Dwedit
He/Him
Joined: 3/24/2006
Posts: 692
Location: Chicago
If you could memory tamper in a TAS, you could immediately win the game.
Banned User
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 742
Location: Gone
Finally, back on the go! This time, I finally made it to Ch. 2 on another attempt. As usual in the first boss (Gilga), I started off by doing a little "magic dancing" using the Bolttor1 spell. There was one thing I clearly noticed between Emptyeye's video and my input for the "true color" first boss (Gilga part II). He was on level 4 using Defenee to increase damage using the Rod. I was on level 3 picking off Gilga using the rod and not using any other spell. The comparisons will take dramatic research. Once you reach level 3, does it save frames by fighting toward level 4 first before meeting Gilga, then using Defenee to quickly defeat the true-color Gilga? Or, should you just head straight for the boss and get rid of the true-color Gilga as soon as possible, while ignoring level 4 altogether? I think I had 93 ex. on LV3, while Emptyeye held 246 ex. on LV4. For some reason, defeating each bandit only gives you a meager 2 ex. Plus, players may not gain a lot of ex. if they win "menu-based" battles. Perhaps menu-battle approaches could kill a lot of frames, too. So if my theory of ignoring LV4 and just settling for Bolttor1 to defeat Gilga, is correct, then I think I am already cutting down at least a few minutes off his VHS run. There has been times when Emptyeye was frequently using the Pampoo spell throughout the first chapter and even majority of the game. Heh, all I did was buy 10 units each of bread and mashroob at the store before hand. I believe that would deliver HP to me faster than using Pampoo, and would save a few extra frames since we kept getting the "Restore my H.P." message. If my theory here is correct, too, then I think we can totally dominate Emptyeye's run. We're not going anywhere, people! We will dig deeper into this game!
Post subject: Disappearing carpets?! A bug indeed!
Banned User
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 742
Location: Gone
An update, but with information. There is indeed a bug either in the cartridge or the ROM I got. Either way, I was set for the game. In chapter 1, I bought 7 carpets which should have been enough for the game. Then after I picked up Faruk, I only used two. I use one to fly to Rudoria (past) en route toward the time door back to the present; then another one to jump straight to Poponoll after coming back from the past. After I defeated Gilga and proceeding to chapter 2, I took a quick look at my inventory. Those 5 damn carpets I had left suddenly disappeared! Ridiculous for crying out loud!!! Don't tell me there was some bandit that jumped out of the woods in the middle of night and took them without me knowing?! But that is what I call, without a shadow of a doubt, a bug in the game! Now as I continue, back on chapter 2 again, now I have to only buy enough carpet to last throughout a single chapter, not the whole game. Even cats and dogs can put bugs, fleas, and ticks all over your carpets without you knowing, so keep an eye on your money and your stuff next time you want to buy something in the game.
Banned User
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 742
Location: Gone
update, I'm on chapter 3 yet again. and I think I found a good strategy, I really hope it works. I start off in the present. I go straight to the time door to go 30 years in the future. This way, I skip an armor upgrade and save a little MP. I was told in the game to change myself to a Saint before going through the time door. Perhaps I'll do that. Rethinking strategy... WOAH! Hold up! Time-out! New strategy and challenge planned! Perhaps I can beat chapter 3 without zig-zagging to get Pukin. If my theory here is correct, then we at TASVideos.org have actually broke the story! I will still go straight to the 30-year future of the time door just to power up into a Cimaron rod, but however... I will NOT walk my behind all the way to Nubia (future), and I will NOT get Pukin as an ally! I have to change class to Saint to get the Cimaron rod and then back to Magician, so I'll probably save the casino for chapter 4. It's that I need to make sure I have enough rupias so I can be prepared for that. But here in chapter 3, I should have enough rupias for 2 class changes and pay Mustafa to join me. The game does in fact say you can't get through Demon Troll boss in chapter 3 without Mustafa, but Pukin will be ignored!
Joined: 2/26/2007
Posts: 1365
Location: Minnesota
any new WIPs for us to view?
