- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1
- Starts from a fresh save
- Genre: Puzzle
Bejeweled 3 is a game where you have to match gems of the same color in sets of 3 or more to earn points and clear levels. Matching 4 or more gems together at once causes special gems to spawn which can potentially clear lots of gems around them when matched.
This TAS covers 50% (20 out of 40) quests in Quest mode being cleared, which each have special objectives that require strategizing in different ways than usual. Four quests are required per relic, and beating half of the quests in total reveals all five relics in the Quest menu.
On the surface, a TAS of this game seems like it would be heavily limited by luck, but there are actually several things I was able to use to make it faster:
- Level Routing: the 40 different quests vary in speed pretty vastly. I watched Dimon12321's Quest Mode 100% TAS to try and figure out which quests are the quickest to clear, and it was simple to figure out for the most part although a few of the quests I didn't choose come pretty close in speed to the ones I did, so it's a bit ambiguous which combinations can truly give the best luck. Here are the quests I worked with:
- Relic 1: Alchemy I, Stratamax I, Balance I, Buried Treasure
- Relic 2: Ice Storm I, Sandstorm I, Balance II, Stratamax II
- Relic 3: Alchemy II, Stratamax III, Wall Blast I, Gold Rush II
- Relic 4: Alchemy III, Stratamax IV, Ice Storm II, Balance III
- Relic 5: Sandstorm II, Ice Storm III, Balance IV, Stratamax V
- These are the basic goals for each type of quest in this run:
- Alchemy: Turn every row and column into gold by matching gems in those spots respectively. These can basically just be brute forced with 3-gem matches, specials have no benefit here. As a result they're the quickest.
- Stratamax: Clear a minimum amount of gems with a limited amount of moves. You run out of moves pretty quickly in the higher tier quests with only 3-gem matches, so at least some specials are probably required. Getting as many cascades/double matches as possible is also super beneficial.
- Balance: Clear a minimum amount of red and blue gems while not matching too many of one type at once. Just like Stratamax, specials & extra combos are pretty beneficial here.
- Buried Treasure/Sandstorm: Clear gems to unravel artifacts from the sand. No need to focus on specials here besides maybe flame gems since they're the only ones that don't lose time from special animation sequences.
- Ice Storm: Match gems before ice fills the screen. Similar to the last one, specials aren't particularly required.
- Wall Blast: Match special gems to destroy the wall. A bit slower due to needing at least several specials to clear, but probably the best routing that can be done for Relic 3 unfortunately.
- Gold Rush: Earn gold pieces by matching gems near the soil at the bottom. Slower since gems have to be matched toward the bottom to matter, again probably the best routing for Relic 3.
- The categories I didn't bother with at all were Butterflies, Poker, Time Bomb, and Avalanche, which all either have much more specific requirements to clear or simply have too high of objective counts compared to the others, so they all seemed slower comparitively.
- Starting Board RNG Manip: Depending on the order you pick quests in, the starting gem boards you receive will be different, which is sometimes pretty helpful, especially for quests like Stratamax where you typically want to start off with special combos that can be immediately made or Balance where you want to start off with more red/blue gem combos.
- Gemswap RNG Manip: Depending on the specific frames that you make gem matches on, different gem colors will drop from the top of the board, allowing you to receive way more specials and cascades when you would want them during levels. This trick even works with purposefully making invalid matches! Theoretically it might be possible to get 100% perfect luck with this manip, but it would probably take an unrealistic amount of time to figure out how to do so even just for a single level.
- For the ends of levels specifically you want to use this trick to cause the opposite to happen (making as close as possible to zero extra matches) in order to not waste time at the ends of levels due to ongoing combos.
- I also initially tested if there was any sort of luck manip with the date and time you start the game at, since luck in some other DS games works off your system's clock settings, it doesn't seem to be the case at all for Bejeweled 3 though.
Glitchless port?
Before Bejeweled 3 released on DS in 2011 it had a few other ports including on PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. As far as I'm aware all of the other ports run on the exact same engine and have some glitches which include the
gemwipe, a bug on Stratamax levels that lets you make infinite matches without getting a game over, and possibly more. The DS port however due to hardware constraints has a unique engine and doesn't seem to have any of these bugs at all.
Theoretically a TAS on PC could get a final time much faster with these glitches and also because it doesn't have any loads, but I don't think the technology to make a TAS of it exists at all, let alone with something like Hourglass.
I should note that this movie starts at booting up the game itself, not the DS BIOS since I wasn't completely sure whether it's something required or not for DS games. Hopefully that's something that works fine, otherwise I'd unfortunately probably have to remake the whole project due to Bejeweled 3's randomness.
Something else I wasn't totally sure about was where timing ends for a game like this, Bejeweled 3 doesn't show its credits or anything automatically after beating 50% of the quests in Quest mode so I assumed it was probably fine to end the movie after the first frame that the final relic is revealed instead.
Also technically the last input is a few seconds before the end of the final quest (Stratamax V), so if timing ends there then this TAS might be a few seconds faster than what it shows as.
Thank You
Special thanks to
Dimon12321 for giving me the idea for this TAS as well as laying the groundwork for the routing.
ThunderAxe31: This is one of those unfortunate cases where the game is actually misleading in how it defines completion. The game has a percentage value for indicating the amount of stages completed for this mode, which apparently may be considered as a sort of indicator for full completion. However, completing 50% of the stages results just in revealing the fifth relic, the throne, which isn't much different from revealing any of the other four relics. On the other hand, completing all stages results in the game giving you a congratulatory message and marking the Quest mode a completed. As such, I can't consider 50% as a form of fastest completion, as we need the game mode to be played in its entirety.
Beating all stages would include the contents of this movie, which is another reason why this movie is considered incomplete. Still, I see that RNG plays a huge factor in optimization and routing for this category. For this reason, I think this goal still has some merit on its own, so I'm allowing it for Playground.
