Welcome to my first TASing attempt. This was my first N64 game so I thought I would run it. The goal was to get from the start of adventure mode to the end of Wizpig II as fast as possible. Banjo seemed to be the fastest character so he was used.
Aims for fastest time
Abuses programming errors
Tricks
Sliding - R sliding makes you go faster but not fast enough to be able to snake.
Zippers - Zippers give you a speed boost. Releasing A over a zipper results in a better boost accompanied by a green as opposed to purple flame.
A tapping - The A button can be pressed repeatedly rather than held to gain speed. This trick is exploited in every cart track and to a lesser extent in the hover and plane tracks. The tap rate differs between the vehicles, though.
Hovercraft snaking - Holding R and alternating between left and right is faster than travelling in a straight line.
Barrel rolling - Used in the plane tracks to gain speed. Releasing A increases this effect.
Boost jump - After a zipper, if you manage to get airborne, the speed boost continues until you land. This effect is displayed in Jungle Falls towards the end of the lap.
Wall boosting - I jump off some walls to change direction or because it was better to do so.
Other Comments
In the Fire Mountain challenge, the eggs can only be stolen a few seconds after they are dropped hence my rolling to kill time.
The boss race in Dino Domain can supposedly be won by staying at the starting point you will mysteriously win. A few people claimed this but I have no idea how to replicate it.
The credits can be skipped with a console reset but that is not yet possible with this emulator. Skipping the credits would have brought the time below two hours.
The trophy races are essentially the same as the other races so I displayed the minimap the whole time to give it some replay value. The exception is Boulder Canyon where the speedometer was too important to be hidden.
There are a few times in this run where a weapon is deployed behind my vehicle. Even though you cannot see it, these weapons always hit the person in first place helping me to lap the CPUs in some races.
The A button is only pressed once during the first Windmill Plains race.
I wasn’t able to use hex editing at all during this run. I changed the minimap/speedometer once during a race but a desync managed to find its way in three tracks later.
Thanks to...
Yasutaka Mitani - I watched his videos to get some strategies.
The members of the forum who me gave encouragement, ideas and various comments.
adelikat: Accepting for publication due to overwhelming viewer response. Even most of the no voters approved of the game choice and voted against it due to claims of improvements. No claim of such improvements were confirmed by any type of testing. Therefore, I was unable to weigh them into my decision.
Nice, my first video game finally gets a long overdue tas. I loved how you owned the sharp turns with one of the clumsiest characters. Voting yes for a great submission.
Joined: 6/13/2006
Posts: 3300
Location: Massachussetts, USA
Yippee! I'm glad to finally see this completed.
I'm going to withold from voting until I can watch it in its entirety by the end of the week, but I'm most likely going to vote yes. Stellar work from the WIPs I had seen of a classic N64 game that many have played.
I loved this game when I was a kid. I recently watched the speedrun, but got bored of it, due to the lack of item use.
I expected the same effect when I was about to watch this tas. I was pleasantly surprised. Doing each level 3 times does make the game a bit repetitive, but what can you do. The minor repetitiveness is not enough to change my STRONG YES VOTE to a meh, let alone a weak yes vote.
A hearty and resounding YES!
A game I could never beat in it's entirety (sp) has been decimated in the ass by Xenos. Gonna have to go with a homing missile of yes-dom for this movie. Good work, buddy.
Good work with this one.
This game is a little repetitive but at least there's some context to it instead of it just being a racing game (not that that justifies it, but it helps when it's apparent, I guess). I didn't view this movie all in one sitting so it stayed relatively fresh whenever I decided to start watching it again, so there's a plus. It's also a very colorful game and seems to render perfectly with Rice's Plugin.
Besides all that, congratulations on completing such a fine TAS of a difficult racing game. Yes vote for the utter ownage over all.
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
I've too actually followed your WIP's (back when I had XP) and enjoyed them fairly well. Yes it is a bit repetitive but that wont stop me from voting yes. Good work.
Hey, this was actually really good for someone who is TASing for the first time! Great!
