Bowling on the atari: how much more simple can you get? This TAS perfectly plays through Game 1 which is slightly different to Games 3/4 and 4/6.
In game 1/2, the ball can only be spun once after it has been thrown. In this TAS, it's a single up press just before the pins.
In game 3/4, the ball can be forever be moved up and down, giving the player almost total control of the ball.
In game 5/6, the ball can't be spun at all and can only roll straight.
On some shots, the player can just sit in the starting corner and roll the ball and the up press can get a strike. This is ideal but some other balls require the player to move up a couple steps before rolling. The player can move up one step and bowl only every 4 frames. The spin can also only be initiated every 8 frames. Other than those little things, It's just your regular bowling game.
DrD2k9: While TASing the
Game 5 mode, I discovered that even without changes to the bowler's or the ball's Y-position in RAM, throwing the ball on different frames yielded different results for which pins were knocked down. I decided to dig deeper into this revalation during my testing things for judgement of this run. I further discovered that WHEN the ball is thrown is more important to getting a strike than WHERE the bowler is positioned. Obviously, when the curve is activated remains important as that affects if the ball hits the head pin or not. To demonstrate,
here's a version of the run that throws the ball on the exact same frames as MarioAtWork's original run; but in this file, bowler movement is eliminated and only slight changes to curve activation were necessary to yield strikes in all frames. These changes do nothing to impact the overall time of the run; they simply show how throw timing is more important to success than where the bowler is positioned.
Soapbox Rant (skip down to the next paragraph if you only care about this submission): Frankly, I think this specific effect of RNG on preventing strikes is a bit of a jerk move by the game's developers; because no matter how skilled a player is at positioning the bowler and knowing when to curve the ball, their skill doesn't actually determine if they are successful or not...ultimately RNG does. From the perspective of non-TAS play, every throw is effeectively a gamble. I don't feel it's right for a 'skill' based game to ultimately be determined by RNG.
Back to this submission: What can significantly impact the time of the run is the final throw. I found that moving the bowler to the middle of the lane before throwing allowed for eliminating the need to curve the ball and thus earlier end of input to the tune of 115 frames saved compared to MarioAtWork's original.
I'm not updating the encode as only the last throw changes, and minimally so.
Requesting co-authorship using
this movie. Setting status to "NEW."
Accepting as its own branch.
