Splatterhouse (Arcade) - Speed Run [13:37] zallard1 2024-10-20 | Splatterhouse (Arcade) - Speed Run [13:37]
Star Fox 2 - Normal Mode New Game+ Speedrun [11:09] zallard1 2024-10-06 | This run was done on a reproduction cartridge I made from a Stunt Race FX cartridge played on a 1chip Super Nintendo.So, this is something I've been meaning to get around to for years, but I wanted the skills to make my own cartridge because some reproductions out there are of dubious quality to me. This run does beat my best run that was performed on a SNES Classic by about 5 seconds, but it's hard to tell how much of it is exactly due to platform differences or not.From some basic tests and observations, the SNES Classic actually seems to be the slowest platform, while playing on a real Super Nintendo seems slightly faster (although some areas lag more).This game is in a weird limbo state because it was only released on the SNES Classic, and so the leaderboards don't actually allow use of playing on a reproduction cartridge, or emulators, because it's faster than its first official release, which kind of sucks for accessibility reasons. There's also the epilepsy filter, which was exclusive to the SNES Classic and does affect lag frames somewhat.Fast forward to today, and we actually have a new platform that's legal for Star Fox 2 since it's also an official release, which is the Nintendo Switch Online service. I did some testing a while back, and it showed that NSO ran the game way, waaaay faster than on SNES Classic. I theorize that it's due to transition screens being arbitrarily faster than they used to be.Anyways, now my splits have a bunch of golds scattered between the SNES Classic, and real hardware. My theory is that when I start running on NSO, I should be able to get really big golds on every single split. If I can do that, then I feel like playing this on a real Super Nintendo (or an accurate emulator) should be valid, just by virtue of it being slower than the fastest official release of the game anyways. This would be nice because it would improve accessibility for speedrunning this game.Anyways, this run was pretty similar to my old 11:14 run in 2018. I played decently, but still had Andross teleport on me once, and a mistake on the first core. I wanna say just about every event in both the 11:14 and this 11:09 played really similarly to each other, so I would wager a guess that a real Super Nintendo likely has a 5 second overall advantage over the SNES Classic, which is wild because Meteor definitely lags way more on a Super Nintendo than it does on the SNES Classic. The framerate of a real Super Nintendo is also marginally faster than a SNES Classic though, which also contributes to the time difference as well (60.0988fps vs 60.00fps). Throughout all these recent attempts, I could never come even remotely close to my SNES Classic Meteor gold split.So that should be it! I think I'll be trying this category on the Nintendo Switch for subsequent runs, but I really wanted to upload this since it just looks much nicer captured through RGB and upscaled than it does on the SNES Classic or Switch, haha.Thanks for watching!
What Super Punch Outs matches REALLY look like in real time zallard1 2024-09-30 | This is an edit of the TASes I did a while ago in Super Punch Out for the 2 player code where player 1 and player 2 win as fast as possible in real time.This edit only shows the active frames of the in-game timer while it's ticking. That means any time the clock freezes, whether it's because the opponent freezes the timer, the player gets an opponent dizzy, or the player is knocked down, those frames are edited out. This edited video immediately starts with the 1p beats everyone TAS, then goes right into the 2p beats everyone TAS.I decided to do this for these 2 particular TASes since they are absolutely the silliest possible examples of in-game timer abuse in the entire game. For more info about what the 2 player code even is for Super Punch Out, definitely check out these video and read the descriptions:youtube.com/watch?v=GSb-hLWcMyMyoutube.com/watch?v=WfVL9k3VticAs a side note since I know it'll be asked, I know there's some slight time improvements, but I didn't bother to re-TAS these for this video since the point of this video is just the silly stuff, so it doesn't really matter imo. It would also require re-encoding the TASes, which is a bit of an inconvenience when I still have the original files.Completely got this idea from a YouTube comment by @TheSkinHater , and since I still had this video files handy, it was a pretty quick and easy edit job.Thanks for watching!
The longest fight in Punch-Out history zallard1 2024-08-05 | This is a TAS of the original NTSC version of Super Punch Out, so no Game Genie codes or anything that alters the original game was needed for this fight to happen. This theoretical fight was something I thought of immediately when the 2 player in-game code was found and I experienced how silly the Gabby Jay fight was. If you don't know what that is, you can check that out here: youtube.com/watch?v=OdVWQpeSupoAs player 2, you can buffer Gabby's iconic "Yay" move, over and over again to increment the timer by 1 frame per use, which obviously takes up far more real-time than in-game time. Naturally, the question presents itself: how long would it take for this fight to finish if it were stalled out as much as possible? The short answer is about 6 hours, the long answer is... well... this video, haha.The only feasible way to really do this fight was to TAS it because of how monotonous it is, and trust me when I say it took me far, far less time to TAS this fight than it took for the fight to elapse naturally, thanks to the magic of copy/paste.The more challenging thing for me was encoding this. I actually did this TAS a while ago, but just didn't know the logistics to really get it done, because I just didn't really want to budge on quality. The one compromise I ended up doing was having to settle on 1080p instead of 4k, which I think is a pretty reasonable omission in this case, lol.The other thing was realizing that the lagarith lossless codec saves much larger file sizes than the H264 codec, so once I figured that out, it finally gave me a video that would barely fit under YouTube's file size limit, which is great.I really don't have anything else to say about this. Enjoy... or don't enjoy, whichever makes the most sense for you in this scenario.
