Snow Bros warpless TAS by Randil

This run is 10 094 frames, 2min 48.23 seconds, faster than the current run of this game, which happens to be the oldest non-obsoleted movie on this site - it's around 3.5 years old! The improved time comes from playing the levels better and avoiding getting items from enemies. More details on what has been improved can be found under the "Improvements section below.
  • Aims for fastest possible time.
  • 1 player controls 2 characters.
  • Manipulates luck.
  • Genre: Platform

About the game:

The goal in Snow Bros is simple, you have to kill all the enemies that are on screen. There are 50 levels in the game, and every 10:th level is a boss level. In order to beat a floor and proceed to the next one, you first have to kill all the enemies that are on screen, and then pick up any items that they leave behind. The next level won't start until there are no items on screen. It is because of this that I avoid getting items unless it's necessary or faster than avoiding it.
There are two ways of killing an enemy: The first way is to cover him in snow until he turns into a snowball, and then roll him away. The second way is to hit him with another snowball. If an enemy that is not totally covered in snow is hit by a snowball, he will drop an item. This is why I almost never hit an enemy with a snowball unless he is completely covered in snow.
There are power-ups in this game that will make your snow men stronger. In this run, I pick up two out of three power-ups: The first one I pick up is the red potion, which allows me to run and jump faster. The second potion, the blue one, makes my shots stronger, which is very useful. There is also a yellow potion that will allow you to fire longer, but it didn't help me anything in the run. I waste some time on level 1 and 2 to get the necessary power-ups for both characters.
You'll notice that I encounter a sumo enemy on floor 24,26 and 28. If you hit him with a freeze shot, he will disappear, but if you don't, and there are enemies on screen, he will fire some shost at you. If you don't shoot him, but you've killed all enemies on screen, he will disappear and money will fall down from above. :) This happens on floor 28, since it's faster than reaching the sumo and shooting him.
After every boss, I'll get to play the slot machines. I always get 3 X every time I play, since getting anything else would give me points, and this wastes time.

Boss fights:

As stated above, there are 5 bosses in this game. All bosses have both normal HP (health points) and sub-HP, where 1 HP = 256 sub-HP, just like with pixels and sub-pixels.
Hitting a boss with a snowball deals 1 HP damage to the boss. Hitting him with a freeze shot deals 1 sub-HP. So theoretically, I can kill a boss by just shooting at him, but as you'll realize, it's much faster to use snowballs.
For example, the first boss has 5 HP and 40 sub-HP. So the way to kill that boss is to fire 40 shots to drain all his sub-HP, and then hit him with 5 snowballs. It's possible to kill him using just snowballs, but in that case I would need 6 snowballs, which takes more time.

Improvements:

It would be too much work to write each and every improvement here, so I'll just give you the general strategies I used to save time:
  • Playing with frame precision, such as jumping on the first possible frame, etc.
  • Fire at the first possible frame.
  • Avoid getting items by killing every enemy on screen when they're completely covered in snow.
  • Kill bosses faster.
  • New and faster strategies on every level.
  • Better manipulation of the slots.

The making of this run:

This is my first completed 2-player movie. It was challenging to control 2 players at the same time - I assigned control of player 1 to my gamepad, and player 2 to my keyboard. I usually first played each level individually to get a hunch of what to do with each character before playing with both.
This game is pretty edit-friendly, I managed to edit in some improvements without having to redo the entire run, which was nice. :)

Thanks to:

  • DJ FozzBoss for his previous run, suggestions and motivation.
  • Maximus for his TAS movie editor.
That should be all. Enjoy the movie!

Bisqwit: The author replaced the movie file, making a 95 frame improvement by avoiding money drops in floor 28.

NesVideoAgent: Hi! I am a robot. I took a few screenshots of this movie and placed them here. Here goes! Feel free to clean up the list.

adelikat: Accepting for publication as an improvement to the published movie.

