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Yeah. This is happening.

Other than just typing like lightning my general strategies for this are to avoid every zombie word challenge that comes up as soon as possible to just move on, and let those poor cutscene hostages die (SORRY) so I don't get their rescue scenes. Otherwise it's a fairly straightforward brain-munching Mavis Beacon.

As there is no level transition other than going back to the level select screen, does anyone imagine it would be acceptable to submit individual levels?
Thread title:  
Edit history:
DJS: 2012-01-29 02:38:46 am
torch slug since 2006
i think il's are the way to go, also have a single-segment hopefully.

i hope you know all the answers to that boss who asks ridic. questions Wink

edit: maybe a 100% ss could be all challenges complete and all rescues?
I don't. Yet. I'm kinda dreading that one.

I'm still running through the levels making notes on which victim routes would be fastest to go through but at this point it just seems faster on almost every level to let them die.


And yeah, that's what I was thinking as far as a 100% run. There's really no other way to conventionally 100% a typing game like this that I can think of.
Now this I want to see Cheesy . Good luck with the run!
just watched your quality test and came in to quote the best line in the boss fight after seeing "no egg in eggplant", but then "girl of tender age" and "dinky little hotel" appeared to challenge the best line in the boss. so now i'm just here to give you mad props for this
Wait until the later levels. You get such gems as "Why do I sweat when I eat?" and zombies saying "It was all just a game to her".

So from what I'm hearing, the bonus room from house of the dead 2 is still in this game if you save every survivor, at this point I would consider a 100% run as

    - All Survivors Saved
    - All Challenges Complete
    - Bonus Room unlocked

Any% individual level runs are definitely doable seperately. The game also features a boss time attack mode. Would anyone be interested in seeing Boss Rush mode runs?
Remember your mantra.
You're bravery for attempting this run is legendary.
I support you all the way.


I like the idea of running this, because it's one of the few games will practicing a run will benefit your typing skills IRL immensely. What difficulty level have you been playing on?
What are you going to do about level 6?  you can't choose it off the menu, I think. Doesn't that mean you'd have to play level 5-level 6 counted as one level? Cause if you play through chapter 5 you create a bias as your performance affects how difficult the next level will be.

What other options are you using, all default? Isn't there like difficulty settings as well?

Anyway seems like a good idea. I always thought the game existed to be speedran seeing as everything is timed.
You're right, you can't just go to level 6 immediately, but it does become unlocked after you beat level 5 to choose as it's own level, making an IL for it possible because to the best of my knowledge how good or bad you do on level 5 doesn't effect how difficult level 6 will be, but I could be wrong. I'll give it a test soon.

And my plan for difficulty was to do everything on glorious default settings.
"The fastest typing speed ever, 216 words per minute, was achieved by Stella Pajunas-Garnand from Chicago in 1946 in one minute on an IBM electric.[6][7][8][9] As of 2005, writer Barbara Blackburn was the fastest English language typist in the world, according to The Guinness Book of World Records. Using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, she has maintained 150 wpm for 50 minutes, and 170 wpm for shorter periods. She has been clocked at a peak speed of 212 wpm." word here means 5 keystrokes.
How fast are you?
Edit history:
T3tsuya: 2012-02-01 03:33:09 am
While I am slower then Stella Pajunas-Garnand in 1946, I am fairly confident I can type faster than her in the current moment as she spends most of her time these days being dead. So I feel a counter-attempt by her on this run isn't very likely.

I've maintained ~120 WPM. Reasonably high. Though with planning the run and timing the certain things in this game that require timing I'll have to hope I can maintain a speed of "Really really fast".


More on topic, my quality test just got the go-ahead by Nate. I should begin on this in the next few days. I'll keep updating here and posting up topics of interest, I really appreciate the interest and insight on this. If there's anyone who might be more knowledgeable about this game than me, I would very much appreciate any tips you might have for the run that I might have missed.
We all scream for Eyes Cream
Quote from T3tsuya:
While I am slower then Stella Pajunas-Garnand in 1946, I am fairly confident I can type faster than her in the current moment as she spends most of her time these days being dead. So I feel a counter-attempt by her on this run isn't very likely.


