Submission #7715: ShesChardcore's SMS Rocky in 02:55.64

This submission is for the Sega Master System game Rocky, a boxing game loosely based on the films. It has only 3 bouts, and no story whatsoever

This game contains 3 fights from the Rocky film franchise. Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang, and Ivan Drago. There isn't really a plot to speak of in this game, so I made my own.

Rocky has entered a world championship boxing tournament in downtown Philadelphia. When he arrived, there was no parking available so he double parked on South Street. He has 4 minutes to win all 3 bouts and get back to his car to avoid getting a ticket.

As far as boxing games that aren't Punch-Out go, this one is not terrible, though it is short. The AI has some weaknesses you can exploit, and we do so heavily.

Past that, there are also training events before each fight. Train successfully well and you'll gain some punch power, punch speed, etc. The problem is that each of the training modes take 45 seconds to complete and don't confer enough benefit to offset that time cost. The middle one is absolutely brutal for RTA runners, having to maintain a 7hz or better mash for 45 seconds. Yikes.

Creed is not very aggressive, so you can walk him down to get into range. When you throw 3 straight "normal" punches your next punch will be a powerful straight, an uppercut, or a hook to the body depending on distance and button combinations. The uppercut by far does the most damage and Creed is susceptible to it. We back him into the corner, manipulate him to block so we can close into uppercut range (which is very close) and lay into him until he goes down.

You can win via knockout (opponent's health is low enough when you knock them down) or TKO for 3 knockdowns. TKO is faster because you have to deal with less "counting." If they get up at 6 and you knock them down for a KO you're sitting through 16 "counts" as opposed to 11 or so going the TKO route. The third knockdown doesn't trigger the get up cutscene.

Lang is a pain in the ass. Uppercuts are very hard to perform on him so we stick with body shots and straight punches. We intentionally miss a few punches in this fight to line up positioning better, as well as being cognizant of the knockdown timer (basically manipulating their health to be where we want it for the knockdowns.)

Drago is amusingly the fastest and easiest fight in the game. He is very aggressive which is also his weakness. By blocking appropriately we can get into position for the uppercut spammage pretty easily and he goes down with relatively little effort. Other non-uppercuts are mixed in when necessary to keep the chain of hits going.

And with that, we won the world title, didn't get a ticket for double parking, and celebrated in victory with Adrian.

GoddessMaria: Claiming for judging.

Samsara: Resetting to New, as there has been no judgement activity on this submission in several months.

ThunderAxe31: Claiming for judging.

ThunderAxe31: Unlike the RTA WR, this TAS skips all training sessions. This would allow to bulk up more power for Rocky, which would allow to beat the second and third matches faster. However, that also results in an overall longer movie, so that would ultimately be a sub-optimal strategy for a fastest completion TAS (aka any%). However, I also want to note that we may consider passing the training sessions as a form of additional challenge, and thus applicable for 100%. There is an obsoleted TAS that does that.

Accepting as improvement of the current fastest-completion publication.

EZGames69: Processing...