This topic is for the purpose of discussing #8946: eladogGames's Arcade Mortal Kombat in 07:08.47

this tas always gets flawless victory which costs time and also gets the skippable jade fight

I have limited knowledge of Mortal Kombat. But there is a few things that I do know, and part of it is due to the SNES Publication. Bicycle Kick is the most effective move in Mortal Kombat II. However it's not the fastest in quickly ending a round, a mid kick, two quick jabs, anything to get the character to celebrate quickly is more effective. In your input you are holding your input down for Bicycle Kick which is fine. However, this leads to problems such as with the Jax fight where you don't attack for a few visible frames. So you can't say that you're being optimal there, when visibly you're not. This is something that can be avoided if you used TAStudio effectively to clean up your input. Look at the input to the SNES Publication if you want a better understanding about how to clean up your input. Taking any form of chip damage with a block is faster than having a "Flawless Victory" (Perfect Round) as there is less information the game gives you bringing down the time. There is a way to lightly manipulate the AI to give you an attack you want from them that you can effectively block (preferably a projectile), since the TAS is on Medium it's a bit harder. Obviously for the final round with Shao Kahn go for "Flawless Victory" because you're ending input as quickly as you can here. Another thing that can be done is change the Sync Settings on the Arcade dip-switches settings. Change Coinage Source to "Dipswitch" then Coinage from USA-1 to USA-Free Play this will give you some free frames. It's a good start but there's more that can be done. Please take your time and use the tools available to you in BizHawk and use the userfiles.

om, nom, nom... blech, bitter!

I'm posting this here, because I feel like you are not noticing the comments that have been made by a number of judges over your history of submissions. In the future, please look under your submission notes to see our judging statements. ---- Well, I didn't have to look at this long before I realized that it is not heading in the right direction. Let's go through some of the details: *The Bicycle kick is certainly a powerful move, but it seems to be slightly behind...due to having a longer striking move. This makes the round last a tiny big longer. Seems that it would be faster to end off on a quicker move that will not take much completion time. *Your character choice MAY be a problem. There are some issues that I see at the end. where you have to delay, in order to affect the AI of your opponent. The WR uses Shang Tsung, where the use of the Triple Flaming Skull attack to deal damage from afar to get around this. *"Flawless Victory". This is a mistake. If you watch the WR, the player takes damage at some point (usually in the first moment of the fight) to receive damage. This is the key to keeping the fight going fast and stop the time it takes to display the notification of your "Damage-less" round. *"Bonus Round". This is another mistake...and the biggest issue I see. This round is achieved by using low kicks only, which is what the bicycle attack does. If you had changed your strategy on the fight before the "?" round, you would have been able to skip this. This article explains it: https://www.ign.com/wikis/mortal-kombat-2/Jade_(Bonus). I do not enjoy seeing your history of rejections, but it doesn't seem to me that you are doing what is necessary to make a highly optimized TAS. In this case, a lot of this could have been avoided by at least perfecting the WR run, which avoids all these issues I mentioned above. I'm sorry, but I'm rejecting this run for optimization reasons.

for TAS i do believe that liu kang is probably the fastest, since RTA doesn't input bike kicks perfectly but still all the other optimizations would have to be done

for TAS i do believe that liu kang is probably the fastest, since RTA doesn't input bike kicks perfectly but still all the other optimizations would have to be done

You are right, but I made the analogy because of the final boss fight. There was a noticeable delay in affecting the AI of Shao Kahn. I was curious if the delay could have been prevented, if using Shang Tsung's Fireball attack. But either way, there were critical optimizations missed through-out the entire TAS. I think that the difference between the two characters wouldn't have warranted a rejection though.