screen location. So "fond" as I am of this game, I'm voting meh. It's fun to watch, but the game is just too long and repetitive.
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Good luck making this interesting. This game is pretty boring even for an autoscroller. The only difference between the four street segments is the speed of the enemies and the color of the road, and the minigames are relatively short and uninteresting. If the game were half as long, I think you could make a decent run with the UD/LR glitches I posted in the other thread. As it is, I think the only thing that could save this game is an extremely bizarre level skip glitch that probably doesn't exist.
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UltimateDarius wrote:
Sorry about the double post, nobody hate me! I was wondering if anyone here could run a test: find out if my trainer ID matches that of the traded Abra's Original Trainer's ID number (25643) will cause automatic obedience. If so, will it also negate the 1.5x multiplier to experience? If Yes to one and No to two, this would make my life a lot easier in the non-TAS world, and it might help a TAS run for less rerecords? I don't know. But if anyone could help, it would be greatly appreciated!
I'm really not up on all the mechanics of the modern games, but if I recall correctly there are three factors that have to match for the game to count a traded Pokémon as your own: the trainer name, the ID number, and a normally unviewable five-digit number called the hidden ID. The chances of the latter two being the same on any two separate games are something like one in four billion. Basically, even if your name and trainer ID match, the chances of a traded Pokémon being recognized as your own are astronomical (outside of a TAS, of course). But if all the numbers do happen to line up, then yes, the Pokémon should obey you at the cost of the EXP multiplier.
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Well, I took a few hours to slog through this game (mostly in real time, except for some of the ludicrously hard bosses), and I'm wowed by just how awful it is. The house is extremely dull and tedious to navigate. The first-person areas are very annoying if you don't start the game knowing you can punch through walls. The warp zones are okay at first, but after the first few they almost always consist of an absurd number of enemies that will immediately come back after you kill them if you're not standing on top of their spawn point. That said, I didn't really find anything useful to a TAS. I played around with the Super Jump, but unfortunately it can't replace the jump boots -- there are quite a few places where you have to jump out of water onto a high ledge, and the Super Jump can't manage that. You could probably use it to skip some of the hidden ladders, and maybe get into a couple of levels early, but I'm not sure what uses it has besides that. All in all, the game is a very mindless and repetitive experience, and I'm not sure it'll make a good TAS since there doesn't seem to be any way to skip getting all the laser pieces. I can't really see a run of this being published unless a very big sequencer breaker comes up. On the other hand, if you can stomach the entire game, it turns out that the ending is hilariously glitchy: http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/312533105/whiteend.fcm Alternate Ending #1: As he frees his brother Ginn from the evil Canbarian, Michael dies and gets a game over. He is then briefly resurrected on the front lawn before warping away and embracing his brother on the ramparts of a castle of glitchy blocks. But personally, I prefer: http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1902145796/chaosendwhat.fcm Alternate Ending #2: Michael again defeats Canbarian, but is taken out by his final attack while Ginn tries to give him a thumbs-up. They are then warped to a vast plain, where Ginn weeps as he drags his brother's lifeless corpse to him with his telekinetic powers. Then the LSD kicks in.
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If this one's as easy to break as Ghoul School, I'd be happy to. ;) It certainly has the same low-budget feel going for it. Unfortunately, it's not likely I'll have another stroke of luck on this like last time. I'll poke around and see what I can find, though.
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All right! Personally, I think this run is utterly awesome, but of course I'm biased. Great job getting this done!