Joined: 4/5/2014
Posts: 999
Location: Pool of misery and suffering (Ukraine)
After more than 20 years, here it comes.
Link to video
Official Description:
This is a Tool Assisted Speedrun of Full Tilt Pinball Space Cadet, done by running a Virtual Machine of Linux, then running a Windows 3.1 emulator inside of that Virtual Machine and using LibTAS as a TASing application. The goal of this TAS is to achieve the in-game rank of "Fleet Admiral", noted by lighting up the entire series of orange dots near the center of the machine. This is done by completing several missions in quick succession, all having different objectives.
There's an incredibly high amount of "randomness" in this game due to how the ball's trajectory is manipulatable by both the flippers and the mouse position on the screen. I use this to my advantage by brute-forcing a good outcome in scenarios like Attack Bumper hits and selecting missions.
The oddest thing is that the Windows XP version always requires you to complete three missions to go up one rank, but the Full Tilt version varies for reasons I don't understand. Going from Rank 1 to Rank 2 requires the completion of three missions (Or two of the "Secret" missions), but going from Rank 2 to Rank 3 only required the completion of one, and Rank 6 to Rank 7 requires 2.
Regardless, this is what I came up with. There's still probably some improvements that can be done with stuff like ball trajectory manipulation in some areas, but I still think this is a solid attempt for the first ever TAS of this game.
TASing is like making a film: only best takes are shown in the final movie.
Link to video
Now that the decomp project has made it possible to port this game to damn near anything, it's going to be a lot more accessible to TASing and speedrunning too. Exciting times!
