Introduction

Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off-Road for the Nintendo Entertainment System (boy, that's a mouthful) is a fun and quirky racing game where you and up to three of your friends drive through obstacle circuits with their pickup trucks. This movie completes all 99 races in the game in record time by heavily abusing luck, physics, and the author's patience.

Strategy

Luck Manipulation

The luck abuse part comes from getting 'infinite' turbos. Turbos are activated with the 'B' button and give the player instantaneous maximum velocity. The game initially gives you 25 and you should use them sparingly. However, during each race, the game would give bonus items with 'random' timing, position and type (extra turbos or money). These elements can be manipulated by precise inputs, which the bot easily found. The ability of constantly getting turbos refilled gives such an enormous advantage that the bot immediately starts running laps around the CPU cars.

Early game

The game has a shop where you can buy turbos or upgrades to your truck. To buy them, you need money that you can get by (a) winning the race, or (b) picking up money bonuses during the race. In this movie I decided to go buy upgrades in this order:
  • Tires: each upgrade improves the turning speed of the car. This is the most important upgrade since slow turning is the only source of slowdowns when you have infinite turbos.
  • Shocks: they improve the maneuverability of the truck when you go over obstacles. I did not notice much of a change after buying these
  • Acceleration and Top Speed: low priority upgrades.

Mid Game

Until I fully upgraded the car, I also instructed the bot to balance the use and collection of turbos in such a way, that even though it can freely used them, it should try as much as possible to end up with 99 (maximum) of them at the end of each race. Other than that, there were no decisions to take other than beating each race as fast as possible and refilling turbos in the store. I scripted the bot to do both, time and time again until several days later I had arrived to race 99.

Race 69

Race 99

For this race I scripted the bot to do burn through the turbos as much as possible, without caring to pickup any bonus items. Additionally, I fixed the ending to have the earliest last input as possible. In this case, by stopping just before the end and letting an opponent 'bump' into me, which looks nice.

Software + Hardware

Rom Information

Rom: Ivan Ironman Stewart's Super Off-Road (U) [!]
  • SHA1: 57919B685B55EE3ED3AD98FB1D25626B98BE7D39
  • MD5: DE38D18A05B39B4E1E15CBFEBF47235D

Emulator

  • EmuHawk 2.9.0 (Core: QuickNES)

Routing Bot

  • Bot: JaffarPlus
  • Routing Core: QuickNES
  • Platform: 'The Jaffanator' - AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X (64 cores, 128 threads) + 256Gb RAM (Average Exploration Performance: 1.00M States/s)

nymx: Claiming for judging.

nymx: Another great TAS by eien86! I found it amazing how you forced the game into supplying all the nitros that you needed.
There's not much else I can say, except that your BOT setup destroyed this game!
Accepting to "Standard" for publication.

despoa: Processing...


TASVideoAgent
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Twisted_Eye
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god i love this game. Using an adaptor back in the day to play 4-Players with my cousins. The gray truck turns green if a human controls it! But wow I can't believe it, this game actually has an end, kinda. I always thought it just looped forever. The way your bot abuses the collision physics to careen around the course in crazy ways is really fun to watch. Race 6 is a good example for people that don't want to watch TOO much of this 50 minute run. Thanks for making this, I really like this.
PLANET
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Great run, but the game itself, especially after all these years, seems a bit dull, even if I liked it back in the days more. It's not even the lack of colours compared to PC or Arcade version, rather than the usual repetitiveness that shows even more when all 8 tracks are looped in the longer run. Admire the work put into it, very nice results, but at least once appreciating this actually goes along a Meh vote (sorry). Heavy skipping saved it a bit : p
nymx
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Wow...what a blow away! Easy yes vote.
I recently discovered that if you haven't reached a level of frustration with TASing any game, then you haven't done your due diligence. ---- SOYZA: Are you playing a game? NYMX: I'm not playing a game, I'm TASing. SOYZA: Oh...so its not a game...Its for real? ---- Anybody got a Quantum computer I can borrow for 20 minutes? Nevermind...eien's 64 core machine will do. :) ---- BOTing will be the end of all games. --NYMX
eien86
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Thanks for all your comments! Very appreciated! The submission summary says re-record count missing, but in fact I manually modified the bk2 file to include the real number: 204150846438. This number comes from the bot's logs, and represents how many load_state/advance_step cycles it tried. I've seen other movies using similar lua script bots being published with similar astronomical re-record counts so I argue there's no reason to not do that for this movie as well.
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [5294] NES Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off Road by eien86 in 50:31.34
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I feel like the early game could have been done faster by manipulating money drops in the second race instead of trying to maximize turbos. There's a couple races where you're getting 9 turbos while having 90+ in your inventory, but your car isn't fully upgraded. You said tires/shocks matter, but it takes until the 8th or so race to get to maximize those. Fun movie, great bot, but it seems like based on your submission text, the early game had potential to be better.
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
eien86
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DarkKobold wrote:
I feel like the early game could have been done faster by manipulating money drops in the second race instead of trying to maximize turbos. There's a couple races where you're getting 9 turbos while having 90+ in your inventory, but your car isn't fully upgraded. You said tires/shocks matter, but it takes until the 8th or so race to get to maximize those. Fun movie, great bot, but it seems like based on your submission text, the early game had potential to be better.
You're totally right, there is a ton of space for improvements still, including and especially the ones you mentioned.