Okay, it's not April 1st anymore so here's the actual notes. Not gonna change the thumbnail, though. It's mostly clouds.
Introduction
Pico Pico Pirates was a Satellaview game that was recently (as in a little over a year ago) dumped from a found memory pack. It's a pretty simple game about shooting down moles before they shoot back. This uses all of the inputs on the controller except for the Start and Select button. Kind of a controller test cartridge given to you by the R A D I O W A V E S! The goal of this submission is to get the best possible score rather than fastest completion since I found doing that a little more interesting.
Run notes
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1
- Aims for maximum score
Mechanics and techniques
- Basic controls
- Shots are fired based on the corresponding button or directional input done. There's a clip of 8 bullets that slowly regenerates with time. That bullet regeneration means that it's not possible to get every single mole in the later rounds due to the frequency of their appearances.
- Scoring
- The scoring is mostly straightforward. The guaranteed points are the ones on successful shots and how much life the enemy ships have. There's also a remaining health bonus and an accuracy bonus. The accuracy bonus is straightforward enough: simply never miss the shots you do take.
The health bonus for remaining health, as well as the perfect "BUNOS", are dependent on not getting hit. This one is definitely trickier to actually get, especially in real time and in later rounds. The key component is knowing which moles to shoot down. Some moles just taunt the player while others shoot the player directly after a short moment. Since accuracy is based on shots fired rather than moles appearing the best course of action is to avoid shooting unnecessary taunting moles to have ammo for defending against the shooting moles. This strategy is key to getting the perfect bonuses in the later rounds due to the frequency of moles popping out.
- Some RNG manipulation?
- There are a few points where shots are delayed to get another mole to pop out quicker. Sometimes a small wait rather than firing immediately did result in slightly faster times but I didn't explore this to the full extent.
A note about version choice
Okay, so this submission is probably gonna cause headaches but not for the normal kind of reason. So on that memory pack there was another game found on it: Sugoi RPG?. According to the dumpers, Pico Pico Pirates overwrote some of Sugoi RPG?'s data on the memory pack. They managed to separate them out into individual, playable game files. This was provided alongside the original dump of the memory pack. I made my TAS on that original dump since that's what someone might consider closer to the intended experience to playing Satellaview games on the Super Famicom. However, it was only after I had got this done and the encode uploaded that I checked the No-Intro database. The database said that while the split games are considered "good" dumps the original data of the memory pack is considered a "bad" dump.
I can understand that but it's kind of a bummer to realize the version you've made a completed TAS on was considered a bad version. I don't quite know how this would shake out in the end so I'm leaving this part of contention up to whoever judges this. I do apologize in advance.
feos: Claiming for judging.
feos: I tried both versions of this game in bsnes-plus, and they seem to work identically, so I don't know why they are different in bizhawk (where the extracted ROM doesn't have the overall intro that bsnes-plus still shows). If emulating the extracted version has problems, it's justified to use a version that's considered a bad dump, because it's all we have right now. And since input sync on both, it's technically a movie that solves both versions of the game.
Accepting.
