(Link to video)
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Improvements on every fight from the old TAS.
Heavy use of RNG manipulation to get optimal patterns/punches and extra stars which allows for more points.
Used various methods to reduce damage and increase score per damage and score per unit time.
There are endless possible score routes that could be explored, and while I do think some of these fights are improvable, I could not find these routes.

Gaining points works as follows:

  • 10 for a regular hit
  • 110 for getting a star
  • 500 for landing a star punch
  • 1010 for a knockdown with a regular punch
  • 1500 for a knockdown with a star punch

Individual fights are as follows:

  • Glass Joe 25000
  • Von Kaiser 23450
  • Piston Honda I 36250
  • Don Flamenco I 22720
  • King Hippo 1550
  • Great Tiger 28500
  • Bald Bull I 40000
  • Piston Honda II 24120
  • Soda Popinski 26640
  • Bald Bull II 32190
  • Don Flamenco II 22150
  • Mr. Sandman 14520
  • Super Macho Man 38660
  • Mike Tyson 25230

Fog: Replaced input file with a spiked input file.
Fog: Judging.
Fog: There has been a lot of discussion about the goal of this submission, as it aims for "high score".
Before we get to that point, we need to consider what tier this submission will be judged under. From the reception received in both votes and audience comments, as well as personal opinion of this judge, this submission is to be considered for Vault. This limits the goals choices to either fastest completion or full completion.
At first glance, "high score" would appear to fit the criteria of full completion, as it aims to get the highest known score for every fight. However, there are a few problems with this assumption:
1) "high score" is not "maximum score".
According to our vault rules, maximum score must be both easily defined as well as absolute. Punch Out currently has neither of these qualities for a maximum score. It's theoretically possible to achieve higher scores than that of this submission.
2 ) "maximum score" indicates full completion of a game where there is no other defined full completion point.
Punch Out, for all intents and purposes, has only one completion point (defeating Mike Tyson). While obtaining a high score can be considered a full completion point, the lack of a truly defined maximum score prevents the high score for each fight to be considered a full completion point. In all Vault cases of maximum score, there is no other completion criteria to be had other than obtaining the maximum score.
3) The high score is not actually achieved in this submission.
This submission avoids use of glitches not allowed in real-time runs in the Soda Popinski fight that allow points to be infinitely racked up. This defeats the entire point of the submission which aims for high score. It also shows that if similar glitches are found in other fights, then the current high score is not actually the maximum score.
With these considerations in mind, the "high score" branch of this submission is un-Vaultable, and cannot be accepted for publication here.
Rejecting.

Thanks for the feedback. I may not agree with the strict rules regarding score oriented runs and I cannot prove that the scores I achieved in each fight are the maximum possible scores (without clockstop glitch), but should I make any future submissions, I will stick to the speedrun aspect, as in this day and age, are more popular and usually less time consuming to make and watch.