Super Punch Out!! - Nick Bruiser [00749] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-07-25 | This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.Here’s the final fight of PAL Super Punch Out, and I’d by lying if I said it was anything other than anticlimactic, lol.The NTSC version of Nick Bruiser is almost identical to this fight, aside from one small difference in execution. If you’d like to compare that fight to this one, you can check it out here: youtube.com/watch?v=ZR1kxwZutr8NTSC Nick requires you to hit one mandatory frame perfect counter, as well as a couple of buffered inputs to match the 7’52” TAS time. However, would you believe me if I said that the PAL version is even easier?That’s right, you just have to memorize a couple of buffer strategies and keep rolling the dice until you win, ultimately requiring very little skill to pull off.The strategy begins just like the NTSC version does, where you simply buffer 2 left jabs. This is the only fight in the entire game where you can simply punch an opponent in the face without needing to worry about guard manipulation, so it makes the inputs for the first attack trivial.Once you land the 2 jabs, you need to buffer a quick duck into a right jab to perfectly counter Nick’s jab to where his recoil animation is faster than usual (Nick may throw a hook here, which ruins attempts 50% of the time). For the NTSC version, this has to be hit manually, but for this version, that buffer makes it automatically free for the player.Once you land the jab, you need to buffer a left jab, then do a "tap duck" which involves holding "Down" on the dpad until the instant you see your character start to duck, then immediately let go. Once your character is almost centered, buffer B to hit Nick on the final frame of his stun. From this point forward, you need several more luck events to align. From there, just buffer 2 left jabs and he should go dizzy assuming he doesn't block at all. With Nick going into his dizzy animation, just buffer 2 right gut punches into 2 low supers for the knockdown at 5”28.Phase 2 is trivial, as you just need to buffer 2 consecutive uppercuts. If you get all of the luck, then the 2nd uppercut will land, and Nick will be down for the KO. It’s extremely easy to execute this strategy in full, but the real deterrent for doing something like this in full game runs is the luck, so let’s take a look at the luck real quick…Phase 1:-Nick throws a jab (1/2)-Nick’s delay for his 2nd attack is 80 frames* (1/4)-Total Phase 1 odds: (1/2)*(1/4) = (1/8) = 12.5%*You won’t see if you got the correct delay until the first uppercut of phase 2 lands.Phase 2:-Nick throws a jab (1/2)-Landing an unstunned uppercut (5/8)-Nick doesn’t get the 24 frame delay for next attack [prevents him blocking 2nd uppercut] (7/8)-Total Phase 2 odds: (1/2)*(5/8)*(7/8) = 35 / 128 = ~1 / 3.6571 (or ~27.34%)Total fight odds: (1/8)*(35/128) = 35 / 1,024 = ~1 / 29.2571 (or ~3.4%) The luck ends up being the 2nd worst odds to complete a strategy in the entire game, with only Narcis being rarer. The good thing is that the execution is so trivial that it handily makes up for the unfavorable luck requirements to make this one of the easiest records in the entire game.Phew, and that’s it for the PAL version of Super Punch Out! That was a pretty fun diversion and I’m glad I finally got around to tying these records.Right now I’m having arm issues (cubital tunnel), so I’ll be taking a break from speedrun attempts for a while, but once it’s better, I’d like to match the Narcis Prince TAS time on the NTSC version to round out my TAS ties in this game in all regions.After that, I’d probably be more inclined to improve my full game run, as my PB is 6 years old at this point and a lot of new things have been found since I ran it last.In the meantime while I heal, I’m probably going to start uploading the couple of marathon runs that I’ve done over the years that I haven’t gotten around to yet. I stopped uploading them at the Calithon run of Double Punch Out in 2017, and there’s still a couple more between that and the 2019 Wii Punch Out run that I haven’t uploaded yet. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while and perhaps this is the best time to get that taken care of.Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Rick Bruiser [00965] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-07-19 | This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.Rick Bruiser on the PAL version has a couple of pretty massive differences compared to the NTSC version. If you would like to compare the NTSC-U fight to this one to see the changes between the two strategies, you can check it out here: youtu.be/kQZu8m929KYLikewise, if you want, you can compare the NTSC-J version to this fight too, as it has a pretty sizable difference vs the NTSC-U version with the dizzy animation: youtu.be/ZE37xPqLWikPhase 1 happens to be completely identical to the NTSC strategy, so we’ll just cover that real quick. Start the fight by not pressing anything for the first frame of the fight, then press Up+Y for the second frame to get a left jab to sneak past his guard. Rick is unique in that he will reel back and retaliate with a jab every time you sneak a punch through his guard, so keep that in mind whenever you fight him!Dodge his retaliation jab, and Rick will immediately attempt 2 jabs on your right side, followed by a hook on your left side. Immediately upon being centered from your previous dodge, throw a right jab with a slight delay to