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
Banned User
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 742
Location: Gone
Sorry, not yet. I can't just stop what I'm doing and post another unfinished run. It's not yet complete. I may not even post another WIP, I'll probably go for a new record time so I can be done with it. It takes a lot to be a good TAS'er, but it takes even more to be a hardcore one. And the game stopped me when it said "I didn't have enough friends to defeat the boss." Rewinding back to the beginning of Chapter 3 to get Pukin. Dammit! =/
Banned User
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 742
Location: Gone
Update, chapter 3 is done. It wasn't what I expected, but I got it under control now. I barely had enough bread and HP to defeat that Demon Troll. According to a game walkthrough I been reading, it said that wearing R. Armor during Demon Troll's thunder attack would cost 10 hp of damage. Well guess what, so does putting the Defenee spell on yourself, too! I only used the spell twice before I faced part II of that Troll. So maybe I did skip that bloody university back at Kasimeel, that would give me the armor. I totally ignored that, now I saved a few extra seconds which I believe. I noticed that everytime I would eat a Rupia seed, I would get invisible. So maybe I would start using that to my advantage as I finish this run. I am in chapter 4 now, I'll figure something out.
Banned User
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 742
Location: Gone
Now I have completed chapter 4. The funny thing was that after I beated the Salamander boss, it wouldn't let me move plus that boss's flame went and hit me, dropping hp to zero at the last moment. Did I die just then? The game still took me to King Feisar and leveled me up to 20, so I barely got through that one. I'm on the last chapter of this game. It said for me to run at least one errand before meeting Sabaron, so now I got to dig even deeper.
Banned User
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 742
Location: Gone
It's finally done. It's not what I expected, but it is six minutes faster than that EmptyEye's SDA video. 1:13'44.32 http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1846612636/mos-unofficial-tas-V1-symbolic-X.fcm I'm working on becoming the first to TAS this game, and then I'll pass it on to anyone else that can do it better. Big thanx to all! Oh, and let me do all the encoding on this game! I already know the rules and the tricks. =)
Joined: 7/10/2007
Posts: 280
symbolic X: I don't know much about the game, but can you explain why you changed classes briefly? Also, it really looks like the room transitions are unoptimized, as far as screen position when entering/exiting rooms. Can you also explain why you fought Pandarm once?
Banned User
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 742
Location: Gone
I changed classes because it seemed a little mandatory. In chapter 3, I couldn't get cimaron fruit from a tree if I wasn't a saint. And in chapter 4, I couldn't get Rainy as an ally if I wasn't a fighter. For your second question, that could be another glitch because transitions from screen to screen are indeed quick. And I fought Pandarm for two reasons. (1) for a desperate need of ex. toward heading to LV 7 and using the Flamol1 spell. Without the spell, I couldn't do much. And (2) for a very short entertainment tradeoff to give everyone the idea of what TAS'ing would be like in a menu-based battle. The thing is that if you do a quick entertainment tradeoff, ya don't want to overdo it. So after that one battle, I ran away from the others. I pretty much got majority of the walkthrough out of this web page: http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/nes/file/587433/16783
tristal wrote:
symbolic X: I don't know much about the game, but can you explain why you changed classes briefly? Also, it really looks like the room transitions are unoptimized, as far as screen position when entering/exiting rooms. Can you also explain why you fought Pandarm once?
Banned User
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 742
Location: Gone
Next attempt will be pending. This time, I look to find a nice rom with a [!] and then I will have to lay out a bitmap so I can decide the best and closest route to move pretty fast. There are several spaces in each world where it interrupts by telling Isfa to use Oprin, including a magic field in chapter 1, so I look to avoid as many of those as I can. And since Isfa can sometimes snap to certain spots in each screen (especially jumping), maybe I can use that to my advantage so he can try to speed up a little bit. And he can also speed up from some of those leafblower enemies (going away from them only) going into chapter 4. You'll want to watch that movie so you guys will know.
Experienced player (828)
Joined: 11/18/2006
Posts: 2426
Location: Back where I belong
The checksum for the movie that you have matches the file "Magic of Scheherazade, The (U) [!].nes", so you have the correct (if mislabeled) ROM. Still don't think it's a very interesting game, but if you can glitch it up, I may be wrong.
