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There are definitely frames to be saved throughout this whole run. Attacking fewer enemies and possibly using more potions, while attacking specific enemies that cause lag with bullets (I'm looking at you, wizard-looking jerks!) Also, the potion use right before the final boss seemed unnecessary--since you have to use one later during the boss anyway you could probably have just swapped characters first instead and saved one trip into the menu. Using a full health potion or two in the Knight fight to keep yourself near or inside his hitbox could possibly make that one faster, too, but this is just me spitballing ideas after only viewing the encode.
I'd like to see more in the submission text, too, like I don't know this game at all, I don't know what you're doing much of the time. It seems like the RTA path has you pick up a bunch of MaxHP Ups...do those affect anything else, like your damage? If it's just HP/MP, maybe a couple could be skipped to save time.
I mean, I'm kinda nitpicking. The run's good! If I paid enough attention to watch the whole way through and notice little things as possible improvements, the game and the run had to be entertaining enough. If the core choice issue doesn't kill the run's chances, I could see it being publishable, but I feel also that there's enough room for someone to take another fine-tooth comb to it later.
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Link to videoDownload .bk2 file here.
Hi! I was looking for something new to play on the Game Boy and found this action adventure. Early in the original GB's existence, this Lolo-Zelda makes a simple fetch quest of Ultima 4's runes, buried at the bottom of caves. Not a very complex adventure, but it being fast-paced and flexible enough for TAS strategies made me think it would be a fun run to gun down.
So, here's a test TAS that completes the game in 30:21. A final time will be easily sub-30, as the usual mid-run discoveries taught me faster techs and provided a need to rethink dungeon order.
Fun Facts:
* There are three difficulty options, but their effects are very limited: They only decide what happens to the player upon death. Easy mode means you restart the room. Medium mode means you leave the dungeon, inventory and cash intact. Hard mode means you leave the dungeon and lose your money and consumables. Since this is a no-deaths run, the difficulty selection makes zero difference, however I picked Hard just for precedent's sake.
* You can select one of four characters. Shamino is balanced, Mariah has high MP, Dupre has high HP/low speed, and Iolo has high speed and a Bow. With Iolo being about a frame per tile faster from the start of the game, he's the best TAS choice.
* The only equipment I pick up are the Magic Rope, which can cross one tile of water at a time, the Wand of Fireballs, which costs 1/8th of an MP to burn special webs and does double Iolo's starting Bow's damage, and the Rod of Lightning, which costs the same to kill the Black Knight and does triple damage to everything else.
* The items I use are Food (a carryable full health refill,) Potions (same for MP,) Jars of Oil (A single use explosive), Magic Boots (allow you to walk over all tiles for one room.), and the Ankh (immediate warp to Lord British, all characters start with this and it never runs out.)
* Runes increase your stats on pickup based on their associated Principles: Compassion raises Speed, Honesty raises MP, and Valor raises HP. Dungeons can be completed in any order, provided you have any necessary equipment. So, I selected an order that gave me all 4 speed increases as soon as possible. So:
--2. Hatred. Speed.
--3. Cowardice. Magic Rope crosses water tiles, and HP.
--4. Injustice. Speed and MP.
--1. Deceit. Wand of Fireballs melts special webs. Needs two trips, skips rune for now.
--5. Selfishness. Rod of Lightning kills the Black Knight. HP and Speed.
--7. Pride. HP, MP, and (supposedly) Speed.
--8. The Stygian Abyss. No benefits from the rune--game doesn't end until all 8 are picked up.
--1. Deceit. At full speed, the trip for the rune is faster. MP.
--6. Dishonor. HP and MP, but the game ends immediately on rune pickup.
* Partway in, I figured out that enemies can be hurt while flashing--it's not actually invincibility. I also learned that you cannot pick up another pair of Boots if you're currently using one. For clarity sake, you also can not carry two of the same kind of key at once.
* One major source of skips is that the game only saves the state of one previous room at a time. What that means is that when you leave a room, then leave that room and go into a third room, the room you originally left is returned to its default, untouched state. This trick can be used to pick up keys or items that the level designers originally intended to only ever be picked up once.
