- Heavy glitch abuse
- Emulator settings:
- Advanced Bus-Level Timing OFF
- Dynamic Recompiler OFF
- Rest default
About
Herbert's Revenge is a point-and-click adventure puzzle game. It's the sequel to Elite Penguin Force, which is based on the Flash game Club Penguin. In 2015 dekutony and solarplex released a TAS of this game, and since then various improvements have been found. With DSHawk seemingly going nowhere, I started work on a new TAS in July. I reused solarplex's inputs in several of the minigames, and also dekutony's in a few.
Improvement table
| mission | 2015 | 2021 | difference | cumulative |
|---|
| 1 | 8135 | 5704 | 2431 | 2431 |
| 2 | 9646 | 7949 | 1697 | 4128 |
| 3 | 7393 | 3573 | 3820 | 7948 |
| 4 | 10332 | 7868 | 2464 | 10412 |
| 5 | 8929 | 7354 | 1575 | 11987 |
| 6 | 9467 | 7043 | 2424 | 14411 |
| 7 | 9420 | 8915 | 505 | 14916 |
| 8 | 12341 | 10732 | 1609 | 16525 |
| 9 | 11105 | 10020 | 1085 | 17610 |
| 10 | 12549 | 11363 | 1186 | 18796 |
New techniques
Pause click/simultaneous click
Essentially clicking two things at the same time or in immediate succession. This is used many times throughout the TAS, for example to leave rooms early or to click on things during conversations. Usually a pause is required to click the desired object.
Fade-in click
When you are fading into an area, you can interact with objects to trigger some of their properties, but not all. This can be used on some minigame triggers to "activate" them without actually starting them, so they can be skipped by finishing a different minigame. It is also often used to skip phone calls as the phone will not open during a fade-in.
Whistle close
When the puffle whistle closes, you gain control of the cursor. The main use of this is during room transitions to have control of the cursor when you enter the room (in instances where it would usually be disabled). It can also be used when spawning puffles, as most of the time if you use the puffle fast enough, the whistle will close during their animation and you regain control of the cursor.
Minigame exits
Pausing and exiting a minigame in most cases saves a few frames, adding up to a couple of seconds overall.
Whistle item pick-up
This is not any sort of glitch but simply picking up items while the puffle whistle is open, to make use of some time that would otherwise be spent doing nothing.
In this game you scroll at a faster speed with the cursor. However, there is a small wait before you start scrolling with this method. I found in many instances scrolling with the D-pad was faster because of the instant movement, despite the slower max speed.
Mission 1: The Elite Penguin Force
I tested various strategies on the puffle section, and ended up with a roughly 90-frame improvement. After that is a major sequence break found by weils which uses the whistle closing technique. Doing it upon exiting the training room allows you to skip the conversations in the next room, and then re-enter the room you just left, triggering a later part of the mission and saving about 40 seconds.
Mission 2: Secret of the Fur
This mission starts to show off the new techniques well. It uses pause clicks throughout, but the biggest timesave is right at the end, clicking the X at the same time as inserting the white fur, to skip a lengthy cutscene.
Mission 3: Questions for a Crab
Another major skip here, utilising a fade-in click, two pause clicks, and a whistle close. The fade-in click retains the map upon entering the Wilderness. The whistle close is used to click the cave door early, where a pause click is used to again retain access to the map. The last pause click escapes Herbert's conversation to leave the Wilderness early with the necessary progress to complete the mission.
Mission 4: Mysterious Tremors
Roughly 15 seconds are saved by using the soda barrel to lift the gift shop, rather than the helium balloon. The rest comes from multiple cutscene skips, and some fast item pick-ups.
Mission 5: Spy and Seek
Quite a complicated mission to route, while incorporating some cutscene skips on the tracking devices, and skipping the welding minigame with the duck minigame. There is also a skip at the Plaza, which interestingly glitches the door to the Stage, a room which should not be accessible in this mission.
Mission 6: Waddle Squad
At the start is a small but significant sequence break in the conversation, one of the few of its kind in the game. The cogs minigame is skipped using Rookie's minigame. Unfortunately neither Jet Pack Guy's nor Rookie's minigames are skippable as you must be in the room for the objective to complete. The lengthy cutscene at the dock is skipped using a whistle close.
Mission 7: The Veggie Villain
This mission has few timesaves. Exiting the wrench minigame additionally skips a cutscene afterwards, saving more time than usual.
Mission 8: Suspect at Large
The puffle section near the start of the mission had several route options, and I'm pleased with the result. It also features the first "jigsaws" of the run, which are quite fun to TAS when you get the hang of them. Later in the mission I use a variety of tricks to save time.
Mission 9: Herbert's Plan
Considering the lack of new techniques in this mission the improvement was quite good. I considered some other routes rescuing the penguins but they didn't pan out. Right at the end is a pause click on the mission log to save a few seconds.
Mission 10: The Ultimate Mission
A lot of items to pick up here. I use several transition pause clicks, some of which save very little time. Both Dot and Gary's minigames are skippable here but neither appear to be worth it. I exit the Ski Village early twice, and try to optimise my puffle spawns as much as possible.
Special thanks
- weils for constant support and suggestions.
- Olivercomet for making EPFExplorer. While I didn't get much use out of it, it's a great tool to have.
- nhaar for never watching the videos I made of skips. (nhaarBlackPuffle)
- PASRC for making the encode and providing some technical support.
- Anyone else who watched my stream or progress videos.
Suggested screenshots
EZGames69: It may be a bit before I get to this one but Processing
15207, 28109, 33232
