Tapper
These Tapper TASes have been sponsored by beer companies (not really), but what if we fold you to do the dew, the Mountain Dew.
TAS Notes
- Uses BizHawk 2.4.0
- Uses Disk version of game
- This game was released in Cartridge, Tape, and Disk formats.
- Cartridge only has the first two stages and is thus a less complete game than the disk/tape versions.
- We use disk for faster loading time over the tape version.
- Aims to finish as quickly as possible.
- This is an endless game and thus requires only completing to where the loop begins (after the 26th stage).
- Difficulty Easy
- However. Don't mark this with the class for Easy Difficulty, the only difference between this and "Arcade" is lives. You can copy + paste input across with no issues in sync.
- Expert is just the second phase of the game that loops forever.
Tricks Used
- When possible, we eliminated all customers before any could stop and drink their beverage.
- When it wasn't possible to avoid a customer drinking, we forced the position of the drinker to not be in the bottom row. Drinkers in that row take longer to drink than in other rows. This allowed for faster completion by getting the drinker off faster while also preventing new customers from arriving.
- When possible, row spamming was used to save time over switching a row for every throw of a mug. This saved 2 frames for every subsequent throw within a given row. The only times this wasn't used was when it would result in additional drinking customers.
- Minor RNG manipulation was accomplished by delaying the final throw within a stage to minimize movement necessary to complete the bonus stages.
- In bonus stages, it is faster to select the correct can than a wrong one.
- Stage 9 is the last stage to introduce new starting customers. Even though the layouts differ, every stage from there onward uses the exact same input as stage 9 to complete the stage as quickly as possible.
Potential improvements
If someone could find a way to improve the Stage 9 input, that improvement could be duplicated for the remaining stages yielding an improvement of roughly 18*X frames where X is the number of frames saved in Stage 9.
slamo: Optimization looks pretty well thought out to me, I don't see anything obviously wrong. There is indeed no new content after the second loop, so we'll consider this good enough for completion of an endless game. Tapper also has an
A2600 run already published, but the game's appearance and the enemies are different enough to consider this a separate game.
Feedback was lukewarm. As admitted in the submission text, many of the levels in the second loop use the same input, so the gameplay overall is simple and repetitive. Accepting to Vault.