What we have here is clearly a quality run. Actually, you managed to make them latecomers on like every race! I remember this game was not too easy (especially the Silver Coin missions) and you make it look so damn easy.
Congratulations, keep this quality on your next runs please.
Yes vote.
As much as I like the game and desperately want to see a run on it I sadly have to vote "no". The game is vastly under optimized there was a few things I noticed
Bananas are very imporant to collect during races as they increase the overall top speed of the players kart, but sometimes easy ones are missed
From what a pro told me getting a green boost while using a hover craft or plane is a bad idea, stick with the purple one, except when using the ground based zipper
I get the feeling its pointless to try and build up a boost via the blue baloons since it only makes a small difference, I think it best to always use the first boost thats collected
There seemed to be a lot of unneccessary bumping which didn't seem deliberate and was avoidable
For hover boosting while using a balloon , wouldn't it be better to hop before using a boost
The plane spin that helps Banjo go faster seemed to not be exploited enough while in some areas while it seemed to be used in areas where it not neccesscary, also there where places where Banjo bashed into the ground perhaps the spin could have helped to avoid such situations
From watching the run in general I got the impression the author did not go back any significant distances in order to make something better, I got the impression the everything whilst going around the tracks was being reacted to instantanously.
Sadly, I'm with AKA on this one. The run seemed unoptimized (even though it was pretty damned good), for the same reasons AKA said. Overall, the run is good, but not perfect. I get a feeling that it wouldn't be too hard to improve this run after it's published.
I'm not against the publishing of this TAS. I just didn't enjoy watching it because there were too many places where I was like "Whaaa.. why didn't you do this?" or "Why in the world would you do it like this?".
Good work, but it could have been better.
if this is true, then it is a flaw because you can use the same trick on the boost balloons that you use on the zippers and there is definitely no point therefore in building up the balloons to get a boost that is equivalent to what you can get with one
also why banjo? why not a faster racer?
and i havent watched it yet but is it possible to unlock drumstick then reset, choose him, and continue? or does that bust up tas rules somewhere to do anything but a soft reset
ive beaten dkr several times and would love to see the tas, but this sounds unoptimized
Joined: 6/5/2006
Posts: 188
Location: Malmö, Sweden
They only increase speed up to 10 IIRC.
On the run itself: I love this game, and it was awesome to see the levels going by at such a fast pace. It did get a bit repetitive though, having to do each level three times. Even though the coin collection offered some minor route changing it wasn't really enough to make the level seem different. But I had fun watching it anyhow :D.
Yes vote.
Even the best player is limited by the speed of his fingers, or his mind's ability to control them. But what happens when speed is not a factor, when theory becomes reality?
hes right
i have one question for the guy who did the movie: any dkr vet knows that pressing "a" early terminates the green boost from a zipper early, what is the amount of time specifically before you can hit "a" after hitting a zipper to maximize the boost?
Joined: 11/11/2006
Posts: 1235
Location: United Kingdom
Okay I've finally watched it twice to get a good feel for what things are done on purpose, and now I'm here to explain things in the best way I can before people vote no on technicality :)
The max to make a difference is 10. They don't seem to make a terribly large difference if he gets just less than 10, so I assume time is wasted for collecting more.
This would be true except hes boosting alot in mid air, making his speed constant until he lands. once hes done so, he also does the snaking thing keeping a higher than usual speed.
I believe this is a case by case bonus. I think the small boosts are used on corners to get the right angle for a particular corner, but there are some levels where this isn't required (and as such this is used).
FODA's altered beast run is that way. :)
Spelling trolling aside, the bumping seems to be either unavoidable due to an inconvenience in the way (such as a giant dinosaur or log) or because something else was in the way. Another thing which is in the submission text is altering the angle of the player (If you notice the speed hardly decreases at all in most jumps and significantly changes the player's angle for the better)
This one I don't know about. Does hopping keep speed without losing any?
