Joined: 8/8/2005
Posts: 296
Location: NSW, Australia
Okay, I got bored so I decided to go and play some Mario Party.
I decided to check which games could be optimised for time and which ones could not, so here goes:
WORLD 1
Coin Block Blitz: Yes (I don't know how you'd go about optimising it though)
Coin Block Bash: Yes
Coin Shower Flower: Yes! You can pick up 25 coins and fall off, and it'll be a clear!
Paddle Battle: No
WORLD 2
Memory Match: Yes
Ground Pound: Yes
Limbo Dance: Yes
Musical Mushroom: Yes (you'd also have to make the music stop as quickly as possible)
Piranha's Pursuit: Not sure. Do you go faster the more you tap B here?
Here, the path splits. It needs to be decided which of Worlds 3/4 and World 5 is quicker (there's 9 minigames on 3/4, and 8 on 5).
On one hand, we have...
WORLD 3
Crazy Cutter: Yes, by ensuring you get the quickest one, and just get the 80 points
Buried Treasure: Yes
Desert Dash: Yes, but quite minimal
Tug Of War: Yes, I think?
Teetering Towers: Possibly, but only very slight.
WORLD 4
Bobsled Run: Yes
Skateboard Scamper: Don't think so, only very marginal if anything
Handcar Havoc: Yes
Ghost Guess: Yes
And on the other hand...
WORLD 5
Cast Aways: No, but you can get a hell of a lot of coins
Shy Guy Says: Not that I know of, but I'm sure you could luck manipulate it somehow
Bumper Balls: Yes
Treasure Divers: Yes
Bombs Away: Yes, if you can get rid of all three opponents
Deep Sea Divers: Yes, minimally
Mushroom Mixup: Yes, and it'd look pretty damn cool if done well
Tightrope Treachery: Yes, I'd say there is a way to ensure that they don't hit you (or at least not make you stop)
Alternatively, you could save the trouble, and play 100% and do both. Either works.
WORLD 6
Box Mountain Mayhem: Yes
Pedal Power: Can't see why not
Tipsy Tourney: Yes
Hot Bob-Omb: No, but you should be able to make it so you don't get it or something
Bombsketball: Yes, but not much quicker than a real player could do
Hot Rope Jump: No, because I'm pretty sure the CPU players can't lose
WORLD 7
Slot Machine: Not much, ideally you'd get a coin to save you picking up too many of them
Crane Game: No, but you'd obviously put a person in the closest position
Pipe Maze: No, except maybe ensuring the game gives you a maze where the first pipe is the winner
Bowl Over: No
Whack-a-Plant: Maybe a little, especially early on
Mario Bandstand: No
WORLD 8
Running of the Bulb: No
Grab Bag: No
Key-pa-Way: Maybe a little
Balloon Burst: Yes
Face Lift: No
Bash 'n' Cash: No
WORLD 9
Hammer Drop: Yes (see Coin Shower Flower)
Slot Car Derby 1: Yes
Shell Game: No
Knock Block Tower: No
Platform Peril: Maybe
Slot Car Derby 2: Yes
In conclusion, World 8 sucks. And I have too much time on my hands.
Incidentally, for a 100 star run... surely you could play a Full Play and get it to give you 100 stars in one hit? I think the best level for this would be Wario's Battle Canyon, since you can always shoot one player to the next star.
Would there also be a way to ensure that the minigame played is always going to get you major coins, like Key-pa-Way, or better yet, Cast Aways?
Joined: 8/1/2004
Posts: 2687
Location: Seattle, WA
mike89 wrote:
Piranha's Pursuit: Not sure. Do you go faster the more you tap B here?
Nope, tapping B just keeps you on the right side of the screen.
mike89 wrote:
Desert Dash: Yes, but quite minimal
This game has a huge window of input, so I'm 99% sure that the most optimal time could be done on console.
mike89 wrote:
Teetering Towers: Possibly, but only very slight.
Actually, I think this one would have a pretty big difference in time between console and emulator. You can jump from pillar to pillar with minimal to no sway if your timings are golden, but it's near impossible to do in person.
mike89 wrote:
Pipe Maze: No, except maybe ensuring the game gives you a maze where the first pipe is the winner
It would be even better if you made a pipe with no links on it.
mike89 wrote:
Shell Game: No
You could probably minimize the amount of swapping that goes on.
mike89 wrote:
Knock Block Tower: No
If the three blocks are all on the bottom or second from the bottom, the game would go a lot faster than something with the third block being breakable.