Is it wrong that I'm laughing after reading this?
A little. But laugh you did, and now I'm off the hook.
We all scream for Eyes Cream
Well I'd rather be wrong and find it hilarious then right and depressing. Cheesy I should watch the quality tests. I've wanted to try this game but I never got the chance.
Quote from T3tsuya:
I would very much appreciate any tips you might have for the run that I might have missed.

You probably already knew this, but you don't have to hit space between words when typing phrases.
torch slug since 2006
in relation to that, you dont need to shift/caps lock for big letters
Sandbagging
I'm looking forward to this run <3
Yeah, finally somebody is gonna run this game. I've been waiting for it for several years Smiley
Edit history:
T3tsuya: 2012-02-01 12:21:44 pm
Quote from Ewil:
Yeah, finally somebody is gonna run this game. I've been waiting for it for several years Smiley

I told you I'm getting that bounty claimed!

Quote from Kotti:
You probably already knew this, but you don't have to hit space between words when typing phrases.

Quote from DJS:
in relation to that, you dont need to shift/caps lock for big letters


And unfortunately I did know these two things. Though you do have to hit shift for punctuation, which isnt fair. I wish I could rip the shift key out and be done with it. Thanks for the help though.
Wish I had some real tips. Something that came to mind is the powerups. Certainly you'll want to hit most of them. E.g. the genre dictionary words could actually be faster to type than random words and phrases. Also if you hit all the powerups as fast as you can, you skip the rest of the time it was gonna wait for you to type them. Or do you?

I'm copying the following from this TotD "general faq" http://faqs.ign.com/articles/435/435758p1.html

Quote:
**NOTE** Chapter 6 will only be avaliable after finishing Chapter 5.
After earning a certain amount of coins in Original Mode, Chapter
6 will be selectable from the beginning.


It goes on to explain how the coins are awarded and that you need 20 coins to unlock chap. 6 from the start.

I'm fairly sure that how the game's difficulty level is determined is as follows: your starting difficulty is whatever you selected in the options menu. Then as you start playing the difficulty keeps rising until you take damage/use a continue. And all the difficulty level does is to determine how long the words and phrases are that you need to type. So if there's no mistake by me, the logical conclusion is you'd probably want to take damage to save time. If you started with 5 lives (or is it 3 by default?) you'd want to lose all but one to the zombies. In fact, after a further reminding myself how the continues work, you should probably also consider using as many continues as possible, cause that iirc causes a massive drop in difficulty. You'll have to work out when the most economic times are to take damage, cause you don't want it to cause another long boss attack animation round, but it doesn't matter if a zombie that was almost going to get you anyway is allowed to deliver a blow.

So I'm quite bemused by these observations if they turn out to be correct.

I'm sure you've tested that it's actually faster to let the first zombie of each of the "missions" to lumber round and bite you rather than try to type all 10 zombies quickly (if it's that sort of challenge). Also if good rewards (tranquilizer?) are given out for success, might that offset the time it took to complete them? Do rescued hostages ever hand out tranquilizers? Actually never mind I think the tranquilizer doesn't lower the difficulty, I hear it only slows the zombies down. Actually I bet you know what that item does.
Edit history:
T3tsuya: 2012-02-01 07:35:57 pm
This is the first I've actually heard about a scaling difficulty in Arcade mode. If that's true this is definitely an eye opener. I'll be sure to run some tests on it later to see what's what about that. If it proves to be correct, that will be a fairly large change to my plan and might save me quite a bit of time throughout the entire run. Thanks for the insight. Just goes to show you, you go through a game your entire time playing it thinking you know exactly what you're doing until a fresh pair of eyes step in and speaks up.

I'll let you know as I find it out.
Edit history:
RaneofSOTN: 2012-02-02 07:41:20 pm
I want off the ride....
Its pretty much very very true. I played the game for quite a while. And after every hit the difficulty of the next section is lowered....

For zombies its not that much of a drop of difficulty while on bosses it greatly shortens the typing.
On Emperor, he can do 4 balls which can be hard as hell to type, but if you took damage the next time it'll be like 4 5 letter words. Its like the game appologizing. Also after all continues it clears the 'room' or CAN damage the boss. Every continue also is like a slightly longer lasting difficulty drop.