Could you give an example where these decrease speed in a negative way? (not to alter trajectory)
I agree with this in some ways, but bear in mind this took a long time to make and hex editing was not possible for this game without desyncing. Expecting him to go back and do things all over again isn't really a valid option unless for a v2 run.
No. Soft reset in this version of mupen is not supported.
Just FYI, I voted yes because it entertained me. My only disappointment was that no extra characters were unlocked. I guess this is because of the redundancy of doing the same tracks over and over anymore than necessary to complete the game.
<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs
I admit that watching the movie sometimes gave the impression, that some parts were not played with enough accuracy, mostly the way AKA already pointed out.
Still, I enjoyed the movie very much and watched the whole thing without fast forwarding (except for parts, I already saw in the WIPs). Good job, xenos
I give this a yes vote, which is, however, greatly influenced by the fact, that I loved to play this game years ago.
I left my no vote as well, I am gonna have to agree with AKA, plus I also tried to offer some advice to this user, having thoroughly beat this game on console I am fairly sure this can be done much better...I mean Banjo isn't even the fastest starting driver. I believe Krunch is. I could be wrong on that though...
if by starting driver you mean not t.t. or drumstick, then you are correct sah!
his handling is awful though
so it looks like someone else wants to know why banjo was chosen
it should be noted however that whenever i saw time trial world records back when the game came out pipsy and tip tup were setting them all
i forget why tip tup and pipsy are optimal for time trial and not for the adventure mode though
Joined: 11/11/2006
Posts: 1235
Location: United Kingdom
They are very light. When something hits them, they lose alot of speed. Maybe thats it?
Also, I believe Banjo was used because hes fast and has the handling required.
<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs
That and the reason why the expert said that is because when you have a green boost in a hovercart or an airplane the game will straighten you out before it boosts you (which costs about 1/2 of a second), if you hit it perfectly in line with the boost though, it will immediately boost you. This is hard to do on a console, and trivial to do in a TAS. I haven't watched the movie so I don't know if the player did this.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
From what a pro told me getting a green boost while using a hover craft or plane is a bad idea, stick with the purple one, except when using the ground based zipper
The colour of the boost is irrelevant. It is whether you are holding A that makes the difference.
AKA wrote:
There seemed to be a lot of unneccessary bumping which didn't seem deliberate and was avoidable
Maybe. But the instances in this movie, no time or a negligible amount was lost due to bumping so I wasn't particularly concerned about it.
AKA wrote:
For hover boosting while using a balloon , wouldn't it be better to hop before using a boost
In some instances, yes but in others, it makes no difference.
AKA wrote:
The plane spin that helps Banjo go faster seemed to not be exploited enough while in some areas while it seemed to be used in areas where it not necessary, also there where places where Banjo bashed into the ground perhaps the spin could have helped to avoid such situations
If you let go of A, start spinning and hold A again your speed goes down to 30 and slowly rises. Perhaps you were referring to instances where I was excessively spinning in order that my speed would not drop like that.
this is me wrote:
also why banjo? why not a faster racer?
Banjo is only second in speed to Krunch. However, Krunch has ridiculously bad handling and acceleration that would lose much time. There were instances in this movie where Banjo's handling wasn't good enough so I don't see how Krunch could make it.
this is me wrote:
i have one question for the guy who did the movie: any dkr vet knows that pressing "a" early terminates the green boost from a zipper early, what is the amount of time specifically before you can hit "a" after hitting a zipper to maximize the boost?
This is only relevent to the hovercraft. It seems the boosts in this game are often based on luck. The starting boost for instance varies in speed from boosting you to 60 to 90 even though you press A at the same time on a different track.
DonamerDragon wrote:
I left my no vote as well, I am gonna have to agree with AKA, plus I also tried to offer some advice to this user, having thoroughly beat this game on console I am fairly sure this can be done much better...I mean Banjo isn't even the fastest starting driver. I believe Krunch is. I could be wrong on that though...
Advice that came to me at the end of the TAS...
All things considered I think that this run is improvable but I think you will find that there is not as much time to be saved as you think there is.