I also whole heartedly agree that Wario's level would be the fastest star getting area. However, the constant enter/fire/reposition cannon effects would chew up a lot of time.
Joined: 8/8/2005
Posts: 296
Location: NSW, Australia
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
How about a Mini-Game Island run that maximizes coins?
Hard to define "maximises" for a game like Cast Aways. I'm sure you could get like 80 coins, but who knows exactly what is possible?
A couple of notes:
I'm pretty sure Knock Block Tower and Pipe Maze have only a few predetermined setups. There's one Knock Block Tower set with six blocks, so I suppose you want to dodge that one.
Which of swapping and rotating is faster on Shell Game?
And sure, all the shooting between platforms on Wario's Battle Canyon would be slow, but you can always use the question marks to switch them around, and you don't even need a Full Play - a Standard Play with one star per turn yields 140 stars.
You could, potentially, even do a Lite Play and get enough stars for it, though it'd require some serious coinage in the minigames, so you might need to make the game give you Cast Aways a lot, or even all, of the time.
This would also require four player input - mostly alternating, but in the minigames it'd be simultaneous. It'd be pretty damn impressive, that's for sure.
Hard to define "maximises" for a game like Cast Aways. I'm sure you could get like 80 coins, but who knows exactly what is possible?
Well, that's what I'd like to find out. Maybe we could have mini-competitions to find out who can luck-manipulate the most coins out of every mini-game.
mike89 wrote:
And sure, all the shooting between platforms on Wario's Battle Canyon would be slow, but you can always use the question marks to switch them around, and you don't even need a Full Play - a Standard Play with one star per turn yields 140 stars.
Hmm, there's a reliable way for a single player to farm 20 coins for the star on every turn?
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Yeah, for 100 stars you'll still need 2000 coins. That could be a problem.
We start with 40 coins, and let's say that the board itself gives us an average of about 10 coins per turn (mostly blue spaces and singleplayer minigames, taking into account a whole heap of ? spaces), and the biggest minigames give about 40-45 total coins per turn.
I can't reliably estimate the max average of coins per turn (without spending hundreds of hours doing it myself, that is), but I do know that if you want to do a Full Play you'll need an average of only 39.2 coins per turn, if you want a Standard Play you'll need 56 coins per turn, and if you are crazy enough to try a Lite Play you will need a humongous 98 coins per turn. (That's well over 20 coins per player.) The only possible solution in that case would be, as mike89 said, a huge amount of Cast Aways. You could easily walk away with 120 total coins in a game like that, if you have 4 humans.
Here's a question: does anyone know what happens if you get more than 1000 coins?
Joined: 8/8/2005
Posts: 296
Location: NSW, Australia
No, but I did try it once on Luigi's Engine Room. Got up to 800+ coins with about ten turns to play and some idiot got Bowser Revolution. I don't know why, but it never occured to me to simply quit the game there and then. Maybe I wasn't saving...
Then, there's the problem that Cast Aways takes one minute, and can't be sped up. Something like Key-pa-Way yields ten coins a turn for all players and takes five seconds of input - not that that can compare to Cast Aways on a coins-per-turn basis, but it'd be at least worth a look.
Just tossing up potential minigame choices as alternative options...
Cast Aways (60 seconds, who knows how many coins [potentially up towards 300?])
Key-pa-Way (5 seconds, plus cinematic, 40 coins)
Box Mountain Mayhem? (not many seconds, about 30 coins, however I think this can vary)
Paddle Battle? (If one player has 0 coins, get them to hit a question mark space and be set to red. If the other three players rotate as fast as possible, while the fourth player registers no input, you could take a decent haul from this game. The problem lies in the time it takes.)
And as a means of saving time, Bash 'n' Cash could be useful. Set it up as for Paddle Battle, but since the Bowser has no coins nothing can happen - can somebody check to see what happens here?
On a final note, don't neglect the Bowser! Toad can appear on Bowser's island plenty of times, and not only does it take 10 coins to get there but another 20 to be shot off.
Times like this you wish you had the Plus Block available to you...
Then, there's the problem that Cast Aways takes one minute, and can't be sped up. Something like Key-pa-Way yields ten coins a turn for all players and takes five seconds of input - not that that can compare to Cast Aways on a coins-per-turn basis, but it'd be at least worth a look.
