Intodruction

Note that I'm German and have been learning English merely 4 and a half years.
This is my first submission on this great site. A run about one of my very first games I've ever played, The Smurfs!

About the game

Here's a short intodruction I found on the internet:
Three Smurfs have disappeared from the village! As Hefty Smurf your journey will be long.
Jump across the river climb the mountains and travel through mines as you try to find Gargamel.
Papa Smurf is counting on you to defeat Gargamel and bring the missing smurfs home!»»
The Smurfs is a sidescroller in which you must reach the goal in each level by beating or avoiding enemies and jumping across fosses.
There are 12 levels in total + 3 boss fights.

About the run

  • No passwords
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Plays on hardest difficulty
  • Manipulates luck
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Used emulator: Visual Boy Advance 1.72
In my first attempt I beat the game in 9:16 minutes. This is an improvement of 14 seconds, most of the improvement came from the fact that I didn't know that the first screen was skipable (~220 frames saved). This led to better timings. I also optimized much at level 6, the boss fights and other parts!

Items

This is about those useless items in the game.
They don't lag but bring bonus points. In the run, I didn't really care for points, though.
The best possible highscore wouldn't have been that amazing anyway.
  • Raspberry - Refills your health by one unit.
  • Leaf - Get ten of them and you'll earn one extra life.
  • Smurf doll - Extra life!
  • Star - If you get all five stars in a level, you may play a bonus game. Even by getting only one star, there would be a lag of 10 frames. So I always avoided them if possible.

Tricks I used

Don't continue reading if you haven't seen the movie yet or it may be less entertaining afterwards!
I found several glitches in the game but almost all of them were useless and pointless.
  • If you get damage, you fall back. By turning around in front of an unavoidable enemy you fall into the right direction.
  • But by pressing left + right before getting hit you can even avoid the "falling back" animation. However, this bug wasn't optimized well yet.
  • You'll run faster on platforms which go into your direction, like birds and water striders.
  • and more...

Notes on certain levels

LEVEL 1

A level with many platforms and great variety of enemies. I used the "falling into other direction" trick here first.

LEVEL 4

I stopped slightly in the end in order to luck-manipulate the location the snake in the next level comes from!

LEVEL 5

In my first attempt I took much damage to save time. But due to better timing I was able to just run through the level without taking much damage. In my opinion, that unfortunately made this level less entertaining...

LEVEL 6

I optimized all jumps, and used the floor detection to its full capacity!

LEVEL 9

Due to buggy layout of the solid sprites in this level, I could have gone a new route but it was sadly not time-saving!

LEVEL 10

The last polar bear in this level was not avoidable. I wonder if it was intended to be like this...

Closing words

Thanks to all people who posted into The Smurfs Thread in the Gameboy forums.
I hope you enjoy the run!
I uploaded the movie on Youtube

adelikat: Good voter response, and nice game choice. Congrats on having your first submission accepted :)


TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #1605: MUGG's GB The Smurfs in 09:02.17
Skilled player (1099)
Joined: 8/26/2006
Posts: 1139
Location: United Kingdom
I have a few gripes with this: In the second level you take damage from a fish where it seems avoidable. Why? At the end of level you rapidly press Start and A. This suggests that this movie was made using slowdown rather than frame advance. Am I right? If so why did you choose to play this way? In the boss level with the Old Man and the see-saw, you jumped entirely over it before jumping back onto it to damage him. It looked like this could have been done earlier. Is there a reason for this? I'll withhold my vote until you answer these questions. EDIT - Okay, I've thought it over. The game was better than what I expected. It was fast and the levels were quite entertaining. The sidestrollers however were not, yet you made an honest effort at jazzing them up a bit which was good to see (although not entirely successful). It looked well optimised for the most part. There are many points in platformers where inexperienced TASer's can lose time and you seemed to avoid this. However, like I said before I'm not entirely convinced by several places (I don't have the time to prove myself right (or wrong) so I will ignore it somewhat). My main problem with this run is that you took damage from that fish. Yes, you needed the item but I'm sure that you could have just gone around it. It gives a sloppy and rushed impression. I'm voting meh, but leaning more towards a yes than a no. I've seen far worse debut runs (and runs in general) so good job! It's just those little parts that I did not enjoy.
Active player (487)
Joined: 2/19/2007
Posts: 114
It looked like there was one point in act 4 where you used vines when you could have used a lilly pad. Also is it only the mine and sledge levels where the slope effects your movement? As there were a couple of places where jumped over a downhill, for no (visible?) reason.
Editor, Expert player (2372)
Joined: 5/15/2007
Posts: 3940
Location: Germany
Mukki wrote:
I have a few gripes with this: In the second level you take damage from a fish where it seems avoidable. Why?
There was a raspberry just behind him. And in the end of the level I had my all my heart containers filled. I thought it looked better if I took damage at that part to make it more variegated..
At the end of level you rapidly press Start and A. This suggests that this movie was made using slowdown rather than frame advance. Am I right? If so why did you choose to play this way?
I used frame advance. Start and A (and also B) have the same effect here, which is closing the window and going to the next level. Pressing A on the one frame and Start on the other leads to the best possible time for closing the window. It's also said somewhere in the "how to make a movie" or so...
In the boss level with the Old Man and the see-saw, you jumped entirely over it before jumping back onto it to damage him. It looked like this could have been done earlier. Is there a reason for this?
I jumped around, what else should I have done? Just standing there and doing some left and right movement? The bird comes down to certain time periods. Only at the last nut that he throws down it is important to stand very left so that the nut flys down very early and to jump as soon as possible on the see-saw.
TheRandomPie_IV wrote:
It looked like there was one point in act 4 where you used vines when you could have used a lilly pad.
Where exactly? It isn't so important in level 4 to come very fast to the right side because you still have to wait for the frog to come up.
Also is it only the mine and sledge levels where the slope effects your movement? As there were a couple of places where jumped over a downhill, for no (visible?) reason.
Where exactly? Please give me the time on the youtube video or the frame number.
Active player (487)
Joined: 2/19/2007
Posts: 114
The three jumped slopes I caught from the youtube video were at: 0:35 2:00 (possibly necessary to avoid an acorn? It looked like you could have jumped later.) 7:44 And the vine at 2:18. Since you seem certain that the the last boss is fine, I'll vote yes, these are only a few minor things and I found the game surprisingly entertaining.
Editor, Expert player (2372)
Joined: 5/15/2007
Posts: 3940
Location: Germany
Oh, those jumps are really random. Because I felt like jumping at those parts!
adelikat
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I enjoyed this movie. It is fast paced, has variety, and has a lot of possibilities in terms of optimizations. The auto-scrollers are less entertaining by nature, but they don't seem to last long enough to get old. The TAS quality is good as well. At first, taking damage on that fish bugged me, but I saw that you did refill your health too. Clearly it was intentional and thought out, but probably not the best thing to do. You don't want your audience questioning whether or not your movie was sloppy. All in all, I vote yes. I think it makes a good contribution to TASvideos.
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects
Active player (411)
Joined: 3/16/2004
Posts: 2623
Location: America, Québec
I got bored watching it. Is it me or the music in that game doesn't fit with the Smurfs theme... :s And Gargamel isn't much taller than the Smurf :s
Joined: 5/27/2005
Posts: 465
Location: Turku, Finland
Phil wrote:
Is it me or the music in that game doesn't fit with the Smurfs theme... :s
I was just about to say that the musics in this game are very good but doesn't seem to fit with the game at all :D The movie itself was very precise and kept me entertained most of the time. It's a shame the game is black'n'white. It reduces the entertainment value pretty much. Anyways, a yes vote for me (even though it has already been accepted). I'll encode this tomorrow so we can get it published ;).
Which run should I encode next? :)
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. ---- [910] GB The Smurfs by MUGG in 09:02.17
Joined: 11/13/2005
Posts: 37
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i could improve this bye 20frames only with frame improving but still a good run but not so good game voting meh
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