This movie contains many flashing screens, very fast transitions and deafening sounds. Please don't watch if these things might be harmful to you.
Goals
any% Pacifist
Takes damage to save time
BARBARIAAAAAAAAAAAN
Introduction
Let's get straight to the point: Barbarian is a bad game with a... flawed control system. I quote Trixter:
Gameplay is done with "icons", which can be selected with the joystick, mouse, or function keys. For example: To move your character to the right, you press/select the right arrow icon. To swing your sword, you select the sword icon. This would be appropriate if the game were a turn-based strategy game or something--but it's not! It's a weak action game. You'd think that you could simply move left, right, etc. and hit a button to swing your sword, but you can't. You have to use the "icons" for everything.
It's the stupidest control system I've ever seen for an action game.
However, behind its many flaws exists a heart of gold. This is a charming game with many components of comedy and action which me and my brother really enjoyed as kids. Once you take a few hours to learn the controls, they aren't as bad anymore.
I made this TAS as an escape valve from the stress I've been dealing with, trying for months to obsolete some masterpieces (Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania). I felt like I was putting too much pressure on myself so I decided to do a simple, no-pressure TAS the old-fashion way. Beyond some stress with the setup, doing made me feel the love for TASing once again.
Why pacifist? The difference in time between pacifist and any% is so minute, that it doesn't justify losing the charm of beating this game without harming anything. You will see that the 'flee in panic throwing away your sword' action (F10) is used extensively in this game. That alone adds the magic that an aggressive (barbarian-like, if you will) movie would have been.
For this run I naturally selected the fastest mode.
New Revision
I have decided to try the Late 80's setup to see if the game would run at a more decent speed when using the fastest setting, and so it did. So now the speedrun is around 6x slower, but can be watched.
Glitches & Tricks
Fast Fall: It is faster to descent by falling to death than descending the stairs normally. I can afford losing this life now because I found a way to save it later on (only doing one death skip, instead of two).
Last Screens' Skip: I found this video on the internet by Vesselin Zhilov that really helped get the route done. In particular, skipping the last few screens with a backwards jump at the stairs really skipped a whole lot of fighting.
Death-Skip: During routing I accidentally discovered that purposefully dying puts you in the top left part of the screen, which allows you to skip some screens. One can also save time by falling all the way, instead of taking the initial long stair, but that leaves you without lives for the suicide-ending.
Suicide Ending: The game requires you to come back to the start after you get rid of the bad magician. However, simply falling to your death triggers the game ending.
Trivia
The synthesized voiceover in the unavoidable title screen is one of the first ones in DOS games, and it runs over the PC speaker. A true feat, when many games at the time used it only for *beep* *boop* sounds. GMP says it was inspired by... this.
Emulator
OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa
Emulator: LibTAS v1.4.3 + PCem 17+st-1 + Late 80's package
slamo: Replaced movie with resynced file, and judging!
slamo: Replaced movie with late 80s movie that uses the original disk.
slamo: We had a bit of a sync adventure on this one, but now that everything is figured out, I think I can judge this properly. This has the most absurd control scheme I've ever seen, but you make it look really easy, and I think the optimization looks decent enough. I also think everyone should hear the absolutely stank PC speaker speech.
There is a faster speedrun out there, but the speed and loading times of this game seem to be completely dependent on the CPU speed. That video is running much faster and is on an unknown emulator (most likely DOSBox at a high cycle count). The late 80s config uses an i386DX/20MHz processor, which would have been very reasonable to use at the time of this game's release in 1989, so this configuration is a perfectly valid environment to run this game in, and I am confident about PCem's accuracy. That video also does not use the death skips so I don't consider it as optimal as this submission.
The movie has a pacifist goal, but I'll just remove the branch and make this a Standard category, since I don't think a non-pacifist run would be different enough to have these two movies coexist. We'll take it for now, and this publication should have the Pacifist movie tag.
Can you please put how you made the floppy in the description? This information needs to be public. We'll need the MD5 hashes of the files, as outlined here.
Can you please put how you made the floppy in the description? This information needs to be public. We'll need the MD5 hashes of the files, as outlined here.
I got the image and it desynced for me. Can you please provide full instructions for how you set your config up, and also post the contents of your .cfg file? I also noticed there's a large amount of time between bootup and starting the game, that's unusually long for the early 90s config.