I cleared the game on "default" arcade mode w/ 2 continues. Coming at Magician and Emperor. Both are just totally rediculous! Also its wayy faster (in almost all cases) to just take damage and avoid having to do each of the challenges. I'd just use those as your damage points unless you pick up more health to use... They come about once a level right around where it is starting to be a pain. In the final level there are 2 of them, and both are better to take the damage and skip for sure.

I'd link you to the "streamed" copy of the run but its horrible, somehow it ended up all choppy and its barely watchable in any form. I also didn't abuse damage (I wanted a 1cc clear but magician and emperor both said no).

so yes damage = good. Life = buffer for damages. Continues should ideally be used on bosses. Cause if you were to damage them and take the hit which causes the continue, it still hurts them! Only time this isn't true is on magician's 3 ball part, where it just clears them and lets you try for the hit (?). so... continues on BOSSES, hits  on challenges. A few extra hits (if you can keep the HP floating) before hard sections could speed it up. If anything I'd let a flying AXE hit you over a zombie (they can sit there for a while on "easy" which is the default IIRC).

as a bonus for no reason what the game recorded from me on that clear...
rane
typing speed A
reflexes A
accuracy B
decisionmaking A
special key C
Reward 5,393,700-
typing speed prof Rank A- ( 22words/1min)

chap1 3529
2 5175
3 4415
4 4011
5 4743
6 6184
Edit history:
LotBlind: 2012-02-04 05:21:02 pm
LotBlind: 2012-02-04 04:48:50 pm
I also played around a little with this game. I think I can agree with Rane on most things. Here's some of my findings and conjectures. Sorry if it's a bit disorderly.

The difficulty level affects not just how long the phrases are, but also how much time you have to type them. The first is bad, but the second doesn't matter so long as you finish typing in time. In fact if you wanted a zombie to attack you for difficulty-lowering purposes, the sooner the better.

The worst time-wasters as I see it would be these:
-typing something that you don't manage to finish in time when you're fighting bosses, cause that causes the boss fight to drag on. taking damage in other situations doesn't directly cause a delay.
-having the difficulty level higher than necessary, simply because even if you manage to keep up with the zombies, you're spending more time on typing longer phrases
-missing an important pick-up, getting a bad pick-up
-bad choice of route

Looks like the defaults for the game are
  normal difficulty
  3 lives
  5 continues

also the default is UK keyboard. If you switched that to US keyboard, you wouldn't be using default settings anymore strictly speaking, but I think that can be left up for the runner to choose in this game.

I did the 20 coins thing that unlocks chap. 6 from the start, but turns out it only unlocks it in original mode! I wonder if there's a password entry code to unlock it in arcade mode as well... The manual only says "you have to finish chapter 5 before chapter 6 is unlocked" so I think that's that. Why did you choose arcade mode for your running tetsuya? Was it arbitrary?

About the items that you can pick up:
-arcade mode and original mode have somewhat different items, so which you choose affects item play greatly
-in arcade mode the important ones are the tranquilizers. I'd say those are good no matter what. They seem to work similar to using a continue.
-whether or not you want to pick up health items depends on whether you feel you can put the extra health into use during the rest of the chapter you're playing. It could even hinder you if you wanted continues instead, but it may be a sort of planning/balancing thing.
-it looks to be random whether you get genre dictionary or alien dictionary from certain crates, also for whether you get a tranquilizer or an excitement pill. In fact some crates seem even more random. You totally need to get the lucky alternatives in a submittable run whenever possible.
-I think it's generally better to take the genre dictionaries rather than to leave them, because I seem to have noticed you sometimes get considerably easier phrases to type that way, even ones that are shorter than the general difficulty level would imply. I don't remember seeing really long genre dictionary phrases at all. Not 100% sure on this.
-I just discovered in the manual that there's actually three strengths of tranquilizers. I had never noticed. "From weakest to strongest: Red, yellow, blue". If that's randomly picked I guess you should look for the strong ones in submitted runs, but maybe it's fixed from crate to crate. Gonna try to keep my eyes peeled to see how all that works.

