Posts for univbee


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The Japanese ladies are all very impressed with your run (yes, I'm serious). As am I, but that probably doesn't impress you as much. Still, I can vote and they can't, so that's another yes into the pile.
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Glad to see a run of this game is being done. Oddly, there are still discrepancies between the Japanese and English versions of the game. I'm not sure how in-depth they are, though; I've only touched the English version to get a feel for the new translation, and since then I've been working to beat the Japanese version. While an excellent English translation they made some unusual decisions (like using "Damnation!" as a one-word expletive instead of something a little less G-rated), and the dancer at the beginning takes her clothes off in the Japanese version as she does in the Super Famicom version, but does not in the English version. I highly doubt the differences are worth considering, but after playing through the Japanese version I'm giving the English version a go, and if anything sticks out like crazy I'll post an update.
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Dear God, man, you're on fire! Awesome work so far. Keep it up!
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Thanks for the uploader! My run to outside of Midenhall is here: http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/417/Dragon%20Warrior%20II%20%28U%29.fcm Not much, but it's a start. Working on more. EDIT: Figure I should make a few comments. I haven't tested whether naming affects anything like in DW1. I'll do that before progressing further. If it does, however, I'm going to need help figuring out what the "Optimized" name is. During the intro the text boxes don't disappear for a very long time unless A is pressed at the correct moment. This corresponds to about 30 frames after the box becomes "finalized" (no more text is "typed") and assuming I didn't screw up somewhere or there's some other trick I don't know about, this is the fastest way to go through the intro. There is a delay of 2 frames if memory serves me getting the contents of the chest in order to manipulate the walking of the citizenry. In retrospect holding down buttons at key points may also affect things in my favor (this is how I got the citizens to show up as far out of my way as possible to minimize interference odds). The soldier, woman and dog can all potentially get in my way, but did not as the run stands now beyond that 2-ish frame delay. I did similar delays in buying the two medicinal herbs in order to obtain lottery tickets to be cashed in later. Following leaving Midenhall, my planned path is as follows: - Make my way to Cannock, talk to king, save. - Make my way to healing spring, talk to old man. - ASAP get into an enemy encounter populated by many tough foes, die, get revived in Cannock. - Go south to the town and pick up the prince. - Go to Hamlin, cash in lottery tickets for wizard's ring and wand, save game. - Go south, get Mirror of Ra in swamp, kill self in swamp. Following this the prince will never be revived. - Go to tower of wind, get cape, die. - Use mirror on princess, get princess. - Go to devil's horn tower, fight 1 metal slime for levels. - Go to coastal town, fight and defeat gremlins, manipulate luck so the fight yields wings. From there I'll have the ship. What's needed now is to determine the optimum order of the subsequent actions to minimize travel time. - Obtain the Golden Key (obtaining this is required for pretty much all of the other events, so doing this first makes sense). - Get a leaf of the world tree for reviving the princess quickly after a suicide warp. - Get crest from side of shrine. - Go to underground town, sell wizard's wand, buy jailer's key. Go to jail, get watergate key, leave. - Complete sequence of events to get Moon Fragment (watergate etc.), fight 1 metal babble on the way up. Die. - Revive in Hamlin. Use leaf of the world tree(not sure if now is the best time). Kill Ozwargs, get crest. - Go to tower, kill four gremlins, get sun crest. - Save in Midenhall - Go to Osterfair, kill saber lion, get crest. - Use moon fragment to go inside cave, kill clowns/wizards, get Eye of Malroth. Die. - Get second leaf of the world tree. - Go to cave to final zone, get final crest, die. - Obtain Rubiss' Charm - Get third leaf of the world tree (they only give you one at a time, unfortunately; might be faster to just revive if cash allows). - Go to final area. - Fight giant on overworld, get Sword of Destruction. - Kill all six bosses, use wings to return, finish game. From memory this is the complete game. I remember people having problems with the DQ2 run path, I'm going to look up those posts and weigh in the recommendations.