counter Rick's jab, then proceed to buffer the following sequence: right jab, right body, right jab, right jab, right body, then another right body to interrupt his hook. This deals exactly the amount of damage needed to get you the ideal phase 2 and 3 refills of 25HP and 14HP, which is exactly enough HP for a single uppercut in phase 3 to TKO Rick. Rick’s ideal health refill will “cascade” down from phase 1, because health refills on this game are partially determined by how much health the opponent had before the final punch knocks him down. You can get lower phase 1 times if you do faster punches, but Rick’s health refill will be ruined in phase 3 if you do.Upon throwing that final right body, Rick will go dizzy, and buffering 2 left gut punches into a low super will net you the first knockdown of the fight. This dizzy animation is also considerably shorter than the NTSC-U version's since Rick goes dizzy immediately when the punch hits in the PAL and NTSC-J versions, while in the NTSC-U version, he recoils and attempts to do a retaliation punch *BEFORE* the dizzy animation actually starts. This saves quite a bit of time over the US version as you'd expect.For phase 2, there’s a huge deviation because of the speeds of punches in the PAL version compared to the NTSC versions. To start phase 2, you will need to do a guard manipulated uppercut, which means pressing nothing at all for the first frame, then Up+A for the second frame. This allows Rick to take an uppercut, although he can dodge it 5/8's of the time, as well as doing a sidestep jump, which is 1/8 likely each time he shuffles his feet. Assuming he does neither of these, he'll be hit with the uppercut, and attempt to counter-jab you for it, to which you just dodge to the right.On the NTSC versions, you would need to then dodge to the left to avoid his hook after dodging the retaliation jab, then cancel your dodge by pressing the A button at the perfect time to cut the dodge tightly and do a low super for the 2nd knockdown of the fight. However, in the PAL version, you have *exactly* enough time to center yourself and just immediately throw a low super directly into his hook, and it’ll barely land. Thankfully this maneuver is also super easy to do, as you just need to buffer a quick dodge and immediately cancel it with the A button to throw the low super.The first time I ever saw this strategy anywhere was from a channel named “Jelly Man” many years ago. I couldn’t find the video up anymore, but I did come across the channel again recently. The channel does have an NTSC video of Rick that at least referenced the PAL video I'm talking about here: youtube.com/watch?v=G_eulxtO9dUPhase 3 is simply the exact same as the start of phase 2 thankfully, which just involves another guard manipulated uppercut, which means pressing nothing at all for the first frame, then Up+A for the second frame. The same odds apply, where you need to win a 5/8's luck roll, and not get the 1/8 Rick sidestep. Once this uppercut lands, Rick will go down for the TKO in under 10 seconds!Here is the luck breakdown for this strategy to succeed:Phase 2:-Landing an unstunned uppercut (5/8)-Rick stands still (7/8)-Total Phase 2 odds: (5/8)*(7/8) = 35 / 64 = ~1 / 1.82857 (or ~54.69%)Phase 3:-Landing an unstunned uppercut (5/8)-Rick stands still (7/8)-Total Phase 3 odds: (5/8)*(7/8) = 35 / 64 = ~1 / 1.82857 (or ~54.69%)Total fight odds: (35/64)*(35/64) = 1,225 / 4,096 = ~1 / 3.3436 (or ~29.9%)Pretty decent odds all things considered! It helps a lot that phase 1 has zero luck at all, and phases 2 and 3 are reasonably likely.Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Hoy Quarlow [00832] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-07-16 | This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.Hoy Quarlow on the PAL version is pretty different compared to the NTSC strategy. If you would like to compare the NTSC fight to this one to see everything that's changed between the two strategies, you can check it out here: youtube.com/watch?v=QB_f64jZiA0Just like the NTSC version, Hoy is very random and will ruin attempt after attempt, usually by doing random dodges when you try to throw unstunned punches, or by randomly changing his guard after manipulating it, which makes him shove you if he blocks your punch.The fight begins with the usual guard manipulation by pressing nothing for the first frame, and "Up" + "Y" on the second frame, which will allow a left jab through his guard, assuming you get favorable luck (3/4 likely). From there, buffer another left jab (buffered unstunned jabs are 9/16 likely), then Hoy will go into a crane stance before attacking you. His sprite will twitch for a brief moment, and immediately following that twitch, you want to throw out a delayed right gut punch to intercept it.This is where the NTSC and PAL strategies diverge. The NTSC strategy from this point forward would yield an 8”34, but Lixunis found a completely different approach based on a phase 1 strategy that Khananaphone found that can cut off a frame in the PAL version.After intercepting Hoy’s crane stance, he'll immediately attack low, which you can counter with a delayed right gut punch. Hoy can only be hit with alternating punches when he’s stunned, so you'll need to end his stun with a buffered left jab. From here, you can buffer 2 left jabs, hope they land, and Hoy should go dizzy!For NTSC, there’s an elaborate reason for real time optimization to knock Hoy down with a jab, but in the PAL version, we need the lower health refill