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #1718: Randil's NES Snow Bros in 13:56.85
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It is slower than 金属狂人's movie, around half minutes so. Why's that?
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Bisqwit wrote:
It is slower than 金属狂人's movie, around half minutes so. Why's that?
Because this run is warpless. 金属狂人's movie uses warps and skips several levels, thus saving a lot of time. I'll add to the comments that this run is warpless.
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Not familiar with the game much, but the faster movie uses a warp of some kind, which has prompted discussion as to whether a warped and non-warped run would be accepted.
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mmbossman wrote:
Not familiar with the game much, but the faster movie uses a warp of some kind, which has prompted discussion as to whether a warped and non-warped run would be accepted.
Exactly. Everyone who has an opinion on this matter is more than welcome to discuss whether a warped run would obsolete this run, or if a warpless run is more entertaining. I personally think that a warpless run is more fun to watch, plus the current run is warpless so I thought I'd stick with that. But if the general opinion is that a warped run would be a lot better, I'll cancel this and make a warped run instead...
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Having not seen either of these new submissions, based on the published movie I think that this game is so boring that only a warpful run deserves to be published, if even that.
adelikat
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Bisqwit wrote:
Having not seen either of these new submissions, based on the published movie I think that this game is so boring that only a warpful run deserves to be published, if even that.
A warpless movie would only save about 1 minute and warping happens to not be very interesting to watch in this game. If we can only have one movie, I vote for the warpless (this may be the first time I have every thought that ;P). Also, I find the game interesting. It is like bubble bobble but with out the ridiculous wait times between levels and far shorter & less repetitive. The two player aspect is also interesting to watch.
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects
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I agree, after watching this. It is certainly not the most entertaining game, but by far the least entertaining. It was slightly repetitive but it was played very well and had some pretty funny moments (I really liked the riding the snowballs into the holes in the floor, just to jump in time for the level to end) It's a shame you couldn't find a single frame more, 9999 is just begging to have one. One question, in floor 28, it feels slower than the other levels, and you never touch the sumo guy (whoever he is). Is there something special about that level, or am I imagining things?
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Allright, so I've done a few rough calculations on how much time a warped run would save: Using warps allows you to go from floor 11 to 18, and from floor 31 to 38. However, since you have to go through a stupid slot machine scene, each time you use a warp you have to watch this slot machine for around 37 seconds per warp, which isn't very fun. Going from floor 11 to 18 saves around 75 seconds. Going from floor 31 to 38 saves aroud 80 seconds. This gives us that using warps will save around 80+75-37-37 = 81 seconds.
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mmbossman wrote:
One question, in floor 28, it feels slower than the other levels, and you never touch the sumo guy (whoever he is). Is there something special about that level, or am I imagining things?
Level 28 is a little special. There are two ways to end the level: 1. The way I do in the run, kill all the enemies, wait until sumo disappears, and grab the money. 2. Use the enemies to get to the sumo and shoot him, to skip the money drop. Interestingly, this is slower than taking the money drop in this level, since I have to wait a lot of time for the enemies to get into positions. That's why I go with the first strategy.
Joined: 3/15/2007
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Just watched it, and while I can understand while some people might call this boring, it's a lot more entertaining than some others. The levels are very short, for one. Before I knew it I was watching level 15. While the slot machine sequences are sort of boring, I think that, due to the limited differences in time between a warp and warpless run there shouldn't be any distinction made between the two. That's usually reserved for stuff like the aLttP glitched run. That being said, it would probably be a better idea to include warps, imo. yes vote for now
Joined: 4/12/2007
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I think that because you would only save so little on a warped run, and there's the loong wait for counting points if you do, there should only be a warpless run. 81 seconds for 12 levels is a good trade, IMO. Voting yes.
adelikat
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Just watched this submission. It looks very well optimized. I enjoyed it. I intended to vote yes, but I may have unintentionally voted no :/
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects
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It was I who voted No. Although I meant to vote yes (oops). I thought it was quite good. I have never played the game but it seems easy enough to understand and looks like a fun game too. The music was nice too but the slotmachine parts I fastforwarded through. They were no fun.
Post subject: The CHILL BROS
Joined: 9/17/2007
