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Improvements on every fight from the old TAS.
Heavy use of RNG manipulation to get optimal patterns/punches and extra stars which allows for more points.
Used various methods to reduce damage and increase score per damage and score per unit time.
There are endless possible score routes that could be explored, and while I do think some of these fights are improvable, I could not find these routes.

Gaining points works as follows:

  • 10 for a regular hit
  • 110 for getting a star
  • 500 for landing a star punch
  • 1010 for a knockdown with a regular punch
  • 1500 for a knockdown with a star punch

Individual fights are as follows:

  • Glass Joe 25000
  • Von Kaiser 23450
  • Piston Honda I 36250
  • Don Flamenco I 22720
  • King Hippo 1550
  • Great Tiger 28500
  • Bald Bull I 40000
  • Piston Honda II 24120
  • Soda Popinski 26640
  • Bald Bull II 32190
  • Don Flamenco II 22150
  • Mr. Sandman 14520
  • Super Macho Man 38660
  • Mike Tyson 25230

Fog: Replaced input file with a spiked input file.
Fog: Judging.
Fog: There has been a lot of discussion about the goal of this submission, as it aims for "high score".
Before we get to that point, we need to consider what tier this submission will be judged under. From the reception received in both votes and audience comments, as well as personal opinion of this judge, this submission is to be considered for Vault. This limits the goals choices to either fastest completion or full completion.
At first glance, "high score" would appear to fit the criteria of full completion, as it aims to get the highest known score for every fight. However, there are a few problems with this assumption:
1) "high score" is not "maximum score".
According to our vault rules, maximum score must be both easily defined as well as absolute. Punch Out currently has neither of these qualities for a maximum score. It's theoretically possible to achieve higher scores than that of this submission.
2 ) "maximum score" indicates full completion of a game where there is no other defined full completion point.
Punch Out, for all intents and purposes, has only one completion point (defeating Mike Tyson). While obtaining a high score can be considered a full completion point, the lack of a truly defined maximum score prevents the high score for each fight to be considered a full completion point. In all Vault cases of maximum score, there is no other completion criteria to be had other than obtaining the maximum score.
3) The high score is not actually achieved in this submission.
This submission avoids use of glitches not allowed in real-time runs in the Soda Popinski fight that allow points to be infinitely racked up. This defeats the entire point of the submission which aims for high score. It also shows that if similar glitches are found in other fights, then the current high score is not actually the maximum score.
With these considerations in mind, the "high score" branch of this submission is un-Vaultable, and cannot be accepted for publication here.
Rejecting.

Thanks for the feedback. I may not agree with the strict rules regarding score oriented runs and I cannot prove that the scores I achieved in each fight are the maximum possible scores (without clockstop glitch), but should I make any future submissions, I will stick to the speedrun aspect, as in this day and age, are more popular and usually less time consuming to make and watch.