from the super knockdown, so we do that instead by buffering a right gut punch into a low super. This phase 1 is interesting because it prevents Hoy’s move timer from advancing as far as the NTSC strategy, and Hoy ends up being setup for something pretty neat in phase 2. For the start of phase 2, Hoy immediately throws 2 consecutive hooks, so you just have to buffer 2 hooks to intercept both attacks. You do want your hooks to be left and right sided, since you need the extra damage from your right hook for this strategy to actually knock Hoy down.Once you land your 2nd hook, Hoy will be in a state where he’s receptive to having his guard manipulated, since he’s been immediately throwing attacks and hasn’t been idle for a single frame yet. Because of this, you must manipulate Hoy’s guard before you can throw your next punch and expect it to actually land.After you land your 2nd hook, you need to delay for one frame without pressing up, then on the next frame, you need to press up & A to throw a guard manipulated uppercut. I timed this around when Hoy’s recoil animation was ending for the 2nd hook I landed. If all goes well and you get lucky (5/8 likely), then the uppercut will land and Hoy will be sent to the mat for the 2nd time.For the NTSC version of the fight, Hoy’s move timer will be in a spot where you cannot land a guard manipulated super before Hoy’s next attack comes out, so you’re a bit limited in what your best time can be, since you need to land a super directly into that next attack.However, with the PAL version, you're earlier in his pattern to where you *can* land a guard manipulated super early, so that's what we'll do. Start phase 3 by holding "Up" for 1 frame, then for the next frame, let go and press "A" for a low super. Assuming you get the 5/8 luck, the super will land and he'll be down for the TKO!For the PAL version, Hoy ends up arguably being the hardest fight to match the TAS time on that isn’t Narcis Prince. The execution for Narcis isn’t bad, but the luck is really rough, while Hoy requires you to hit 5 frame perfect inputs while dealing with the 2nd worst luck needed for a fight in the game.Here's a breakdown all the luck needed to land this strategy:Phase 1:-Landing an unstunned jab (3/4)-Landing a buffered unstunned jab (9/16)-Landing a buffered unstunned jab (9/16)-Landing a buffered unstunned jab (9/16)-Total Phase 1 odds: (3/4)*(9/16)*(9/16)*(9/16) = 2,187 / 16,834 = 1 / 7.6973 (or ~12.99%)Phase 2:-Landing an unstunned uppercut (5/8)Phase 3:-Landing an unstunned uppercut (5/8)Total fight odds: (2,187/16,834)*(5/8)*(5/8) = 54,675 / 1,048,576 = ~1 / 19.178344 (or ~5.21%)I got extremely lucky when I did this fight, because on my very first TAS pace attempt out of phase 2, I hit the final punch in phase 3 perfectly while getting the best luck. It took me roughly 2 hours of effort to match this time because of that. I had 5 perfect phase 1's where 4 of which Hoy dodged in phase 2.Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Super Machoman [00931] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-07-09 | This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.Super Macho Man on the PAL version is very similar to the NTSC strategy, except for a couple of punches in phase 1 If you would like to compare the NTSC fight to this one, you can check it out here: youtube.com/watch?v=tb-dTAbaBScThis strategy starts by pressing nothing on the 1st frame, then pressing "Up" and "Y" for the second frame, and unlike other fights that I've mentioned these inputs on, this punch has to be EXACTLY like this, because if you are not frame perfect on the first jab, then you will not be able to sneak in the 2nd buffered jab before Macho starts to wind up for his first punch. He'll block the 2nd jab because it'll instead be connecting with him as he winds up for his first punch, which he'll just auto guard. Also, because this 2nd jab is buffered, it has lower odds of getting through due to the RNG getting called twice for buffered punches.After landing the frame perfect left jab and buffering your second left jab, Macho is going to wind up for a jab on your right, and you'll need to land a delayed right jab of your own to counter it. From here is where this strategy diverges from NTSC, as the NTSC fight will hit macho with left gut punches every time he's stunned, while PAL has slightly extra leniency on the dizzy meter due to timing differences between versions. This allows you to exchange some of the left gut punches for jabs! DJ Incendration was the one who found these jab adjustments, resulting in a faster possible time on PAL Macho than the previous best strategy that yields a 9"36.So once the 2nd jab is landed, you want to land a jab into a gut punch, specifically in this order because the animation that Macho has when a stun ends with a gut punch ends up exactly the same speed as ending with a jab, which makes it the best place to shoehorn in a gut punch if one is needed, and in this strategy, it absolutely is for getting Macho dizzy. Then Macho will throw another jab, so you'll need to throw a delayed right jab of your own to counter it, then buffer a left jab into a low super, which should barely fill up in time and just barely get him dizzy if you played fast enough.However, there's a big caveat with this adjustment, which is that in order to still get Macho into dizzy status, you *must* do everything in phase 1 frame perfectly. That means that if you are late on a single punch by one frame, then you will miss the dizzy. This is