(Link to video)
Toki: Going Ape Spit is one of those games that’s fascinating in how bad it is. I was introduced to this by Mike Uyama at AGDQ 2013. This quickly became the game everyone was playing in the practice room because it was so bad, and so hard it was like a personal challenge. Even with maximum lives, most people didn’t get past the first couple worlds on hardest difficulty.
This movie takes advantage of a strange glitch to warp to world 8-3 from the title screen. One side effect of this glitch is that the difficulty is set to normal instead of hardest, so this movie will differ significantly from the one already on the website beyond the usage of the glitch to skip most of the game. The difficulty settings for Toki completely change the experience of the game as not only does it change enemy health and pickups available, but certain obstacles and enemies only appear on higher difficulties.
This Movie includes the following categories:
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Luck manipulation
  • Abuses programming errors
  • Takes no damage
  • Uses "warps"
Toki does not control well. He is slow, his jumps are awkward, and spitting your weapon slows you down unless you are in the air.
As for the actual glitch used in this run, it appears to be a programming error with the way the title screen demos are made. A frame perfect pause input on some of the demos will unpause them and give you control from that point in the game, but that only works on demos much earlier in the game. In this instance, the last demo is of world 8-3 and it appears to have been desynced from the inputs slightly. You can see that Toki moves a little bit strangely, and then right before the stage timer runs out the demo will pause. At this point, hitting start will unpause the game instead of skipping the demo and Toki will immediately die to a time out. This respawns us at the start of 8-3 with full control on normal difficulty with 1 extra life and no continues. This leads to a very unusual warp that requires we have to sit on the title screen for a while and skip the earlier demos in order to get there.
From this point on, There are only 4 stages, and 3 bosses left.
Level 8-3
This is the only level featured from the “dark” world. Each world has a gimmick and this one is simply that the levels are dark until you spit your weapon. In highness’ movie, he uses phoenixes and their flames to bounce up to a high platform and skip about half the level. This enemy is not present on normal difficulty, so we have to take the intended route through the stage. As an added bonus, though, a bird that drops powerups is present that would normally not be there on hardest so we are able to pick up a flamethrower for stark.
Boss: Stark
Stark is a pain, in between phases he shoots fire from the phoenix enemies that seemingly fly in random patterns and home onto you. You can bounce on them, but they tend to fly in ways that bouncing on them will get you killed. Having the flamethrower trivializes him, though, as it does damage on every frame and he is quickly melted before we have to deal with that.
If I had manipulated him to spawn on the right side so his death animation would be shorter, then I cannot kill him in one cycle and wind up losing several seconds due to the transition.
Level 9-1
This level is quite difficult on high difficulty, but less than half the enemies are present on normal. There is a secret exit to this level only accessible by bouncing repeatedly on an enemies head, but the required enemy doesn’t have enough health on normal to reach it and we stop short when it dies. Once again we are required to take the intended method. Jumping at the end to fall down the pit at maximum speed saves about a second and a half over walking down.
Level 9-2
For all intents and purposes, this is an autoscroller. You can lose frames if you don’t do the jumps well, but it is very easy to optimize.
Level 9-3
The main challenge in this level is trying to move through all the barriers and get under the pounders without losing cycles. The big spikes are only skippable if moving at full speed while approaching them. If you lose any frames on the approach you cannot get over them, so a few have to be killed.
Boss: Stark
Stark is back and we don’t have as overpowered of a weapon this time. He also has more health, so we have to be a bit more careful. This time, he cannot re-appear on the left, though, so we are able to keep our distance and guarantee 3 damage hits with our spread shot.
Boss: Membrane
Membrane is very annoying as the hitbox on his body is very strange and can fail to register hits sometimes. The hands he spawns also tend to block for his body and also generate large amounts of lag while he’s spitting out spikes, fruit, and powerups. I have to take care not to let too many spread shot projectiles be on the screen or subsequent shots will only shoot 1 or 2 projectiles.
