Submission #7429: ShesChardcore's NES The Blue Marlin in 03:49.71

This submission is for Blue Marlin, The which was an NES fishing game made by HOT B. In this TAS we manipulate fish spawns, weight requirements, fish weights and more. This is nearly 3 minutes faster than the RTA WR.

"When I grow up, I want to be... one of the TASers of the sea"

I believe that every game possible should have a TAS, so I took it upon myself to do this one having never actually played the game before. There is a lot of RNG/layers to this run. Any "missing" frames are deliberate to affect various RNG situations. In some instances we have to affect the frame we actually catch the fish as that seems to seed a different weight table and spawns and stuff.

The gameplay is comprised of 3 parts. Overworld (boat movement, hooking fish, etc.) Fish fighting, and menuing. There are 4 tournaments (I'll just call them levels) with 3 fishing locations per level. Some have better spawn ranges than others in terms of proximity to the boat and dock. We want to catch fish while moving as little as we can, staying as near to the dock as we can to end the level quicker.

Each level has a weight requirement to beat it. You only need one marlin/swordfish (other fish don't count) that execeeds the target weight to win the level. This information is not readily available in RTA runs but we TASers can see it just fine (07FA, 2 byte search) and it's frame entry dependent based on the level (more on that later)

RTA runners also can't see the weight of the fish that was hooked, but we can (05D6, 2 byte search) and we can change it frame by frame on the "I feel a bite on your rod" screen once a fish is hooked.

The schools of fish you see are random junk. To spawn a marlin, we have to drag the lure through a specific spot behind the school, and if done right a marlin will appear. The drawback here is if you throttle the engine while directly over a school, they disperse and disappear. You can drive over them if you let go of A or B for the duration of your time on top of them. The controls are VERY floaty when boating. Marlin can also be spawned behind seagulls, which don't disperse if you throttle near them.

The fish fights go by pretty quickly and uneventfully thanks to wiggle mashing and cutscene manipulations. There are a few quick time events that can happen while fishing. Most of them are bad. One is beneficial as it tires out the fish but we already take care of that so it's just a waste of time.

To tire the fish, wiggling back and forth with left and right is the best way to do that which we can spam at will and we'll tire the fish before anything bad happens to the line. A is the reel button which we only let go of to skip a cutscene spawn or adjust future RNG at the end of the fight. Down lets out slack on the line, giving you a burst of "bonus" reel speed. 30hz mashing of down at certain intervals carries the bonus further than it normally would.

When you have a sufficient fish, it must be weighed at the dock to move on to the next level. The weight is counted up twice, at the weigh in and final results screen, at a rate of 2 pounds per frame. In a perfect world you'd have the lowest possible requirement and fish but in practice this is improbable. The roll for both of those is a range that is basically a seeded table. Instead of counting up or down per frame it just pulls the next number making it inefficient in some results.

The weight requirement for level 1 is rolled when you accept your name. In this TAS it is 387, from the first possible frame. The weight you get here is pretty inconsequential. It can roll lower, but seeing a fish specifically in the 300 lb range was excessively rare. The usual fish range was 200-250 or low 400, making 405 on the first possible frame a worthy fish, that is what we catch.

We go to Cape Canaveral as we can force a very good spawn right near the boat by burning some frames before entry (this affects the spawns and trajectory) and the fast fish we do catch is the 405 pounder. We back up to the dock and win level 1 super fast. The weight requirement for level 2 is chosen on the frame you advance past the password screen.

Weight requirement is 527 but there is a problem. We need to level up first to make bigger fish spawn. There are various stats in the game that can be increased but are honestly not helpful to grind out. The one that matters is Body Strength because it allows fish bigger than 400 lb to spawn. We level this up by catching 3 total fish. We already caught one so we need two more. We go to Kailua and manip a "circular" spawn pattern to let us finish near the dock without chasing down fish. Our final catch of the day is a 596 lb marlin which we have to burn a couple frames to get. We head home.

Requirement is 601. I had some issues finding a suitably fast spawn seed but I managed to find one in Honolulu. We snag a 678 pounder and we're out.

Requirement is 720. Similar to level 3, fast spawns were few and far between. Port Allen was the best I found. It was a 739 lb catch, nice and efficient for the final win.

I had fun making this and diving into a game I knew nothing about going in. Future improvements could be made by botting out the perfect spawns/reqs/weights, as it's layers of RNG that feels like it would take forever for humans to find manually just to save a handful of frames.

I'm happy with where I took this and think it is reasonably optimized but I'd also love to be proven wrong!

"Calling NONAME the Fisherman"

feos: Claiming for judging.

feos: Great manipulation! Accepting.

despoa: Processing...