I got the image and it desynced for me. Can you please provide full instructions for how you set your config up, and also post the contents of your .cfg file? I also noticed there's a large amount of time between bootup and starting the game, that's unusually long for the early 90s config.
Alright, I added the instructions for creating the image and the contents of the cfg file.
Since I now created a new image (using those linux commands), here is the resync'd movie:
User movie #637891445280063924
Just in case, always remember to delete rom/pb570/flash.bin before running the movie
Joined: 5/22/2020
Posts: 197
Location: Chennai, India
With all the new information provided, I was able to get the movie to sync. Like slamo mentioned the game indeed takes a unusually long time to boot (about 5000 frames) and throws an nvr checksum error since flash.bin is deleted. The optimization looks fine. The branch/goal choice makes sense to me as well, although can probably just be considered standard run with minor speed-entertainment trade-offs. The guidelines suggest the use of the Late 80s package as the game was released in 1987, but the floppy created doesn't seem to be detected, so the next best choice seems to have been used.
Edit: In light of the new developments, I am cancelling my review because it is no longer relevant. My vote however stands the same.
I still can't get this to sync. I've confirmed my config matches (looks like you removed the B: drive for some reason) and the files in the floppy match as well. I've also deleted flash.bin. Maybe it's the .nvr file, did you do anything to it? I'm just using the one from the Early 90s package renamed barb.pb570.nvr.
One thing that's really throwing me off is that if I use the Early 90s .nvr, the checksum error shows up at around 13 seconds, way before the actual Escape input to clear it. Can somebody make an encode of the bootup so I can see what's going on?
I still can't get this to sync. I've confirmed my config matches (looks like you removed the B: drive for some reason) and the files in the floppy match as well. I've also deleted flash.bin. Maybe it's the .nvr file, did you do anything to it? I'm just using the one from the Early 90s package renamed barb.pb570.nvr.
One thing that's really throwing me off is that if I use the Early 90s .nvr, the checksum error shows up at around 13 seconds, way before the actual Escape input to clear it. Can somebody make an encode of the bootup so I can see what's going on?
My apologies. I think this time I got it right. I deleted all my files and created the setup anew and things worked like you are describing now. But also realized I should have used the late 80's setup instead. Now the game runs at a decent pace (which allowed me to refine the movements and get a better route). I really hope this syncs for you now, otherwise we'll have to find out what the problem might be.
In any case, here's the new movie file.
https://tasvideos.org/UserFiles/Info/637907299679525951CoolHandMike wrote:
Uh that is not playing at the right speed.
Noted and agreed. I hope the new version makes it more enjoyable now.
So we figured out that the floppy creation process on different PCs can result in different file structures on the floppy which causes desyncs. I've added a warning to the PCem page not to make your own floppies for TASes, using the ISO method is more reliable. However, if there's a good dump of the original game floppy available, it's recommended to use that.
I agree that the late 80s setup is more appropriate. The early 90s one was super glitchy for me if I tried to play it casually. This is to be expected, some older games have problems with faster processors, I had the same problem with Ford Simulator.
So we figured out that the floppy creation process on different PCs can result in different file structures on the floppy which causes desyncs. I've added a warning to the PCem page not to make your own floppies for TASes, using the ISO method is more reliable. However, if there's a good dump of the original game floppy available, it's recommended to use that.
I agree that the late 80s setup is more appropriate. The early 90s one was super glitchy for me if I tried to play it casually. This is to be expected, some older games have problems with faster processors, I had the same problem with Ford Simulator.
What fun, I played this a lot as a child.
While the function keys are indeed a poor choice of controls, using F1 for left, F4 for right, F6 to jump, F8 to attack is at least playable and I've seen more awkward keyboard controls.
Winning the game by jumping into the chasm is clearly a bug, but those are fair game. The version I played, at least, blocks you from completing it the intended way by another bug (as one of the required passages back loops you to the same screen instead of the previous one). Another bug is that putting down the bow will give you the shield. although if you skip the bow, this is likely slower than getting the shield the normal way. Finally, IIRC getting 100% completion (which the game counts as "100% screens visited") requires you to kill yourself in one of the pit screens (the other two don't count because you can't enter those without dying, but the third does due to a bug). Anyway a 100% run wouldn't be interesting here.
Love the pacifist approach. Yes vote.
This movie has been published.
The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie.
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[4742] DOS Barbarian by eien86 in 07:19.90
