Skilled player (1410)
Joined: 5/31/2004
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Skilled player (1828)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2161
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
That was really cool, nice job! Now I want to do something similiar myself, creating a lua-script for the sole sake of making a game more enjoyable to watch. Perhaps we should even create a thread in the forums dedicated to these kind of things. Oh, the possibilities!
Skilled player (1410)
Joined: 5/31/2004
Posts: 1821
Slightly offtopic, but I still think this site should have a regular dr. mario run. I don't think I could improve my submission timewise, but I think the movie can be made more interesting. I noticed that pieces nearly instantly appear in versus mode, whereas in single player mode, it takes quite a while for dr. mario to throw them. I think a great submission would be one that played versus and: - First game, player one wins as fast as possible, without player 2 dying and, if possible, player 2 not giving any input at all. It should be possible since player one being very fast will probably send player 2 a whole stream of garbage. - Second game, the reverse, only player 2 input, but player one still wins. Player 2 is however not allowed to die, but has to complete player 1's game by sending lots and lots of garbage. - Third (and last) game, maybe a playaround? Maybe completing the game as fast as possible by using the exact same input for player 1 and player 2 (one would have to avoid garbage then). Of course, player 1 should win to end the game... but player 2 doesn't have to give the same input for the last frame or so. I would love it, if someone were to make a TAS like this.
Active player (328)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Interesting idea, but I would absolutely hate making a movie like that. It's hard enough dealing with the pill sequence you are given, without having to worry about how it dumps garbage on the other person. I'd consider that a candidate for "luck manipulation from hell", especially if you can't change the garbage sequence without changing the actual combo. And that's not even to mention how to manipulate "dropping on yourself" by clearing combos for the other person. 2-Player matches are "first to 3 wins", so if there are 2 games where each player wins, there would need to be at least 2 more matches. Possibly 3, for the sake of balance. It seems like too much trouble than its worth. It would be awesome to watch, but we hardly have any tools that can help with making it. I might try a Level 20 TAS, though. I think I can beat it a lot faster than 2 minutes. Edit: I took down the video, due to having a bad typo. I'll fix it (and the JPEG title cards) a little later. Edit 2: Video is re-uploaded with a better title card. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aeM-rEieOw
Joined: 3/11/2008
Posts: 583
Location: USA
Yiii. Most wtf was the bottom two line clear Though, I'd have been amused if the graphical artifacts persisted- Dr. Mario's Virii escape the bottle! So, do we know why p2 input restores stability yet?
Banned User
Joined: 12/5/2007
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Location: Gone
Look, a certain game console has limitations. If the game puts too much pressure on the system, it is likely to lag, freeze, or even throw a program-error screen (like Tecmo Bowl). This is the first time I have seen a game that puts so much pressure on the system and later allow input from another controller to resume from lag.
Active player (328)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Well, I've been able to trigger the glitch a little more consistently. The glitch is triggered by too much processing of combos, but not necessarily just clearing of lines or viruses. What exactly is getting overloaded I do not know yet. It seems more likely to happen when rows of different colors are cleared, rather than the same color. If the glitch is triggered on a horizontal combo rather than a vertical one, it will behave differently, possibly triggering the "clear the whole bottom" effect. If it's triggered on a vertical combo, the game will probably freeze for a second, and then clear the entire column. Well, I now present: Dr. Glitch and the Quest for Ten Million Points: http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1296052021/drm_3.fm2 Using the same lua script, I start at level 20. It all goes downhill from there. After 6 levels, I manage to get 9,999,999, but then the scoreboard wraps around to 9,000,000. And that combo on the last level must be the biggest one I've ever done.
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 757
CtrlAltDestroy wrote:
Dr. Glitch and the Quest for Ten Million Points: http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1296052021/drm_3.fm2
x.x It refuses to playback properly. It kills you off after a few pills in the 1st stage. YT Video? Mr. Kelly R. Flewin
Mr. Kelly R. Flewin Just another random gamer ---- <OmnipotentEntity> How do you people get bored in the span of 10 seconds? Worst ADD ever.
Active player (328)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Did you run the lua script before starting the movie? Are you using FCEUX 2.1.0a? This one won't be so simple to YouTube, since it's a little bit over the limit.
Former player
Joined: 4/16/2004
Posts: 1276
Location: Uppsala, Sweden
CtrlAltDestroy wrote:
Youtubed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aeM-rEieOw Stupid JPEG artifacts on the intro slides... I blame MSPaint for saving to JPEG by default.
