This TAS beats the official DS port of INTV Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain, which was instead titled "Crown of Kings", and uses the "Adventure" ROM due to licensing issues (we'll get to THAT later). A TAS of the original Intellivision version already exists. The only reason I decided to TAS this port was to show off a unique glitch not found in the original which allows the player to walk through walls!
Objectives
- Uses hardest difficulty
- Major skip glitch
- Heavy glitch abuse
- Heavy luck manipulation
- Pacifist version
- Genre: Action/Adventure
Difficulty
The game was played on the hardest difficulty, AKA "Hero" difficulty. In this mode, enemies move very fast and you only start with 3 arrows (not like we'll be needing them).
The Corner Skip
For some reason, there are designated coordinates for spaces outside the playable area on the overworld map; one of them, position 0, is actually a passable space and is located up-left from the upper-left corner. Therefore, we are able to enter out-of-bounds by moving up-left into the corner. Moving up-left again from here causes an underflow of the map position value and we come out near the lower-right corner of the map with only one mountain separating us from Cloudy Mountain. The map position value is located at Main RAM address 0x111367.
Luck Manipulation and Strategy
In the first mountain, I intentionally enter on a frame where the ladder is only one chamber away from the starting point to get out of there as fast as possible. In Cloudy Mountain, we must collect the two halves of the Crown of Kings so we manipulate luck to give us a crown half adjacent to the start point with the second crown half adjacent to the first.
Walk Through Walls Glitch
Unlike the Intellivision version, here we don't have to worry about things like corridor curvature or really walls at all when manipulating our lucky scenario. You can pass through walls or halt a chamber from revealing as you run into it by simply holding anywhere on the touch screen. If rushing into enemies for their items wasn't already a silly enough strategy, this is really some next level nonsense. We basically... *APPEAR* on top of the first dragon so that we can take his crown half. He obviously doesn't like that but too bad because we're gonna phase through the wall to get away. We don't even have the courtesy to do the same to the next dragon and collect the crown BEFORE we even reveal the chamber! Thanks to our walk-through-walls ability, we used no arrows during the TAS.
Lag
Unlike the Intellivision version which lags all over the place, we were able to avoid getting ANY lag during our adventure here. Killing one of the enemies for entertainment purposes would have generated some lag, hence another reason this run is pacifist.
Why accept this submission when it's so similar to the existing TAS on Intellivision?
- While The DS port calls the game "Crown of Kings", you can see briefly that the title screen reads the game name "Adventure" instead of "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" which means they used a different ROM due to licensing issues. The "Adventure" ROM is actually a prototype ROM that probably would've been the final Intellivision release if the AD&D license was not secured. The two ROMs may look identical otherwise, but they are NOT the same game. Adventure's RNG algorithm is different, meaning an identical set of inputs will not yield the same overworld or cave layouts between the two ROMs. Intellivision ROMs for both "Adventure" and "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" exist, making this claim readily testable.
- As a result, a TAS of this game will always play a different adventure relative to a TAS done on Intellivision, navigating unique overworld and cave layouts; the rat enemy also makes an appearance here, which has not occurred in any other TAS of this game I've made.
- The walk through walls glitch adds an extra and significant layer of intrigue not found in the original.
- Counting only the time spent playing Crown of Kings yields a total 9.7 seconds of gameplay, which is around 1.8 seconds faster than the Intellivision TAS.
Suggested Publication Notes
"Crown of Kings is the DS port of the Intellivision game "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain". The gameplay of Crown of Kings involves exploring a series of randomly generated mazes, searching for tools or arrows with which to progress on the overworld map, or to defeat monsters. The end goal is to reach Cloudy Mountain and recover the Crown of Kings from the fearsome winged dragons!
Winslinator not only substantially manipulates luck, but also abuses a walk-through-walls glitch exclusive to the DS port to blast through the game's content. A major skip was also used to only visit two mountains in the process."
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: Grabbing the crown halves in invisible rooms is visually confusing, because you don't get to see those items, but I confirmed their presence by releasing the touch before they're grabbed. Accepting.
Spikestuff: Processing...