BomBun is a fast-paced game by indie developer Kunedon. As a quick-footed rabbit, escape each of 10 rooms in 10 seconds before the building blows up! Each room contains a key that must be found and used to open a locked door and advance to the next room.
About the run
Emulator used: Hourglass-r81
Aims for in-game time without sacrificing real time
Entertains without losing a frame
Genre: Action
Genre: Platform
To replay the run on Hourglass:
The game is most likely to work on Windows 7.
Open and close the game executable, then open it in Hourglass. This prevents a game crash.
Note that audio does not dump properly. My encode's sound was recorded from my system speakers.
I made this after browsing the SDARunsWithoutAPublishedTAS page, seeing the SDA speedrun and wondering how much time could be squeezed out of it. The game is very simple, but little tricks can still help save quite a few frames.
This game wouldn't run on my XP Virtual Machine, so I ran it on Windows 7 (with Aero turned off). This greatly decreased savestate stability to the point where loading a second savestate during a session would usually crash Hourglass. The rerecord count is therefore roughly the number of times I closed the game window and reopened it to test a different strategy. Glad we have that turbo feature!
Enjoy the action and Batman theme music!
Room-by-room comments
Room 1
The key becomes tangible on the frame after it reaches its highest point in midair. This means I have to jump to get the key as soon as I can.
I tried several different jumps. As all of them reached the door on the same frame, I chose the most entertaining one.
Room 2
I open some other boxes just for fun.
The key is spawned from the lower platform to save some waiting for it to become grabbable.
Room 3
This room introduces a jump that lets you fall through floors.
Due to the game's simple physics, it doesn't matter how early or late you jump; you'll reach the door on the same frame.
Room 4
This room introduces speed shoes that give a short speed boost.
I jump so that I open the key box in midair and then collect it as I land.
Room 5
This level looks simpler than it is. The main obstacles are the falling light fixtures, which daze you if you get hit by one, wasting time.
Room 6
The first 180 degree jump in the run. Unlike in most other games, it's fastest to hug the wall on your way up.
Speed shoes appear again in this level. Besides saving time by themselves, they're right on the path to the key.
It's half a second faster to spawn and grab the shoes as soon as you can instead of getting the key while waiting for the shoes to become tangible.
Room 7
This level has a tricky design for a speed-oriented route.
You can't land on the key platform from the left without getting hit by the light.
You can't jump high enough from the floor to reach the key as soon as it becomes tangible.
This meant spawning the key as early as possible to reduce the wait to jump and grab it from the floor.
The speed shoes are collected during the wait to save a few frames in moving to the door.
Room 8
A very straightforward room. Once again, I use a jump to open the key box and grab the key in one swift motion.
Room 9
This level has an open feel, and a quite vertical route. The main direction to go is up, since that's where the key is.
There are speed shoes in the corner of the level, but they take way too long to get to. In normal gameplay, you can easily run out of time trying to get them. I'm inclined to call them a trap.
Scepheo: This game isn't very known at all, failing to qualify for notability, and the lack of content in the run does little to offset that. It doesn't help that sound does not dump correctly (which violates the rule to only play games that are emulated well), so I'm afraid I'm going to have to reject this.
There are a billion little indy/flash games like this, and this seems like a particularly half-assed one with under 19 seconds of actual play.
It's meant to be a short game anyway, but it usually takes a lot longer to finish, up to 100 seconds of ingame time if you never die. This TAS plays through it much faster than a casual player, making the game look shorter than it is.
There are a billion little indy/flash games like this, and this seems like a particularly half-assed one with under 19 seconds of actual play.
It's meant to be a short game anyway, but it usually takes a lot longer to finish, up to 100 seconds of ingame time if you never die. This TAS plays through it much faster than a casual player, making the game look shorter than it is.
The keys are always in the same place, so the casual player plays once and has seen every single thing it has to offer. Mastery is simple rote memorization, same as every 'puzzle' game, for a very loose definition of puzzle, and again, this is miniscule even among short ones.
Joined: 8/14/2009
Posts: 4090
Location: The Netherlands
Yeah, I'm going to have to vote no.
The music quality sounds pretty bad and the noise SFX hurt my ears. The graphics mostly look like white and grey MS Paint shapes and some mediocre player sprites. Gameplay looks a little simplistic but most notably, very short. It's also a Game Maker game, but I won't go in depth about my opinions regarding that.
It probably qualifies for notability (if just barely), and the run itself looks to be of good quality, but that's about the only good thing I can say about this movie.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Joined: 8/14/2014
Posts: 188
Location: North Kilttown
Holy jeez, this is random. I didn't know the game time could be pushed that far.
Honestly, I'm going to remain neutral on this one seeing as, yes, this is a high quality TAS from a technical standpoint (given the simplicity of the game and the fact that CooKirby isn't exactly new to this, what would you expect?) but... there's kind of a reason why I chose not to submit my TAS of it (and it has nothing to do with it being suboptimal being literally the first thing I ever TAS). I have a bit of attachment seeing as I speedran the game out of morbid curiosity over how far down I could get the time, but I don't know how this would translate to a general audience. Again, I'm going to stay neutral in this case.
Fun fact: I spoke with Kundeon and he said the 60's batman theme was an accident. He (or someone he knew iirc) wrote it in like 20 seconds and he only noticed after the fact.
Thanks for your comments, guys. You have some good points. I was leaning toward cancelling this, but I'd kind of like to see how the judging decision turns out. For example, how does this compare to games like Syobon Action and Catplanet, which are of similar quality but were received much better?
TehBerral wrote:
yes, this is a high quality TAS from a technical standpoint ... CoolKirby isn't exactly new to this, what would you expect?
I thought that might be you, TehBerral! Thanks for the compliments. Yeah, I liked your speedrun, though the comments here have made me wonder if SDA has any requirements for game quality or notability like we do.
Joined: 8/14/2014
Posts: 188
Location: North Kilttown
When I did my test TAS I was able to dump the audio, the only issue was it did this weird music restart in room 3. If that's all there is then I personally see no reason it should be rejected on those grounds. Iirc, the published Frogger: He's Back! TAS has similar sound issues. Unless there's a reason why that was an exception that I'm not aware of.
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6440
Location: The land down under.
I was surprised when this was rejected on the basis of sound as it was a game made in GameMaker. So I took a look into it and remembered that They Need To Be Fed was a game where the sound works fine when dumping an avi with hourglass.
I decided to extract both the games down to see what the issue was, it was nothing.
Both of them were running .wav files, only difference was one bgm in BomBun was set to bgm, changing this still did nothing.
By guess the audio files themselves are the issue as hourglass won't recognize 'em.
Possibly converting the audio would work... even if it did, you'll fall into desync on the first level.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
Thanks for your detective work, Spikestuff. I was a little surprised about that part of the rejection message too, as there was a similar situation with Pepsiman and its music, and that got accepted.
It could be a different bit rate or something that Hourglass' encoder doesn't support. This game sounds like it uses mono audio, for instance.
I would like to point out that the issues with sound dumping played only a minor part in my decision to reject this. That said, Pepsiman isn't Windows. Hourglass is a very fickle program and very much an unfinished one, so I feel we should be extra careful with "emulation" issues.