mPap
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Joined: 11/29/2016
Posts: 7
Location: Australia
Score isnt really relevant at all to the speedrun community. Currently, I'm the only person doing runs for single segment highscore and sinister1 has also done it in the past. There are a few people interested in IL scores, but its a long process to learn. A very different beast to tackle compared to the speedrun. There is an incredible amount of RNG in the game, 9/14 fights have random stars that you can get, and while most of them are about 50%, Don Flamenco 2's random stars are 6.25%, so in real time attempts, its not even worth going for them. Almost all the fights have random amounts of HP the opponents will get up with, and some opponents have random KO's which means you get far less points if they decide not to get up. You may notice on Bald Bull 1 he only does a couple of Bull Charges for the whole fight. This is because I either knock him down, or take a knockdown as the clock ticks over a specific time which triggers the Bull Charge pattern, this is not easy to do in real time as Bald Bull can give you patterns where trying to skip the charge is incredibly difficult or even impossible. I hold the current record for playing in real time with a score of 266,450 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4JIcBABN8E if anyone is interested) you may notice that there are 2 losses in the run, this in an artifact from the Twin Galaxy ruleset, I am however trying to beat this record with 0 losses which is alot tougher than I realised when I started. boct1584 has pretty much covered the point system, just the regular knockdown is 1010 points (1000 for the knockdown + 10 for the regular punch) other than that, its all correct. I have no idea how long maxing out the score on Soda Popinski would take, firstly you have to do the clockstop glitch, then intercepting his hooks with face punches, which deal 1 damage each. when Soda gets down to 1hp (lets assuming Mac is at 17 HP) Mac would get hit with a straight jab, getting hit with a punch allows the opponent to recover 4hp, the straight jab does 16 damage to Mac bringing his HP down to 1, I would then intercept 4 hooks with a face punch which deal 1 damage each and recover 4 HP each time bringing Macs hp back up to 17, as long as you have the clock stopped, this process can be repeated over and over. Mac would lose his hearts eventually and it takes about 10 second each time to get his stamina back. Also along with this, opponents do not recover HP to full when Mac gets hit, instead there is a 'soft' cap of 32 (if opponent is at 32hp and hits Mac > do not recover hp, if opponent is at 31hp and hits Mac > recover to 35hp). This is true for all fights except 3, King Hippo's soft cap is at 16, and Don Flamenco 2's and Mike Tyson's soft cap are at 48. All opponents including Mac start with 96hp.
mPap
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Joined: 11/29/2016
Posts: 7
Location: Australia
Another thing is I have to make sure that Mac gets a guaranteed star on the first punch of each round or after taking a knockdown. This is because you can only get random stars while holding a star, and after taking a knockdown or the beginning of a new round you start with 0 stars. This works by counting how many punches you have landed since the last guaranteed star (except ones that knockdown the oppoenent, these do not increment the counter for some reason) While getting guaranteed stars in many fights are every second punch (after getting the first star), Glass Joe and Don Flamenco 2 are every 8 and 7 punches respectively. This means I have to make sure I'm on the correct punch before the next round starts. This has also been taken into account into my routing choices. Do you guys think I should mention all these things in the author comments/explanations section. There is a lot I want to cover in the way of explaining these things which are not obvious at all if someone isnt familiar with the game. I dont want to flood this discussion with super long explanations, and I apologise for the long posts.
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I think you should mention how the game scoring works in the author's notes, since it doesn't seem like it's info that even people who've played the game would know until they actually investigated it.
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Joined: 9/12/2016
Posts: 1646
Location: Italy
Thanks for the explainations!
mPap wrote:
Do you guys think I should mention all these things in the author comments/explanations section. There is a lot I want to cover in the way of explaining these things which are not obvious at all if someone isnt familiar with the game. I dont want to flood this discussion with super long explanations, and I apologise for the long posts.
No, don't worry, we actually appreciate extremely detailed and exhaustive submission texts.
my personal page - my YouTube channel - my GitHub - my Discord: thunderaxe31 <Masterjun> if you look at the "NES" in a weird angle, it actually clearly says "GBA"
adelikat
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Posts: 4754
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Wow, I don't usually enjoy runs like this, since they can become very tedious, but this was much more entertaining than I expected. You did an amazing job, and a big yes vote.
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects
Dimon12321
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If there was no "TAS" written in the title, I would take it for a simple walkthrough))
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
TASVideosGrue
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om, nom, nom... om, nom, nom... nom nom
mPap
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Joined: 11/29/2016
Posts: 7
Location: Australia
I'm not sure what you mean Dimon12321, if you are referring to just the elapsed time of the TAS, then I can see where you are coming from. However, in the just the first round against Glass Joe, I get 25 random stars each at a 50% rate without manipulation. The odds of this occuring are 1 in 33,554,432 and just executing all of Round 1 is even lower because there are pattern manipulations as well. Round 1 takes approximately 2 minutes, if you look at the first 2 minutes of the speedrun TAS, the first 2 fights are completed in times that have been matched by a human. Im just confused as to why you would think this is a walkthrough upon first glance. All in all, I thank the moderators, judges and whomever else for the feedback aswell as the discussion regarding the rules for score oriented TASes, which I disagree with. I will probably never submit a score oriented TAS again simply because I am not interested in score runs where a maximum score is a defined value and the TAS goal is just to achieve that maximum score as fast as possible. To me, thats just a speedrun with the category requirements being "achieve the maximum score". I believe this is the result of speedruns being in fashion and highscores being a thing of the past. Once again, I want to thank everyone and the next TAS I submit will definitely be built for speed!
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Huh, that's too bad. I really enjoyed this movie.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day, Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
Skilled player (1672)
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Posts: 448
mPap wrote:
the next TAS I submit will definitely be built for speed!
Go get 'em, mate! If this submission is any indication, you should have no difficulty having future work published here.