Planned Changes:
* At one point, I go into a couple towns to buy Food, Potions, or pick up hidden Jars of Oil. Those events would disappear in the final run--I was skipping these useful pieces of gear at first assuming I wouldn't need them, and um I do
* The final dungeon order will need to change. It turns out that Iolo reaches a speed cap after three upgrades. The rune at the bottom of Pride is supposed to give a Speed boost, but he gets none. That means that it's not actually faster to save the runes in Deceit and Dishonor until after the Abyss. The bonuses to HP and MP that they give will instead be picked up earlier to make me stronger for the Pride/Abyss gauntlet.
* Deceit is split into two runs because the cave splits very early on, and each path reaches a different goal. In the same room as the rune, though, there is a transport square that sends the player back to the very start of the dungeon, meaning it's possible to get the rune and the Wand of Fireballs in one run. I will have to test my doubts whether this is faster than coming back later, since this way Iolo would barely not yet be at max speed.
* Technically, Medium difficulty (or even Hard) could be used to allow for deathwarps, perhaps. I really can't think of anywhere that it would save time, though. The Ankh does the job perfectly fine, and you're refilled to full HP and MP whenever you pick up a rune, so it wouldn't even be convenient.
Anyone familiar with the game, check it out and tell me what you think! Any ideas and suggestions are welcome. I'm honestly surprised this game hasn't been TASed yet.
*Oh also!*
Thanks to Bizhawk's neat Dual GB feature, there's also the ability to TAS the game's two-player mode! Team-based dungeon delving in a completely separate set of caves from the 1P game could also make for a really interesting run. I haven't looked into it too deeply (or even found any maps online!) It's really cool that it exists, though, maybe I'll whip up a test.
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Oh hell yes. I'm pumped to see Intellivision on the site finally, with an excellent first choice of game, and a very surprisingly fast run to boot! Awesome.
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Hmm, a "100% no horizontal underflow" run that skips at least one boss and zips through entire levels. I am reminded of the "no zips" Sonic 1 run that used zips and got published anyway.
The run is really well done and really entertaining. Really! But it just doesn't feel to me like it lives up to the spirit (if not the limitations) of the stated goals. I'd say it shouldn't get published, but if it does then the run will be a fun watch for the archives so its all good[/url]
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Yknow what about if the language isn't changed to Japanese at the start? Changing the language text to save non-gameplay time is sometimes an iffy proposition for publishing, for one. But if the language changes to Japanese after the glitch takes effect, then it becomes even more clear that things are weird and glitched out.
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MrWint wrote:
Twisted Eye wrote:
Only bummer is that choosing to make Red's audio the main source of the encode prevents us from hearing the awesome Champion battle song,but that's superficial.
I had to make a choice, I'd have chosen Blue's sound if it weren't for the gambling. The constant jackpot sounds gets old very quickly.
True, true. A slider would be neat for a viewer but that's clearly not possible with a youtube encode, and sliding back and forth in post-processing is probably more effort than possibly is necessary.
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No Mew means Voted No!
...awesome run, I love the concept. You're right about it showing off more of the natural game. Only bummer is that choosing to make Red's audio the main source of the encode prevents us from hearing the awesome Champion battle song,but that's superficial.
Love this.
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Not familiar with the game, but, wow, you did an incredible job with the fighting and the juggling. Movement was slick the whole time, too. I liked this movie quite a bit, yup. Nice work!
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Lots of really nice solutions here. Once I caught on just how long the "Nice pair!" and such cutscenes were, I suddenly appreciated the extra effort to match all of the colors on the same move whenever possible. Incredible amount of forethought went into this one, and it shows in the end.