I wasn’t able to force him into a pattern where I could kill him before he flies left and you can see a bit of the lag generation that attack causes. He dies before he gets most of the way through that attack however and Toki: Going Ape Spit is finished in record time.
Known improvements:
There are a few minor mistakes in the movie, but every attempt of mine to remove them has resulted in the next level's loading screen taking more frames than the number saved. Being relatively new to TASing and never having done anything with Genesis before, leaves me without the ability to fix these.
  • 8-3 the exit is entered later than possible with the duck input.
  • 9-2 The jump onto the second vehicle is a few frames late.
  • 9-3 The movement while bouncing on the two enemies before the spikes could save a few frames by not deviating as far left once it's been baited to walk off the cliff.
On top of a few other single digit frame losses

Truncated: What's this, an unclaimed run? Taking care of it.
Noxxa: Fixing judging status for Truncated, who forgot to set it to claimed :)
Truncated: Updating file per author request.
Truncated: There is precedent for accepting this kind of run, since the type of glitch is nearly exactly the same as with Arkanoid. That run also desyncs a demo to cause the death of the player, and continues from the stage where the demo played.
The movie itself is reasonably well made, and different enough from the existing run that I think that both can be featured here. The three minute long stretch of time at the start where nothing happens doesn't help it in entertainment value obviously, and I'm suggesting that, like the Arkanoid run, it's placed in the Vault.
Noxxa: Obsoletion note: This movie will obsolete [546] Genesis Toki: Going Ape Spit by Highness in 28:25.37, as that movie is a slower any% run in the Vault with a 3.6 entertainment rating. By Vault rules, only the fastest completion run may be accepted as any%.
Fog: Processing.

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #5671: Raelcun's Genesis Toki: Going Ape Spit in 07:09.89
Player (56)
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First off: Temporary encode is bad quality. Link to video Secondly: Toki has a scoreboard after the credits and before the “The End” screen. Submitted is a Movie with inputs ended early, but I have also made a file that enters TAS! into the name input which can be found here. http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/42346992048499974 I will leave the decision on which one is used for publication up to smarter people than I. Thirdly: I have no idea what to name this branch name as it probably shouldn't obsolete the current movie.
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Raelcun wrote:
Secondly: Toki has a scoreboard after the credits and before the “The End” screen. Submitted is a Movie with inputs ended early, but I have also made a file that enters TAS! into the name input which can be found here. http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/42346992048499974 I will leave the decision on which one is used for publication up to smarter people than I.
Yes! Someone who added that little extra for name entry! ... Okay, enough excitement. I have done something similar in my Alien Hominid TAS. Basically, I submitted a file that was enough to show the ending in its entirety, as a record keeping file, and asked encoders to instead use a secondary file for that slight extra at name entry. The publication video uses the name entry version, while the timing uses the submitted version. I think that's the ideal situation. No one disagreed with my request.
Noxxa
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I did the same thing for Chip Chan Kick a few months ago. The rule here generally is: your published movie just has to reach the credits, but you can supply an additional file for post-credits stuff like name entries, which can be used for encodes.
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.
Editor, Skilled player (1158)
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Now that I actually viewed the run, I was reminded of this: [984] NES Arkanoid "warps, demo glitch" by Baxter in 04:26.28 Basically, the linked movie also uses the demo to skip ahead, giving us a lovely precedent to work with. "Warp glitch" is probably the ideal branch name.
Player (56)
Joined: 8/22/2015
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I just realized that I, in fact, did not link the shorter input file. Oops. http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/42358656211714307 is the correct file for the shorter time.
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Congrats on the first submission. There are parts of this that are decidedly not entertaining (good grief he moves slow) but there were other parts that amused me, such as taking over the demo and the sheer absurdity of spitting at an enemy and somehow seeing it do something useful. I mean, I don't know about you, but if *I* try to spit straight up in the air it doesn't end particularly well. And stuff. Ahem. Anyway, interesting run, voted Yes. One question, though - can you please elaborate on why making changes seemed to cause the loading time of the next level to increase? Is there some kind of frame rule like SMB's 21-frame counter or is it something else? It's OK if you don't know, I'm mostly just curious. Thanks and good job!