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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #5681: mPap's NES Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! "high score" in 1:15:08.46
Spikestuff
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Improvements on every fight from the old TAS.
Link to Old TAS that you're referring to thanks. Also, you wrote King Hippo's score looks wrong. Might want to fix that. Nevermind it is 1550 points. And there goes 5136 frames of blank input: User movie #42644174955803311 So Judge replace it... I guess?
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Nice TAS, yes vote! What surprising improvements! Yes vote for an outstanding run!
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Surprisingly, I personally enjoyed watching this TAS. There was some good strategy with a somewhat interesting goal choice. I'm giving it a yes vote.
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This is the old TAS which was done by me about a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y9FZoLHFGE
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Also, my bad if I put any of the individual scores in the comments wrong. I kinda submitted it right before I wen to sleep last night. It seems to be fixed now.
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I'm not a fan of long drawn out score TASes so I voted No. However. I'm concerned by your King Hippo fight, as it ended in Round 2 and you weren't able to drag it out to the 3rd Round.
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Shortly after I make this topic, this TAS comes in. You have my thanks. This game certainly has an interesting score limit, which doesn't appear trivial to meet. Interesting to also see Little Mac apparently having trouble and getting beat up just to restore his opponent's stamina and earn a few more hits. Overall, the gameplay appears somewhat slow, but the stated goal of earning as much points as possible is fairly clear watching this. There should be no question this run shows off significantly different gameplay from our speed oriented TAS. Only real question is one of optimization. If a few others fool around and can't get a higher score, or are also unable to get the same score in shorter time, then that would be pretty convincing the effort necessary to improve the run isn't trivial. It is hard to tell from the appearances of this run, though. Just did a quick check on the Vault rules, and score is listed as a possible criteria. As long as you got the highest possible score, and got to such a score as quickly as you can, then that criteria is met.
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That's fair enough Spikestuff. Just by the nature of highscore, ending fights sooner means less points. The King Hippo fight is at its limit (as far as I know). There is no point dragging to round 3 because if Little mac takes another punch, he will not be able to get up and will lose the fight. I take the maximum amount of punches that do the least damage (Hippo's closed mouth punches). And I get the biggest HP refill from pressing Select before entering round 2. There is also another small manipulation I do right after taking the 3rd knockdown. In 'normal' gameplay, when Little Mac gets up the 3rd time he will get a large amount of HP but the moment he gets hit by Hippo, he will instantly be knocked down. I force a jab and quickly dodge it and for some reason this caused Hippo's punches to do the normal amount of damage. I also do punches that do the least amount of damage to hippo (3 damage per punch). FatRatKnight, I didnt even see this topic you posted haha. Routing for score in this game is tricky because Little Mac's opponents have a finite amount of HP, and Mac has a finite amount of time to score the points in. I do allow Mac to take damage to let opponents recover HP to score more points but Mac's HP is not infinite either. Its a delicate balance of several factors. There is 1 fight however (Soda Popinski) where getting the 999990 points is possible (or whatever the limit the game can display is). To do this you use a combination of Little Mac recovering HP, getting hit by Soda's straight jab and the clockstop glitch (which effectively gives you infinite time) I didnt include this because clockstop is not allowed in real time attempts and would be pretty repetetive and boring to watch imo. There were several instances where in an earlier version I did end a fight sooner, but upon later discovery I could get and extra 10 or 20 points out of a fight, I went back and reTAS'd it. While I'm not afraid to admit that this is might not be the absolute limit for score, I'm confident its rather close; just putting this TAS out there might inspire people to beat this TAS.
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FatRatKnight wrote:
Just did a quick check on the Vault rules, and score is listed as a possible criteria. As long as you got the highest possible score, and got to such a score as quickly as you can, then that criteria is met.
Actually, it's not exactly like that. The Vault rules require the game to have a definite preset maximum:
Vault wrote:
  • The maximum score is easily defined and absolute - it must not be possible to gain a higher score, even theoretically. It must be definable without being dependent on precise time, speed, or similar requirements.
  • The maximum score is limited by not being able to gain any more points, not by hitting a score cap or overflow. If it is possible to score points infinitely, score cannot be used to define full completion.
Still, I think this run has a good chance to get in Moons. This is the only alternative to any% branch, it shows more of the game and the goal is challening.
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ThunderAxe31 wrote:
FatRatKnight wrote:
Just did a quick check on the Vault rules, and score is listed as a possible criteria. As long as you got the highest possible score, and got to such a score as quickly as you can, then that criteria is met.
Actually, it's not exactly like that. The Vault rules require the game to have a definite preset maximum:
Vault wrote:
  • The maximum score is easily defined and absolute - it must not be possible to gain a higher score, even theoretically. It must be definable without being dependent on precise time, speed, or similar requirements.
