Introduction
After working on this project a long time in January, and then taking a very, very long break, then getting back to the project literally today, working on it super hard all day, and finally finishing it up, I proudly present to you my TAS of "The Morning Adventure" for the Game Boy Advance. Though the game is, admittedly, not great...no, that's an overstatement. It's horrible. Though the game is horrible, especially for casual play, not to mention the never-ending level music, I found that the game really has a lot of interesting run strats and glitches. I usually deal with games that are bad or at least perceived as bad by the general public anyway, but I just found this particular game to actually have some potential for entertainment to viewers. Plus, the game is very short, which is a big plus.
(If you think YOU'RE sick of the same song playing over and over horribly throughout 90% of the run, just think about how I, the TASer, must feel...)
- Time: 8:14.26
- Frames: 29521
- Rerecords: 6129
Goals
- Any% completion
- Aims for fastest time
- Genre: Platformer
- Takes damage to save time
- Eats more than a hundred tacos and Mañanitos
Ending
The run ends the frame when the last menu image of the credits is skipped (the one about McCann etc.) I decided to make this the ending, since I wanted to show off the Mañanito animation glitch at the end and because people can't see the full credits if the run ends the frame when the boss battle is over. People can always pause the game at each menu picture at the end if they want to read it.
Suggested description
Something along the lines of...
The Morning Adventure is an extremely rare Spanish video game that was advertisement for a snack food product in Spain known as Mañanitos which was manufactured by the company Bollycao, which is today no longer manufactured. The game entails the adventures of the product's mascot, "Mañanito Boy", through his home, the city, and his school. Ready Steady Yeti completes these adventures in just over 8 minutes, including the use of several minor-glitch shortcuts and the use of the Mañanitos, the sacred food, to increase his speed and jump height for limited periods.
Suggested screenshots
Frame: About 7851
Frame: About 14258
About this game
I feel I should explain a full answer to the question "What is this game?" since this game is so rare and so poorly marketed and more unheard-of than any actually licensed game I've ever seen. Though licensed by Nintendo, and yes, was an actual GBA cartridge, the game never actually left Spain. This is because the game is actually an advertisement for the Spanish snack food product known as "Mañanitos", which is no longer manufactured. Those of you from Spain MAY have heard of it.
The above link is an example of a snack food package containing a Mañanito (an invented diminutive of "mañana", the word for "morning"). I think it's some sort of biscuit or something. I believe it was somewhat popular in Spain throughout the 2000s (decade).
It continues to surprise me, and others too, that this actually became a GBA game. I mean, MCDONALD'S didn't get a GBA game, but somehow Mañanitos did.
Because the game never left Spain, the game only provides text in the Spanish language. There really isn't much text, and the stuff they say is pretty simple really, so it's easy to translate. Because it's a game solely meant to advertise for a food product, obviously it was rushed and wasn't very well done.
Gameplay
So, now I'll tell you about casual gameplay. There are 6 levels: 1.) Wake up your two siblings, 2.) Get the milk and the cereal into the kitchen shelves, 3.) Go through the city, 4.) Go through the school, 5.) Side-scroller level, ride your skateboard and dodge all those jerks in your way. 6.) Beat the giant boss battle, who is (apparently) a buff teenager who throws basketballs at you.
The game is a platformer, as mentioned above, with the exception of the side-scroller level. You can run left or right and jump, normally, in the platformer levels.
When you take damage, you are bounced back slightly. The number on the top left HUD represents how many lives you have left, and the hourglasses represent your health (out of 3). Throughout the entire run, death is never necessary, but I do get one-ups just for kicks.
Items in the game... There are tacos like everywhere (hey, if they're not tacos, I'm just saying what they look like!). Each time you collect 100 tacos, you get an extra life. The Mañanitos (the circular brown objects that kind of look like one of the fruits from Super Mario Sunshine) give you extra speed and extra jump height for a limited amount of time. If you hit an enemy or other damaging object, that limited time decreases greatly, but it does not damage your health. Two items that you pick up and lay down: the trampoline and the wooden board. The wooden board is intended to be used to increase your height so you can jump to higher spots when intended. The trampoline is intended to be bounced on, to get to really, really high locations. The trampolines suck.
Text and menuing
The only text in the game that can't be skipped are the first four menu screens (ending in Bit Management). After that, all the text and menuing can just be skipped, really easily. It doesn't need much explanation, really.
Wake up, sleepyheads!
The first level. The goal of the level is to go to the two rooms and wake up the two siblings (by moving up to the alarm clocks).
The way the first sibling in the run was INTENDED to be woken was by going all the way to a third room which isn't shown in this run, which has a wooden board. No Mañanitos in the first sibling's room, so you just have to use the wooden board to jump over that pile of blocks. IF you play it the intended way. I carry out a glitch that does take a bit of waiting around, but it does the trick. By bouncing off of the toy truck with just the right timing, I can jump over the block pile without the wooden board, keeping me from having to visit that extra room, saving a lot of time, like over 20 seconds possibly! That route is boss!
