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Batman: Dark Loading Screens "The kusoge we needed, but didn't deserve"
Woah boy, do I have a stinker for you. Panned in the press at the time of release on March 18, 2003, and winding up with the legacy of "worst game of 2003/one of the worst 'Batman' games of all-time", Dark Tomorrow has been rightfully relegated to the trashbin of licensed game history. Featuring a soundtrack that at times sounds like Symphony of the Night (and other times like babi's first garage band experiement), horrendusly clunky gameplay that apes from MGS/Tomb Raider/side-scrolling beat'em ups, underwhelming graphics and some of the worst stage design of it's genre, Dark Tomorrow fails to deliver on any level. An absolute chore to run RTA thanks to the controls, this movie aims to get through this stinker faster than WR on either platform. We will be aiming for the "Good Ending" in this TAS, which requires us to defeat the final boss and disarm the doomsday nuclear satellite. This is the typical RTA goal.

Versions

The game was released on GameCube and Xbox, with the Xbox version seemingly being a "1.01" type release, with small QOL and time saving level differences (some stages be cleared without handcuffing the thugs) enemy placement and camera placement is different throughout the game, bosses have much less health and take slightly more damage etc. As we are running on GameCube, our boss fights will take 3x~ as long because of their extra health + we will need to do some routing differences (primarily handcuffing/not handcuffing some thugs in certain sections).

Gameplay notes

As mentioned before, the gameplay and controls are CLUNKY. Batman runs like he crapped his pants with very stiff movement and a lack of sharp turning while running. Also, when we change camera angles, (which happens constantly) Batman is stuck running in the same direction we were just moving in for 1-4 frames, before we can let go for one frame in between and change our direction. If we change our direction immediatly without this little buffer, Batman will stop on a dime and shift his whole body in that direction, then start moving forward instead of just turning. You will see this at times when taking corners, where we aren't always as sharp as we would like to be. We also have to wait for Batman to rest his arms at his sides before we can open a door after running, so if enemies are nearby or we just left combat, you will see Batman stopping for just a moment before he can open the door.
Jumping also will ""normally"" make Batman stop for 20~ frames upon landing, however sometimes, for whatever reason, he just doesn't and will keep running right when he hits the ground. I tried to get this to happen as many times as possible but it is wholly inconsistent and I have no idea what causes it specifically. We will also be maneuvering around enemies as much as possible rather than fighting them, jumping over their heads if need be. Enemies have very wide hitboxes that you can not walk through, including on their KO animation. This becomes evident a few times in the run where our path is blocked by a thug finishing his animation.
There's also ICE PHYSICS if you can believe it. In icy sections of the game, we will have acceleration to full running speed, slide on the ground when turning AND always have the jump recovery stun animation occur. This is annoying as in the ice canyon area, we will be forced to trigger the animation while walking due to level geometry, wasting time. Combat is equally as wonky. If you throw any attack without "locking on", you will punch/kick and deal a bit of damage while pushing the enemy back slightly. If you "lock on", you can do a 4 hit combo and a finisher(we never only do 4 hits, trying to reset while fighting a boss will get us hit). Batman will also freeze and do a hurt animation if he takes any damage from a boss enemy or gets hurt by a normal enemy when his blue armor bar hits 0. Generally speaking, we will be fighting bosses by spamming combos ASAP. Some boss fights however, allow us to stunlock the boss in loops of normal, non "lock on" attacks , letting us chain together lots of extra damage without always having to wait for the boss to get back up off the ground. This is finnicky however, with bosses able to just stop taking damage and go invincible when they please (Killer Croc in particular will do this).

