Submission #9145: polyrhythmic-drop's NES Crash 'n' the Boys: Street Challenge "playaround" in 13:39.30

Crash 'n' the Boys: Street Challenge is a 5-event "sports" game, where the "sports" mostly involve beating up your opponent (or drowning them, or tossing slabs of wood at them, or breaking their backs). The goal of this TAS was entertainment rather than speed. However, if it was run by a human, the TAS would qualify for the WR in its category because there is no Deathless, No Item category on Speedrun.com.

I also wanted to use a team other than Southside because all major runs of this game use Southside. Because of that, I couldn't get the true ending, but I felt that the true ending had already been shown elsewhere (as in Inzult's excellent run), so I wanted to do something different.

Because I wasn't using items, I couldn't use the normal strategy of purchasing <!(&/&X! items and manipulating the RNG to affect only opponents. Since the main goal was to be entertaining, I also chose to focus on completing each event rather than depleting my opponent's HP for a quicker DNF victory.

My goal was to get to the finish line and collect as many medals as possible. For most of the heats, I chose to stay on the ground and smash hurdles as much as possible to increase speed, while using slides and spin kicks to dodge and deflect attacks. Aside from the first heat (since Crash is a little more aggressive), I kept the opponent toward the back of the screen instead of forcing them out of the frame. Forcing them out the frame causes them to rubber band back near your position, which makes it harder to dodge their attacks and slows you down when doing counterattacks and dodges.

The most boring event. My goal here was mostly to collect as many medals as possible while still beating the CPU.

The opening part of each heat was focused on keeping the opponent underwater. Once their oxygen got to a certain point, I focused on landing kicks rather than grappling wherever possible, since repeated kicks cause more HP loss than grapples and punches, especially when oxygen is low. I used grapples to knock out opponents only when I needed to return to the surface for more oxygen. At one point I chose to get pulled down by my opponent because it was faster than jumping up and letting my opponent surface briefly (thus getting more oxygen and prolonging the heat).

Used the poles as often as I could to speed up roof crossings while collecting as many medals as possible.

This is probably where I had the most time loss, mostly because the goals here were more for entertainment than speed. The final round is the perfect example: I chose to show the Spin Out Throw glitch because it was fun, and the standoff toward the end was another way to add some entertainment value to the run.

This is my first TAS, so there's a lot to improve here. If I was going for speed, many parts of the game could be optimized. Specifically, I could have completed the Hammer Throw in fewer throws, and the final Fighting Scene round could have gone much faster. Even though I wasn't using items, I could have manipulated the RNG to make the CPU choose weaker opponents with lower defense. Overall, this was a fun TAS to make, and it helped to exorcise childhood trauma from losing at this game over and over.

Darkman425: Claiming for judging.

Darkman425: Trimmed off some blank and extra input to match the ending point of [3513] NES Crash 'n' the Boys: Street Challenge "best ending" by Inzult in 08:10.86 as a better representation of input time.

Darkman425: Hello polyrhythmic-drop, and welcome to TASVideos!

I think the goal of beating the game without using items or knocking them out during the hurdles would be a fine goal in of itself. Not quite sure what would work for a better category name than something like "fair play" or something. The wrinkle in the whole thing is that this is clearly going for entertainment in the form of a playaround rather than pure speed. From what I could gather from the responses on the forums and chatting with the other judges, the reception to this submission was lukewarm in the entertainment department. Even watching this, while I was overall leaning positive on this I still felt like there could be more done for entertainment. If you ever do come back to making a playaround for this, a possible suggestion is going for multiplayer since that increases the range of what weird things you could do in the name of entertainment.

For now this fits as a Playground submission since there are decently entertaining parts but not quite enough to meet the Alternate publication class.

I do think this is a decent first TAS submission for the site! Don't be discouraged by the rest of my judgment, though. I encourage you to explore TASing further to learn more about the craft and what works for entertainment in a TAS setting.

Darkman425: I changed the goal to playaround, to better match how the site would set the goal and to match what the author intended to change the goal to.