Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti is much better known by its English title - Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti. It is the prequel to Splatterhouse, for either the Turbo Graphics 16 or the Sony Arcade. It was never released outside of the state of Japan, and it was never really all that entertaining to watch when TASed.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: FCEUX 2.2.2
- Aims for fastest time
- Aims for best ending
- That's about it
- Were you expecting more puns?
Platterhouse: Kitchen Nightmare was developed by Now Production, which I believe is more of a command than a company name. They're known as Nowpro today, and have developed other brilliant gorefests such as Splatterhouse 2, Splatterhouse 3, and Katamari Damacy.
This run of Splatterhorse: American Pharoah is 8170 frames longer than the published run by Diman. Clearly, I am a horrible TASer and I am the scourge that is ruining this community full of wonderful people. Either that or I decided to do the two secret areas to get the two MYSTIC POWER ORBS to unlock the two bonus scenes in the ending. This run is 273 frames shorter than Diman's run in comparable areas.
I initially started this run of Plannerhouse: Keikaku Graffiti in December of 2012. The first 2500 frames of this run (everything up to the very start of the Thriller fight) were done then, and the rest was completed within the past couple months. I wish I could say it's been a hell of a ride, but I'm saving that for a TG-16 Splatterhouse run.
I intend for this run of Slaughterhouse Five: Wanpakurt Vonnegraffiti to obsolete the currently published run, as I feel the runs are too similar to be published side-by-side, but I added a "best ending" branch just in case. I'd put this in the same category as something like Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, where accomplishing a couple extra tasks leads to an extended section after where the game "normally" ends. To be more specific: There are only two rooms that are unique to the published run/any% route. Every other room in the game is played in both runs.
Anyway, enough of this rambling. Please enjoy this TAS of Splatoon.
Tricks Used
Mostly for entertainment purposes.
Friction? More like Rick-tion
If Rick moves for longer than 6 frames, he'll keep moving for 6 frames before stopping. This gives a very brief window in which Rick can turn around without losing his forward momentum. Often this is just used for entertainment, hitting enemies behind me without slowing down and all that, but it shines in conjunction with a shotgun. Firing a shotgun normally recoils Rick backward quite a ways with each shot. You can see an example of this behavior in the Fly battle. However, if you turn around for a frame on the same frame you fire, then you can still fire forward while having the game think you fired backward.
The recoil is the same speed as walking, so this doesn't actually save time or anything, but this does help clear up some lag in a couple areas. Plus, it lets me use shotguns more often than usual, and that's always a plus!
Hitbox? More like... Rickbox
The axe's hitbox lasts longer than one may think. If you see me slash long before reaching an enemy, only to kill it after the swing animation stops, then you'll have seen this. This also works the opposite way, in that the hitbox appears before the axe is actually swung.
You can almost tell I have nothing to write about the tricks in this game. Almost.
Stage I: Our Grave (Ha Ha Ha)
Thank heavens we have a grave, we needed a place to rest after we die of boredom watching this game.
Rave in my grave, everyone's invited
Aw, no one showed up. Except Rick and all these zombies. I don't have too much to say about the first 2500 frames. It's all faded from my memory after two and a half years of lying dormant on my laptop. But I will say this: At the time I was pretty hardcore into playing the Splatterhouse games. I even picked up the TG-16 version on that there ol' Wii Virtual Console after beating it several times on emulator. I wanted to see if I could improve Diman's published run, maybe at the very least make it more entertaining to watch, and since I'm obsessed with syncing sounds to music I came up with what you presumably watched here. This becomes a common theme in the run, because there's really not much else to do.
Michael Dracson
There's your pun. Get off my lawn. This is a timed battle, so killing the zombies any faster or slower makes no difference. In fact, this is still completely even with Diman's run, and will be for at least the rest of the screen.
The dancing part marks the beginning of what I like to consider my attempt at making "cutscenes" within the game. These were the most fun things to come up with, honestly. Hopefully I confuse some people into thinking these little moments are actually computer-controlled... But that implies people are going to be interested enough to stay awake through the run. Oops.
Go Axe Alice
Because I'm chopping up books. Tighter control and faster book killing allowed me to get my first improvement over Diman's run: 48 frames to be exact. I may or may not collect a burger through sheer force of earthquake. You'll have to watch the run and find out!
The Exorgeist
Your mother sells clocks in Heck, but this doll's head is stunlocked and eliminated with no threat whatsoever. Rick is also scared of sudden lightning strikes, then mans the hell up when the fight begins. That's the power of the Terror Mask, I guess.
Stage 1 is completed 48 frames faster than the published run.
Stage II: Cesspool
BE GARBAGE OF CESSPOOL sounds like a Flagitious Idiosyncrasy In The Dilapidation song title, if you ask me.
T.G.I. Knife Fights
Should've never brought an axe to a knife fight. The second screen was improved by 10 frames due to better jumping right at the beginning, though 4 of those frames were lost due to a frame rule at the door, and the knife fight is a staggering...
