Ecco: The Tides of Time is the sequel to Ecco the Dolphin, and has been one of my favorite games for a long, long time. Like Nitsuja did with the original, I made the mistake of thinking that this game would be easy to TAS, got disabused of that notion rather quickly, and only managed to complete the TAS by writing a few special types of autofire into gens. Ecco is a dolphin that controls like a tank with a jet engine. He can get up to very high speeds, but his turning radius is large to begin with, and is greater than the size of the screen at top speed. Additionally, hitboxes are quite difficult to determine just from the game graphics, there's an entire set of levels that involves navigating along mostly dry-land while the gravity changes almost at random, and many levels are sprinkled liberally with obstacles or enemies that will kill you instantly upon contact. Additionally, this time around Ecco must jump through hoops in long 3D levels, and rebuild the Asterite from a single pair of globes.
Neither of the really impressive glitches that Nitsuja used in the first movie remain, but there are still a few subtler ones, and I do make use of them.
Since I don't really know what more to say about this game, I'll just submit and answer any questions that come along.
Oh, for just a taste of what TASing this game was like:
16:04:21 * Upthorn almost done with ecco 2
16:33:52 <Upthorn> wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
16:35:03 <Upthorn> when I said "almost done" there was exactly 1 second of gameplay left.
As you will note from the timestamps the last 60 frames of gameplay took TWENTY NINE MINUTES to complete.
NesVideoAgent: Hi! I am a robot. I took a few screenshots
of this movie and placed them here.
I'm not sure I got the right ROM though. (I tried ECCO - The Tides of Time (U) [!].gen, which was the closest match to what you wrote.) Well, here goes! Feel free to clean up the list.
Truncated: I'll do the honors. It seems this movie is very popular with the audience. I found it very good too, minus perhaps some of the ball catching, but the rest of it made up for that.
Raiscan: I'm currently trying to encode this, after which I will process. Imagine it to be like Gunstar Heroes but worse :(
Expect it to take a few more days, but rest assured I am making good progress. Heads up: the output will likely be mkv and be greater than a 4:1 size ratio...
So, was that helix thing you built just a McGuffin or was it supposed to do something that you glitched out of?
I agree, some explanation of the plot and such would be nice. (Especially if you manage to skip anything the game thinks is required.)
For those of you who have not played this game before, and want to follow along with the story, this gmv is now available. Aside from delaying input a bit in several places so that every screen of dialogue is readable, in this version, Ecco sings to two more dolphins for a little bit of extra exposition.
EDIT: Upon reviewing the textual GMV this morning, I noticed that a couple of the delays weren't long enough to read all the text without pausing. So I have updated the GMV to fix that issue.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
For those of you who have not played this game before, and want to follow along with the story, this gmv is now available....
Usually I wait for the AVIs, but I wanted to see this one now, so I downloaded and got things to work... well, sort of.
I can't get this one to play in Gens 9.5c, although the non-texty one plays. When loaded, the "play movie" button is disabled, and both controllers are listed as UNKNOWN instead of 3-button, as in the non-texty TAS. (Everything else-- number of frames, rerecords, length-- also come in as 0s.
I tried downloading 9f, but it doesn't work there, either, and the one I found glitches my screen up slightly while running. Odd.
Any advice? ^^;
I can't get this one to play in Gens 9.5c, although the non-texty one plays. When loaded, the "play movie" button is disabled, and both controllers are listed as UNKNOWN instead of 3-button, as in the non-texty TAS. (Everything else-- number of frames, rerecords, length-- also come in as 0s.
I think that probably means you downloaded the gmv wrong. The link he gave was not a direct link to a file even though it ends with ".gmv", so if you right-click and choose save-as on it you'll just save a web page. Gens doesn't know how to play HTML.
EDIT: Might as well comment on the movie too. I enjoyed it (fast + weirdness overload), although I thought the first game made for a better paced movie.
I think that probably means you downloaded the gmv wrong. The link he gave was not a direct link to a file even though it ends with ".gmv", so if you right-click and choose save-as on it you'll just save a web page. Gens doesn't know how to play HTML.
Er, that's how I downloaded it. Let me try that again...
Yep, that fixed it. Thank you for the help.