But still, why did the developers add CATS that you can KILL? I find this cruel, that I have to kill cats at times to save time. :( In the second level too.
Find the kitchen items
This took a lot of routing. I basically have to go out and grab each item individually and bring them back individually. I had to use the best route that would coordinate best with the enemies in different rooms (which is controlled by a thing similar to RNG; the enemies actually move while you're not even in the room they're in! What an outrage!). That was horrible to test and route and shit. Glad it's finally over.
Why do I go to such length to jump those spiders up that hill? That's a skip glitch. I do that to skip having to go up and use the Mañanito on that high platform, saving many seconds. Secondly, to go down, I take advantage of the speed from the hill by jumping as far as I possibly can, right before that electric bolt.
RIP innocent cats.
In this level, I also do a glitch where I do a normal fall while also killing a blimp.
The city
I use a glitch to use a bee to get up the large concrete platform, rather than waiting to use the balloons as intended. I had to run only to certain screen positions to make sure the height the bee changed to horizontal was enough to bounce on it. Took a lot of work to get this right.
This level is the first time the wooden boards appear, and the first time I use a glitch with them. Now I will admit I didn't discover this glitch; I found it in a longplay linked below. (Why they used the glitch in a LP I don't even know.) Basically, the frame before jumping off the wooden board, you press B so you can collect it while jumping in midair. This glitch causes sequence breaking in many parts of the run.
First, I use this glitch to get on top of the stop sign faster WITH the board so that I can then use the board to get to the Mañanito. But I then collect the wooden board yet again to use to get to the falling balloons far faster than intended. Fun.
School
The second room took a LOT of damage routing. You know, with all those gas leaks? Just saying.
I used the wooden board glitch yet again in this room to get to the Mañanito while still holding the board, getting back to the door faster.
After that gas leak room, I have to use the wooden board AND a Mañanito to get up the platform. I use the wooden board glitch here yet again. I had to test a lot to see what the best frame to drop the wooden board was. Meanwhile in this same room, I do another glitch just for kicks, because I can. I activate two of the bully enemy at the same time, clearly visible to viewers for like half a second. One is running away, and one is still there. This happens because I'm going too fast for the game to keep up with spots for the bully.
Now, in the gym, because of using the wooden board glitch, I don't have to go into the final room twice, the first time to get the wooden board in there. This saves a HECK of a lot of time. I just grab the Mañanito after setting the board down, so I can go up to the platform to get the trampoline.
Then go to the final room and use the trampoline as normal.
The side-scroller physics are pretty different from the regular physics. You literally can't go any faster, any slower. I could have just kept taking damage and dying, and the side-scroller would've just kept moving. I didn't do this though, since I've been advised that "dying for entertainment" is not entertaining.
There's only one thing that you shouldn't do during the side-scroller in a speedrun at all costs; don't get a Mañanito. This is surprising, since in the platformer levels the Mañanitos are what give the player extra speed. Well it does give you speed in the side-scroller, but the speed is also useless since the side-scroller speed doesn't change. The problem with collecting a Mañanito is that, while the Mañanito collection animation happens, the side-scroller stops, which wastes time.
All of the enemies' locations are based on your locations at certain times.
No matter what, basically, don't collect Mañanitos, in my case don't take damage or die since that doesn't entertain viewers, and at the end of the side-scroller, make sure you are already all the way to the right side.
Final boss
There are several glitches you can use here, but I used the quickest and most efficient glitch. Basically, instead of collecting the Mañanitos and do simultaneous bounces on top of the basketballs thrown (like the developers intended), I use a glitch in which I jump on top of the boss's head right while he lands from jumping (but it has to be very precise). See, the developers didn't intend for you to get on top of his head without extra leverage, so this is indeed cool, and it allows for a MUCH faster defeat.
After the boss was defeated, I performed an entertainment glitch where I jump up adjacent the Mañanito above, and, while the concluding animation is going, the player actually gets into Mañanito mode. Pretty cool glitch.
Conclusion
I did enjoy creating this TAS, even though the game is not conventionally good. I actually stayed up all night tonight doing the latter half of the run, which explains my very tired and sort of rushed commentary. If you have questions for me, feel free to ask anywhere, including on TASVideos. I hope you enjoy my run, regardless of the quality of the game. It took a lot of work and testing, despite being such a short game.
External links
This is a nice movie, and a nice game, but the regular speed of the character ruins it for most of the viewers. And even though there are some cool tricks pulled off, since the game was only released in Spain, the majority of people haven't ever heard of it, so they won't notice these tricks, as they don't know how it's supposed to play normally. That also plays role in the lack of enjoyment, and the votes/posts showcase that.
Accepting for Vault.