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Well, good movie...the fellows are entretaining, i however fell asleep. I didnt fell asleep at the othello movie, so has to mean something... ....loved the boss-scenes optimizations, the twin-birds more than any other, and the final boss. Maybe i just need to sleep more. At the end, the movie was entretaining enough, and a warp-ful movie will be just 80 seconds shorter (which is an improvement to the current movie, if im not wrong) but it would be 100% less entretaining (i mean, it was noticeable the effort to make the movie entretaining). So its a Yes, not solid, but a yes.
I am not a Taser, i just needed to vote...i do visit the site =P
Shingen
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The falling money is not caused by the Sumo, it was because you beat the level by launching one snowball. Try it - Edit in a second snowball launch and you'll remove the money falling. Probably won't save a whole lot of frames... this is the only reason why I voted "meh" instead of "Yes".
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Shingen wrote:
The falling money is not caused by the Sumo, it was because you beat the level by launching one snowball. Try it - Edit in a second snowball launch and you'll remove the money falling. Probably won't save a whole lot of frames... this is the only reason why I voted "meh" instead of "Yes".
Damn, you're right. :S I feel really stupid now. Avoiding the money saves 115 frames. I'll try to edit this in, but I'll have to redo a few levels anyway... I'll let you all know later how it works out, but it's likely that I'll ask Bisqwit to update the movie file. Thanks for telling me about this, Shingen. :)' EDIT: I have now PM:d Bisqwit with the new .fcm file. In total, the new movie file is 95 frames faster, so the 10 000 frames wall has been reached! :) The editing went just fine, though I had some bad luck on the slots machines and lost a few frames there, but it's nothing to worry about. I also managed to beat floor 39 a bit faster. EDIT2: The .fcm-file has been replaced! Now this submission is 95 frames faster. :)
Shingen
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Randil wrote:
Damn, you're right. :S I feel really stupid now. Avoiding the money saves 115 frames. I'll try to edit this in, but I'll have to redo a few levels anyway... I'll let you all know later how it works out, but it's likely that I'll ask Bisqwit to update the movie file. Thanks for telling me about this, Shingen. :)'
I frequently play the arcade version in MAME, this is one of my "guilty pleasure" games. Too bad the warps don't exist in the arcade version.
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adelikat wrote:
A warpless movie would only save about 1 minute and warping happens to not be very interesting to watch in this game. If we can only have one movie, I vote for the warpless (this may be the first time I have every thought that ;P).
Randil wrote:
Allright, so I've done a few rough calculations on how much time a warpless run would save: Using warps (...)
haha, these make so much sense I don't know whether to laugh or cry
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Wouter Jansen wrote:
adelikat wrote:
A warpless movie would only save about 1 minute and warping happens to not be very interesting to watch in this game. If we can only have one movie, I vote for the warpless (this may be the first time I have every thought that ;P).
Randil wrote:
Allright, so I've done a few rough calculations on how much time a warpless run would save: Using warps (...)
haha, these make so much sense I don't know whether to laugh or cry
I don't know, either.
<klmz> it reminds me of that people used to keep quoting adelikat's IRC statements in the old good days <adelikat> no doubt <adelikat> klmz, they still do
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Wouter Jansen wrote:
adelikat wrote:
A warpless movie would only save about 1 minute and warping happens to not be very interesting to watch in this game. If we can only have one movie, I vote for the warpless (this may be the first time I have every thought that ;P).
Randil wrote:
Allright, so I've done a few rough calculations on how much time a warpless run would save: Using warps (...)
haha, these make so much sense I don't know whether to laugh or cry
I think that what is confusing is a small typo from both adelikat's part and mine. It should be "a warped movie would only..." in adelkat's post, and "I've done a few rough calculations on how much time a warped run would save" in my post. Once again, it is the warped run that is faster than the warpless run, by about 85 seconds. Sorry for the confusion. :)
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. ---- [980] NES Snow Bros. "2 players" by Randil in 13:56.85
Joined: 2/16/2005
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Its funny how much the bot failed taking good pictures :) I guess this run is mostly screen scrolling?
This signature is much better than its previous version.
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asteron wrote:
Its funny how much the bot failed taking good pictures :) I guess this run is mostly screen scrolling?
Yeah, about 75% of this run is waiting for the screen to scroll. :P And it is here that the most "movement" is going on too, that's why most screenshost are from screen scrolling.
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The .avi-file for this submission was encoded with the wrong movie-file! The .avi-file was encoded with the old .fcm-file, before Bisqwit replaced it with a 95 frames faster one. (you'll see this on floor 28 - in the current .fcm-file, I don't get money drop on this floor, but in the .avi-file I do.) So I guess this will have to be encoded to .avi again... :P