Level by level notes

  • Gotham City Rooftops
    • We start off in an alleyway. We just need to KO and ziptie the 3 thugs ASAP and it's on to the next screen.
    • We immediatly start swinging across the rooftops with our batclaw, positioning ourselves with our jumps so that we avoid having to climb the wall at the end of the screen and save a bit of time.
    • We position ourselves on the roof so that we can swing straight across and brush against the wall, falling down on glass roof we run to the next screen.
    • More rooftop swinging, we position ourselves to land on the water tower, then the catwalk, then onto the last set of roofs.
  • Gotham City Alleyway
    • Ignoring the bad guys, we hop over their heads with a double jump and then a single jump to get over the last guy who was just knocked down.
    • Watch out for the rocket!
    • We take a few shots from a guy in a gorilla gimp mask (who gets frozen in time) and then head out the door.
    • These next few screens are simply running from one end to another. We position ourselves to avoid the thugs coming down the road and continue running from one screen to the next.
  • Gazette Square
    • More chasing down Black Mask from one screen to another. Nothing much of note other than we run past a guy who kills himself by running over a flaming gasline, then skip rescuing a hostage.
    • We perform a method too difficult for RTA by jumping on top of the shelves and over the counter, booting a thug in the face so he moves away from the doorway.
  • Warehouse district
    • We skip a huge portion of the level and cheese about 10 minutes of gametime by running to the back of a building and batclaw swinging our way up a wall, letting us hop over a fence and continue on past some thugs to the next screen.
    • We have to tie up 4 thugs before Black Mask spawns in. Once he's in, we position ourselves to backflip through his shots to avoid hitstun, then start doing combo loops. Black Mask won't let us sneak in extra damage from stray hits, as he just absorbs them, so we need to just mash through combos as fast as possible. At 6:22, we move aside a bit for a canned animation, then perform the final combo and move to the next stage.
  • Gotham Docks
    • We skip much of the stage by just jumping over some boxes, then hop through a railing to skip another section and move to the next screen,
    • We hop over more boxes while tanking damage and move to the next screen
    • We take a hit while falling with our medkit out so we regain health, then climb up a ladder and double jump over the crane geometry to skip the ending section of the stage
  • GPD Rooftop
    • We hop down some walls, then beat up some thugs. The RTA strategy and intended route is to knock them all down and zip them up, but we are fast enough that we can just hit them and run to the locked door for the next screen.
    • We skip an entire action segment and simply hop into a vent before the thugs can catch up with us
    • We bypass this room by immediatly moving to the door and unlocking it before the enemy AI kicks in, so they don't get alerted and we don't waste time fighting them.
  • Underground Sewers
    • No shitty game is complete without a sewer level
    • We run through the sewer, hopping over some electrified water (we criss cross, since jumping forward will come up just slightly short and result in us getting shocked and wasting time)
    • We dodge some badguys and hop through a breakable wall
    • Running past more enemies, we hop into the only underwater segment for a few seconds, then proceed forward.
    • We suffer through sub 20fps frame rates to pull 2 levers, then double jump and climb a ledge across the water to save a few seconds from climbing a ladder.
    • We move through a few screens and get to a short batclaw swing.
    • We bypass the rat gauntlets, just barely making it to the doors quick enough to open them up before Batman's combat state activates.
    • We clear out the Giant Rats as quickly as possible. When we can, we get damage in with batarangs across the stage, as well as perform some stray non combo hits when it's possible. The Giant Rats have 3x the HP on GC than Xbox, making this fight last much longer than that version.
    • Latin. Abandon hope ye who TAS this game.
    • We clear out thugs stuck in our path, we have no choice but to wait for their animation timers to finish before we can run past their bodies on the ground.
  • Arkham Asyum
    • More bad guys we have no choice but to wait to get around because the hallways are too tight. We hit a switch and move past some loading screens to make our way to Killer Croc.
    • Killer Croc acts a bit differently from other boss fights, in that he will just stop taking damage after 2-3 hits. We mix in stray hits when we can with our combos to finish him ASAP. The RTA method to fighting Croc is to get in a corner or on the gate on the right of the arena, then crouch to break Croc's AI and spam non-combo punches until Croc falls over. Our TAS method is much faster.
    • We grab Croc's key and run to unlock the door, then head back the way we came to deal with more crazy inmates. We get around as many as we can without hitting them and wait for the ones we have to, then make our way through the locked doors and upstairs.
    • We free the nurses (withotu ziptying the bad guys as inteded) and move on.
    • Dodging some crazies, we continue down the halls and up some stairs to another locked door.
    • We run down the hall and stop just before the poison pods hit us, running past them ASAP.
    • The Giant Plant fight is nigh-impossible RTA without using an exploit to just through batarangs and smoke bombs at it from the doorway. However, using our TAS ability, we are able to jump in and do melee damage while avoiding the insane spam hitboxes of the vine tentacles.