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So I took a break for a couple months, dealing with some life stuff--good life stuff, promotion and buying a house--and decided to spend the weekend putting in some hours developing this run further. Here's an update:
Link to video
Lemmings was giving me fits trying to find a working solution, so I grabbed a best-right-now that's 11 time units short and moved on. This whole run is going to have at least one final pass before I submit it, as every once in a while I find some new trick that might apply earlier in the run. I expect to be redoing a bunch of levels--I think someone beat my fancy Oorto Geld time?--so squeezing in a better Lemmings will happen at some point anyway.
The video goes all the way up to Level 54, Grail. I am stuck again, as I'm really really close to tying the posted best time and am out of ideas for where to find that missing couple steps. That's the only other bad news at the moment--36, Ladder, 37, Seeing Stars, and 53, Traffic Cop, all received times better than the high scores! Seeing Stars is exactly what I was hoping this TAS would look like when it came time for the massive 'move blocks around into tiny water squares for minutes at a time' levels to come around, as there's precise block slapping all over the place to save time. 'Pain' is going to be a crazy level that I'm almost dreading as much as curious about improving...
I've also started up an online spreadsheet for myself to track my times that others can follow. Link is here.
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It's in! Awesome, I've been looking forward to the finished work. I watched a couple WIPs and was very impressed. I'll watch the whole thing when I get some time, but I've loved what you've shown so far.
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Wow. What WASN'T stolen from somewhere else? Mario Bros 1 levels, DK graphics, Pokemon Pinball music, a spinning animation that looks like it came out of a Tazmanian Devil game, it's got it all. I don't think this really fits on the site considering how much is just copied.
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Oh I remember this http://tasvideos.org/1903S.html
...augh that was seven years ago? i hate it when you do this to me, internet
wait looking at the two submissions side by side, is there a frame count difference, did you improve a run with no input, nice
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This doesn't actually just end the game, though, like a cut to the credits roll or THE END screen. It just calls the final boss fight really early. With that I agree that naming the branch as 'memory corruption' or naming the previously fastest run 'no corruption' are the best choices.
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If I'm remembering straight, the NES version's manual was actually a small book that explained nearly everything in the game for you if you read it right, and it also came with a foldout map. The one I still have also has basic maps for all of the dungeons (save the Abyss) on the backside, too. So but yeah they basically gave up on a lot of the conversational side of the game's exploration theme because ain't nobody got time for that
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Under an hour?? Hot damn, I never would've begun to hope for a time that short. I'm going to have to watch this one when I get the time, it will be worth it for sure.
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You give credit to a guy for discovering grabbing the flower from the staircase as something that happened last year, but that's not a new trick at all? I don't know if the video you linked has something I'm missing, but jumping from the staircase to grab that flower has been known from much closer to when the game came out, as far as I know. I know I've always done it that way. Screw that slow-ass old lady!
Picking out what is '100%' in this game seems kinda arbitrary to me--partially because of *just how much* is in this game. I'm confusing 100% speedrun with, like, 100% let's play I know, but I'm still highly confused by every Phantasy Star 4 TAS that isn't any% so whatever.
This run was really well made, totally fun watch.
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This is a prime example of why speed is not an ideal goal for most fighting games. It's a neat proof of concept for how fast you can win, sure, but it's not particularly entertaining.
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Here's a progress update. I'm stuck on level 35, Lemmings, at the moment. I'm having a hard time getting the fireballs disrupted properly like in the demonstrations and explanations I'm finding online. The Lynx record is the same as the Windows record, so there's got to be a way to make this work somehow.
Part of the reason it has been over a month is that I redid much of the first 20 levels to switch to best in-game time, so that all of the level times at least match the known records. Furthermore, levels 2 and 24, Lesson 2 and Oorto Geld, I've been able to get a better time than the record by one second.
I also spent a lot of time on level 23, Blobnet, but I haven't been able to beat the best time. The path in this WIP is one of the only ties I could find, and even then the end looks pretty ugly. I feel like it must be possible to improve this by another second, but I just haven't been able to yet. The game's somewhat edit friendly, so if I get inspired later and find a successful route, I can just patch it in.
Link to video
And here's the .bk2 to download: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/download/20189616912395663 Using turbo to get through the longer stages may be better than trying to skip through the Youtube video.
