The kingdom of Bizyland is in trouble when the evil ruler of the neighboring land (Lasyland) uses a magic mirror to swap kingdoms and kidnap the princess. It's up to the king's chosen warriors to reverse the spell cast by the mirror and save the princess.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.2.1
  • Fastest Real Time
  • 2 Player

Comments

A 2-player game for a 2-player day. Using teamwork both characters make short work of each level. In each level you trace a trail of magic behind you, and once you close it off it changes that portion of the level back to the colorful Bizyland. Once you change a high enough percentage of the level back to normal you win.
Character selection. The pink girl is by far the fastest character. Her weakness is that it takes a long time to respond to controller inputs (10 frames) which isn't a problem for a TAS. Both players can choose the girl, but the game can't process both characters moving so fast and every level would move at half speed due to all the lag. It would also make the strategy for every level nearly identical. The blue boy is the average character with no strengths or weaknesses and is chosen to team up with the pink girl.
Items in the game are hidden until you complete a section of the level. The treasure chests can contain strength boosts, mirror fragments, fairies, clocks, and boots of speed.
When a section of the level gets completed the game pauses for a length of time directly related to how big the section was. The game always fills in the smallest area that's sectioned off, so it's not possible to fill in more than half of the level at once. But, as you get down to the individual pixels the game gets wildly inaccurate at determining what percentage is completed. As an example, trying to section a level in half will yield 50.6% of the stage being filled in even though it's considered the 'smaller' half. And sometimes a single extra pixel will provide a full extra percentage point for completion and other times a full extra square centimeter will only give a few tenths of a percent. I attempt to get as close to the minimum required percentage as possible.

Stage by stage comments

LevelPercentDetails
1-153%The enemies along the wall will only hurt you if you run into them
1-253%Flying enemies can damage you if they hit your line while you're still drawing it, but only if they hit it from the right direction. Otherwise they just bounce off it.
1-355%At the end of every world you're shown a screen with all the fairies you've saved and all the mirror fragments you've collected. The princess is trapped inside mirror, but you free her just the same in the end even if you don't collect the pieces.
2-157%If you try and touch a teammate's line before it's finished you get a bit of a surprise with an alarm bell and an enemy that appears and moves along your trail to catch up to you and hurt you if you don't finish your section fast enough.
2-257%
2-360%The game can't process too much going on at once, so there are lots of lag frames throughout the more intense levels. If any projectiles hit your trail before it's complete, then it damages you
3-163%
3-263%
3-365%
4-167%
4-267%
4-370%
5-173%
5-273%
5-375%
6-180%
6-280%
6-382%
7-186%
7-286%
7-388%Everything Hurts. Avoid it all :)

Possible Improvements

Better understanding of how the game calculates percentages would certainly prove useful. It also occurred to me during the writing of this submission text that it could be faster to choose the pink girl for player 1 instead of player 2. A lot of the flying enemies appear on the left side of the level, so there would definitely be a whole new strategy in maneuvering around them.
Screenshot
16927, 19269, 23664

Noxxa: This game features some reasonably novel gameplay not commonly seen in TASes, and it's a nice change of pace. Unfortunately, the pauses after each section completed and the general amounts of lag in the game hurt the pacing a lot. Also, while each level does have its own nuances in strategy used, ultimately they mostly are cleared the same way, especially early on - with each level cleared in a quite short time, while having a relatively long delay between each level. Even those who voted yes for this movie and commented in the thread noted its repetitiveness. As such, accepting for the Vault.
feos: Pub.

TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 14772
Location: 127.0.0.1
This topic is for the purpose of discussing #5826: WarHippy's SNES Cacoma Knight in Bizyland in 07:52.84
Memory
She/Her
Site Admin, Skilled player (1514)
Joined: 3/20/2014
Posts: 1762
Location: Dumpster
Very unique game! Got a little repetitive at parts but I still really liked the TAS.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Twisted_Eye
He/Him
Active player (332)
Joined: 10/17/2005
Posts: 629
Location: Seattle, WA
Co-Op Qix? Fascinating. The run is definitely repetitive, though--if only the game had meaningful bosses where you had to draw over them or something. Still, a sub-10 minute time helps.
Patashu
He/Him
Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 3999
Very repetitive, but I love this kind of 'fill in the squares' gameplay, having grown up with Airxonix, and this was a brutal curbstomp, yes vote.
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Player (26)
Joined: 8/29/2011
Posts: 1206
Location: Amsterdam
Memory wrote:
Very unique game! Got a little repetitive at parts but I still really liked the TAS.
What's so unique about it? Looks like a straightforward Qix / Stix / Volfied clone to me. The run spends more time on level transitions than on the levels themselves :) while technically impressive, I do not find this entertaining; I'd call this prime vault material.
Experienced player (990)
Joined: 1/9/2011
Posts: 227
Radiant wrote:
The run spends more time on level transitions than on the levels themselves :) while technically impressive, I do not find this entertaining; I'd call this prime vault material.
That sums it up perfectly. There's about 1 minute of actual gameplay the other 7 are pauses and transitions. I was a little put off by that, too, but I've been wanting to see a game of this style TASed for awhile now. I hadn't heard of those other games before.
Memory
She/Her
Site Admin, Skilled player (1514)
Joined: 3/20/2014
Posts: 1762
Location: Dumpster
Radiant wrote:
Memory wrote:
Very unique game! Got a little repetitive at parts but I still really liked the TAS.
What's so unique about it? Looks like a straightforward Qix / Stix / Volfied clone to me.
I meant that you don't exactly see a ton of TASes of those.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 14772
Location: 127.0.0.1
This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [3638] SNES Cacoma Knight in Bizyland by WarHippy in 07:52.84
Active player (397)
Joined: 10/4/2015
Posts: 98
Neat game, saw this game for the first time maybe a month ago. What happens if you collect all the puzzle pieces? Do you get a better ending?
Experienced player (990)
Joined: 1/9/2011
Posts: 227
I never took the time to try and collect them all since it showed her being freed in the end anyways. The mirror itself is actually sentient and it was only after the kingdoms were swapped that it decided to also trap the princess. For absolutely no reason. There's also no reason there would be mirror fragments to collect in the first place (the mirror was never broken). And don't forget about the fairies (even though the storyline does). Each one you collect shows up at the end of each world when the pieces are shown, but the excess ones fly past the edge of the screen.
Active player (397)
Joined: 10/4/2015
Posts: 98
Ok so you can get 1 mirror piece each level, for a total of 15/16 by the end of world 5. However, world 6 actually grants you 0 pieces, because the bad guy talks instead. So, yep, it's impossible to finish the mirror early. Seems like maybe the developers intended for you to be able to play until the mirror was completed, but maybe that feature got cut.
Active player (397)
Joined: 10/4/2015
Posts: 98
I'm coming for this record by the way. I'm using 2 fast characters, so my strategy is going to be different on the levels. The lag is real bad like you said. Who the heck programmed this game? Can we go back in time and fire them?
Experienced player (990)
Joined: 1/9/2011
Posts: 227
Interesting. Well, if you do submit a run using both of the fastest characters I'm not really sure what will happen since you would have the fastest in-game time and I would have the fastest real time (although the movie rules seem to suggest that you need to follow the precedent I set for real time).
Active player (397)
Joined: 10/4/2015
Posts: 98
You think I can't have both fastest real and fastest in game? : ) I've got 3 new tricks not used in your run.
Experienced player (990)
Joined: 1/9/2011
Posts: 227
Neat. I look forward to seeing your run. All I know is that when I tried using both players as the fast character I had to continuously add lots of frames each level to make up for all the lag (in addition to the extra 218 frames it takes to switch characters in the beginning). If nothing else, it'll probably increase the entertainment factor since the game slows down enough that you can actually see what happens in every level. Best of luck!
Active player (397)
Joined: 10/4/2015
Posts: 98