an all-or-nothing strategy that saves you 2 frames compared to the 9"36 strategy that used to be the previous best PAL Macho time.Once Macho gets up, phase 2 ends up being completely identical to the NTSC phase 2. We want to manipulate Macho's guard up by pressing "Up" for the first frame of the phase, then let go 1 frame later and press "A" to throw a low super. If Macho doesn't do an exercise program, dance twice, and lets a super through (5/8 likely), then it should land while he's idle.Once the super animation ends, Macho will throw a hook immediately after, which you can counter with a delayed left gut punch to stun him. Simply buffer a low super while he's stunned and Macho will be down for the KO!Now let's talk about luck. This fight is one of 2 fights where the RNG actually doesn't work correctly (Masked Muscle being the other one). For Muscle, the instance of the luck being broken doesn't come into play for IL fights, as it only occurs with the first instance of him spitting in the fight, but for Macho it's always relevant because it affects the first exercise program he does in the fight. I'm not going to go into everything here, but here's a pastebin that talks about the issue in more detail: pastebin.com/yt6FqTuQSo, with that cleared up, here's every luck event in the fight, as well as the total luck needed to land this strategy...Phase 1:-Macho doesn't dance (7/8)-Landing an unstunned jab (3/4)-Macho doesn't dance (7/8)-Landing a buffered unstunned jab (3/4)^2 = (9/16)-Total Phase 1 odds: (7/8)*(3/4)*(7/8)*(9/16) = 1,323 / 4,096 (or ~32.29%)Phase 2:-Macho doesn't do an exercise program (405/512)-Macho doesn't dance 2 times in a row (63/64)-Macho lets an unstunned super land (5/8)-Total Phase 2 odds: (405/512)*(63/64)*(5/8) = 127,575 / 262,144 (or ~48.66%)-Total fight odds: (1,323/4,096)*(127,575/262,144) = 168,781,725 / 1,073,741,824 (or ~15.72%)It took me 8 frame perfect 1st phases in order to get the perfect time of 9"31 on PAL Macho. Definitely a tricky fight to match with that first phase requirement, but I think it's cool to see a relatively new strategy that has a tight enough dizzy threshold to where everything has to be frame perfect.Again, gotta give a huge thanks & shoutout to McHazard for explaining everything regarding the skewed odds to me!Anyways, thanks for watching!
Mike Tysons Punch-Out!! - Mike Tyson [2:05.82] (PB) zallard1 2024-05-28 | This run was done on an original cartridge of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! on a top loading NES that was modded with the Tim Worthington NESRGB kit. For some more in depth information about my RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/m7tzR5CqI've been intermittently throwing attempts at Tyson over the past year, with struggles all along the way, but during the last couple of months, I've been on fire with my Tyson execution. I really truly feel like I've gotten to the point where I now match my Tyson consistency that I had before the stroke, and this fight is the hard, confirmable proof that we're so back.The exact time for this fight is a 2:05.82 on the middle frame of the .82 increment, according to the Tyson Finder spreadsheet created by Omnigamer, which is a 100% accurate reading since I record my console footage at the exact NES framerate of 60.09 FPS. This is completely identical to my original 2:05.82 PB that I set 5+ years ago to the frame, and the second time I've ever gotten a 2:05. To check out the results of the Tyson Finder spreadsheet, you can take a look at it here: https://i.imgur.com/WtMsV86.pngDespite the difficulty of this fight, it's actually pretty simple to explain. To deal maximum damage on Tyson in the uppercut phase, you need to mirror what side he throws his punch on when you throw a jab to stun him. Each time you do this, it deals 5 damage to his 96HP health bar, as opposed to 1 damage if you stunned him with the opposite fist. The 2nd punch for each of these also needs to be delayed to the very last frame of the stun. If you land it, it'll also deal 5 damage, otherwise you'll be blocked or deal 1 damage. Phase 1 requires you to hit 9 out of 10 of these, while getting decent enough luck to get past phase 1 at 56 seconds or below (or below 1:00 if you just care about him throwing 6 uppercuts in phase 2). This run got a 55, which is acceptable, but I need decent luck in phase 2 as well.Phase 2 is pretty much the same as phase 1, except you won't see the 8 second delay from Tyson. You only have to hit 5 of 6 frame perfect punches here, due to his 56HP health refill, which he gets if you have full health when he's knocked down. For being in contention of the best non-phase-3-uppercut time, you need Tyson down by 1:28 or earlier. I thankfully only got 1 delay, which let me get to the end of phase 2 fast enough to where Tyson will just stand there for a couple of frames in phase 3 before he naturally transitions to throwing hooks, meaning I got there just in time to not lose any unnecessary frames.Phase 3 starts with Tyson going into his hook phase at 1:30, and you need to hit 8 hooks frame perfectly in order to get a perfectly executed fight. Since I start the phase at 1:28, I cannot safely do the buffer strategy to hit his first hook frame perfectly, so I am forced to hit it manually instead.His health refill is 40HP this time, and dodging/punching will get you 2 damage per punch, whereas if you wait until the very end of Tyson's hook, and punch on the very last frame, you'll land 1 punch that deals 5 damage. As long as you get to