This was awesome. I had several moments of: "What the hell is he doing? Placing those capsules randomly like... wait what?" Awesome.
/Walker Boh
Active player (328)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Movie #3 Youtubed! I managed to cut it down by cropping out a lot of the freeze time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moQcqUrOvbM
Skilled player (1410)
Joined: 5/31/2004
Posts: 1821
I like it. It would be great if you were to make a submittable movie abusing this glitch :) (Although I know, that would be a little harder, having to deal with a fixed line of pills :S)
Editor, Expert player (2331)
Joined: 5/15/2007
Posts: 3940
Location: Germany
That glitch is really neat. You cleared two rows, and it just doesn't make any sense... (It seems to sometimes clear lines although the viruses aren't connected with each other but sometimes it doesn't.) Would be great if you managed to clear all of level 20 with that glitch. I also like how you randomly place pills everywhere. I never knew what you planned. (I'm watching the latest video now)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 757
Now I'm really curious.. does the game literally roll back to 9 Million points after 9999900 or is the combo that glitched that the game honestly scored 9 million freaking points? And for those interested.. a fellow colleague of mine is interested in my little inquiry, so we're going to try to combo the crap out of a VS Dr. Mario machine and see what happens ot the Arcade version. I'm wondering if it's fixed or not. ;) Mr. Kelly R. Flewin
Mr. Kelly R. Flewin Just another random gamer ---- <OmnipotentEntity> How do you people get bored in the span of 10 seconds? Worst ADD ever.
Skilled player (1417)
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1978
Location: Making an escape
Alrighty! At first I thought I was watching an ordinary, impressive-combo video that used external scripts to makes things easier. Very nice, very nice... Then I noticed that viruses were dying in ways that completely went against well established rules. What the deuce, man? Leave that internal logic alone! (in short: I like it!)
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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Player (247)
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
I'm sorry to open this discussion here, but am I the only one who thinks this game is so simple it's boring? Can someone explain to me how to have fun with this game?
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
The key to having fun here is to realize the potential for setting up complicated combos. If you just go for making four-in-a-rows to clear the viruses directly, then yes, it's rather boring. It's much more interesting to try to use every single pill you get as part of some grand combination that'll clear many sets of viruses.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Joined: 8/23/2008
Posts: 417
Mr. Kelly R. Flewin wrote:
Now I'm really curious.. does the game literally roll back to 9 Million points after 9999900 or is the combo that glitched that the game honestly scored 9 million freaking points?
I would guess that there is no programmed "rollback" for the last digit in the counter.
FODA wrote:
I'm sorry to open this discussion here, but am I the only one who thinks this game is so simple it's boring? Can someone explain to me how to have fun with this game?
The same way a person enjoys Tetris. These games are much easier to watch than they are to play, especially when the game speeds up. That may just not be your thing, so I can't explain how to have fun, but whether you personally enjoy that kind of challenge obviously doesn't preclude the large amount of people who do.
I will not use self-reference in my signature.
Active player (328)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
Dr. Mario has always had a lot of the same appeal to me that Tetris has: it's a mad struggle to survive, but the game mechanics are so simple (only 3 colors) that you can manage if you focus hard enough, and you have to really think fast and get creative if the game gives you pieces you don't want (just like the S-blocks in Tetris). Unlike Tetris, you can actually win levels, so it adds more intensity. You can't just bury the last virus underneath a pile of junk pills and survive forever, you have to dig back down to get it if you want to win, while the pills start dropping faster every 10 turns. In fact, this often makes the end of the level just as difficult as the beginning, since your rejected pills will have all fallen down to the bottom of the bottle and buried the last viruses. Also unlike Tetris, if you're clever and think fast, you can make great combos for high score, or to drop junk on your opponent in 2-player mode. When playing tool-assisted, the focus shifts to setting up huge, mind-boggling combos, which sort of has a Chess quality to it. You have to really imagine and test just how the huge towers will fall and line up to make horizontal combos and such, often without wasting a single pill given to you. Unfortunately, tool-assisted movies really make this game look too easy and don't really give an impression of what the real gameplay looks like. Obviously I can't make you like the game just by explaining it, but hopefully that explains why I do.
Player (56)
Joined: 10/16/2012
Posts: 233
Location: Milwaukee, WI
Test run of first two levels of Dr. Mario May not be published, but still.
If I could have a tool-assisted real life, I'd... Being a novice, I'd probably load the wrong state, have the IRS AI bankrupt me, and eventually make me want to kill myself and redo 11 years of hard work.