This TAS is the summary of what would happen if a professional baseball player was hired to save the president's daughter ⚾
Emulator
- Dolphin 5.0-21460
- DualCore off
- DSP HLE
- JIT Recompiler
- Change Discs Automatically on
TAS Objectives
- Complete the game using only grenades to kill enemies and also in mandatory parts of the scenario
- Deliberately taking damage to manipulate the game's difficulty and use fewer grenades
- Manipulate RNG of drops to get grenades
- Use pistol to get items and also drop grenades from boxes/vases/barrels
Note: Del Lago can only be killed with harpoons, so no grenades were used on him for that reason.
About the run
This TAS consists of completing Resident Evil 4 on the Nintendo GameCube using only grenades to kill enemies and bosses, as well as to pass mandatory parts of the scenario. The rules are simple: all enemies must be killed by grenades and all mandatory parts of the scenario must be completed only using grenades, while the use of pistol is allowed to break boxes/barrels/vases, get treasures, break padlocks, etc.
This TAS was made in NEW GAME, without using any memory card. This means that Leon starts the game without any grenades and I had to drop the necessary grenades throughout the game. Money in this run is only important to buy bigger suitcases, so once I get the biggest suitcase available, I no longer care about collecting pesetas.
This TAS can probably be much faster, using other strategies, manipulating RNG's better. I didn't focus so much on optimization.
Adaptive Difficulty
Here comes one of the most important things in this TAS. Resident Evil 4 has something we call Adaptive Difficulty. Basically, adaptive difficulty increases the difficulty of the game if the player is playing well (killing enemies, dodging attacks, taking little damage, etc.) while it decreases the difficulty if the player is playing poorly (taking a lot of damage, dying several times, missing shots, etc.). This means that, if the player is playing well, the bosses and enemies become stronger, with more HP and if the player is playing poorly, the opposite happens.
The address responsible for the adaptive difficulty is $80284760. The default value for this address is 5500, which would be the game's normal difficulty. This value varies, as I already said, depending on how the player is playing. The highest value this address can reach is 10999 and the minimum is 1000. During the entire TAS, I was monitoring the value of this address to never let it rise too much, but also not to drop too much and waste time for nothing. Because of this, you will see Leon taking damage dozens of times throughout the entire video. All damage is intentional to manipulate the value of that address.
But why is it so necessary to manipulate the adaptive difficulty in this TAS? It's necessary because, if I simply ignore it, the game ends up being very difficult and the bosses require absurd amounts of grenades to die. That way, I wouldn't have enough grenades to get to the end of the game.
You may also be wondering why I didn't lower the value to the minimum (1000) and maintain that value throughout the game. The explanation is that the bosses (Del Lago, El Gigante, Bitorez Mendez, Verdugo, etc.) reset this value to 5500, which is the default, if the player reaches the boss with a lower value. If the value is greater than 5500, then it is not reset. In other words, if I arrive at Del Lago with this address worth 1500, automatically, at the start of the battle, the value is reset to 5500. So, there would be no point in me taking damage to keep the value at a minimum because the value would reset to 5500 anyway and I would waste time for nothing. Therefore, I had to maintain a base value and only lower it when it was really necessary.
Observations
- This TAS was recorded using an HD texture pack, but the movie works perfectly with the game's original graphics. If this TAS is accepted and the encoder want to post with the HD textures, this video has the download link for the textures and the instructions.
- The final in-game time is 2:13:03.
- The only address I followed during the TAS was $80284760, as already mentioned.
Special Thanks
- MasterReset7 for the idea of completing the game using only grenades. Without him, this TAS would probably not even exist.
- Noise de Gole for support and ideas.
- Aldelaro5 for THIS
- You for watching!
eien86: Claiming for judging.
eien86: The choice of goal in this submission is one that can totally be accepted in the current (new) set of rules in the site. It is an odd choice, and its original definition (grenades and pistol only) was not precise enough to justify some decisions made in the movie (e.g., not stopping the ceiling with a pistol). So after some discussion I believe the author had a clear vision for this movie and just wasn't precise enough in expressing it in the 'Goal' field.
The correct goal for this movie is "Uses only grenades for enemies; pistol for everything else". This title is, of course very long, so I think "grenades only for enemies" should suffice.
In terms of optimization, it's hard to tell, but it seems a satisfactory effort was made to achieve the stated goal as fast as possible. Added to that, the community reacted positively to this movie and voted accordingly.
Accepting to Alternative
EZGames69: Processing, Dimon12321 is handling thr encodes for this one.