Might as well comment on the movie too. I enjoyed it (fast + weirdness overload), although I thought the first game made for a better paced movie.
Thanks. I think you're right about the first game making a better TAS -- less repetition, more glitching and skippable stuff. But it's nice to know this can be enjoyable for what it is.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
I like... woah... voted yes a while ago...
But like the programmers of this game, I was like, way too stoned to like, write a reply.
J/K about me being stoned, not kidding about the programmers being stoned. Seriously...
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
Stoned creators.
"Oh no. Will Ecco have to collect orbs enough to fill that thing? At least the music's good..." Two minutes later, music change.
Was that little ball-meter a gravity indicator?
Surprised that the autoscroller in alien technoland let you squish through so many walls (though it visibly protested by coloring the screen)...how did you manage that? It looked as simple as "is turning, don't die".
Hmm...credits...*checks time* Not done yet?
Thanks for playing
Ecco
Ecco
Ecco
...oh yeah, that thing. Are there supposed to be that many or are you just ruining the illusion by moving to the next spawn point quickly?
*looks up what secret password does...can't find* What does the "secret" password do?
Shouldn't this be listed as "plays on hardest difficulty"?
"Oh no. Will Ecco have to collect orbs enough to fill that thing? At least the music's good..." Two minutes later, music change.
Yeah, that was also my least favorite part of making the run. Because you have to do the same exact thing 23 times, but each time it takes totally different input to do. So not only is it boring and repetetive, but it's boring and repetetive and you have to pay very very close attention to exactly how boring and repetetive it is, in order to TAS it.
eternaljwh wrote:
Was that little ball-meter a gravity indicator?
Yes.
eternaljwh wrote:
Surprised that the autoscroller in alien technoland let you squish through so many walls (though it visibly protested by coloring the screen)...how did you manage that? It looked as simple as "is turning, don't die".
Wherever two wall collision boxes meet without overlapping, if you line up with the "seem", you can make the screen push you through. If you are not properly lined up, you will die when the screen gets too far ahead. The screen turning red is the game's way of saying "WARNING: MOVE NOW OR DIE!"
eternaljwh wrote:
Are there supposed to be that many or are you just ruining the illusion by moving to the next spawn point quickly?
Well, they won't appear at the spawn point if the old one is still in memory, so yeah, I think I'm ruining an illusion there.
eternaljwh wrote:
*looks up what secret password does...can't find* What does the "secret" password do?
According to the game's creator, in an interview here. The secret password was intended to give you a bonus at the beginning of the third game. However, the team was never allowed to make a third Ecco game. The 3D Ecco game was handled by totally different people.
eternaljwh wrote:
Shouldn't this be listed as "plays on hardest
difficulty"?
... yes, yes it should.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Good ol' Ecco the Dolphin. I voted yes because the speedrun was well made, with good entertainment value, despite some parts in which I was forced myself to press and hold Tab.
Like Ecco 1, it is very simple to pass trough walls on the auto-scrollers. That saved my life a couple of times. It's really awful when one is about to reach the end of the level, and wam! wrong direction. Thank God for the stupid glitch.
I'm Espyo from the SRB2 Forums.
Current project: A Pikmin fan engine, Pikifen
Hello. Um, sorry for this, uh... irrelevant comment, to the actual run... There is no seed to download the file from. I normally wait several days if there's no seed and any and every run I have downloaded in the past has always been completed due to getting a seed within a day or two. But I have been trying to download this run for well over a week now, and no seed at all. So, uh... Could anyone seed it? I'd be extremely grateful. Thank you very much.
Here is a small timesaver I saw while watching this game being run on SDA:
http://youtu.be/EkYMibrGtEw?t=10m5s
In the bird segments, it is possible to dive by pressing down+B. It is also possible to dive upwards, by pressing up directly after pressing down+B. This probably saves a few seconds for these segments. The runner (Blueglass) even mentions that the TAS does not include this trick.
There might be other stuff in there too which would help improve this movie.
If you experience desyncs when playing back the movie in the emulator, make sure you checked "Allow Up+Down/Left+Right" in Options > Input and uncheck "reset SRAM" in Tools > Movie > play movie.
[17:37:00]<TheCoreyBurton> It's N64 - it's ALWAYS bad news.