the start of this phase at an early enough time, your final time is completely dictated by what pattern you get from Tyson, with the very best phase 3 pattern netting you a 2:05.25. This phase 3 pattern, plus any frames lost against a 1:28 phase 2, are the only differences between this fight, and my original PB of 2:05.82 on Tyson from 2019, and this fight loses frames on neither.I still wanted to upload this since this is now my best recorded Tyson fight with my new RGB setup, as well as my true PB this time! I put a great deal of effort in making sure that my captures off of original hardware are as clean as possible these days, which is a great improvement over my original 2:05.82's video quality. To see that video out to compare, you can check it out here: youtube.com/watch?v=1_La7FOsMfkI also had a weirdly horrible time getting this recording out of my capture PC, because when I plugged my portable hard drive into a USB port to back the file up and get it ready for processing for youtube, the entire PC suddenly shut down while refusing to boot again, and the hard drive wouldn't be recognized by the PC at all, which really really scared me. I had tried for hours to get it to boot or recognize the drive, and ended up basically thinking my entire drive was wiped. I tried again today and finally got some life out of it, so I backed up the entire drive, replaced the SATA cable, and hopefully that should solve my issues?I also streamed this attempt live, and you can check it out along with the live reaction here if you'd like: twitch.tv/videos/2157171695Anyways, thanks for watching!
Defeating the glitchiest Mike Tyson Ive ever seen (Motion Warning) zallard1 2024-05-26 | I think I pressed my reset button too hard or something, because my NESRGB got jostled just enough to where I needed to reseat it. It did have the effect where one of the pins of the PPU had a bad connection, so I took the opportunity to fight Tyson during it anyways for fun lol.I did try cleaning the cartridge for a bit to make sure that it wasn't due to the cartridge (I even tested a different one with no improvement), so I knew it was something with the NES itself. Pretty easy fix! I'll just have to be more gentle with the reset button next time (or install a new socket).
Mike Tysons Punch-Out!! - Mike Tyson [2:06.25] - PB since stroke zallard1 2024-04-23 | This run was done on an original cartridge of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! on a top loading NES that was modded with the Tim Worthington NESRGB kit. For some more in depth information about my RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/m7tzR5CqDecided to upload this one with the raw recording, since it's one I decided to frame count to confirm the decimal. I've been intermittently throwing attempts at Tyson over the past several months, with struggles all along the way, but during the last couple of streams, things are finally starting to click for me again, and I got my first 2:06 since the stroke I suffered in May of last year.The exact time for this fight is a 2:06 on the 2nd frame of the .25 increment, according to the Tyson Finder spreadsheet created by Omnigamer, which is a 100% accurate reading since I record my console footage at the exact NES framerate of 60.09 FPS.Despite the difficulty of this fight, it's actually pretty simple to explain. To deal maximum damage on Tyson in the uppercut phase, you need to mirror what side he throws his punch on when you throw a jab to stun him. Each time you do this, it deals 5 damage to his 96HP health bar, as opposed to 1 damage if you stunned him with the opposite fist. The 2nd punch for each of these also needs to be delayed to the very last frame of the stun. If you land it, it'll also deal 5 damage, otherwise you'll be blocked or deal 1 damage. Phase 1 requires you to hit 9 out of 10 of these, while getting decent enough luck to get past phase 1 at 56 seconds or below (or below 1:00 if you just care about him throwing 6 uppercuts in phase 2).Phase 2 is pretty much the same as phase 1, except you won't see the 8 second delay from Tyson. You only have to hit 5 of 6 frame perfect punches here, due to his 56HP health refill, which he gets if you have full health when he's knocked down. For being in contention of the best non-phase-3-uppercut time, you need Tyson down by 1:28 or earlier. I got one delay at the end of phase 2 that put me out of contention of my real PB, but I could still get a "seasonal PB" with this, since I was still looking for anything under 2:07, since it was my previous "seasonal PB" since what happened to me. If you'd like to watch that fight, and gather more context for why I'm uploading this, you can check it out here: youtube.com/watch?v=qOf-RrC9UPMPhase 3 will start with Tyson going into his hook phase at 1:30, and you need to hit 8 hooks frame perfectly in order to get a perfectly executed fight. Since I start the phase at 1:29, I can safely do a buffer strategy to hit his first hook frame perfectly 100% of the time. It requires you to buffer a left dodge as the phase starts, then wait until Mac fully centers, then do a right quick dodge, into a jab by holding up and punch.His health refill is 40HP this time, and dodging/punching will get you 2 damage per punch, whereas if you wait until the very end of Tyson's hook, and punch on the very last frame, you'll land 1 punch that deals 5 damage. As long as you get to the start of this phase at an early enough time, your final time is completely dictated by what pattern you get