In this game from the list of ideas Dizzy must travel Treasure Island collecting coins and various items to barter his way to a boat so that he could escape.
Game objectives
Emulator used: FCEUX 2.10.60 with TAS Editor
Aims for fastest time
Completes with a 100%
Genre: Puzzle/Platform
Comments
Treasure Island Dizzy is one of four games on a compendium called Quattro Adventure which also contained Linus Spacehead, Super Robin Hood and Boomerang Kid.
To win the game you must collect various pieces over the beach that were used to access other locations to finally escape the island. The controls for the game are quite simplistic and not very responsive so much of the optimization had to come from finding the optimal route.
To complete the game acquiring coins is unnecessary but you get a "bad ending" result after you cross the waterway in the boat. Not collecting the coins would probably save around a minute but I chose to collect to get the best ending.
Other comments
Overall this is in my opinion far from the most interesting game but is completed quickly and hopefully is entertaining. It was on the list of ideas so I am hoping that there is a fan base out there who would appreciate the work.
Thanks to Bag of Magic Food for his help with route planning and help overall. This run would be worse without your input.
Baxter: Apparently, this TAS had enough positive response to warrant publication. Accepting.
Joined: 6/11/2006
Posts: 818
Location: Arboga, Sweden
Christ buddy, this wasn't my cup of tea I can tell you that. I gave up at 24000 frames, that music gives Death a sound. Had to give up, this was unbearable. No vote, sorry.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11480
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Same here :(
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
If I had to be truthful I would say same here, but as I said in the submission text I was just hoping that since it was on the list of ideas that there would be an audience for it... I have have been mistaken
Yes vote, this game is noteworthy for how hard and unforgiving it is to complete without savestates. I'm just disappointed that there were no warps used on this route.
The problem with the warps is that because of the order that you need to pick up items they don't actually create a faster path (unless someone else can come up with a new route that I couldn't think of). They are all either in places that take too long to get to or don't work with the three item limit and order.
That was an incredible run of an incredibly touchy as hell game! Considering how shite movement and positioning can be, you blazed through it and made it a solid piece of entertainment!
Definitely a Yes vote... even if the music grates ones nerves, which is not your fault.
Mr. Kelly R. Flewin
Mr. Kelly R. Flewin
Just another random gamer
----
<OmnipotentEntity> How do you people get bored in the span of 10 seconds? Worst ADD ever.
Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 2227
Location: Georgia, USA
As somebody who quite enjoyed the Dizzy run we have by alden, I was looking forward to this one! I can't get this to play though... every time I try to load the ROM in FCEUX, FCEUX crashes. Granted, I'm trying FCEUX 2.1.3, but it's usually worked well for the runs people are making currently.
EDIT:
Never mind, I installed FCEUX 2.1.5, and that worked fine. I actually like this run!
The music is a little annoying, but it's better when the volume is low. The game makes you run back and forth a bunch, but the scenery is pretty varied and the items are amusing (I like "Infra-Red Detonator" and "Cursed Treasure" personally). The game is fairly inventive. I wish it moved a little faster, like the Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, but it's got a decent pace. You make the clunky physics look decent, especially when dodging the fish underwater.
I'd say the route-planning definitely deserves a Yes vote!
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically.
Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.)
Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html)
Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature!
Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
I didn't find the music that annoying either. I was able to tolerate it just fine throughout the whole run.
I think the run is of pretty high technical quality, and it looks like you really planned your route well and completed the game fast. Voting yes!
I'd probably have to agree with goofydylan8 about the warps. I recall Boco's route used them, but in my mind they always either leave you stranded in a bad way or force you to set up the use of more warps and waste too much time on them for too little gain. Like, yeah, you could grab the magic pebble, warp twice to get the flippers, and warp back, but then you only have one slot left to transport objects while swimming.
I'm surprised so many people don't like the music! I think it works in a Mario kind of way.
Link to video
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Bag of Magic Food: I know you didn't say anything about it but thanks for all of your help and I apologize for not acknowledging you in the description. That has been changed. Also, you didn't comment on this but we discussed it in the thread, but the jumping over the fish didn't manage to save any time because you aren't able to jump him and not move to the next screen. Thanks again.
This game may look bad by today's standards, but a couple decades ago the Dizzy series were huge, popular, and ported to most systems available at the time. So I strongly believe we should have TAS'es of those games where viable.
And this is a quality TAS. Don't reject it because the game art.
Lovin' it. Great run of a frustrating game. There were several surprising moments like getting eaten by a fish and jumping in mid-air. Yeah, it's not sonic the hedgehog but still an impressive movie. Do fantastic dizzy next please :)
Yeah, here's how the original sounded:
Link to video
It's funny how the Nintendo version's in-game music is based on the song from the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC versions, but its title song and death song sound more like how they were done on Commodore 64, Amiga, and Atari ST, and its expanded level design is shared by those last two computers too. What's also interesting about the NES version is that pressing Start gives you the option to switch off the music and only hear sound effects as you play. All the sound effects but the footstep noises already play when the music is on, though, so there's not much point to that mode but to get some peace and quiet. It's just a cute throwback to old computers like Commodore's that were evidently hard to program to play music and sound effects simultaneously on, so a lot of developers didn't bother and gave users the option to hear one or the other.
I read somewhere that Treasure Island Dizzy was CodeMasters' first NES game, before they got a real development kit and learned all the cool graphics tricks they would use in later games, so that gives it a kind of hacky pirate feel. You can tell they used a really inefficient method of loading graphics if you open the Name Table Viewer or play a copy of the ROM without proper bank switching, as you will see the new backgrounds slowly pasted onto the play area during the second that the screen goes blank. The other two Dizzy adventures for NES loaded new areas much faster. I'm not sure CodeMasters' programmers ever quite got the hang of the sound engine, though, as a few of their other NES games had no in-game music or next to no sound effects, and then there was the infamous Dizzy the Adventurer soundtrack with the clipped waveforms... But they continued to make great use of trilling! :)
As for the speedrun, I like the improvements from the first movie goofydylan8 made, but I wonder if it should have been redone from the very beginning one more time instead of simply editing obvious improvements in. I mean it's pretty good, but I would like to try a few more route possibilities in the future, maybe if I ever feel like doing a whole TAS again.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Cool!
By the way, if anyone worries they might be missing out on something by watching the second Dizzy game first, I just found this commentated play-through of the first Dizzy game, which was the basis for this retrospective of the whole Dizzy series along with footage of the Amiga games.
(Although now as I watch it, it's becoming apparent that he's not just editing out the boring parts in post, but is stopping the recording whenever he expects the next part to be boring to save disk space, since sometimes it skips over what could have only been a few seconds of play, and sometimes it skips over when he actually accomplished something.)
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Thanks for both of those videos/songs BomF. I appreciated them for entirely different reasons :P
I ended up skipping around a bit in the run after a while, but it was neat to see all the different environments and silly items.
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
I don't actually have much control over the moonwalk. You start moonwalking when you hit the bee which was the quickest way to hop up on the platform. Once you hit the bee you begin moonwalking until the effects wear off which is just on a timer.
There was some talk on IRC a few days ago about the game name being incorrect and something along the lines of Quattro Adventure: Treasure Island Dizzy "100%" being more appropriate, along the same lines as how other instances of multiple games in one cart are labeled. Any resolution to that? I'd like to make official encodes, but they need to be correctly subtitled and labeled.