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1-Up!
Game Page: http://speeddemosarchive.com/Nikujin.html

Segmented any% run

Verifier Responses

Quote:
audio/video quality is good.
I'm not the best (nor the most experienced) Nikujin player around but the glitches used are legit so there's no cheating (see below)

the author claims it's segmented though there's no actual proof of it past the 2nd stage, (where the music is turned on) so i'll just take his word for it.

with my limited experience of the game and the currently published run as a reference, i can say that this one is clearly faster and ALOT more technically efficient. High jumps--although easy to do once you get the hang of it--require strict timing, and doing multiple high jumps in succession while going through the level's route is difficult and requires great skill. I'm not entirely sure if this one can be improved further (as in more than a few seconds faster) so i'll let the more experienced players discuss that. It's an accept from me.

Time of the run is displayed at the end results screen, and it's 2:12. I timed the run in virtualdub with the usual "start of control to end of control" method: timer starts right when the level loads and ends when the arrow is touched. I got ~4495 frames total at the final arrow and that equates to 149 secs or 2:29. Depending on how the in-game timer works, the difference of 17 seconds from frame-by-frame timing is either negligible or legit (which would mean the final segment was part of a different attempt than the rest)

If the segmentation is indeed legit then i guess 2:12 should be the final time.


Quote:
I've gotta say, I was pretty surprised that it was even possible for even a segmented run to be this much faster than Daiz's single segment run. I checked though and all the savings seem to be 'genuine' savings rather than the game or timer running faster on one runner's PC than the other's. I'm not entirely sure what precisely the game's timer times, and what it doesn't, but it seems to measure the time difference between Daiz's and Blazier's runs accurately so I think we can be happy to use it, at least for now.

The runner wasn't able to figure out how to back up saves, so he had to do the whole run in one long sitting and couldn't return to an old segment to redo it after he'd moved on to the next one. I've never heard before of any other segmented run on SDA suffering from these kind of technical restrictions, but I see no reason why they should stop us accepting the run, and, frankly, the run is easily acceptable even without giving any extra credit for the obstacles the runner faced with his segmentation method.

Everything is tightly optimised and the runner's new glitches (mainly the high jump glitch) get used to their full effect, allowing some significant skips in a game that I'd previously considered to be almost entirely linear.

I note that the picture quality in the video us verifiers have been given is quite noticably worse than in Daiz's run, although I also note that, unlike Daiz's run, it's 60FPS - I'm guessing that the runner has a later version of the game than I do, since the only version I've ever seen ran at 30FPS and the save function didn't work.

Everything is very tightly optimised, every tiny movement trick that saves a few frames has been used, and this run is really smooth and fun to watch. I haven't scrutinised every detail painstakingly, because honestly, I get the impression that the runner very much knew what he was doing, and after a moderately careful watch, I simply don't see anything that would merit even considering rejecting this.

Accept.


Decision: Accept

Congratulations to Blaise 'Blazier' Roth!
Thread title:  
Thanks guys! The encode wasn't done by me, so you can blame Nate for the poor quality. Hopefully that'll be fixed by the time it's posted. I sent him some uncompressed, lossless files of each segment. The game actually runs at 50 FPS, but I didn't know that at the time, so I recorded at 60 just to be safe.

This was all done when TAS of Nikujin wasn't possible, so there are dozens of tiny savings I didn't know about. I'd be happy to redo it if I could backup my saves, but for now I'm happy with the result. Coincidentally, as we speak, a TAS of Nikujin is being judged at TASVideos. I helped the runner out a bit and the resulting TAS looks great and is worth watching. http://tasvideos.org/3581S.html
Not a walrus
Verification files always look like crap if they're encoded by nate. Verification quality is more to spot things like blatantly missing chunks of video or a bad audio track.
SGL Scrublord
More naked Elbonian ninja madness is on the way! Yay!