Post subject: Ghoul Patrol
Former player
Joined: 4/16/2004
Posts: 1276
Location: Uppsala, Sweden
Ghoul Patrol is the sequel to Zombies Ate My Neighbors. Is there any interest in this game? I tried it very briefly to see if it was the same and if it was fun. I only played the first stage but the gameplay is pretty much different. It's still in "Zelda-view" but you can run, jump and slide now. Your mission is still to rescue your neighbors who are threatened by ghosts and evil beings but in this game the exit door appeared at a fixed place. Which in reality shouldn't be much of a problem in a time attack. Besides this I don't know anything about the game really (there are no FAQ for it at gamefaqs). I've never owned the cartridge nor do I remember anything of it (I played it briefly for a couple of years ago). So, is this something that people would like to see? If so I might check it out some day.
/Walker Boh
Former player
Joined: 6/25/2004
Posts: 607
Location: Maine
I really didn't play it all that much, but from what I played, it was too different from ZAMN for me. A run would be nifty, but I couldn't be of any service this time.
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1310)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
I don't know very much about this game either. I've heard it's quite a bad game, not sure how much to trust that, but personally I would rather see a (2P) run of Pocky & Rocky.
Former player
Joined: 7/2/2005
Posts: 309
Location: Baltimore, MD
I'd love to see a run of this game. I played it briefly myself and found it very fun. I also watched your run of ZAMN and it was superb.
Guybrush: "I'm selling these fine leather jackets." Wally: "Really?" Guybrush: "No. I 'm lying." Wally: "In that case, I don't want one!" Currently working on: Nothing at the moment.
Former player
Joined: 4/16/2004
Posts: 1276
Location: Uppsala, Sweden
I might give it a try in the future then. Thanks for feedback though!
/Walker Boh
Former player
Joined: 6/6/2005
Posts: 384
Any news on the status? I don't LIKE Ghoul Patrol much... but only because the difficult is of ">:o" proportions. It IS like ZAMN only much more annoying and tough. If you decide on it, Walker, you going to do a 2-player run like with Zombies?
Former player
Joined: 4/16/2004
Posts: 1276
Location: Uppsala, Sweden
If I do it it will be a 2-player run. I'm still in the forest though with no chance of doing a TAS. I'll report if and when I start with it. And also, I don't know anything about the game really.
/Walker Boh
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2238)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
Happy almost 16 year anniversary of the last post in this thread! I have chosen this game for Dream Team Contest 10!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family. Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
LeHulk
He/Him
Active player (349)
Joined: 8/23/2015
Posts: 34
Location: France
Holy moly! I can't believe some people care about this game! Well, when I have some time I'll write a post with the stuff I know about Ghoul Patrol.
Masterjun
He/Him
Site Developer, Skilled player (1987)
Joined: 10/12/2010
Posts: 1185
Location: Germany
In the spirit of the ongoing contest, you might want to wait until it's over to share new stuff. It's more fun if the teams have to fully research on their own. Sometimes it even leads to taking wrong routes discovering new stuff because everything has to be considered.
Warning: Might glitch to credits I will finish this ACE soon as possible (or will I?)
LeHulk
He/Him
Active player (349)
Joined: 8/23/2015
Posts: 34
Location: France
Oh OK. I can't wait to see what people will figure out then :)
Editor, Skilled player (1202)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
In case anyone's wondering since the contest, there was a burst of progress shortly after its end and... nothing. We're carrying a lot of information in the Discord channel, but that's not very visible here. So I'd like help migrating everything in there to here at TASVideos. This should help give the little TASing project a bit more life than hoping I somehow get my act together. My TASing interest has been dead for a while, and still has yet to be resurrected, so I'd rather get what we have out here than forgotten in some unknown spot. Regardless, I'm not sure how much I can put together on my own for the migration. I'm not interested in TASing, but I am interested in keeping all the info intact. So, this is a call for help on anyone still about on the project before I start attempts myself.
Editor, Skilled player (1202)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
Been dealing with a sickness that's keeping me down through fatigue. Also heard it's going to last around 2 to 3 weeks, so that's a pain. I'm already through a lot of the supposed time, so hopefully I'll be more energetic soon. I'm already practically guaranteed full recovery, just the annoying fatigue and coughs to go through. Here's a 1-1 upload just to make sure it's around. I put my description with the userfile. I'll be trying to put effort in getting one upload per day, if nothing else. It's not as though things are clean in the Discord, despite past attempts, so it might be a bit before I can track down our 1-3 attempts. I'm still hoping for assistance, but even without it, I'm going to make sure the knowledge base and TAS are available over the course of several weeks. The requested help will ensure all this happens sooner than the projected time.
Editor, Skilled player (1202)
Joined: 9/27/2008
Posts: 1085
Here, now I got our stage 1-2 here for you. While browsing through our Discord, I realize I have one weakness I can't overcome on my own with my habits: Handling images. Don't bother asking why, just I'm not sure how to go about dealing with them at all. Attempting to get me used to doing so will be met with stupid amounts of resistance from my own personality. Anywhere images are concerned (like, oh... our maps with routes drawn on them), they will be lost in my migration attempts to here. This is where help will be mandatory, and no amount of time on my own will fix that. In the meantime, rediscovering some tricks reading over old things is fun. What is BackJump, anyway? It's a deceleration abuse involving tricking the game into thinking we're headed in one direction, thereby having us "decelerate" to a higher speed threshold during the landing animation. Understood none of that? Good, because I'm still picking apart some of the intricacies of our tricks. At the least, I can go into details. The player's direction is stored in 0A1E. If the player's D-pad is pressed in the same direction as the player's momentum, this is updated to match the direction you're headed. For some reason, Up+Left is the only exception to this rule, in which any direction of north, northwest, west, southwest, or south is updated to be northwest if you press Up+Left. If the D-pad is neutral, 0A1E is also updated to match your momentum. When landing from a jump, the game decelerates Zeke/Julie based on 0A1E. The deceleration is not affected by speed caps, because it's supposed to decelerate you, not speed you up. From full speed south, we can set our direction to the northwest easily because of the weird exception. We can then hold Up+Right to start moving east without losing our northwest direction. With most of the momentum to the east, and a little south, you can alternate between Up+Right and Down+Left in order to trick the game into keeping your direction as northwest. Once we land from the jump, at close to our speed cap east, the landing will magically ratchet our speed up faster to the east. I suppose I should also talk about the speed cap. The game has your speed and subspeed. When asking if you're going too fast, it first checks your subspeed before checking the integer speed. If your subspeed is below the subspeed cap of your current movement, the game shortcuts the check and says you're good. If your speed cap is 2.50 px/f, and you're traveling along at 3.23 px/f, it just looks at the .23 part and decides you're under the speed cap after noticing it's below the .50 part, despite the integer being well above where it should be. The BackJump is abusing the deceleration direction to push the fractional portion up enough to get us to reach the next integer, then our subspeed is well below the subspeed cap and the game says we're good. At the start of 1-2, this is what we do to get our speed above 4 px/f. We choose this speed because the camera itself doesn't go faster than 4 pixels per frame anyway, and most of the things we want done are limited by the camera. From there, we can pay the 120 frames it takes to get into Sprint mode while outracing the camera. Then we jump as soon as Sprint is triggered, splash into some water, and trigger Perma-Sprint and dash around 1-2 at a crazy pace. Ah, I need to figure out the mechanics of Perma-Sprint now...