I was laid off in May 2023 and could use support via Patreon or onetime donations as I work on TASBot Re: and TASBot HD. I'm dwangoAC, part of the senior staff of TASVideos as the Senior Ambassador and BDFL of the TASBot community; I post TAS content on YouTube.com/dwangoAC based on livestreams from Twitch.tv/dwangoAC.
Player (56)
Joined: 8/22/2015
Posts: 73
I have absolutely no idea. The few mistakes I was trying to fix were small numbers of frames since RNG is easy to manipulate. Any time I fire it advances RNG, every time I jump it advances RNG and I can fire while in the air without losing any speed. For instance at the end of 8-3 when I crouch to extend his hitbox forward to hit the exit sooner that was something like 5 frames late? Then I gained control Toki a significant number of frames after where I did before the change. It SEEMS like a frame rule situation, but that makes no sense to me given that removing frames should still put me on the same frame rule not on a later one. There's something about the loading screens I don't understand.
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I still didn't watched this movie, but I suppose the glitch abuse is similar to the one used there: [3471] GBC Devil Island "demo glitch" by ThunderAxe31 in 02:10.27 I wanted to call the branch "demo glitch" because it's the more intuitive way to explain what's going on in few words. I also considered "demo unlock", but while it's a more accurate name, it could bring to misunderstandings. There is also another movie abusing the same glitch: [2285] GBA Densetsu no Stafy "demo glitch" by jlun2 in 03:28.68
FatRatKnight wrote:
Now that I actually viewed the run, I was reminded of this: [984] NES Arkanoid "warps, demo glitch" by Baxter in 04:26.28 Basically, the linked movie also uses the demo to skip ahead, giving us a lovely precedent to work with. "Warp glitch" is probably the ideal branch name.
Actually, the Arkanoid run also abuses a built-in cheat feature that allows to continue from a game over, after having generated a desync in the demo execution. So I'm not sure if it's exactly the same. Edit: Meh vote.
my personal page - my YouTube channel - my GitHub - my Discord: thunderaxe31 <Masterjun> if you look at the "NES" in a weird angle, it actually clearly says "GBA"
mklip2001
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Yay, Toki is pretty underrated on this site too. Although the demo glitch takes about 2.5 to 3 minutes to happen, the remaining action is fairly good. I'd say this merits a Yes vote. I would really love to see a full-game improvement that takes Diman's last submission and pushes it to the limit. Diman ended up canceling his last submitted run, which was minutes ahead of Highness's TAS and was much more entertaining. However, I understand if this project doesn't get underway; it seems like a thankless game to optimize.
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:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Player (56)
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Requesting again for movie file to be updated. http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/42358656211714307
Editor, Experienced player, Reviewer (967)
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I will update the file. I have a question: at frame 18000, you land on the right edge of the moving platform, even though you are jumping right. In all other cases you land on the left edge when jumping right. It looks like you could have jumped sooner to land sooner. What am I missing? Never mind, you noted this in the comments already: "The jump onto the second vehicle is a few frames late."
Player (56)
Joined: 8/22/2015
Posts: 73
Yeah, it's only like 4-5 frames, and when I tried to fix that, the loading screen took significantly more than 5 extra frames. I'm still uncertain what causes this upon further testing.
Player (70)
Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
This was nice to see. Cool demo glitch and well executed bosses. I'll put in yes vote for this. I think that two runs could co-exist. One full run, and one demo glitch warp run. Back in 2013 me, Diman, and RandomPie were working on an improved full run. Lack of time and loss of interest lead to not completing the run. We only made it to stage 2-2. We did find a lot of improvements over both my submission, and Diman's submission. I'll upload the old movie and post it in the Toki thread. Edit: The old movie was already uploaded there. Need to select CPU -> Country -> USA for it to sync.
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [3557] Genesis Toki: Going Ape Spit "demo glitch" by Raelcun in 07:09.89