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maybe my mind is messed up but that may be the single most unintentionally erotic congratulations screen i've ever seen
Only thing I didn't like about this run is that it goes by too quickly to really see what even happened. Pressing the buttons up to the champagne bottle is by rule the proper way to go with the TAS, sure, but I just wish there was some way to show the (-9) > (-20) screen
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I'm trying to find a seconds timer so I can better predict when the clock drops seconds. 3BDB does a pretty good job, but it goes from 20-1 instead of 20-0 and is a little stilted about the counting. Still a perfect 60 frames per second loop, though.
Point of which is, yeah, the timer glitch where your first second isn't always a full second does apply here. The only way to manipulate this is to wait in-level, either by starting a level and then restarting it at the right time or by waiting on the square before the exit until the right time to enter. Part of me is concerned about in-game time, since there has been an active Chip's community keeping devoted lists of best times and a TAS missing many of those times by exactly one in-game second just seems so wrong, haha. I was able to beat their time on level 24, Oorto Geld, through copious amounts of block slapping, at least.
Thanks for the extra information on blobs. Knowing that there are only four possible routines they can follow motivates me to more thoroughly examine every possible outcome--I found a route through level 23, Blobnet, that meets the best times I could find, but it still looked kind of ugly to me. Having three more starting conditions I can repeat that process with to maybe find a faster/cleaner path is much better sounding than the worried 'it's not manipulable in-level, but nigh-infinitely manipulable before you start' pain in the ass condition.
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EricS wrote:
If this version is TASed, how should the secret levels be handled? They can only be reached by entering a password, which seems to require resetting the Lynx. I think the best thing would be to have two TASes: one which plays the 144 regular levels, and another which plays the 4 secret levels via the password. The alternative approach would get the ending after the 144 levels, power cycle, and then play the secret levels and get the ending again.
I was thinking to power cycle immediately after finishing level 144, putting in the code for the final levels, and then letting that ending be the finish for the TAS. Or let the ending cycle through once, power cycle again, and then putting in the code for the secret Mandlebrot generator and letting that fill the screen! no
Thanks for the level tips, too.
--Fixing up Level 9 taught me more about block slapping--if I can't get it to slap immediately, I can push into a wall for three frames and then block slap just fine. Instead of slapping the one block, I could slap the next one as well. This helped in Level 15 at the very end as well, along with your thief trick which I really should've already known. I also cleaned up Level 17, the big chip-smiley-face level, by hitting the green button myself to save myself those frames of staring at a wall waiting for it to disappear. The game is relatively pleasant to edit without desyncing too hard, though saving an odd number of frames can change even-step/odd-step alignment. Until I saved time in level 17, the level with all the teeth and the dirt was going straight to the deaths.
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I saw the discussion about whether this game would be worth approaching and thought I'd put a video together to see what that would be like.
Link to video
This video TASes the first 19 levels in the original Lynx version of the game. If you can make it through these 15 minutes and feel like you could go through another...two and half, three hours, we've got something!
The process of TASing this game is easy in a number of ways, but largely because the levels are almost entirely TAS-solved already--https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EczCcswkoc0&list=PLA220B8606ECB5342&index=1 This link is a Youtube playlist of every level in the game played at the current optimal possible time, and a large majority of these videos' movements can be copied straight across to the Lynx version, with some changes to entertainment factor possible maybe without sacrificing time; I tried to really tease the teeth monsters in Level 19, for example. Captions would go a long way to making this game approachable, too. Another aid here: this page is a list of the high scores for time remaining on the clock for the Lynx version: http://www.jamesa7171.net/cc1lynx.htm This video runs short by a second in a couple levels, though I'm pretty sure that's due to a bit of a frame-rule issue where the sub-second timer doesn't properly reset between levels.
I should also talk about what version of CC would really be the best to use. The Windows version includes a large amount of abuseable programming errors that speed up a bunch of levels, and I feel like the way movement is handled alone would speed up the run a lot, but I worry that it would be harder to watch with how jumpy it is, and I haven't been able to get Hourglass to work with the game at all anyway. Using Bizhawk to record the original Lynx version is actually really convenient and easy to do, but I don't know any of the other ports well enough to say if they'd be worth trying instead. I get the sense that it's just the Windows version that messed up the porting enough to be glitchy.
Salvageable, or would there just be way too many dull maze-solving periods like Level 15, Elementary? I'm not exactly looking forward to Writer's Block or Pain, for sure, but if blobs and walkers can be RNG manipulated then there could be really interesting moments throughout as well.
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packsciences wrote:
Also, you "supposed" that walking is faster than jumping? That implies that you didn't bother checking.
Alf's animation takes very long time and he jumps not very fast so, now I am sure, walking is faster
Walking is actually faster, but you can't walk and attack at the same time. The cave under the house has infinitely spawning bats, and the emulator timing used at the time of the last TAS didn't let you get past most of them without attacking, so jumping and attacking occurred a lot. (The SMS emulator on my Wii allowed you to just walk by them with its timing, which would be so much better.)
But yeah, sounds like this is a no-go if a code was used. Not a good game to TAS anyway, since so much if it is or is effectively boring autoscroller.
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My first thought is, hey, a TAS can manipulate anything else in a run, why not also manipulate the start of the run? By that I mean, if you can have the resources to peek at the memory in the first place, than you theoretically can do what it takes to set up the RAM for yourself before you start your run.
