This is using the joystick version of the game. You will need the trackball version AND joystick version in the same folder to run it, as well as the bios in the game's zip folder (ym2413_instruments).
Rampart came out in 1990, being one of the first tower defense games, maybe ever. The game follows a loop of 3 phases - build -> place cannons -> battle -> build, so on and so forth. If you fail to surround a castle with your walls, you are defeated. The game's multiplayer is where it really shines, where the single player has largely been ignored due to its rather extreme difficulty.
The best I've ever seen someone play it, involved completing the game on normal difficulty... with 5 deaths. You see, the game is actually set up for you to die. If you insert another coin, you can restart the current level, except your cannons are stronger. And if you die again, you can get your cannons even stronger (but any death beyond that will not benefit you).
However, this TAS aims to beat the game on its hardest difficulty, without any deaths. This TAS is also a demonstration, as I have never seen anyone complete this mode.
You will first need to play this file, and the flush saveRAM when it's complete to set the game to its hardest difficulty before playing the submitted movie.
UserFiles/Info/638472352846723018
To complete a level, you need to destroy enough enemy ships - I assume there's some internal score that counts down every time you destroy a ship, and when it reaches 0, the level is complete.
There are 3 types of ships.
- Single, white sail. These take 2 hits to kill, and don't have any special abilities.
- Dark brown ship with double sail. These take 3 hits to kill. If they reach your shores, they will deploy little grunts that will get in the way when you build, and almost guarantee you fail. It's imperative that none of these ships reach the shores.
- Red ship with 3 sails. These take a whopping 5 shots to kill. They shoot fire cannonballs which leave a burning crater where ever they land, which cannot be placed on for 3 cycles. They are a serious threat and can even completely screw you over - if there's a line of craters between a castle and the edge of the build space, then a wall cannot be built around the castle whatsoever for that build phase.
After the third stage, all ships switch to their darker/edgier versions and require an additional shot to kill.
Stages 1, 2, 3, and 4 are all required, and then you're given an option for your 5th stage, before being forced into the final stage afterward. I intentionally saved an easier stage for my 4th, since it has great building area, necessary to endure the ships' new upgrades.
Aside from that, the game is pretty straightforward. The main strategy is to try and hit "critical mass" as soon as possible. This means surrounding all possible castles and placing as many cannons as possible (surrounding your home castle gives you 2, any other castle gives 1). Eventually, you will massively overpower the enemy forces and make major progress toward the current level's completion. Also, a cannon is reloaded once its ball hits something, so having more cannons is better, to ensure you can basically always fire.
As you get deeper into the game, the stages have less castles, therefore less cannons, and take longer to reach critical mass.
There are actually instances where surrounding a castle is not the best move. The fireball ships can create a direct line of shots that make it literally impossible to surround a castle. This is most notable in the final stage, where there are only 2 castles, and both are close to the edges. There was a build phase where I intentionally didn't surround a castle even though I could have - because if I did, a fireball ship would have destroyed the ground, rendering BOTH castles unable to be saved, therefore making me lose, no matter what.
Very Hard difficulty means more ships spawn every cycle, you need to destroy more, and the spawned ships are usually the more threatening ones. Also, the build timer is shorter, but that doesn't mean much for TAS.
Speaking of building, you're mostly at the mercy of a predetermined list of pieces you will receive. Unlike the SNES release some time later, where you can manipulate your next piece on the fly, you cannot do that with the Arcade version.
The submitted movie file ends input when firing the last cannonball, and will sit in the name screen without typing anything afterward. Alternatively, here's a movie file that will put "NAT" in the name screen. You know, like Nate, but it only has 3 slots, so...
UserFiles/Info/638472387214608843
Noteworthy paragraph from youtube description: "I actually got quite deep into a TAS of the GBC version of this game, which is identical in gameplay, but it has more difficulty options - including the elusive "Hardest"(!!!!) difficulty, which isn't even an option in the arcade version. The audio and video of the GBC version is downright awful though, so I abandoned it to start this TAS instead."
The GBC version has an issue where, when too many cannonballs are on screen, your firing cursor becomes invisible. It made TASing it too painful - though surprisingly, "Hardest" difficulty isn't much harder than Very Hard.
eien86: Rampart is a unique game where puzzle, strategy, and arcade elements mix together in a quest to defend one's fief. In this submission, the author sets the Arcade machine's configuration to the hardest difficulty and then braves through the game without losing a single battle.
I can say without a doubt that this movie can be improved. From RNG manipulation, wall repair routing, cannon shooting, to cannon placement, I can imagine ways to squeeze more frames here and there. This fact notwithstanding, the submission is clearly superhuman and highly optimized. Any attempts at trying to obtain a better result would require some serious effort. Hence this movie meets our optimization standard.
The use of SRAM is necessary for difficulty selection. I consider this difficulty should be the default for this game and deathless to be the fastest way to win. Therefore, the author's chosen label 'Very hard, 1 Coin' seems unnecessary.
Accepting to Standard
eien86: After some research, we found out that the movie desyncs on the latest stable release of Bizhawk (2.9.1), and instead a dev build was used to make this movie. Since submissions must be done on stable BizHawk releases only, this movie cannot be processed at the moment. Accepting it in the first place was my fault since I also used a dev version of Bizhawk to reproduce it, unknowing it would desync on the stable version. For this reason, I am delaying the acceptance of this movie until one of these conditions happen:
1) The movie syncs on the next stable release of BizHawk
2) The author resyncs the current movie on the current stable build and uploads the new movie to user files. This might be the quickest and easiest of the two solutions.
eien86: CasualPokePlayer found out the reason of the desync had to do with the different ways inputs are parsed for the dev and stable versions of the arcade controller. The resynced movies can be found
here. I'm updating the submission movie with the resync and re-accepting. Please make sure you use a stable release of BizHawk for your next movie(s)
