- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1 (melonDS)
- DSi Mode: False
- Use Real BIOS: False
- Firmware Start-Up: Auto Boot
- Aims for maximum score
- Starts from SaveRAM to unlock the hardest difficulty (vertification movie)
- A couple of catchy tunes, they’re like guilty pleasures to me
- RP’s as some black girl named Alicia from Prairie, whose sweetheart is Waffle, and her fashion label is CyberConnect idk
- Obvious April Fool’s game is obvious
Introduction
Imagine: Movie Star is touch-screen Guitar Hero for teenage girls, released for the Nintendo DS near the tail-end of 2008 by Ubisoft and developed by Powerhead Games.
Yep, not really gonna bother with a more formal description for this game, seeing as how it’s April Fools' Day and I made this TAS with the intention of it being rejected.
Objective
This movie plays through all of the songs and dress-up activities on Hard difficulty, which is unlocked by first beating the game on Normal, aiming for the highest possible score one can get in each level.
Each level has a maximum amount of 1000 fans. Last time I sat down to play this game casually, the game was pretty lenient with how many notes I was allowed to miss, so even if you’re not on an FC run, you can still gain 1000 fans per song quite easily, even on Hard. Every criteria you can check off in the dress-up levels nets you 50 points and 250 fans each.
The stars in the upper-left that you can use by touching them or using the D-Pad cut the amount of points you get in half when they’re active, so I avoid using them for the whole movie.
Broken Notes
Broken notes are a very rare sight in rhythm games, with their documentation being fairly scarce. Unfortunately, some charts in Imagine: Movie Star weren’t playtested as well as others.
Premiere Night and The Grand Opening both have sphere-catching sections where there’s a significant lull of spheres near the end, which forces the game to break your note streak numerous times.
The Chase Scene and Run For The Hills' first sphere-catching sections are only slightly broken: There’s a few spheres that can’t be caught near the start, but you can very briefly let go of the touch screen to bank in the first couple of spheres that can be caught. At least your note streak can’t be forced broken to these parts.
True Confessions has a yellow note immediately after its sphere-catching section, which you can only hit with a “Good” or just outright miss it because the transition back to tapping the notes takes too long to hit it with a “Perfect” and keep the note streak going. Funnily enough, getting “Good” on a sustain doesn’t break your note streak.
Possible Improvements
I don’t know... make a bot, perhaps? Either way, it’s pretty much impossible to hit those aforementioned broken notes any better/at all.
Special Thanks To
My parents, for somehow buying me a terrible rhythm game that was actually aimed at teenage girls.
eien86: Although the movie has been submitted for April Fool's, and against the author's own expectations, it represents a perfectly optimized solution that completes the game and therefore is a candidate for acceptance.
The game itself consists of Guitar Hero-like autoscrollers from which no further speedups can be expected. The maximum score goal is then the most logical goal and source of entertainment. It is not clear that the score achieved is indeed the maximum as some notes are missed, but these seem to be unavoidable glitches.
Further apparent time losses (name inputting, cloth selection) seem fully justified for entertainment purposes and align well with the goal of the movie. Any movie seeking to obsolete this one should either:
a) Achieve the same score faster with improvements in gameplay (i.e., a faster signature would not necessarily count towards this)
b) Achieve a higher score
Accepting to Standard
