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Just watched...nicely done! The raft/recorder glitch is so cool - good to see it in a TAS. Optimization and entertainment also look good. I liked the swordplay going into some bombed caves.
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Moon Patrol is a decent game where you pilot a moon buggy jumping craters/rocks/mines and blowing up tanks and spaceships. Its technical claim to fame is being the first major use of parallax scrolling, where the foreground scrolls faster than the background layer(s) to give the impression of a 3D scene.
I had a lot of fun with the Atari 2600 version as a kid and was surprised I couldn't really find any speed-running or TAS-related efforts for the game on any system. Well, here's a WIP that gets through the first course on Hard difficulty.
Link to video
The buggy has 3 speeds - half, 3/4, and full - and how fast you go depends on where the buggy is onscreen. If it's left of neutral position, you go half speed, if it's at neutral position (exactly) you go 3/4, if it's to the right you go full speed. Note this means that most of the time when the buggy moves left to dodge bullets or just jiggle around, it is NOT actually losing speed as the course's scrolling is unaffected. There are 2 spots in the WIP where I do have to slow down to pass combinations of craters and rocks.
There's a decent amount to optimize to be fast and kill lots of the ships overhead, so hopefully this will be reasonably entertaining for an A2600 TAS.
The game goes on indefinitely but my current goal is to complete 2 courses on Hard as that's when the difficulty/scoring levels stops increasing and 8ish minutes seems about right for this type of game. If you're curious, the score can run up to 999,990 but then it just rolls over to 0 with no notice.
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Yes vote for silly Atari game crushed. Laughing that the game has like a 5 second title screen, after which the 5 separate stages documented in the comments are passed in the subsequent ~17 seconds, including stage 1 which requires obtaining 10 separate items (or 1 item 10 times, but you get the idea...)
Since it looks like you only used 7 spears in stage 2, I'm assuming you need to get 10 before you can exit stage 1?
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adelikat wrote:
To me this isn't a playaround but rather a "clear the screen" goal. A goal that is arbitrary, but leads to a lot of potentially interesting strategies for doing it quickly. But this movie doesn't do those things quickly. I don't know if it would be interesting to do so, but I think it would be far more interesting and entertaining than this playaround, if it a TAS aimed to clear the screen in as few frames as possible.
Agree with this. Would add that having played Dig Dug many times in the arcade, there is some intrigue/appeal to the bizarre goal but not really sure there's a permutation that really makes sense as a run on this site.
I have many times had an issue with FCEUX behaving as you describe following a crash of some sort (not on clean install). I traced my issue to the values below in fceux.cfg being set to some crazy number so the window is offscreen. Fixing the values and restarting fixes the issue for me.
MainWindow_wndx 140
MainWindow_wndy 115
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Great little run, yes vote! I must have only ever played this on difficulty 1 as I had no idea there was a bat. Very cool to not only use the bat to your advantage but have it complete the game after input has ended.
I'd be in favor of putting in the start screen movement with a bit of explanation - perhaps move in a little repetitive pattern (which you can call using the player for a loading animation) or off toward the far corner or otherwise do something that looks useless (and therefore provoke interest in what, exactly you are doing). I think with short runs like this, the more density of antics/unexplained behavior generally the better, especially if they're visually apparent. The WTF factor makes me want to watch multiple times/more closely and read to understand what's going on. As the run is, I watched the video 3 times and read the submission text twice before having any clue - pretty good!
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Truncated wrote:
If there is any feedback I can give, it is only that the active strip of the atlas encode sometimes ends up in the very bottom of the screen, and is then obscured by the subtitles.
I can fix that by adjusting the scrolling. Currently tweaking my script to refine an atlas encode of the published movie; once that's done will upload both encodes with the improved scrolling.
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Watched this slightly late, but recall being disappointed to find there was no TAS for this title way back when...well done - epic underground helicoptery.
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ThunderAxe31 wrote:
I can't follow the subtitles without having to pause the play every second, which defeats the purpose of having subtitles instead of reading the submission text. In order to improve the subtitles, you should either make each line last for longer, or make each sentence shorter.
Thanks for that feedback -- I reworked the subtitles to be more succinct and have more realistic durations.
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CoolHandMike wrote:
This was a lot of fun to watch especially with the commentated Live Atlas encode. One of my favorites tases for this year so far. Looks like a ton of work was put into this. How many hours you think it took you to do this?
Thanks! As to the hours, oh man, a lot...I would estimate about 150 hours making the TAS since December when I returned to the project in earnest, with about an equal amount spaced over the past decade as I chipped away writing scripts and abandoned WIPs. Then the live atlas was a whole other mini-project, maybe 50 hours there, along with a fried brain.
AndyDick wrote:
Lord Tom never ceases to amaze me! Obvious YES vote for not only improving this run by a huge amount, but also the ridiculously impressive "live atlas" encode!!!
Wow, thanks!!! As I said, I love your atlas vids, such a great concept to create new experiences from old games. I definitely didn't achieve your degree of polish with mine, but did use the quality of your work as something to work toward.
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6 years later, I have an impending submission for the any %! I'm currently on the final crown and have completed a test run that suggests a sub-13:00 final time is very likely.