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No, don't end the opp-topic chatter now! No-one's heard of a babbling brook? But yes, it could be one of those translation "guesses," like Crash Man and Clash Man (both are technically valid and a matter of preference, and one would have to talk to the original Rockman 2 crew to find out what they were talking about). OK, now we can finish the chatter :) Yes, I can post a WIP for what it's worth (it's all of like 3 minutes so far. Oooh! I'm going to work on it some more this weekend, though). As for keeping the Prince alive, there's absolutely no way he can serve a purpose that would justify the time it takes to revive him. Keep in mind that I have to walk through some nasty damage squares and have to heal everyone still alive each turn (DW2 doesn't give you Stepguard until about EXP level 17, and my crew will be well below that), wait through the funky music to revive him, and various other douchebaggery. The only fight that would justify having some acceleration is the final fight, and you can't critical on him (similar to the Dragonlord in DW1) so the maximum damage the prince would be able to do there is 1 damage (2 with the falcon sword, but obtaining that is in a whole other world of impracticality and would require a minimum of about ten extra minutes). Beyond the critical hits, some more efficient overworld and never reviving the prince, there's very little the existing VirtuaNES doesn't already do that can be done faster. Thank you for the tips on enemy encounters, though. I'll experiment with that when I continue. Where's the best place to host a 22k in-progress FCM file?
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Wow, that took way too long. Real life has been kicking my ass for the longest time (in Japan teaching English; language barriers don't make it very easy), but I've finally gotten the hang of work, meaning that I finally have the time and energy to do this run. I've started and am all the way...outside of Midenhall castle. Stupid deceptive game and it's "pressing A at the exact right frame is faster than holding A" nonsense. So using the submitted VirtualNES run as a guide, I have a solid idea on how to do things. Before leaving Midenhall, I purchased two medicinal herbs, which also each net me lottery tickets. I intend to cash in these tickets for a wizard's ring and a wizard's wand. The wizard's wand will be sold for 1875 gold, leaving me only 125 gold short for the jailor's key. If I'm still short after monster battles and the like I'll sell some of my character's inventory items (specifically the prince's, as he'll be dead for pretty much the entirety of the run). The structure of this game is such that the only fight that can't be won within about three turns is the final fight, and the only person who'll be capable of doing effective amounts of damage at such low levels will be the main character anyway (the Prince of Cannock won't be able to hit for more than 1 or 2 dmg, which isn't worth the extra time his turn would take). So leaving the Prince dead after dying in the "four bridges swamp" seems like the most effective strategy. I'll probably still get a leaf of the world tree to more quickly revive the Princess of Moonbrooke (paying a priest to do it forces an unskippable tune, wasting something like 5 seconds in all while getting a world tree leaf takes considerably less time if the game completion path is right). The only thing I still have to learn how to do is forcing enemies to drop items (so I can get Wings of the Wyvern and the Sword of Destruction as in the VirtualNES run) and forcing certain specific creature encounters (mainly metal slimes and babbles, but also creatures intent on killing me to teleport me back somewhere). I'm also curious about the new "smooth" walking without enemy encounters. My understanding is that pressing "right" just before in DW1 and DW4 allows an enemy battle to be "skipped," but I'd like to know more information about this bug to see if it also works in DW2 so I can more smoothly do the overworld. BTW, I can upload the FCM of my WIP if I can find space somewhere.
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Ahaha I like this new approach. Total yes vote. BTW I don't think the "New Kid" disable just inside the security doors is due to the "enemy freeze" glitch; I think they disable it in the original PC version as well to give a sort of "point of no return" feel to entering the lab (even though you can bail from the first room if you so choose). Still, though, solid run and beautiful bug exploitation.
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Interesting comments from TheAxeMan, so I do hope a second, improved version follows. That being said, I find this run quite solid overall and do hope it gets published, and that you or someone else picks up the run to improve it. Voted yes.
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Wow. I'm really glad you started your run over the first time; not only is this one much better, but it doesn't have the "saved money" problem your original had, which would have made it unsubmittable. Definite yes vote here.