...half second slower! Splintercell: Wanpaku Blacklist manages to make long, boring fights even more aggravating by giving them frame rules. The knives attack slower in this run than they do in Diman's run, and after a while of hemming and hawing at the fight, I managed to reduce the lost time from a full second to only half a second. At the door leading into the sewer area, I'm down to only 32 frames ahead. It sucks, but it's necessary.
i looked in the sewer there was u
Rick may very well be the world's slowest swimmer. He's so bad at swimming that he can't even maintain the same speed when he magically jumps several feet out of the water like a dolphin. I take the time to demonstrate a few weird quirks of the game. The hopping on water is simply jumping on the first frame you can. No biggie. The other, harder to notice quirk is that Rick can hit enemies behind him without slowing down. So you may see that. Actually, you will see that. Because it happens.
Over the course of the sewer section, I remove 4 frames of lag and end up saving 12 more frames somehow. Magically. I think taking damage after the boss saved 10 frames? I don't know. I hope you guys weren't expecting a really nice, well thought out submission text with detailed frame improvements or anything.
Stage 2 is completed 0 frames faster than the published run, for a total of 48 frames.
Stage III: Devil Town
Hey little sister, shotgun
Losing 4 frames due to the door frame rule also feels like a blast in the face, but not as big of a blast in the face as the upcoming section.
My choice of entertainment here (and in all the other town sections) is simply showing how much candy the devils in this town throw away. One of them even had a perfectly good candy shotgun that was just waiting to be eaten, but wasn't! How careless!
Thankfully, there's a time save in this section. The chainsaw fight is completed 16 frames faster, including a little bit of taking damage to save a frame! For some reason it only saves a frame there. Go figure.
"But Samsara," you ask, and for a moment I wonder whether or not I've used this setup in a submission text before, "couldn't you have used that shotgun from the previous stage to save time here?" The answer, young padawan, is both yes and no. Using the shotgun would allow me to save 30 frames here, but at the same time it makes the next screen about 200 frames longer, negating... well, every improvement so far and most of the rest of the movie, too.
Alien 4: Reservation, or Slowmetheus
I had to do this about 4 times and it was fun to do precisely 0 of those times. This is also a timed fight, so I do the best I can playing with the facehuggers. Around the end I let my frustration loose through Rick, killing facehuggers and attempting to get the cute anime schoolgirl to wake up by violently slashing at her head with an axe.
The game decided to be nice to me after robbing me of frames during the knife fight in the previous stage, and I get all those frames back plus some spare change! I unavoidably save 48 frames here, which is the best thing to happen to you unavoidably. As I said in the last section, this fight would have been over three seconds slower had I taken that 30 frame improvement with the chainsaws. I'd much rather pass up 30 frames to gain 48 than take the 30 and lose 200. I'm sure you understand.
checkmate, atheists
Seriously, how much candy is thrown away in this Devil Town? I would've eaten that candy! It looks huge and delicious and that's about the most I can say without sounding obscene! 6 frames of lag are saved here in this town section. I intentionally pass up manipulating some candy out of the trashcans, as it would have caused some lag. And I'm all about avoiding that lag.
In the church, another 28 frames are saved after a summoning ritual and a lot of slashin' with an axe. This is actually another timed battle, or at least the first part with the flying bat things is. Had I not killed them, they would have despawned eventually. I have no idea where those 28 frames came from, so I'm just gonna assume it's another frame rule going my way.
Just so I have something interesting to say, every time I read the phrase "going my way", I hear it in my head in Faust's voice from Guilty Gear.
Pretty Fly for a White Guy
The third town section means actually collecting a shotgun, to be used for the end boss, and more importantly saving a frame of lag! More candy, less lag, more shotgun.
Since this is the first use of the shotgun, I should mention that most of the time I use the shotgun, I turn around for a frame. Doing this tricks the game into thinking I'm firing it backward, which allows me to keep moving unhindered while still firing forward. This gets used a lot more in Stage IV.
The shotgun is mostly used on the Fly boss here, to greatly reduce the time of a normal fight. I don't know how long a shotgun-less fight would be when TASed, but I'm willing to estimate it's between "way too long" and "banish this PoS to Vault".
After the fight, I do the most logical thing I can think of and enter the teleporter that the fly monster came out of. There has never been a better course of action than that, especially when it takes me to Japan after causing a few more seizures than that Pokemon episode.
Quiet Life
So this is the first of two secret areas of the game, and... There's not much to say about it. It's just Japan. There are those umbrella youkai around, falling bamboo shoots, and of course clumsy maids. Also a dancing girl! With frames of animation nearly in the double digits! I decided to take the classy route here. Japan is a classy place and I will not ruin this sacred scene with any expulsions of gas. I get orb for my troubles.
In theory, I lose a very large number of frames, but it doesn't matter because different category. Next stage!
Stage 3 is technically completed 99 frames faster than the published run, for a total of 147 frames.
