Tool-assisted Speedrun: Bisqwit's PC Star Control II in 35:03.5

[Chad]

This is fascinating to me.   Apparently a gentleman, Bisqwit, did a speed-run on Star Control 2 but with "tool assistance".  He submitted this to a "console only" site and they rejected it.

35 minutes seems awfully fast to me!  Just seeing text wizzz by is interesting enough.  But, the flowchart showing everything you have to do in Star Control 2 to complete the game is even better.  Goto TASVideo's Submission #1493: Bisqwit's PC Star Control II in 35:03.5 to check out the full article on speed-running Star Control 2.

This speedrun attempts to complete the game in a minimal amount of time, and the completion time ends up being 35:04.

It is the first DOS tool-assisted speedrun on this site. Although the method used to create it was not as robust as for the console game speedruns so far, it is still a legitimate TAS nonetheless, with savestates and frame advance being used and no file edit/TSR hacks.

Because it is rather unlikely anyone will be able to replay the actual movie file, given the myriad of ways the game installation or DOSBox configuration may differ, an AVI was submitted together with the movie file.

Because you can pretty much go anywhere whenever you want, there is no "sequence breaking" in this game. However, there are numerous things that are required for the game to be completed.

This movie is now also available at Youtube, albeit at a significantly lower resolution:

   1. Part 1/5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M11RkNmJBs4
   2. Part 2/5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFRum1aeEX0
   3. Part 3/5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ8g8HpJYuY
   4. Part 4/5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDVKVwnBKWg
   5. Part 5/5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_kIRVEWGFE

(Split in 5 because Youtube has a 10-minute length limitation.)

Here is why they rejected it.  It doesn't sound like they've played Star Control 2 to me 

While this is a very interesting movie, technically, being the first PC TAS, viewer feedback has been negative, and it is obvious why. Probably more than 80% of the movie is just seeing stars zooming by on red/green tinted backgrounds, which I started skipping after the first minute. The space battles are interesting, but few, short, and far apart, which isn't a very good combination. Therefore I think this movie should be rejected.

P.S.  This is fairly old in Internet time... originally posted in 2007.  UQM Forums has a post on it here.  I wanted to give it a news post here.

[Alen]

35 Minutes is awfully fast. I'm sure if they did play star control 2 they would have shit themselves and added the movie in seconds. 

[Angelfish]

Quick Question: what does the term tool assisted mean in this case?

[Megagun]

Generally, tool-assisted means that savestates (sometimes to 'game the random number generator'), frame-advance (advance the game by one frame to allow perfect precision) and auto-turbo-keys (automated, repeated pressing of a certain key) are in use. Sometimes, memhacking tools are used to alter the outcome of an ingame dice roll, but I don't think that the guy who made this is using that.

[Dabir]

He's got perfectly precise resource drops, if I recall.

[Death 999]

Sometimes, memhacking tools are used to alter the outcome of an ingame dice roll, but I don't think that the guy who made this is using that.

To clarify, the only permissible use of memhacking is read-only so you can figure out what you need to do using only in-game inputs to force the desired random outcome -- not simply rewriting.

As an example, the 'beat 4 CPU players in Monopoly in 1 turn' speedrun.