  • The maximum score is limited by not being able to gain any more points, not by hitting a score cap or overflow. If it is possible to score points infinitely, score cannot be used to define full completion.
Still, I think this run has a good chance to get in Moons. This is the only alternative to any% branch, it shows more of the game and the goal is challening.
And it's once again shown why the vault rules are too strict. Highscore should always be a vaultable goal.
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Vault wrote:
The maximum score is easily defined and absolute - it must not be possible to gain a higher score, even theoretically. It must be definable without being dependent on precise time, speed, or similar requirements.
It should be clear that in the case of this game, there is a definable maximum score, because the player is limited by round timers and health in terms of how many points they can milk out of each match. Round timers, health, and number of matches are all finite, ergo maximum score is also finite. Whether the max score is easily definable is a different question, but also not a relevant one IMO. We don't require speed-oriented TASes to have an easily-defined fastest possible time. Just because we don't know for certain that this TAS achieves the maximum possible score doesn't mean we shouldn't accept it as a score-oriented TAS, which could possibly be obsoleted in the future by another TAS with a higher score. What we don't want is to accept a score-oriented TAS in a game where score is unbounded. And the rules do require that, but then they go further than necessary with this "easily defined" stuff.
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andypanther wrote:
And it's once again shown why the vault rules are too strict. Highscore should always be a vaultable goal.
Derakon wrote:
It should be clear that in the case of this game, there is a definable maximum score, because the player is limited by round timers and health in terms of how many points they can milk out of each match. Round timers, health, and number of matches are all finite, ergo maximum score is also finite. Whether the max score is easily definable is a different question, but also not a relevant one IMO.
How do you go about defining full completion of a game through maximum score, without being able to prove conclusively that it is the maximum score? Note that the "conclusive" part is exactly why the rule has qualifiers about precise time or speed requirements. "As long as you do everything perfectly optimized within the timer's limits" is not conclusive, because the optimality of a TAS is very rarely provable in itself.
Derakon wrote:
We don't require speed-oriented TASes to have an easily-defined fastest possible time. Just because we don't know for certain that this TAS achieves the maximum possible score doesn't mean we shouldn't accept it as a score-oriented TAS, which could possibly be obsoleted in the future by another TAS with a higher score.
Apples and oranges. The speed at which you beat a game has nothing to do with criteria of completion, and those should be clear and unambiguous for any sort of TAS. A speedrun's goal is "beat the game", with some conclusive proof that it beats the game. Likewise, a full completion run must have conclusive proof that it beats the game with full completion.
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Mothrayas wrote:
How do you go about defining full completion of a game through maximum score, without being able to prove conclusively that it is the maximum score?
... Mmm... You know, we are now at a subject of debate. One that probably extends past this submission. I know of a topic I want to cart this discussion to. I have a new post to make. Essentially, the question I have in mind is: If it can't be proven the achieved score is the highest possible, and after significant effort a higher score wasn't achieved, is this still grounds for rejection with no other consideration?
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FatRatKnight wrote:
Essentially, the question I have in mind is: If it can't be proven the achieved score is the highest possible, and after significant effort a higher score wasn't achieved, is this still grounds for rejection with no other consideration?
"Significant effort" is a very vague term, so it's hard to build a straight answer on that. But even if you assume a very thorough definition of effort, with the game disassembled, researched and simulated to Dragster-tier levels, my answer would still be no. The plainness requirement exists for a few reasons, including logistics and consistency. If we were to accept a max score TAS based on such thorough research, we would have to do the same for any such TAS, and that's just plain not feasible - not to mention that it would ironically make such TASes way harder to be acceptable. We do not want to go down that road. (Also keep in mind that this is a Vault rule only - if the run is considered interesting and entertaining enough, these restrictions need not apply)
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i'm a dilettante at MTPO, but I was very entertained by this. You wouldn't think 3 rounds for (almost) every fighter would take as long as it does, but even considering that, the run is interesting the whole way through. Voting yes.
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Im finding the discussion quite interesting. I wasn't aware of such rules for score oriented TASes, so I'm sorry if this is causing controversy. I'm happy to answer any questions regarding the TAS; the author comments/explanations is quite brief and I could go more in-depth into the strategies I used for each fight.
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mPap wrote:
Im finding the discussion quite interesting. I wasn't aware of such rules for score oriented TASes, so I'm sorry if this is causing controversy. I'm happy to answer any questions regarding the TAS; the author comments/explanations is quite brief and I could go more in-depth into the strategies I used for each fight.
Thanks, it's always useful to have more info. However, I would be more interested in understanding how much relevant is scoring in this game for the speedrunning community. Also, is aiming to a high score a challenging goal for real-time attack, or does it tend to have a random outcome?
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Spikestuff wrote:
I'm not a fan of long drawn out score TASes so I voted No.
With respect, mPap, I agree with Spikestuff.
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mPap wrote:
Im finding the discussion quite interesting. I wasn't aware of such rules for score oriented TASes, so I'm sorry if this is causing controversy. I'm happy to answer any questions regarding the TAS; the author comments/explanations is quite brief and I could go more in-depth into the strategies I used for each fight.
Don't worry; not sure if it applies to others, but I'm rather glad you posted runs like this since that means if there's controversy about some rule(s), there's an actual submission to discuss, rather than some hypothetical run about some hypothetical scenario. Also:
FatRatKnight, I didnt even see this topic you posted haha. Routing for score in this game is tricky because Little Mac's opponents have a finite amount of HP, and Mac has a finite amount of time to score the points in. I do allow Mac to take damage to let opponents recover HP to score more points but Mac's HP is not infinite either. Its a delicate balance of several factors. There is 1 fight however (Soda Popinski) where getting the 999990 points is possible (or whatever the limit the game can display is). To do this you use a combination of Little Mac recovering HP, getting hit by Soda's straight jab and the clockstop glitch (which effectively gives you infinite time) I didnt include this because clockstop is not allowed in real time attempts and would be pretty repetetive and boring to watch imo.
Can you please make a video of how long it would take to max the score using this trick? Edit: Also how does the game's point system work?
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jlun2 wrote:
Edit: Also how does the game's point system work?
From watching casually, I've seen... Hit with a regular punch: 10 points Earn a star: 110 points (100 for the star, 10 for the punch) Hit with a star punch: 500 points Knock opponent down: 1000 points Knock opponent down with star punch: 1500 points
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_26640 - Soda Popinski's score 999990 - Suggested limit (something to confirm, perhaps by memory edits) 973350 - Score difference to make up. In the first 10 seconds of that match, the player was able to score 1940 points. Mostly because most of those punches earned stars and some star punches were mixed in. More practically, right after the next star punch to get 2440 points, the player gets pairs of stars in a two punch pattern. 10 seconds later, we are now at 3760 points, so that time was worth 1320 points. Let's assume stamina recovery doesn't affect our time (we can likely just add in a fixed time per loop later), and after stopping the clock, the AI lets us deliver these sorts of punches endlessly. Our rate is 1320 points per 10 seconds, and we need 973350. A quick division tells us we'll need 7374 seconds, or over two hours, to get to this score. And as I stated in the first sentence of this paragraph, we haven't accounted for whatever tricks are needed for stamina recovery during the match, which will certainly add more time. And if we can't make star earning punches after stopping the clock, we can expect the time to multiply by 11. Just a quick estimation of the time needed to grind the score when time is no longer a limiting resource. But I'd still like a response on how long we can expect it to take.
Mothrayas wrote:
"Significant effort" is a very vague term, so it's hard to build a straight answer on that. But even if you assume a very thorough definition of effort, with the game disassembled, researched and simulated to Dragster-tier levels, my answer would still be no.
By "significant effort", I don't have any specific meaning. Dragster-tier analysis is definitely on the upper end of it, and passing interest over one afternoon is probably well below the level I'm looking for. Mostly, as long as some effort is apparent, and there are no obvious avenues of improvement, then it's around the level of "significant effort" I'm talking about. Some level of judgement is expected to determine where on the line it is, and the logistics of ensuring Dragster-tier analysis is decidedly far too much to expect on every score running TAS submission. Much like how we don't expect the judges to disassemble every game to ensure the submission is as fast as actually possible.
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I still don't get why score should not be vaultable in all cases. If there isn't an obvious max score, just go for the highest possible, the TAS could then be obsoleted by one that gets a higher score or gets the same one faster. And if the score just overflows? Define the point of the overflow as the max score. That could lead to boring strats being used to score? Well, that's the point of the vault, TASes in that tier don't have to be entertaining.
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andypanther wrote:
I still don't get why score should not be vaultable in all cases.
The Vault is founded on two categories - any% fastest time, and full completion fastest time. A max score run would have to count as full completion to be a viable goal choice, but it is not full completion if there is no consistently viable way to know it's full.
andypanther wrote:
If there isn't an obvious max score, just go for the highest possible, the TAS could then be obsoleted by one that gets a higher score or gets the same one faster. And if the score just overflows? Define the point of the overflow as the max score. That could lead to boring strats being used to score? Well, that's the point of the vault, TASes in that tier don't have to be entertaining.
There's unentertaining, but there's also being borderline unpublishable. If we had to follow this metric, we would have to accept and publish 792 hours of Desert Bus.
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In essence, the Vault is not constructed to use score as a metric in any form; it only uses time. There are no other forms of measurement used by the Vault. A value reported by the game itself is immaterial, as it is not time measured by the length of the input file. Any sort of scoring can only be used as a measurement of completion, and it has to be 100% or any%. If 100% can't be defined on a measurable maximum value, it can't be used for defining the 100% goal. That is how I interpret the rules here.