Game Description
"Crazy Castle 4?! How many of these f*ckin' games could there possibly be?!
Alright, well if you just can't get enough Crazy Castle action, here comes number four. It starts out with Bugs Bunny looking at a map. On it, he sees a castle, but all it says is "C Castle". So Bugs thinks about it and decides that "C" must stand for "Carrot." And that means he thinks the castle's full of carrots, and from how much he loves carrots, he rushes over there. And of course, the game has to explain to us that "C" really stands for "Crazy" and not "Carrot", like we're f*ckin' idiots. This is only the fourth f*ckin' game, right?
You're going around, opening doors that lead to rooms that have keys. You get all the damn keys, and go to the final door, I mean what am I supposed to say? It's so hard to even imagine that this game exists, and I'm trying to review it. It's like trying to review a pink porcupine with a monkey's head up its butt eating a buffalo's ballsack. Should I describe what it looks like and analyze it, or should I just be so f*ckin' shocked the thing even exists?"
– The Angry Video Game Nerd on Crazy Castle 4
Highlights
The TASing Process
So how long did this take to TAS? Well, I started working on it back in 2016... Yeah... this game is a marathon and can get pretty monotonous at times. The biggest problem is the sheer number of doors you have to enter and exit throughout the run. You have to go through at least 8 doors per level, and at 69 levels (nice) in the whole game, that's at least 552 doors D: In other words, that's gonna get really old really quick. It got so old that I TASed up to level 4-5 in 2016, took an 8 year break, and it wasn't until 2024 that I picked this up again. This second time around, I would have a couple bright ideas that would make finishing up the TAS much more efficient.
The first and by far the biggest development was writing
a Lua script which would automatically navigate through each room in the most efficient way possible. This script was the only reason I even finished this TAS, showing that knowing how to program something simple can go a long way in reducing the amount of effort. The second development was to complete the TAS in two passes instead of one. The first pass I would navigate through each level as efficiently as I could playing in real time, and on the second pass, I would clean everything up. This greatly reduced the amount of time I spent manually assigning inputs in TAStudio. The first pass TAS had a final time of 2h 51m 01s, meaning I cleaned up about 2m 54.5s of mistakes during the second pass. A final pass, checking for any mistakes I may have missed, saved another 6.5 seconds, bringing the final time below 2h 48m! The third development was to finish making this game's maps. Will Malia had posted maps up to level 9-6 on
VGMaps.com, so I decided to put in the effort to finish the remaining 25 maps. This was instrumental for developing efficient routes for the TAS.
Finally, I wanted to give a quick shoutout to
Aqfaq, who made a WIP up to level 4-5 and a Lua script for navigating rooms
way back in 2005. The route this TAS takes in level 3-2 was an idea from his WIP, and the idea for writing a Lua script for the rooms came from him, although the script I wrote is much more robust.
General Movement
- Navigating up ladders is much faster using a zig-zag movement where you climb up for one frame, move laterally the next, then rinse and repeat.
- When walking across ladders that have space to climb down, pressing down to grab hold of the ladder as early as possible may snap you forward a farther distance than you would have walked in that time, which is dependent on your pixel position.
- There's about a half-second delay before enemies become tangible again after exiting a door, which is why you can run straight through them during this time. Enemies are also intangible during the animation that plays when you try to go through the exit door without all 8 keys. The latter instance is only used in level 5-3 in the TAS.
- Navigating rooms is so slow that we never collect any extraneous items in the TAS, even the speed shoes; only the keys, hammers, and pickaxes required to progress are collected.
Possible Improvements
- There's a potential time-saving glitch that can only be done in all World 4 levels and 9-3—the only levels that have breakable blocks stacked on top of each other. If after breaking the bottom block, you take damage before the top block falls down to take its place, the top block will be stuck floating in midair, meaning you'll never have to break it. No enemies were in good enough positions to take advantage of that in this TAS.
- When my brother and I played this game as kids, we both swear we remember level 4-5 being skipped during one of our playthroughs. The game just went from 4-4 straight to 5-1. I have not yet found any way to replicate this. If anyone has experienced anything similar, let me know as finding potential level skips in this game would be awesome!