Stage IV: Diamond Lake
You know, this is reminding me of something... I guess it'll come to me later.
Finite Dark Water
There's a brief moment of shame and regret when you find out that a "shotgun wedding" isn't the ultimate expression of how much you love your shotgun. But I'm over that. There's lots of shotgun momentum abuse here, as a lot of those enemies are unavoidable otherwise. For the most part, tighter precision allowed me to save 8 frames here.
Not much to this level, really, though I'm really glad I noticed that extra frame of lag during the boss fight after I submitted the run. The file has been replaced, the run looks exactly the same otherwise.
Stage 4 is completed 8 frames faster than the published run, for a total of 155 frames.
Stage V: Diamond Camp
Oh! Right! Now I remember! A Nightmare on Elm Street! There we go.
Woodsvivor: The Woods Survivor
A lot of damage is taken here to save time. I use a slightly different strategy right at the beginning of the first screen that saves 6 frames over Diman and takes away one of the damage boosts. This, alongside one less frame of lag, leads to 9 frames of improvement on the first screen.
This game being this game, 12 frames are unavoidably lost on the boss, so this stage actually ends up slower in the end.
Stage 5 is completed 3 frames slower than the published run, for a total of 152 frames.
Stage VI: Road to Hell House
Highway to the underworld.
I have nothing clever here I just think this music owns
This is probably my favorite stage in the game. It's short, varied, fun to watch, and it has great music. Oh, and it doesn't have a boss! So any improvements here won't be negated by bosses failing to attack me as fast as they should! Good stage, I wish there were more like it.
There's a bit of a camera conundrum happening in Diman's run, where he doesn't scroll the camera up far enough when climbing up those mountains. This actually ends up costing him a lot of time, since he needs to scroll the camera farther to the right to be able to get it to move upward for the third mountain, and then it doesn't move upward far enough again, causing him to go past the door to Hell House and needing to walk backward.
Fixing these, plus removing another frame of lag, leads to a solid 89 frame improvement on this stage. Also there's dancing!
Stage 6 is completed 89 frames faster than the published run, for a total of 241 frames.
Stage VII: Hell House
This house... is a Doom House!
Shoot Like an Egyptian
This is where improvements start getting nebulous, as the second secret stage happens almost immediately and the published run clears 3 extra rooms that aren't in this run. The first room in both runs is cleared at the same time, so I'll leave the improvement calculations for when the runs rejoin.
In the meantime, Egypt! Known for its shotguns, bats, and migraine-inducing music. The only thing of note here is that landing on the floor usually sends you back to the start of the stage. Those panels open up like the floor underneath the shotgun, so I stay above the ground as much as possible. For finishing the stage, I'm treated to another 5 frames of sexy dancing animation. I'm not in control during that entire scene. Even walking up to the sexy dancing is CPU-controlled, which is why it keeps happily pressing itself into walls. Come on. Have some respect for yourself, game.
I get orb for my troubles once again. Both orb are now collected, so after the game is done I can be transported to Orb Zone. Not really. Sorry for getting your hopes up.
7th Stage Stretch
A lot of the stage is actually pretty uneventful, with most of the rooms just being running right and not stopping. I lose 4 frames due to a door frame rule, but I also remove 16(!) frames of lag in the bat room, because I like sticking it to the game as much as I possibly can. You can't hold back improvements, game! Unless it's Stage 5. But we don't talk about Stage 5 in this house.
zzzzzzzzzzzz
Sorry, every time I watch this 2 minute timed boss battle I start to fall asleep. The Pumpking takes 16 hits, which means I need to play around 15 times, and I ran out of ideas about halfway into the... entire TAS. This is the weakest part of the run, and the part of the run I think I spent the most overall time on... mostly because I could only work for about 5 minutes at a time before falling asleep. But I tried my best.
Look out for the hidden morse code message, and definitely look out for the 20 frames I saved in this fight. Mostly by just ending input earlier, but still. You gotta give me some credit.
Stage 7 is technically completed 32 frames faster, for a grand total of 273 frames.
I hadn't entirely expected to continue this run when I started, let alone finish it and submit it, so it's a little weird that it's here now on the workbench. It's also been a while since I've completed something on my own after doing so many group projects over the last few months. It was a fun project to do, if tedious at times, but then again isn't that what TASing is all about in the first place?
I've got a couple other projects in the pipeline, so look forward to those at some point in the future. If you want to, I mean. I'm not your mom. You don't have to listen to me.
Special Thanks
- Big thanks to Diman for providing the published run. I'm impressed at how optimized it was even for 9 years ago!
- Thanks to everyone who posted in the thread after I revived it
- Double thanks to you for watching
- Thank God for me.
Screenshot Suggestions
33933, 55374
GoddessMaria: This movie overall has a very entertaining movie and takes every moment to have fun without losing time. Excellent optimization and audience reception was very positive for the most part. Well done, Samsara!
Accepting!
says:
"Those are some exceptionally smooth moves."