    • We run back upstairs and past a bunch of crazies. We jump over the heads of those that we can, then continue running through the halls until we grab the plant killer.
    • Posion Ivy's Giant Plant fight is another fight that's basically impossible RTA without using exploits. The tentacle attack spam and poison bomb spam is incredibly annoying, but thankfully, we can position ourselves to the rear left of the boss and just wail on it with nonstop combo attacks.
    • Onwards into the freezer, we have our first encounter with ice phsyics. As explkained above, our movement is slightly different in this section, but we manage with our TAS abilities and maneuver around the freezing steam to get to Mr. Freeze's room.
    • Mr. Freeze is a stragithforward boss. We get behind him and wail away with combos. We backflip over his wakeup kick attack so we can start our combo ASAP, stunlocking him to death. EZ PZ lemon freezy.
    • We skip the investigation section and turn around out the doors.
    • We get through some crazies and run down more halls. We are skipping 45~ minutes of content and just ignoring everything since it has no effect on progression.
    • The Zsasz boss fight is a joke. What is supposed to be a high speed twitch action fight,we turn into a breakdance exhibition. We stunlock Zsasz with our crouchkick and make short work of him.
    • The Joker boss fight is next, but we just completely ignore it entirely. We are intended to fight off a pack of armed crazies on the bottom level and defend Commissioner Gordon, but since we have TAS speed, we instead leave him to his fate since we can hit the level complete trigger on the top floor before the first part of the boss fight begins.
  • Ra's Al Ghul's Castle
    • This section is a pure autoscroller. We have no control on how fast we move, just needing to get to the end of the canyon without falling to our death. In RTA this is where runs go to die. Your wings do not need to touch the walls to result in failure, simply coming within a foot~ of the walls will send Batman tumbling. We also have to watch for when the snow shifts up/down, as this means we need to start gaining air with Batman or we will simply be auto-killed.
    • A short platforming section, we run to the end while taking a few falls that are unavoidable due to the ice physics and level geometry being uneven, resulting in a tiny bit of speed loss from Batman's recovery animation. Where these falls are, Batman takes a double jump to get some distance before hitting the ground.
    • We sneak past some guards then get inside, KOing 3 bad guys on our way in. We get down the hallways as fast as possible, making sure to take enough damage to put us 1 hit from death.
    • We take a slightly wide angle to avoid triggering all the guards in the area, continuing to the castle wall.
    • We get ourselves killed ASAP with one enemy bullet so we can get back our batarangs for an upcoming segment (there is no other way to get batarangs back in this game, great game design) then climb up the wall and head inside. RTA will KO the guards so Batman isn't stunned by the shotguns while climbing, but we just don't get stunned here for whatever reason.
    • We climb a ladder and run down some halls. Getting outside, we take out one guard with stealth, then use our respanwed batarangs to blow up some barrels down the way so the guards near them are KOd. We ziptie the first guard so he can't get back up, then wait for the spawning in guard to open the door. He will only open the door if these specific guards we KOd are knocked down and there is no alarm currently activated.
    • We skip another investigation segment and run by some guards an down some halls.
    • We take a right in the mouth room so we can run through a maze of lower sections on our way to the satelitte nuke controls. We disarm the space nukes (there is no hint or anything ingame that leads you to do this but it's required for the good ending) and sit through 40~ seconds of an unskippable computer screen, then head back the way we came in, taking a different hallway to avoid getting stuck on some spawned in guards.
    • We fight the Elite Guards (who are just normal enemy thug AI with buffed health) by throwing in plenty of stray hits and comboing them in sequence, one of the ground and one standing, to get max damage.
    • The boss fight with Ubu is dead simple. We get behind him and do combos. He's immune to stray hit spam, so we have to combo him through the fight. Each time he wakes up, he performs a headbutt attack with a hitbox that encompases his whole body and slightly behind him, sometimes following up with a rear donkey kick. We simply stay behind him and walk him into the walls, bashing him as soon as there is an opening, then finishing him off with a batarang from across the stage just as he is vulnerable again.
    • The final boss fight with Ra's Al Ghul... just as bad as the rest of the boss fights. Standing up and fighting with the sword is a fool's errand, and Ra's will block 99% of the attacks and counter attack you, knocking you to the ground. The RTA method is to crouch, sit still and spam punch until one of you dies. We use this partially during the fight, as our sword has superior reach and speed to punches and won't ""normally"" cause a knockdown (sometimes it just does, so we stop attacking with the sword and perform another attack). We are also able to stunlock him in an extended loop of stray kick attacks, until his health gets below a trigger that causes him to become invincible and perform a flurry of slashes. We finish him off with a combo and that's the game! Our input ends before the combo does, on hit 3, saving us a bit of extra time.
I hope the judges and community enjoy the movie. I showed this TAS to the WR holder, Maestro_Breaker, who was impressed and enjoyed the run. His route was used for this TAS, so shoutouts to him for grinding out this kusoge.

