Dino Land
(GEN) in 1:11.142
Some people just want to TAS games they played as a child, and there's not much else to the impulse. By some people, I mean me. Today I bring to you Dino Land, a pinball game for the ol' Sega that wasn't the highest regarded for the system but still has its fun and charm. Your ball is actually an armadillo-like dinosaur named Dino-Bunz, and he aims to defeat large dinosaur boss enemies in order to save his sweet girlfriend, Meeshell.
But that doesn't really matter, because what we want is the ending sequence and to roll credits, and the only way to do that is to roll over the scroll counter, so let's spam some high scoring bonuses baby! The game officially ends once the visible score counter crosses the 100 million point threshold, which can take a very, very long time in a standard gameplay--defeating boss monsters only gives Dino-Bunz 1 million each time, which isn't much for how long it takes to do! But there's a simple trick that can be abused to rack up the points quick, and this TAS abuses it obscenely.
- Dino Land begins on the Land table. With warps, you can go to the Sea table (not seen here,) or the Sky table, which has the high-scoring trick. So our first goal is to head there as quickly as we can.
- Step 1 to unlocking Sky table is the four turtle-dinos in the top-right--flip all of their lights to red and keep them red. Step 2 is defeating all of the five gray dinos that circle the bottom half of the field. Once all five are gone, they will start to respawn, but if those top-right lights are red, these gray dinos will be replaced with yellowy frilly boys instead. Step 3 is to defeat these five new dinos and dump your ball down to the warp zone. Since waiting for all five dinos to spawn in twice is required, I believe my Land table is done pretty much as fast as possible, barring maybe some better lag management.
- Now in the Sky table, our goal is the plinko zone in the top-right. Setting all nine lights to the same color (red or blue) gives the player One Meeellion Dollars *places pinky up to lips. that's still a culturally relevant reference, right?* This bonus not only does not pause gameplay, but it also does not reset the lights, so flip-flopping a single light red-to-blue-to-red again will give yet another million, rinse and repeat and repeat and repeat, one hundred times total, and you've broken 100 Mil and the game is won. (Note that the trigger to roll credits is for the visible score counter to break 100,000,000. Letting the ball fall down the fail hole and warping back to the Land table causes the visible counter to immediately re-sync with the internal score. You *could* just hold the ball on a flipper and wait for the score to slowly tick up, but why?)
Thanks for watching, and the only other thing I want to say is that initially, I tried to find an endless score loop. By that I mean, ending input super-early and letting the ball auto-score for itself infinitely until 100m was scored. This game seems to add a random direction vector to every time the ball hits a target or a wall, though, plus you cannot interact with a table element again until the ball is completely disconnected from it, so the game developers definitely took extra steps to prevent that kind of easy exploit. It would be really neat to find infinite points somewhere on the Land table and forcing the TAS viewer to sit through like fifteen minutes of score counting before the credits roll, har har har. The route I ended up with came out to being extremely fast--the runs I found on Youtube are hours long, and speedrun.com has no runs for this game.
OH also, the whole reason I made this run was because I wanted to go see the previous TAS one more time and discovered that...there never was one? I could swear I saw a TAS for this a long long time ago, and now I can't find evidence of anything at all ever existing. No idea what I'm on about, what my memory was actually from, maybe it was just a game play vid on Google Videos or something I dunno. we're talking a long long long long time ago, and i'm an old man now. now i'm making up clouds to yell at apparently
Challenger: Wow this pinball game is everything! It has an actual objective and you can achieve the credits sequence by just having a very bold strategy without the need to advance the story. Great job beating it with only one minute of time!
Accepting to Standard.
