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Road Fighter is a simple racing game, which was only released in Japan, and this is the first tool-assisted speed run of it. It aims for the fastest, shortest and highest-scoring route, and thus makes the game look really easy. Konamiman also makes an appearance in the game.

Game objectives

  • Aims for the fastest time
  • Tries to get the highest score for given time
  • Attempts to minimize movement and thus find the shortest route
  • FCEU RR v0.98.28 was used

Comments

The main menu of the game contains the options "LEVEL 1" and "LEVEL 2" to select from. Despite their misleading names they're not levels in the traditional sense, but difficulty levels. Since playing games on easy is lame and boring (and against the guidelines) "LEVEL 2" is selected. The game is still quite easy though (having completed it manually before taking out the tools).

Stage-by-stage comments

COURSE 1

All of the levels are quite straightforward, but there are minor differences in them. The playing style differs from rest of the levels only during the first dodge, because of style and straighter route. Also note that the cars in the beginning are only decoration; they disappear before leaving the screen.

COURSE 2

There's one boulder to look out for and dodging it has to start before it comes to the screen (talk about fair challenge); otherwise the driving is identical to the first level.

COURSE 3

There are two collisions on this level, both of them unavoidable. It's faster to run into the opponents than try to slow down or stop the opponents loading -- all of the methods were tested.

COURSE 4

There's nothing special in this track, unless the finishing fanfare or intensive wall hugging count.
(The screenshot should either contain collisions or wall hugging.)

Baxter: Unlike what the submission text states, this is the sixth submission of this game. The five submissions before it were all either cancelled or rejected due to poor game choice. This TAS is not significantly different from the other submissions; rejecting.


TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #2678: Tuplanolla's NES Road Fighter in 04:36.62
Joined: 11/4/2007
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It was a bit boring, but clearly optimized (But knowing how simple this game is...). Very much a Meh vote. Optimized screenshot: Also... not encoding due to the below post.
mklip2001
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Hi there Tuplanolla, There have been prior submissions of this game, actually. The fastest one I see from a simple search on this site is at http://tasvideos.org/700S.html which gets a time of 4:36.40 on Level 2. (This may be faster because it ends input early, so I don't know... your submission might have a faster in-game time.) It was rejected for being a bad game choice. I haven't watched this yet, so I don't know whether I agree with this being a bad game choice. However, maybe you should see what this other submitter did in order to beat their time. Good luck!
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Post subject: mmk NOW I'm off to bed :P
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I vote "meh" on this as well. I was expecting something more like Spy Hunter, but it's like spy hunter minus the violence. I didn't expect the encode to finish so quickly (I went to bio and came back and it was done), so have an encode linky. Archive.org Linky Direct Linky
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My thought was to submit a run of this game as an april fools' submission last year, and I beat it in 4:34.83, but when I watched it through I didn't think it was funny enough for such a submission. I think that maybe your game play might be even better than mine but what you lose time on is that you pick up those extra fuel cars and thus have more fuel points to tick down after each level.
feos wrote:
Only Aglar can improve this now.
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mklip2001 wrote:
There have been prior submissions of this game, actually. The fastest one I see from a simple search on this site is at http://tasvideos.org/700S.html which gets a time of 4:36.40 on Level 2. (This may be faster because it ends input early, so I don't know... your submission might have a faster in-game time.) It was rejected for being a bad game choice.
The earlier runs were sloppy and ended input so early the in-game time (to the finish line) was significantly increased. There shouldn't be such a thing as bad game choice though, especially when the movie isn't very long.
Aglar wrote:
My thought was to submit a run of this game as an april fools' submission last year, and I beat it in 4:34.83, but when I watched it through I didn't think it was funny enough for such a submission. I think that maybe your game play might be even better than mine but what you lose time on is that you pick up those extra fuel cars and thus have more fuel points to tick down after each level.
I decided to collect the fuel, but kept that in mind: the fuel trucks are collected on the last frame possible and thus the movie can be easily edited (by delaying the collection inputs by one frame) to not collect them, if it's a problem.
sgrunt
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In addition to being not very interesting to watch, there's little evidence that tool assistance adds much of benefit to this run - in other words, the run looks as though it could have been performed by a high calibre speed runner in that it doesn't look like anything takes place that is obviously impossible under real time conditions. Even a thoroughly optimal run of this game (as by all indications this one is) just does not have enough technical merit, in my opinion, to be worth publishing. As the runs on this site are not solely about entertainment, so too are they not solely about level of optimisation - which, I must emphasise, is not the same as technical merit. Some games allow for neither interesting viewing nor sufficient flexibility to allow for staggering technical feats, and this falls squarely into such a category. Further, previous runs of this game have been rejected for poor game choice. This all leads to a vote of no.
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Thanks for the encode Velitha. While short, this wasn't particularly exciting or interesting. And I'm not sure what could be done with this game to make it more interesting. Chalk up another tally for "well done, but poor game choice".
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I don't know... could you have perhaps bounced off the walls in the narrow stretch, avoiding as many drivers as possible? Cut in the way of opponents when they are just driving straight lines? Match opponents that swerve and drive parallel to them? I realize there doesn't seem to be much to work with... but honestly, to me, it looks like that run could be done by hitting the gas and letting the controller sit on the floor.
Warepire
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Everything has already been mentioned. Looks good but doesn't entertain much nor does it seem like anything "special" was achieved by TASing the game compared to playing it normally. Meh vote.
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It's as exciting as a sine wave. I would rather listen to white noise than this. The game sucks, even one minute is too long.
nesrocks
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The arcade version might be more interesting to watch. Might...
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This was a nice game to play once upon a time. But I guess it may look bleh to watch. (I didn't see this submission yet.)
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om, nom, nom... minty!