In this game adapted from the famous Where's Waldo books, the player must find the wizard's scroll and either Waldo himself (in the first four levels) or the striped sock (in the last level).
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.3.0
- Aims for fastest time
- Manipulates luck
I wanted to check the full potential for this game after having run it for the third Super 16 race. This game seems simple enough, but these two aspects made it slightly harder to optimize than I expected:
Minimize score count at the end of levels
I discovered that simply optimizing movement to select the two items is not enough, I also need to select wrongly a certain amount of times (hence the constant beeping) in order to deplete the remaining time before finishing the level. As it turns out, the game takes less time calculating your final score at the end of the level, which saves up to three frames. However, I needed to do those "incorrect" selects on certain particular frames, otherwise it can block the magnifying glass's movement for one frame.
... and of course, RNG
Each level has (I believe) four possible locations of every item, so of course I need to get the best possible pattern everytime. The pattern is randomly seeded depending on which frame I start a level, but it seems that my exact behaviour inside of a level can also affect the pattern I get in the next levels. This restricted the "incorrect" selects even more. The best I could do was: delay 2 frames for the first level, and 1 frame for the second level. I managed to get the correct patterns of the remaining three levels without delaying a single frame.
I don't think it's possible to save the two frames for the first level RNG because nothing seems to affect the seeding other than delaying frames in the menus. It might have been possible to save the one frame I spent for the level two pattern, but I couldn't find a way.
Enjoy the run!
feos: There was no feedback ever since Aran Jaeger has posted, and I should note that his post is important regarding TASing this game. As I replied below, this game's hard mode is not "same thing just longer", its spawns are actually different, and supposedly harder in real time. At least one level can be completed faster than on normal mode.
We don't use to require that a game is played on hard mode, it's more of a guideline, but sometimes not playing the hardest difficulty leads to bad feedback. I tried to get some feedback on that matter, but couldn't. Additionally, the hard mode movie has already been completed, so preferring it for this game in general won't demand any unreasonable extra work from anyone.
So even though this movie is good and I couldn't improve it, I'm rejecting, as explained in the thread, in favor of the hard mode movie that I encourage Aran to submit.