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Wow. We just got N64 working and we're already...somewhere with PlayStation. Nice. So when does XBox360 speedrunning start? :) As for loading times, I could be dead wrong about this but I figured I'd chime in since as far as games from PC go, I've run the complete gamut of load times and have some understanding of how they work. I've played games from floppies, I've played games from hard drives, I've played games from CDs, and I've even played games from virtual RAM drives, which is a hell of a lot of fun. But I digress. From what I understand you have a "start the now loading screen" sequence, the loading itself, and the "OK the game's loaded now, get going" sequence. For argument's sake, let's say "start loading screen" is fading into the "Now Loading" screen and the "now load the game" sequence is fading OUT of this screen. Now the middle sequence, the loading, may, depending on how the game/console is programmed, only start once the "Now Loading" screen has fully faded in, or it may start earlier (the fade in is done by the system and its RAM, leaving the drive to do other things like start loading the game). However, what happens is that the game makes frequent (for argument's sake, let's say every frame) checks as to whether the game is loaded yet or not, but it WILL NOT start these checks until after the "Now Loading" screen has fully faded in. So basically, if we were playing this game off of RAM in an emulator, the "Now Loading" Screen would fade in and then IMMEDIATELY fade out. Naturally, I could be wrong about this, although I will bet money that a properly-coded emulator designed for speedrunning will give completely repeatable results just like the emulators we have working with speedruns now. Don't forget that many cartridge-based console games do technically have load times under certain circumstances, and they work (FDS ahoy). One cartridge game I know has significant "loading" is "Mace: The Dark Ages" for N64 as the console itself doesn't have enough memory to load everyone's character model at once on the fighter select screen, forcing the game to load whenever you move the cursor to a new fighter (it creates a very apparent pause on a real console if you pay attention to the blinking cursor; not sure about on an emulator). Newer fighting games still apply similar strategies (Soul Calibur 2, at least on PS2, only loads silhouettes initially before loading the actual model, and you can hear the PS2's drive work even though there's no "on-screen" pause). And, of course, some games stream data. FMVs, of course, do this, as do voice (DDR songs as well, for example) and, of course, CD audio tracks. As for "OMG UNAUTHENTIC" dissenters, keep in mind that the PS2 also allows for doubling the PS1 game load speed. It's possible that certain emulators may limit data intake speed to ensure compatibility in case a game is dependent on loading lag (although I think only early, mostly-forgettable PS1 games would have this problem; I think everything from FFVII on should be fine if you jack up the speed), but I think it's best we get something that actually works before we start having a meaningless fight. Having this kind of fight now is akin to people taking stances now over their position on brain transplants. Once someone who actually knows what the realities of the PS1's functionalities are (and isn't just guessing like I'm doing) and actually reliably tests these things out in a recording-capable PS1 emulator, then we can find out the best way of handling things. Let's not put the cart in front of the horse, as they say. One last thing: I'm fairly sure tampering with the CD is a no-no speedrun-wise for the same reasons that "nudging" a cartridge while playing is a no-no for them as well (or baddumps, for that matter). If any speedrunning is going to happen it's going to require verified versions of a game and the emulator is going to have to be able to reliably acquire the information for the game and not just "gloss over" it as the PSX is designed to be able to do to a certain degree. Runners themselves will likely be working off CD images on their hard drive; constant loading and re-loading would wreck the be-jesus out of a CD drive. Playback may be doable off a CD, although I'm sure that anyone having trouble with playback won't get much support until (s)he dumps the CD to an HD image. Phew! OK, I'm done.
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Very, very nice. And I never realized that Skull Man's lackeys are immune to the weapon he's weak against (Dust Crusher). My Nintendo work is crumbling! Voted yes.
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Hmmm...this video was quite interesting. Although I think that this video suffers a tad much from stale moves, I think the game might not lend itself well to other strategies. Due to my computer currently rendering videos, I watched this on my underpowered laptop in slow motion, so I could see some interesting details in the construction of the video. I also would have liked to see the bonus games beasted instead of opted-out from. I did very much enjoy the fights where you conned the AI into doing something stupid, most notably the Metal Mario fight (although maybe there's a way to manipulate him into doing it sooner)? Nonetheless, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt for all the oddness except for the bonus games, which is just a personal choice, and vote yes, although I think attempting this video a second time, or maybe making a second vid altogether with a different character or harder difficulty setting might be more enjoyable. I look forward to future runs if you choose to do any.
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The original "Famicom" version of the game was FDS-only; no cartridge was ever officially made (excluding Super Mario Collection/All-Stars' Lost Levels and the more recent GBA cart). I do own a physical pirated cart of SMB2j and while for the most part the game works as intended, it does have at least one difference from the FDS version: selecting a "Luigi Game" still displays Mario's name above the score. It's also unquestionably a pirate; it's in a beige US NES-sized cartridge. I scored it from a friend for free because it didn't work; after opening the cart I discovered it was the board of a small-size cart (like the Japanese famicom and popular bootleg cartridges) with a pin-converter board (also from bootleg fame), and they had come apart somehow. A quick shove and the game worked excluding the above "Luigi-Mario" bug. I also have no idea if it saved, as I've never beaten the thing on a real cart. Apparently another pirated version displays Rambo as a name instead of Mario. Short version: run the FDS with the IPS patch or the SNES Lost Levels if it has a similar "warp to World A" routine.
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Simply amazing. I, too, was curious as to how speedrunning would be affected with camera angles thrown into the mix. I even wondered if there was a way to "detach" and see the game from a perspective you weren't really meant to (a la recammed Quake films). I do have one serious question, though, which is what settings/resolution the rendered AVI would be at, since the emulator allows pretty much any number your monitor can take. IMAX (approx. 4000 X 3000 pixels) Mario 64 run, anyone?