I didn't do my testing very systematically, but over my last few playthroughs I got the feeling that only continues matter considerably what comes to keeping the difficulty level low. I still think taking damage also has an effect at least in boss fights, and Rane seems to agree. I imagine your aim would be to lose as many continues as possible while sacrificing minimal time. Here's my general ideas of when it's best to take damage:

-reflex monsters (bats etc.), axes etc.
-regular zombies who are [almost] too fast to stop them hitting you anyway
-missions (all or almost all?)

More thoughts on health pickups: you can gain health by rescuing certain civilians, typing certain crates or having the perfect gauge fill up. If you type really accurately, you could even do that unintentionally, but I think you should probably know whether you want it to happen or not and type a little sloppier if you don't.

Before I forget, there's actually more than one alternative entrance to some levels, I think it's 2, 3 and 4. I don't think this matters in IL runs, but in a full game speed run it would... And it's determined by what path you took in the previous level.

Finally I didn't realize there were keyboard shortcuts like this, so maybe someone else benefits from these too:
-pause key to pause the game
-alt-F2 to reset the game
-alt-F3 to return to the drills menu screen from drills or tutorials
-alt-F4 to shut the game down

And if you think you can confirm or disprove any of this, please go ahead!

edit - corrected the keyboard shortcuts, minor changes
edit - more minor changes after some more testing
I want off the ride....
my first boot up settings were
easy US 3 5

i didn;t hit default but i;ll try that when i get home
Oh my. This is looking to be a lot more complicated than I first thought. I came back to report pretty much everything you just took the time to type out Blind. Thank you for your time and investigation. From what Im seeing everything is dead on, tragically complicating an already silly run, but I am still dedicated. This run needs to be done and challenges are great. I'll try to touch on everything here so we get some ideas mulled out.

On original mode vs arcade mode. I picked arcade mode as the arbitrary default selection, I didn't want to overcomplicate things, but Sega seems to have done that for me. I think I'm going to stick to an arcade mode run though as it seems the difficulty scaling is in both modes.

One important thing is, like you said. Tranquilizers. What tranquilizers do is lower the difficulty of the words and phrases like we keep trying to figure out ways to accomplish, so I'll definitely be praying to the RNG gods on that one. Something I hate doing in runs, especially single segment runs. Though from what I'm seeing, and I could be wrong. The strengths look fixed. I have not yet observed a yellow or blue tranquilizer in level 1, though honestly, up until recently I havent been looking specifically. More testing needs to happen, I hope to jump on that soon.

On health items vs continues, I -THINK- it might benefit me to find fast places to get hit, keep my combo relatively low so I dont get more health and then coast on my one remaining health until I need to use that continue. I'm thinking it'll be best to pop continues in front of boss fights to keep phrase length down. Especially in level 2 against Hierophant. I have gotten to type out his entire phrase before he closes his chest before, and on some of the longer ones it's impossible. If you get caught with his chest closed, it wastes a ton of time. The later bosses are just going to plain be a pain on longer words too. It doesn't look fun. COULD ALWAYS CHICKEN OUT AND SET WORD LENGTH TO SHORT. Not sure at this point if that would destroy the spirit of the run. Hell I'm not even sure if it would REMAIN short. I've never done it. I'm just a hardcore zombie killing typist like that.

On dictionaries, not only do the genre dictionaries keep the words shorter, I've found it's usually the same stock set of words. You can memorize them the best you can and get those typed out fairly quickly. But they really do not last long and they're usually only used for zombie challenges which Im skipping anyway. On the whole I'd say get them, but not if it's going to be going out of the way to do so.

On routes, I'm still trying to figure out the fastest routes through each level, I even have a lot of clever ascii charts drawn out. On a good section of the timings Ive found the choice of route to be pretty negligible, but as a cynical perfectionist, I'm not going to believe that until I do a lot more testing. Again, that'll happen soon and I'll update.


Also Rane, My defaults were Normal UK 3 5. So maybe something got crossed there. Seems "Default" enough. Though if anyone can tell me the difference between a UK and US keyboard other than the $ I'd love to know.



This is going to take longer than I planned originally, there's going to need to be a lot more testing done routewise and some deeper looks into the strategy of the whole thing, but the end result will be worth it. Thank you again for the continued help and support on this. I would have easily submitted a sub-par run without this advice. I really do appreciate it. If you find or think of anything else, please don't hesitate to post it up.