Living Well Is The Best Revenge My Personal Page
Banned User
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 742
Location: Gone
I once said that if you sometimes move Isfa just a hair, he can snap himself to trees/walls. And sometimes, the same thing would go when picking the right time to jump. I do not know if it is faster to jump in order to "snap" or just walk, but I believe that can be a glitch and I can't wait to abuse it. I'll do a demo of chapter 1 (from starting point to time door) soon.
Joined: 12/5/2004
Posts: 60
Woo, my password finally works again. Bizarre. Anyway, being the author of that SDA run (And I really should get more anal about people capitalizing my name properly..."EmptyEye" is the most common misspelling, though "Empty Eye" is another one. And let's not get into my cousin, who will occasionally intentionally misspell my real first name as "Mark" just to piss me off.), maybe I could lend some help in your preparing the TAS. -The first thing that came immediately to mind as far as "What could a TAS do to save time versus my run?" was...well, using a shorter name ("Marc" is my real first name, if you're curious. Also, I know you've looked at the run already, but check out the comments as well if you haven't yet.). The second thing that came to mind, though, was skipping the R. Armor, which saves you almost a minute plus some Rupias. I grabbed it because, my run being done on a console in real-time, it was worth losing the minute to permanently double my defense and avoid constant going to the menu for Defenee, as my menu manipulation skills are rather weak. -As others have said, definitely plan out precisely how much of everything you'll need, and grab exactly that, no more, no less (I actually went a little overboard in terms of grabbing Rupias later on). -Pretty much everything you could think of in terms of "This would be an awesome sequence break, why didn't Emptyeye do it?" is because I did try it and it didn't work. You already saw that with skipping Pukin; the other big one I could think of would be going to the end game without going to Sabaron's room first (Scheherazade simply never appears if you do this). -Defenee actually has nothing to do with attack power (The reason I kill Gilga's eyes in one hit is because I'm level 4); it doubles your defense power for a time. Since I imagine you can manipulate what enemies you want to appear or not, this is another reason to not get the R. Armor. -The Eclipses seemed, from my observations, to be time-based, with the timer reseting upon entering a new chapter. Incidentally, my Chapter 4 was the hardest one to decide precisely what I was going to do route-wise (Also, if you're not using the Eclipse, you can obviously skip the magics too, saving you more time), and I ended up wasting a bit of time waiting for said Eclipse, so I'm not surprised that it didn't show up for you (As you should obviously be quicker than me). -Tristal: Yeah, he changed classes because he had to, as he already explained. -R. Seeds, besides turning you invisible, also let you walk on water. This may be worth looking into to see whether you can optimize overworld routes more than I did. The practical application seems pretty limited from what I found--you can only exit screens through "official" exits as it were--but give it a try anyway. Hopefully some of that helps out.
Emptyeye.com- Come for the music, stay for the blog.
Banned User
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 742
Location: Gone
I saw the single-segment and even played along with it as I switched back-and-forth between the video and FCE ultra. On the video, Gilga did take more damage on level 4 than on level 3. I bet it was because of the offensive power of the rod that went up. So yeah, you're right about Defenee, that doesn't do any good. I apologize =)
emptyeye wrote:
-Defenee actually has nothing to do with attack power (The reason I kill Gilga's eyes in one hit is because I'm level 4); it doubles your defense power for a time.
I am still thinking about my first submission here. And it seems that I may still have a few flaws. I continue to believe that I could still kill a lot of frames leveling up to 4 than to conserve them by settling for level 3. I got to manipulate more luck than I could imagine, omg... lol...
Post subject: The Magic of Scheherazade
Joined: 8/15/2010
Posts: 3
Is there a reason a TAS has never been made for this game?
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Nobody has bothered to yet, presumably. You're welcome to give it a shot.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Skilled player (1826)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2161
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
There's an old thread for this game here.
NitroGenesis
He/Him
Editor, Experienced player (556)
Joined: 12/24/2009
Posts: 1873
I think p0rtal_of_rain did a runof this game, and it was considered a bad game choice. http://tasvideos.org/1944S.html
YoungJ1997lol wrote:
Normally i would say Yes, but thennI thought "its not the same hack" so ill stick with meh.