Nothing can compare with Cast Aways!
mike89 wrote:
Paddle Battle? (If one player has 0 coins, get them to hit a question mark space and be set to red. If the other three players rotate as fast as possible, while the fourth player registers no input, you could take a decent haul from this game. The problem lies in the time it takes.)
Yeah, Paddle Battle takes so much time that you might as well just do Cast Aways. Also, it would be extremely difficult to manipulate one player to 0 more than a few times, considering that in a Standard Play game you need to get almost 100 stars in just 130 turns. You'll want to get as many stars as possible (and even more so in a Lite Play, where you only get 80 turns).
I think that, even though Cast Aways costs an entire minute plus cutscenes, it would still be the best (if not the only) way to get the required amount of coins in a Lite Play game. I don't know of any other minigames that can net a total gain of more than about 45 coins, so you'll want to be doing Cast Away a lot (at the very least five [maybe four] times, probably a bit more) and wasting the minutes.
As mike89 said, though, the best minigame to use whenever Cast Away isn't being used would probably be Key-pa-Way. On Lite Play, you'd then want to manipulate about 5 Cast Aways and the rest to be Key-pa-Way (which would, of course, mean that you ALWAYS have to either land on a blue space or land on a ? space and manipulate it to be blue).
Even if you can get the coins, though, good luck converting them into the stars. If anyone pulls this off, I'd love to watch it!
Joined: 8/8/2005
Posts: 296
Location: NSW, Australia
Can someone confirm what happens if you play Bash 'n' Cash, and the player in the Bowser Suit has 0 coins? I've been trying to set this combination up, but it refuses to cooperate.
Incidentally, when trying to set this up I noticed something interesting. I was playing Bowser's Magma Mountain, so I wanted the 1 to hit a blue space and the other three to hit reds. 5 away was a ? space, and 8 away was a minigame space. However, in my attempts I could only seem to roll 2, 5, 7 or 10!
Could someone investigate?
It might not even allow it on the roulette.
Also, guys? On a blank game, you start with 300 coins in the bank. So you can get the Plus block or the Event block right at the start.
Manipulating rare stuff like that is tricky. Maybe you can figure out what changes in memory on those occasions that you do get a rare block, then try to change that just enough before each player's turn to get it again. And there might be special limitations on when or how often the blocks may appear that we don't know about.
And yeah, you should test just how many values you can get out of a die block. Does it just take a 4-number subset rather than letting you hit any value, the way it takes a small subset of mini-games for that roulette?
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Joined: 6/4/2006
Posts: 97
Location: Everywhere including nowhere
From what I've seen toying around with the game, every single random number that is generated in the game works off of a single seed. That seed is never recalculated from what I can tell. The only way I could think to defeat the system is if we could find a way to force it to generate a random number really quickly (like opening the menu in Mother), but I'm at a loss for ideas there.
Saving and restarting might recalculate the seed, but that leads to its own set of problems timewise.
You also can't manipulate the minigame on the list, or the event on Bowser's roulette.
You can, however, manipulate where your character lands after getting launched at Wario's Battle Canyon, and you can manipulate everything at a Chance Time, since those aren't purely random events.
Okay, so you would have to be some sort of smart mathematician to figure out how to manipulate all that. So why not concentrate on the Mini-Game Island run for now?
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Yeah.
It's just that nobody stepped forward and said, "Hey, I'll do this run!".
They're probably just too busy with more well-known games (or less-known) to think about Mario Party for now.
Joined: 8/8/2005
Posts: 296
Location: NSW, Australia
Consider Wario's Battle Canyon.
Since you can shoot wherever you want, you roll up a ten, get into the cannon and shoot to right next to the star, and if the island you shoot to is not preferable, you keep on shooting right next to the cannon until its on the one you want.
The difficulty would be in keeping characters' coins replenished every turn so they can continue to purchase stars. When it comes to giving all players coins, the grand master of all minigames is Cast Aways, but you can't draw that every turn.
Anyhow, my memory's a bit hazy - if you buy the Casino purse and get 50 stars, does it double your star count?
Also Mini-Game Island run FTW. Somebody get on it. >_>
A Wario's Battle Canyon TAS would be insane. Someone should definately make a run of this, and minigame island isnt a bad idea either. If you could manipulate where the star would appear, the only thing holding you back would be coins, and for Cast Away you could easily get 40 coins per player each time you play the game. So if you could manipulate Cast Away every time, you could easily get 2 stars per player per turn, meaning youd have 100 stars in only 13 turns. If you couldnt get Cast Away every time, there are still other coin-collecting minigames to choose from.
