Resident Evil: Gaiden is a Gameboy Color game released in 2001. The title depicts a viral outbreak on a luxurious passenger ship. It introduces an underground organization established to put an end to the global operations of Umbrella, the company responsible for the Raccoon City disaster. Leon S. Kennedy, one of the protagonists of Resident Evil 2, joined the initiative and received orders to investigate the ocean liner, Starlight, which is rumored to be carrying a new type of bio-organic weapon (BOW) developed by Umbrella Corporation. Eventually, the headquarters loses contact with him and Barry Burton, a support character from the original Resident Evil, is sent in to find his whereabouts.
Game objectives
Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.8
Aims for Fastest Time
Uses Hardest Difficulty
Comments
Gaiden was an extremely ambitious game for the Gameboy Color. Essentially, Headquarters sends us (Barry) in at the beginning of the game to both find Leon who was sent in before us, and investigate/secure a BOW that escaped from one of Umbrella's labs. The game follows a top-down perspective in the exploration mode, allowing you to go about finding key items and using them. When you are either grabbed by an enemy, or you aim with the B button at an enemy, you'll enter the combat mode, where a cursor will go back and forth across the screen with you having to time an A press to hit an enemy. If you land right in the middle of an enemy's bar, you land a critical hit.
A couple things to note in this run; Sometimes when an enemy aggros onto you, the game randomly spawns 1-3 additional enemies just offscreen to make larger encounters without having them loaded at all times. However, enemies spawned by the game like this cannot grab you and are safe to run by at any range. This means that only "real" enemies can force you into combat. Another thing, the gas launcher weapon is bugged; When you try to run away in combat, the cursor becomes the run away indicator and you can no longer fire any weapons, except for the gas launcher. What's more, when you fire the gas launcher in this manner, it doesn't consume any ammunition.
Other Comments
There's definitely a little bit of potential for improvement; Most likely involving more lag reduction with different lines. And there's theoretically a tad more timesave with more BOW skips, the last one just saves more time easiest.
arkiandruski: Looks acceptable for publishing. The known improvements are on the smaller side and would be a lot of work to implement. I tried fixing the opening menus like Flip mentioned. Unfortunately the movie desynced at the first zombie encouter. I did remove 8541 empty frames from the end and uploaded that movie to the submission.
There are a couple other technical errors. It seems the movie was recorded without BIOS or with the wrong BIOS. There's also a message about it not saving cycle count. I have verified that it syncs on my emulator with a proper ROM, though.
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6341
Location: The land down under.
Light Spike of 8539 as well as the Cycle Count provided.
For everyone else, here's a thread on srcom about basically breaking every single major boss in Gaiden and the benefits/consequences.
Hello IzumiChenmeiru and welcome to TASVideos.
This was something that I was looking at a year and a bit ago now, and then practically lost motivation not even 2 minutes in.
You are correct about the potential for movement in regards to lines. The first set of Zombies you have to deal with in their positions you over-extenuate your movement costing some frames.
Besides that, I recon this is a good baseline of a TAS.
If you're curious what I had, this is the input file which was made with BizHawk 2.6 (and a bios).
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
Thank you for doing this TAS, it will certainly serve as a good template and should be good enough for publication. However, I too will voice my concerns for movement and certain choices regarding zombies, as after witnessing the horrific lag they cause makes it almost certain that it's beneficial to spend time killing certain packs rather than dodging them. Obviously such improvements can only be investigated and contrasted once we have a template to compare it to, so this shouldn't be held against you.
Just regarding the first major section, after looting the Coolant Fuse you then backtrack and take the eastern stairs, rather than progressing and taking the western set. Given that you need to be going west in the next room anyway, it would make sense to take the left set instead. Granted, I can appreciate that there's a large pack of zombies in the way, but it's still faster to clear them out and spend time to take the extra ammo, compared to wasting time backtracking and yet still needing to sacrifice time to manipulate the other pack out of your way. Plus, on the return trip up shortly after exiting the kitchen, it means that they're not there to cause path problems or the huge lag which can be seen in the current video.
I haven't been able to get Spikestuff's WIP to sync, but here's my WIP for the first few areas, which shows such an example of improvements. First, you can save ~100 frames by skipping another opening screen properly, so that's something which should be edited into the current publication, if possible. You'll see how the pack of 3 zombies guarding the left side are killed and the handgun ammo looted which takes approximately 250 frames longer than the right hand side route does, but it saves 240 frames in the next room by already being on the left side anyway, plus 200+ further frames are saved on the return journey by not having massive lag or needing to beckon the zombies out of your way. In the next room, the first zombie can be avoided without moving him away, and for the lone enemy who does need to be defeated, it's faster to start combat from closer up so that you don't need to spend time moving the slow aiming reticle. There's still enough time to kill him before he does any damage, so I feel that certain future fights could also be started from closer proximity too.
Future runs in this game will need more research into the potential benefits of extra ammo looting in order to kill more packs of zombies, but for now, yes vote.
Link to video
Some zombie kills are still questionable because you had some ammo in your assault rifle left and you could kill specific blockers instead of running them around multiple times and still spending a big amount of time on killing them with a gas launcher.
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