eien86: Claiming for judging.

eien86: Giant rats and sewer levels. As it happens, it is possible to create good TASes out of bad games. This is a rather forgetable entry in the endless list of Batman-licensed games which the author finishes almost 10 minutes faster than the current RTA WR.
As far as I could see, there are no visible time losses. The only suspicion I had was with a delayed entry to a staircase, but that was explained by the fact enemy hitboxes are rather large and they won't disappear until they complete their death animation. Therefore, they will block your way for a while before they let you pass through narrow corridors. The fights that can be avoided are correctly skipped, and those who cannot are promptly finished. There is one death, but it is used to recharge HP and Bat-arangs required for the next section(s). After continuing, Batman respawns immediately at the same place. The movie is finished at the last attack, successfully triggering the credits.
The 'good ending' goal can be assumed as standard. Any other ending should be an alternative category.
Accepting to Standard


TASVideoAgent
They/Them
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #9252: Geferulf's GC Batman: Dark Tomorrow in 32:36.72
Former player
Joined: 6/30/2010
Posts: 1102
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
This game really looks atrociously bad. Who thought that it was a good idea to make everything painfully slow and add a disorienting Resident Evil-style camera? You can tell how much even a TAS has to fight the clunky game mechanics here. I give this one a "meh". It is impressive to see a TAS push through a game that is this bad, but the game still is what it is, so there is only so much entertainment I can get out of it.
Current project: Gex 3 any% Paused: Gex 64 any% There are no N64 emulators. Just SM64 emulators with hacky support for all the other games.
Dimon12321
He/Him
Reviewer, Experienced player (567)
Joined: 4/5/2014
Posts: 1190
Location: Romania
The game is so boring I though I would really fall asleep in the middle of the day. Voting Meh. There are some minor complaints from my side regarding the lack of straight lines in some places, but I don't think much time can be saved
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Experienced player (584)
Joined: 2/5/2012
Posts: 1757
Location: Brasil
why did you game over at the ice part at the end of the game? this syncs btw at the recommended emu version if anybody wants to skip that, ID GBME7F checksum 35ac51774891839fc8ad1b284a6ef5cb i hope this info helps tasvideos staff somehow
TAS i'm interested: Megaman series, specially the RPGs! Where is the mmbn1 all chips TAS we deserve? Where is the Command Mission TAS? i'm slowly moving away from TASing fighting games for speed, maybe it's time to start finding some entertainment value in TASing.
Player (151)
Joined: 10/4/2015
Posts: 139
KusogeMan wrote:
why did you game over at the ice part at the end of the game? this syncs btw at the recommended emu version if anybody wants to skip that, ID GBME7F checksum 35ac51774891839fc8ad1b284a6ef5cb i hope this info helps tasvideos staff somehow
As stated in the notes, we take a game over to get our batarangs back so we can use 4 of them for the "stealth" (barrel explosions) segment that comes a few minutes later, +1 to kill Ubu from across the room. Dying, while it takes a few seconds to respawn, is faster than saving the batarangs for a slower Giant Rats fight and is MUCH faster than doing that stealth segment without batarangs blowing up the barrels. WR on both consoles takes multiple deaths in the run in order to get batarangs back (after the Giant Plant fight for example) We set ourselves up to get killed quickly by leaving us at 2hp in a section with unavoidable damage just past the point on the screen where Batman spawns in.
Enter the Matrix is a piece of garbage but I'm gonna finish it if it kills me.
eien86
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Judge, Skilled player (1854)
Joined: 3/21/2021
Posts: 238
Location: Switzerland
At @15:45 of the encode, it seems you struggle against the wall before you get on the stairs. Is it the enemy is blocking your way before it finishes dying?
Player (151)
Joined: 10/4/2015
Posts: 139
eien86 wrote:
At @15:45 of the encode, it seems you struggle against the wall before you get on the stairs. Is it the enemy is blocking your way before it finishes dying?
Yes, he completely blocks the path through until his canned animation finishes. I mentioned this in the notes. There's a few other sections where Batman is forced to wait because the hallways are just too small and they can't be jumped over.
Enter the Matrix is a piece of garbage but I'm gonna finish it if it kills me.