I wanted to make this topic in order to inform you all about this game that I've unfortunately been testing with for hours on end for 2 days, you know, just trying to regularly beat it.
Now, I don't have much information about other versions of this game, and its differences to this one, but it seems like there are major differences from what I've read on the game's Wikipedia article. And since there's a GameCube version, it's probably an entirely different game than the GBA version, since the GBA is 32 bit and the GC is 128 bit, one is handheld and one is not, etc.
Bratz: Rock Angelz is a simple roleplaying game especially intended to appeal to female players. It's based on the Bratz toyline and probably the television series as well. It is a birdseye view game, and most objects are NOT vertical or horizontal, but instead are in a diagonal view, which is a quite annoying part of the game since some of the objects are fairly glitchy and the doorways and people are especially annoying.
So far, I've found 2 glitches in this game that I may share with the world on YouTube, if I ever decide to even play the game ever again. There are certain circumstances where you can go through people. There are also certain warps in the game that allow you to glitch behind them with the skateboard. Neither of these will be useful in a TAS. Honestly, the game isn't even very open to speed glitches, especially since you can't actually jump in the game, so there basically is no game physics. It's all walking, running, and skateboarding.
So anyway, the routing that will have to be decided on the actual map is not really all that bad. There are certain times when you have to switch characters frequently, and sometimes you are given a choice on which tasks to do when. But, I must tell you the reason I never want to touch this game again; it's the buying things! I mean, I haven't beaten the game yet, but I got pretty damn close. The game has many objectives where you have to use your "BlingBling" (what they call currency in the game) to buy certain things, or a certain number of things. And as I went along, I wrote down the prices of all the things the game required me to buy as I went:
+100
+500
+500
+500
+500
+500
+500
+500
+500
+500
+5000
+19240
=
OVER 30,000 BLINGBLINGS and I haven't even beaten it yet. Once I got to the part where I needed 19240 BlingBlings to buy 8 punk rock clothing items, I officially quit playing. This means that there's no choice but to redo minigames at LEAST 10 more times (depending on how many BlingBlings you made in the previous minigames that you were required to complete), and that also depends on routing which ones you want to get as much BlingBling as possible in, and which ones you want to just lose on purpose after getting the required 500 BlingBlings in the minigame. But even after all that, you'd still have to do some minigame replays nonetheless. I mean I don't even think it'd be POSSIBLE to collect all those 30,000+ BlingBlings without redoing anything.
Now, the first parts really aren't so bad; all you have to do is walk around and talk to people and skip cutscenes. Then there's chapter 2 where you actually have to switch characters and use the skateboard (which has dumb-ass clockwise-counterclockwise rotation controls that only allow turning at certain times) when outside. The bad part is, the skateboard with the dumb controls is actually used in a lot of the game, since it's faster than running. And the first few minigames didn't require that much luck manipulation, so I was thinking at the time that this game would be perfect TAS material for me.
Oh, and one more thing. Most of the minigames in the game will require an amount of luck manipulation, and then it also all depends on how much money you want to make per minigame and which ones would be more convenient for that and which ones not.
So in other words, the game sucks ass in TASing-context. Now I don't know, maybe 10 year old girls love repeating a random necklace-making minigame for 10-20 minutes (which would be the fastest repeater, which I saw obvious). But I don't like it. So sorry guys, but I'm not going to TAS this game.
I made this topic to tell anyone who was considering TASing it that it's going to be quite a bit of work. I personally don't recommend it. With the progressivism of TASVideos over the past 10+ years though, I feel like someone one day will eventually try it, but whoever does and sees this topic, you've been warned!