I've also planned the route for a 100% run - which I'd forgotten I had mentioned in a previous post. The goals I'm currently planning are:
1. all chests collected
2. at least one of every item collected
3. each character completes their own intended quest
4. 100% kills (defined as killing every enemy spawn point once during the run)
The major difference from what I'd proposed before is #4 which I think is a good way to improve entertainment both by having more to do in each room and also using items like the powered boots and armor which haven't really been shown off in previous TASes.
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I watched to the end and found myself smiling, so good enough for a Yes from me, though I do agree with others that a movie with different goals than any% would better show off this hack. Apart from multi-tasking opportunities, situations where 1 player has a power-up and the other doesn't would be visually and tactically interesting. Gameplay went a bit overboard with the constant jumping sound effects IMO but plenty of entertaining antics (especially sending the shells between the 2 players) and looks well optimized.
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Just wanted to post a big thank you to the devs, especially those who worked on the N64 core. I haven't used BizHawk too much over the years, sticking to FCEUX for my NES runs, but fired it up to have a look at N64 F-Zero X and wow, compared to mupen the ability to search/poke/freeze memory addresses and do Lua scripting has been a huge treat the past few weeks!
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I wasn't holding right when the tail flip was performed to avoid running. Unless jumping upward or P-meter full, you can still accelerate past walking speed in the air with the racoon suit, so the movement implications are basically the same.
Also, allowing air tail-flips would decrease difficulty passing pirahna plants, etc., in various spots.
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Link to video
I've been toying with this category for about 10 years, and needed a fun TAS project for Covid stress relief. It's in the same spirit as the SMB warpless walkathon. Even apart from going offscreen in 1-1, the strats for many levels are quite different from the other SMB3 TAS's. You can't clip into walls at walking speed, and can't wall jump unless small.
Rules:
-No running
-Minimize in-level B button use (okay to use on Map screen)
-Warpless (no warp whistles used)
-Otherwise as fast as possible
The B button is pressed for a single frame to pass 2-Pyramid, the final level completed here, using a tail-flip. Throwing a shell is also possible but would require pressing B for many frames. With no Jugem's clouds available this early in the game, the level doesn't appear passable without pressing B. Luckily, I don't see any other places where this will be required.
Various parts could be a little faster (e.g. clipping into blocks for boosts in 1-1) but all would have been lost manipulating the "early hammer" pattern in World 2, so I focused on entertainment.
Anyway, it's moving pretty quickly, so hope to finish in a month or two. Hope you like it!
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Not useful for anything, but to add to the pantheon of glitches for this game...I found a setup in World 4 where it is possible to maneuver the World Map Hammer Brothers such that they will loop endlessly and soft-lock the game. Enable closed captions on the video (CC button) for details.
Link to videoDownload the .fm2
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Cool! I used a similar simulation approach for River Raid. That game's logic is obviously simpler; I imagine on current hardware I could run my simulation for decent quality in close to real time.
I've always been a fan of this Arkanoid category and had it in mind for something similar. The quality looks great; glad you did this!
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Patashu wrote:
Lord Tom wrote:
Could one of the admins please update our submission file with this one that's one frame shorter?
We discovered that we had lost a frame between Bowser's death and the door opening due to an unfavorable Bowser y sub-pixel. This was fixed with a trivial change to 8-Tank2; the rest of the input is unchanged. Thanks.
Haha, does that mean it's now a 0 frame speed/entertainment tradeoff? Because you were only 1 frame behind before this.
I wish. Sadly, the same manipulation could be performed on either version.
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Could one of the admins please update our submission file with this one that's one frame shorter?
We discovered that we had lost a frame between Bowser's death and the door opening due to an unfavorable Bowser y sub-pixel. This was fixed with a trivial change to 8-Tank2; the rest of the input is unchanged. Thanks.
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RAT926 wrote:
First of all, this movie is improving 4 frames until it reaches W8.Will it affect RNG and improve overall TAS?
fm2
Unfortunately, no. This is 3 frames faster in 1-3 and then another frame in 1-F for 4 frames total through World 1. But you'd have to be another frame faster in World 1 for the next good 8-Tank boss pattern, which is quite difficult as further improvements to 1-F give bad hammer brother movements, so at least another 9 frames improvement would be needed for this to pass 8-Tank1 faster.
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Wow! I just randomly got on the site and saw this, great job! I had wondered if anyone would ever pick up MESHUGGAH's WIP. Looks clean technically and a lot of good entertainment choices.
My jaw's a bit on the floor with the Kraid door entry. I had long hoped that would be possible but could never coax Samus that one little pixel leftward to go in the room. Nice also that avoiding damage from the bug lets you take damage on Kraid, saving the jump to avoid his projectiles.
I had experimented back in the day with pausing to despawn the rinkas, but thought it wouldn't be worth it with how often you'd have to pause...I was obviously wrong about that!
Overall big yes vote!
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That's interesting, though difficult to investigate without an emulator recording or more info on what may have led to it happening.
The time saving would be pretty minimal with just the Ridley statue being activated, but if it could be done for both it would probably save about a second.
Of course, if you could activate both without the bosses actually being dead, then we're talking...;)