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Bahaha 3 different versions in a little over a day. I managed to beat the first three PRO levels on the actual cart back in the day, but never the fourth. Thanks for this!
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There's no question that Air is one of the most bizarre hacks that would fall into the Total Conversion category. The objective of this hack, IMO, was to see how far the SMB1 engine could be taken, and to exploit things not done in the original game. For example, making getting hit a requirement, making getting X number of coins a requirement, making dying a requirement...all of these things had absolutely never been handled in the original Mario game. It reminds me a little of some concepts present in the Japanese FDS Super Mario Bros. 2 (the one renamed to Lost Levels), such as having a blooper out of the water and reverse warp zones. This hack basically takes these things to the furthest extreme. Now I think it goes without saying that playing this game without an emulator is completely impossible; the whole one-mistake-in-this-impossible-game-and-it's-game-over thing should make that abundantly clear, coupled with the fact that only experimentation and dying many, many times can reveal how the hell this hack's wacky physics fit into a viable solution. Many, many puzzles involve setting things into place so that Mario doesn't get himself killed as he auto-pilots between a flag pole and castle entrance. There's definitely little sense of reality here; Mario should be smart enough to not walk his dumb self into a pit. Unless Air's storyline is some kind of crossover with Lemmings it's certainly little more than the programmer saying "ah-ha! You've fallen into my trap and now Mario will die!" to the player. Remember Seanbaby bitching about the controls in one game, talking about how he always apologized profusely to VG characters he killed off because they misplaced their trust in him for a quarter but would say "It's your fault; I told you to jump" due to this one game's shit controls? This is kind of the reaction you get from playing Air: the programmer is testing the player using Mario and a screwy digital world as a medium, and there's no sense of immersion that you get in a traditional game. Although did anyone else get claustrophobic playing this hack? That being said, I do think that this type of movie does have some merit as a speedrun. In fact, Genisto's run isn't so much a speedrun as it is an "only run." AFAIK, there's almost no deviation possible from Genisto's actions, and for the most part they're done as fast as they can reasonably be, and I'm convinced that the "slower" times are more for aesthetically showing off than actually wasting time (i.e. revealing those hidden coin blocks to show off blocked passages).
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I'm a big fan of this hack simply because of the multitude of new features. Yes, they're not all perfectly implemented, but they're close enough to be tons of fun. I checked out the speed run and found it quite interesting. However, I saw no mention of this anywhere so I thought I'd point it out: your speedrun technically starts from a save. Not sure if you have any items, but you definitely start the game with 166 coins you're not supposed to have. For the record, this game constantly saves the time spent, the number of coins you have and, IIRC, your inventory and keys you've collected. A speedrun that's submittable would have to be started with an erased "battery save" file. Just FYI. But I'm liking the vid.
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I have a few 64-bit 1024 megs o' ram machines at my disposal if the timing of this is correct. Sign me up!
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This is the most difficult theoretical vote I've had to make. In the end, though, I have a simple solution that I think will solve a lot of headaches, and that's to just have a seperate "hacks" section, outside of the system-specific sections. I'm not suggesting to just open the floodgates and allow any stupid hack in; I think sticking to "total conversion" type stuff would be ideal and using the current "ask first" rule. I decided that this video should be included, though; getting anywhere in that hack is impressive. I'd also like to see speedruns of the infamous Challenge Games, too.
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Bahaha this video is hilarious. Despite the fact that every single action in this game looks to be inefficient somehow, getting the magic armor and reducing the herb purchases and use speeds this video up so much that it beats the previous record nicely. Total yes vote. Erm, scratch that. I would vote yes, but it appears I'm still on lurker status. Either that or I'm really really blind and can't find how to vote. So this is a hypothetical plus one, or something. I don't know.
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Randil, there are differences, the two biggest being that instead of saves, this game was password-based (an insanely long chain of hiragana, like 52 characters or something crazy like that) and, most significant speedrun-wise, the intro starts when the wounded Moonbrooke soldier makes it to the starting castle whose name I can't recall; every other version of the game, including the Japanese remakes, features an intro showcasing the attack on Moonbrooke, the slaying of its king and the escape of the one soldier, which theoretically would extend a technical "run" by 2 to 3 minutes over the Japanese version. The original game had cross iconography, too, a no-no in Nintendo's anal-retentive days, so the US NES version replaces them with Stars. IIRC these are the only significant changes to the game.
