From the one who suggested "SimCity", comes a Syugi Yoshida film...
Here's a lesser known SNES game that has a lot of character--the date is September 13th, 1912; the place is aboard the cruise liner "Lady Crithania", which at 7:11 P.M. is wracked by such severe waves that it completely overturns, leaving you, one of four selectable characters, alone and trapped on the sinking vessel. With almost all of the passengers and crew dead and only an hour until the ship capsizes, you have only one goal--escape.
However, each character has one or more specific other--"charge", if you will, that must be rescued. Their location is revealed at the beginning of each character's intro, and all you have to do is get to them--through an upside-down, shifting, sinking ship with some parts blown away, and others on fire. Oh, don't forget the other survivors who are waiting for a hero...
I really would like to see someone who has the time do a speedrun of this game--it's very challenging.
Here is a link to some very good information about the game:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/snes/game/28702.html
I had never heard of this game before, but I now played it for a while and I must say it's extremely fun to play. For making a TAS however, I'm not sure if rescuing every passenger is the best option. Not only does it take more time talking to them, but you also have to wait for them every room (unless there's some fast way for them to keep up with you). Instead, I'm thinking the best option would be completing the game and totally ignoring all the people asking you for help, which seems quite hilarious if you ask me :).
As for making the TAS itself, the biggest challenge would be finding the fastest path to the boiler room, and manipulating luck to have the best possible 'ship tilts'.
And, of course, there's the question which character to play...
An interesting concept, a Poseidon Adventure for the SNES. I remember reading about this ages ago in an issue of EGM (before it started to suck) and planning to play it one day. I never really got around to it...I probably will one day...but in the meantime, someone doing a TAS of this more than captures my attention.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/4139/SOStest.smv
A little bit of recording of what I think to be the optimal route using Capris and rescuing no passengers. To avoid desynchs, you should disable Interpolated Sound.
I'm pretty sure you cannot manipulate the time when the ship tilts, but you can manipulate it's direction. This could eliminate two of the three waiting parts in the movie now.
Though, when I'm looking back at the movie I'm not really sure if this would the best game to TAS. Adding some optimised jumping and running could change that however.
not sure if it would make a good run or not either...It was interesting - it reminded me of playing Clock Tower slightly. (now there is another game which might not be an good TAS...(Is it bad that this game scares me.))
I'd rather see a full run that collects enough survivors (25pt worth) and your matches to get the best ending. The current run is basically "walk to this room, game over". Meh.
I didn't even notice the date of the original post, wow.
Interesting how it got brought up again!
But unfortunately, it seems that Gunty disappeared (from this thread)...
Wow, I hadn't noticed the OP's date either. :)
I agree with Xkeeper that a TAS rescuing no passengers could be quite boring after all, so that's off the table. A TAS featuring the "best ending" would have to collect about 5-6 passengers I think, however this leads to the following problems:
The general lacking AI of the passengers:
In realtime the passengers often aren't able to make jumps the player can make. I can only imagine this being worse in a TAS since it would have a lot of "impossible" jumps.
The speed of the passengers:
Everytime you want the passengers to follow you to a certain point you have to call them. Calling them automatically stops your movement. To make the matter even worse, if the passengers ever exit the screen they are often not going to respond to your calls. This means you have to stop and call the passengers every time you have moved a bit.
In my opinion, those are the two major things that makes a TAS both annoying to make and less entertaining to watch, unless there are some obvious solutions to the above problems..
I believe there was some bug mentioned, where if you went to the next room and called, passengers would somehow magically make it past horrible jumps to where you were. I dunno, though; you'll have to test it yourself.
From Now On I'm going to post all my completed TASes in the forums, because I want to make sure that they're OK and I don't want to clog up the workbench with useless movies.
Anyway , here's S.O.S: http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/150285308/SOS%20by%20NitroGenesis.smv
If you're wondering why in-game time is slower than the console run it's because I used a speed-entertainment trade-off.
It is explained here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?z5y04ydiwnz
Anyway, enjoy.
YoungJ1997lol wrote:
Normally i would say Yes, but thennI thought "its not the same hack" so ill stick with meh.
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
First of all, thank you for posting this here before submitting it.
As for the run itself:
speed-entertainment tradeoff explanation wrote:
The console run is faster than my run due to a speed-entertainment trade-off.
It is:
As you can see, the ship tilts to the right. A few minutes later, it turns back to the left.
In the RTS, he stops moving a couple of times in order to synchronize it with the room needed. This is indeed faster, but looks sloppy.
In my TAS, I keep moving. This wastes about 5 seconds but looks alot better.
I hope I've explained good enough.
(quoted here for easy reference)
If I understand you correctly, you're referring to the sequence around frame 13300 in your run; since the tilt is still there, it's impossible for you to jump up to the platform on the right. I happen to think that your approach looks sloppier - it looks as though you're ignoring a better route in the room. The delay needed to get this to sync up could be handled just by inserting a pause here and there.
As it stands, the run would not be acceptable because it's slower than the real-time run, which is against the rule that it must beat all existing records.
I don't buy your justification for such a trade-off for the above reason, and because this just isn't an entertaining run to begin with - it's just moving slowly back and forth and jumping from platform to platform, so this type of run is not something I would view as likely to be accepted even if it were polished to be better than the current speed run.
As I understand it, this is a game with multiple endings for each of the characters, and the point is to go through and rescue passengers - a run aiming for the best ending would, I think, be better received, but I don't know by how much. If you're insistent upon a run of this game, I'd suggest doing a test run of that nature and posting it here to see whether it would be worth doing an optimised run.
I knew it was a bit slow. I think I'll work on a different game.
Well, at least my idea (post all my completed TASes in the forums) was good.
You'll see something new later :)
(Edit: Oops, it looks like my french keyboard made an è instead of an '.)
YoungJ1997lol wrote:
Normally i would say Yes, but thennI thought "its not the same hack" so ill stick with meh.
Sadly, I have to agree with sgrunt about the chances of this game getting a published TAS. A run that doesn't save any passengers is certainly not entertaining enough. Going for the best ending with a character might have a shot though, simply because there's a decent amount of route planning and luck manipulation involved.
As for your SMV, it shows a lot of room for improvement. I won't nag every little movement choice here, but a few things stand out:
- The introduction stuff could be made more entertaining by simply speaking to the other passengers while you wait. Jeffrey has far too much downtime for dancing to be a good idea. (That is, unless it helps with luck manipulation.)
- The game really handed you some rotten luck on that first boat turn. You really need to find a way to manipulate this, because this is the most important factor in getting a good time for a worst ending run.
- The room right before the boiler room will always be at that angle, so there's no need to slow down and wait for a boat turn. Also, in that same room, the climbing was really unoptimized. Your dude's hands should touch the left corner of each block on the way up every time.
- The first jump in the boiler room was rough. Just jump when you pass the mid-way mark of that second barrel and you won't need to release the D-pad (you won't hit the wall either).
- On the ladder before the two hook platforms, if you jump to the right at the very top, you'll grab the first hook. It's quicker than pulling yourself up first and then jumping over.
- It's worth noting that if the boiler explodes, you weren't moving fast enough. Just pointing that out, because it's a pretty easy way to gauge your speed.
Anyway, here's a link to a mock TAS I did back in July of last year. Completes the game in 3:10, so hopefully you can take some tips from it.