How many games would benefit from this, anyway? I imagine a good chunk of games take a second to blank out the RAM before anything is read from it, or at least the parts that would get used. (Sure would be nice to have this feature for Ultima: Exodus for the NES, though, there's a glitch that can read from the untouched RAM during party creation that I would have looooved to manipulate when looking at it a couple years ago)
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£e Nécroyeur wrote:
Twisted Eye, Az Atorse Main Body can only be destroyed if all 8 Orbs are destroyed, or if its self-destruct timer expires. The Submission has been updated to clarify this a bit. The only reason I mention that Az Atorse Main Body can be damaged is because I had hoped for a shortcut to avoid the Orb battle, and thought there might have been a chance at damage overflow or some such by attacking it directly. Suffice it to say, I wailed on that sucker.. To no avail.
Ahh, alright. I'll have to take back some of my earlier judgment then!
Yeah, if it turns out that killing the orbs actually kills the boss much much faster than waiting for the selfdestruct sequence, then it might actually make for a more appropriate run to do this instead of wait. I still like the concept that just sitting around doing nothing will still lead to the boss's death, but the actual video is not as good to watch. I'd vote to just redo that last little bit at the end and ask for the input file to be switched in instead.
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The Submission Text wrote:
Az Atorse's main body can be damaged, but it is futile, as the main body has infinite Hit Points.
He did not cheap out on the final boss--no matter what he did, the boss would have died in the same way at the same time. There is no defeating this boss without running out the timer.
If you think that he should have played around with the boss for three minutes, fine, that's cool, but I'm more impressed by him finding the earliest possible moment to end input. I've always been a fan of runs that beat the game despite pulling the controller out and walking into the next room, metaphorically. The whole rest of the run was incredibly quick and glitchy, too, so there's no way I'm not YES!ing this baby. Good job!
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Liked the run! The zipping was nice, and cutting down the difficulty if it's JUST repetition doesn't bother me.
I haven't been following this at all, either, and don't know the game, but watching the run, I got a couple of ideas (that you might have already tried, just guessing here) to maybe cut some time.
There was a long underwater section little over halfway through that was nothing but laaaaaag the whole way. Would it have eased the lag by leaving one of the mice dead the whole time, or would it not be enough to cover any improvements having both alive would bring?
Also, from the looks of it, are you doing double damage by having both mice bounce on the boss's head at the same time? Would it be at all possible between timing and momentum to also have cork shots 'strike' at the same time and do extra damage?
I could easily see both ideas not working out, but I figured I'd bring them up anyway.
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The length of time that the glitch takes to get the score to maximum will probably send a lot of users to the No button, but I'm giving the run a Yes based on everything before the glitch point and as props for the glitch use. The first couple minutes are clearly optimized, quick, and reasonably entertaining for an Atari 2600 game. I digs!
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mklip2001 wrote:
For the record, the movie is way more interesting than the game. It's pretty silly humor, but Dana Carvey does a good job playing Wayne. There's a pretty well-known scene with guys singing with and headbanging to Bohemian Rhapsody in a car.
Dana Carvey plays Garth. Wayne is played by Mike Meyers, the guy who was later Austin Powers and Shrek. Man it's been a long time since I've seen this movie, I'll have to give it another watch!
...I'm not watching a movie of this game again, though, cripes this is bad. Reminds me of the Total Recall NES game, though that TAS is at least varied enough to make the watch bearable. Also, the music loops in this game are really, really short. Meeeehhhhh.
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Watched the embed--amused enough for the short length. Minesweeper doesn't quite fit the usual TAS flair, but being less than a minute long makes it work.
Do you still have to press an input to get to the ANTARCTICA CLEAR! screen? If just waiting is good enough to get to the ending, there's always clearing the largest patch of zeroes last and ending input early.
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There was a LOT of '...oh that's genius' in that video! Manipulating creating/killing the helper to have the game go through certain steps while not increasing the in-game clock was annoying until I figured out that that was what was going on, but after that it was clever to see the different uses of the trick. The final hit on Marx was an especially neat way to stop the clock as quickly as possible.
--oh, creating a helper lowers the boss's health? I didn't realize that happened. Or do you mean that bosses get more HP if there are two players when loaded? I don't know if I ever noticed that before, hm!
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Good run! The final bosses were especially fun to watch, you flowed through their shots very well. You clearly did what you could to add style and 'near-hits' wherever you could throughout the whole run, which is really important in how repetitive a perfect run of a bait-and-trap platformer is.
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Good run, this game has been needing it for years and years.
Still, this run looks like it could use minor optimization, especially in the last third. (And the purist in me still thinks that keeping health to less than a full heart to shorten the 'Round X Complete!' screens is the best way, horrendous 'You're about to die!' screeching be damned!) Not that I think sub-10 minutes is possible or anything, so again I'd say this run was pretty darn good.
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TASeditor wrote:
I see you hit other cars from behind, doesn't this cost time?
Doesn't look like it, as long as the speed stays at max. Apparently, speed stays at full after a jump, too, so that doesn't have to be particularly optimized at least.
But man, playing Bump'n'Jump perfectly turns it into an autoscroller. As much as I played the Intellivision port in my youth, I'm not sure if this is really entertaining enough to publish.