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Given the proposed improvements I think a DW2 vid would be in 55 minute range. Don't forget the US version has an unskippable intro (something I'm guessing Enix wanted to do in the original version but couldn't for memory/time reasons, since this intro is present in every Japanese remake of DQ2) so that tacks on something like 2-3 minutes. Still, this could be quite interesting. I'm organizing some teaching classes and I'll take a second look in a bit.
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Daah! Just watched this movie. While I don't think it's approval-worthy I do think there are a lot of interesting things in this video and with a couple of improvements this movie would be perfect. I also learned a lot about the way the game works in watching this movie. I, too, considered using the Japanese version (if for no other reason than skipping the long-ass intro), but dismissed the idea because the good dumps of the Japanese version of the game don't work at all in FCEU (incidentally, I used (J) [h1] to play the movie and it got all the way to the end). I think the overworld path is excellent, and if you tak out the silver key trek (I'd forgotten the gold key could open iron doors too) it's probably the fastest possible path. There's definitely some weirdness with the items that needs fixing (or I'm missing something) and I'm almost 100% sure that criticals can be manipulated. But this is an extremely promising plan-of-attack. FinalFighter, is your friend planning a round 2?
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Ah. Thanks for the info, TheAxeMan! In examining my video, I think going straight for the end ASAP is actually the fastest route. Doing only the minimum battles, my characters are already at a semi-reasonable level (only the end bosses remain, in theory), but I think leveling the prince and princess to the point where they obtain specific spells might not be worthwhile. This game seems to fall in a strange sort of middle ground between Dragon Warrior 1 and 4; unless the end bosses do something really funky, I think my characters are capable of inflicting reasonable amounts of damage to enemies, to the point where I think finishing off the end boss can be accomplished in very few turns (i.e. I'll be doing things a lot faster than the DW1 speedrun chipping away at the sleeping Dragonlord). At the level the prince is now (7), he's actually stronger with the iron spear (29) than he is with the Falcon Sword (14X2), so unless more than Strength factors into criticals the Falcon Sword is literally a useless purchase. Also, the only enemies that drop items that can be sold for enough for the Falcon Sword are only reached towards the end game (e.g. Cave to Rhone), and the added battles aren't likely to be worth it. Still, I'll further my experimentation; I'm very open to the possibility that I'm neglecting something and am wrong about this. I'm also going to consult an EXP chart to see where I can level my characters to before it just becomes excessive (i.e. where does killing 4 or 5 metal babbles get me?) How big of a metal babble fight is theoretically possible, anyway, eight metal babbles? I think buying wings is faster than leveling to get Return, though. One final note: I've found an always-critical Game Genie code (untested right now, though, so it could be wrong), but I've had no luck finding a "guarantee drops" code. Methinks I'll need to delve into the programming to see what can make that happen. More later; I'm falling asleep. Night.
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About the Falcon Sword: true, I didn't think of Criticals. Still, raising the 24000 gold needed for it is likely not worthwhile; I think the Iron Spear, while slower, won't be so much slower that it makes getting the Falcon Sword worth it. I think the only conceivable way to get it would be to sell the Staff of Thunder as well as getting a golden card through the lottery (so two lottery runs would be necessary), and by the time we'd get it it would only save time for the end boss fights; everything up until then can definitely go down with a Hero + Prince critical combo; all of the forced-fight creatures have a max HP of 70, and even at the low levels my characters are they can wreck that with one or two criticals. What I'm going to do is build a savestate at the end of the game with low levels, but all the useful weapons so I can do a side-by-side test with the Falcon Sword and Iron Spear to see where that leads. Optimal use of wings is also tricky, mainly because wings are particularly expensive in this game (80 gold); I know there's at least one chest in the silver key cave that has one, as well as one behind the golden key door in the first castle. I'm going to map out a route and figure out which locations make the most of the wings. So following another binge I've just gotten Rubis' Charm. I recorded from a position where I had gotten all keys and two crests (Moon and Sun), coupled with some fun-times screw-ups like taking blatantly wrong paths and the like :) Should make a good cure for insomnia. What I'd like to know is if it's possible for the Saber Lion in Osterfair Castle (whom you kill for the Moon Crest) can drop an Iron Spear (the ones out in the wild can); since this fight is mandatory it would save considerable bother if it gives me what I need (potentially the weapon of choice for the Prince). Other things I need to know: I never got a Dragon Potion in my original playthrough and didn't even know of its existence until recently; does it only save or does it heal as well? And if it heals, does it really work anywhere (i.e. can I use it for a full heal before fighting Hargon or Malroth?)