Game objectives
- Emulator used: Dolphin 5.0 LUA + TAStudio (Syncs on Dolphin 5.0 Stable)
- Heavy Luck Manipulation
- Aims for fastest time
- Beats all known records
Hashes
MD5: 5FAEBC5E4ECD1813A51CA1C843615B45
SHA1: A4F2AF3E1B874E570902C8EA555B0CDFDD30E1BE
Game explanation:
Mario Party 6 is a party game released for the Nintendo GameCube in 2004 (2005 for Europe and Australia). Four players race across a board trying to get stars. During each turn, every player will take their turn to roll a dice from 1 to 10. This will determine how many spaces each player will move, if a player lands on a blue space, they will gain some coins, but if a player lands on a red space, they will lose coins. There are other spaces on the board which will cause different events to happen if a player lands on them, some events may be good and helpful for the player, others not so much. At the end of each turn, all four players will compete in a minigame to win coins, coins are used to buy stars. The player with the most amount of stars at the end wins!
In this TAS, we played on the Solo Mode! Solo Mode is, as the name implies, a Single-player game mode that has the player go through 3 boards and it has the character playing minigames against the Koopa Kids. The turn limit on these boards is set to 50 turns and players can roll a Dice Block that shows numbers only from 1-6 rather than the usual 1-10.
The spaces on Solo Mode are different than those in normal modes of play. There are spaces for 4-player, 2-vs-2 (these are played teamed up with a CPU partner of the player's choice; but it can't be the same character as the player's), 1-vs-3 (the human is always the 1 player against 3), Battle, and Duel Mini-games. There are also Bowser spaces, which feature (normally 1-vs-3) games played against the Koopa Kids where all the players' coins are lost if they lose; ? spaces, which cause an event to happen; and the Goal is where Rare Mini-Games are awarded.
Landing on one of these Rare Mini-Game spaces concludes the game and grants players one of the Rare Mini-games: Dunk Bros., Lab Brats, or Block Star. Seer Terror must be bought from the Star Bank. If the player goes past the Rare space, then the collected mini-games and bonuses are lost, and the game ends. Each board have a space limit and the as explained above, going past the Rare Mini-Game space is considered a loss. So we aim to get to the Goal in fewest turns possible. Along the way, we have to play Mini-games and we aim for faster Mini-games. These are achieved through RNG manipulation.
Tricks Used:
Pausing the game: You can manipulate RNG by pausing the game for a certain number for frames. This allows you to control things like, what number a player rolls on their dice or what orb you get.
Wasting frames before closing a text box: This is another way to manipulate RNG. There are few times during this TAS where I waste frames on a text box to manipulate RNG. I'll explain these more in the stage-by-stage notes.
Toggling game options: This is done right as the first board begins, I have to toggle two settings! One is to skip minigame explanations which saves time throughout the game and the other is switching text box speed to fast! By default, text box speed is on normal, this means it takes one frame for each letter to appear during text boxes. Fast speed means all letters will show up instantly which allows me to close text boxes as soon as the text appears.
Stage-by-stage notes:
This section will explain everything that was done in each board to save time, including a brief explanation on each boards objective!
Thirsty Gulch (すすめ！はらはらキャニオン):
Objective for this board is 15 spaces. Landing on the "?" Spaces causes the slab underneath to fall off, sending players to the lower section of the board. If a player goes past the last space of the board, they stop at the edge of a cliff. The cliff then crumbles beneath them, and the player falls to the river below, ending the game.
- We start off by pausing the game to toggle the settings mentioned above.
- Some frames were wasted to manipulate a "3" on the dice roll followed by the first instance of RNG manipulation after landing on the "1-Vs-3" Mini-Game space for Ray of Fright (はねっかえりレーザー). A few frames were delayed to get the Koopa Kids to remain in relatively close proximity to each other and in the laser's path.
- 3 more pauses to manipulate another Mini-Game; this time, it's Garden Grab (ダイコンぬききょうそう).
- A few more frames of delay to roll the 6 and clear the board.
Turn Count: 3
Astro Avenue (めざせ！オーロラロード):
Objective for this board is 25 spaces. The "?" Spaces are on small space stations. Landing on one causes a UFO to appear and take the player to another space closer to the end of the board. If a player goes past the last space of the board, they stop at the platform with a stop light next to it. The light then changes from red to green and a spaceship appears, drives into the player, and carries them off to space, resulting in the player losing everything!
- A few frames of delay to roll a 5 and land on the first "?", thus skipping ahead by 7 spaces.
- Another short delay of frames in order to roll a 3 and land on the second "?", skipping ahead by 8 more spaces this time.
- Last turn is yet another brief delay to roll the 2 and clear this board.
Turn Count: 3
Infernal Tower (のぼれ！クッパタワー):
Objective for this board is 31 spaces. The "?" Spaces are in front of steel doors. Landing on one causes a Chain Chomp to come out and bash the player back to start. If a player goes past the last space of the board, they stop at a small platform. This activates a trap, causing a cage to fall on the player, who is then carried away by Bowser in his Koopa Clown Car. In the process, the player loses all possessions!
- Some frames were wasted to delay for a 6 on the dice roll. The first Mini-Game is a 1-Vs-3 game; Snow Brawl (たいけつ！ゆきがっせん). The movement during the Mini-Game is to make sure that the Koopa Kids prioritize picking up a snowball and targeting Peach to quickly end the Mini-Game in a loss to save time.
- We roll a 6 on the dice and 2 pauses were done to manipulate the next Mini-Game: Circuit Maximus (ぐるっとビリキューレース). Turns out that the movement patterns of the Amps in later rooms are influenced by movements in earlier rooms. This was finished in record time of 0'11"26, currently the fastest time for this Mini-Game!
- Samsara: Hi, this minigame was my big contribution! For what became just 11 seconds of running, this ended up taking a good amount of good old fashioned brute force work. Generally we'd have to go back two or three rooms in order to change an upcoming pattern in a favorable way, slightly adjusting running angles or taking turns extra wide so we'd have a straighter shot to the exit door. The final result ended up being 0.22 seconds faster than the fastest run we could find, and given how tight that one looked it was lovely to shave off that much from it... Okay, look, it's a lot in context, okay?
- There are 2 instances of pause manipulation; the first is to manipulate the dice cycle to get a 6 and the second was to manipulate the Mini-Game. This Mini-game is Odd Card Out (はやおしまちがいさがし), the fastest 4-Player Mini-Game in the game.
- Here, we roll another 6 and land on the Duel Mini-Game Space; playing Lunar-tics (ピッタリげつめんちゃくち). It's faster to get a Draw than to win so it there was just messing about until time to land along with the Koopa Kid.
- This turn is where 3 pauses are done to manipulate the last Mini-Game; Sunday Drivers (ハッスルショット！). This one was finished in 0'14"90, the current fastest time for the Mini-Game!
- A few frames were delayed to roll the remaining 6 on the final dice block and land on the Goal. RTA timing ends as "Finish" is on the screen. This run ended input after the confirmation A press of the tally.
Turn Count: 6
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I hope everyone enjoys watching the TAS and you can feel free to ask questions if you need to know anything!
Credit to Mario Wiki for the info!
Memory: Optimization appears good. Presumably improvements are possible, but would require a much greater understanding of RNG than is necessary for publication.
The movie was a fun and short ride. Some fun luck manipulation and the few minigames that were played were largely cute to watch.
Accepting.