from Tyson, with the very best phase 3 pattern netting you a 2:05.25. This phase 3 pattern, plus any frames lost against a 1:28 phase 2, are the only differences between this fight, and my real PB of 2:05.82 on Tyson. That fight got a 2:05.82 on the middle frame of the increment, meaning this fight was a mere 11 frames from my true PB, which is exciting to see!I wanted to upload this here since this is also my best recorded Tyson fight with my new RGB setup! I put a great deal of effort in making sure that my captures off of original hardware are as clean as possible these days, which is a great improvement over my original 2:05.82's video quality. To see that video out to compare, you can check it out here: youtube.com/watch?v=1_La7FOsMfkI also streamed this attempt live, and you can check it out here if you'd like: twitch.tv/videos/2127254490Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Mad Clown [00897] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-04-16 | This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.The PAL version of Mad Clown is interesting in that the new optimal NTSC strategy that was found recently that can get you a 9"01 actually ends up getting you a 9"04 with a 5"62 1st knockdown on the PAL version, but the older TAS strategy that got a 9"05 actually ends up being faster than both of those in the PAL version, which makes a sub 9 second fight barely possible. If you'd like to see the NTSC version of this older 9"05 strategy, you can check it out here: youtube.com/watch?v=Rs6AEtl-HMsThe newer NTSC Mad Clown strategy requires a completely different approach compared to these ones because it skips ahead to a slightly faster pattern that Clown has in phase 2. If you would like to check out that version of the fight, you can check it out here: youtube.com/watch?v=u1lbpG4Wci4Mad Clown's PAL record strategy is a fairly easy fight to execute relatively speaking, but the fight is riddled with randomness throughout the first and second phases, which involve randomly blocking, randomly dodging, and randomly counter attacking any punch you attempt to throw. This fight starts with you pressing nothing for the first frame, and then pressing "Up" and "Y" to throw a left jab on the next frame. Follow up from that left jab with a buffered right jab (for 1 extra damage so we get a good refill), with Mad Clown hopefully standing still without random retaliations and not randomly blocking for both of these punches. The odds to get past these 2 jabs are about 1 in 4.2 (or ~23.7%). From there, Clown will throw a jab on your left side, and you'll need to do a delayed left jab to counter it.Once the jab is countered, just buffer 2 left jabs during Clown's stun, and then buffer 2 more right jabs, the first of which intercepts a hook Clown was about to throw. You'll need to hope that 2nd jab lands without him randomly blocking, or doing a random retaliation. Once they both land, Clown will instantly go into a dizzy state, and you'll need to land the strictest dizzy knockdown in the game, which sits at a 5 frame window. Thankfully, there exists a buffer for an optimal dizzy knockdown, which is to do a quick dodge into a left jab, followed by a quick dodge into an uppercut to get a time of 5”15. The total odds to get past phase 1 are about 1 in 10.It’s also worth noting that the 9”05 Clown strategy had you do a specific buffer to waste some frames so you can do a quick duck to frame perfectly counter his hook in the next phase, however in the PAL version, no such setup exists, so you have to hit the punch manually.The start of phase 2 will consist of Mad Clown either opening by doing a taunt where he's pointing to his stomach, which means he'll retaliate when you attempt to throw a punch, or he'll start to throw a hook. If he taunts, then your attempt is dead, but if he attempts to throw a hook, then you're past the final piece of luck in this strategy. The probability of him not doing the taunt is 3/4, so this successful outcome is reasonably in your favor.You will need to throw a delayed right jab in order to counter Clown’s hook to stun him. Once you counter that hook, then immediately buffer an uppercut during Clown's stun, then once Clown's animation of getting hit ends, he's going to attempt to hit you with a backhand attack. You want to land an uppercut directly into this attack in order to take him down for the second time. I time this uppercut roughly around the first frame I see him start to throw out the attack.Once you get past phase 2, then congratulations, because you've basically finished the fight! For phase 3, Mad Clown always opens with "Show Time", which involves him throwing really fast jabs. Because of Show Time, you can easily counter his first jab by buffering a right jab as soon as the phase begins, and because of how fast phase 2 was, he'll come back with so little health that he'll go right back down when the jab lands.This strategy isn’t too bad as far as execution goes, with only 4 things you have to time frame perfectly in order to match this record, but the luck is fairly obnoxious, coming in at about 1 in 13.3 (or 7.5%), which is thankfully at least slightly better than the 9”01 NTSC strategy, which is about 1 in 21.3 (or 4.7%). The exact probability of the 8"97 is (3/4)^9, while the NTSC 9"01 fight is [(3/4)^9]*(5/8), which accounts for all random blocks and retaliations, as well as landing an unstunned super in the NTSC version.It took me 23 frame perfect phase 1’s to get this fight, about half of which came from bad luck, and the other half were due to adjusting to the slightly different timings between PAL and NTSC. You can see my best times table is filled out quite a bit as I got closer and closer to the perfect timings.Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Heike Kagero [00985] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-03-14 | This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.Just like in the NTSC version of Heike, it is indeed possible to score a KO on him as opposed to a TKO, which was widely thought to be the only way to win this fight for a very long time, at least until McHazard released his NTSC TAS in 2014. The strategy is basically a carbon copy of the NTSC fight, but yields a lower in-game time due to differences between the two clocks in each version. If you'd like to compare the two fights, you can check out my NTSC fight here: youtube.com/watch?v=V_7B4Q3mUooSo the idea here for enabling the KO is to get Heike's HP lower in phase 1 than the TKO strategy. The KO has 3 components to it, which involves a unique base refill value that every boxer has, a timer penalty (this has to do with how fast the knockdowns are, with most phase 2's needing to be within 4 in-game seconds to get the best value), and 25% of the amount of HP the opponent has right before their knockdown. The equation for refills goes something like [Timer Penalty + 25% Opponent's HP Before Knockdown - Boxer's Base Refill Value], and if this ever ends up being negative or zero, the opponent gets a refill of 0 (i.e. the boxer is KO'd). Fellow Super Punch Out speedrunner Akiteru made a fantastic calculator tool that you can mess with to determine subsequent health refills (and KOs) based on specific criteria. You can check it out here if you'd like: akiterusda.github.io/SpokoThis fight starts with you holding "Up" for the first frame of the fight, and then letting go of "Up" and throwing a right gut punch for the next frame. Follow that up with buffering another right gut punch, a left jab, and two more right gut punches; they should all land without issue as long as the first punch of the fight landed.From here, Heike is going to attempt to hit you with a jab on your left side, which you will need to counter with a very slightly delayed left jab of your own. As soon as the punch connects and as long as the punch was delayed enough to be a counter punch, you need to pause the game to allow the super meter to fill up completely. Once it's filled, just unpause and buffer a low super for Heike to go dizzy! For the dizzy, you can buffer a right gut punch into a quick dodge that's cancelled with a low super to hit the instant knockdown window.For the start of phase 2, Heike is going to attempt an attack on your left, and you're going to need to intercept that with rapid punches within the first 2 frames that rapid punches can come out. The input for rapid punches is to double tap the "A" button pretty fast. You need to make sure that you've tapped the button the 2nd time within 8 frames for your rapid punches to come out as fast as they possibly can. Once they start hitting Heike, then one of two things will happen.Either Heike will block you, and you'll have to buffer a low super to get the KO. Keep in mind that the KO with this pattern will only work if you score the 2nd knockdown at 10.01 or earlier. If you get the 1 in 8 luck where Heike dodges, then you will have a chance at pulling off the slightly faster KO, which involves throwing a low super right around when Heike is just about centered from the dodge, but not quite there yet. It's also worth noting that when throwing this punch, Heike has a random chance of dodging your low super 3/8's of the time even if it's timed correctly, making this the final luck event needed, which makes the total luck of the fight (1/8)*(5/8) = 5/64, or about 1 in 12.8 (~7.8%). The only situation where you've actually mistimed your punch ends up being when Heike is able to block your super when it's thrown too early. Once it lands, depending on the time, you should be good for a KO as long as your final time ends up being a 10"01 or lower!Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Aran Ryan [00846] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-03-05 | This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.The PAL version of Aran Ryan is effectively a carbon copy of the NTSC version of the fight aside from one of the buffer strategies, and one less random event that you have to contend with. Interestingly though, he ends up being faster on the NTSC version by 0.01, even though typically we see the opposite happen between PAL and NTSC strategies that are the same. That being said, if you would like to compare the two fights together, here's a link to my NTSC run here: youtube.com/watch?v=vrDmWhUVyOkAran Ryan in this game has a couple of unique qualities to him. Aran takes barely any damage from all of your normal punches, so he's hyper resistant to everything aside from Supers. To illustrate this, all of your normals (left/right jab and left/right body blow) all do only a measly 2 damage each, with Aran's full health bar being 80HP total. Compare that to Gabby Jay, where left jab deals 4 damage, right jab deals 5 damage, left gut does 3 damage, and right gut deals 4 damage. Effectively, your damage output on average is cut *in half* compared to Gabby. However, if you throw a low super at Gabby, it deals 10 damage, and an uppercut landed on Gabby deals 17 damage, which is pretty solid damage. If you land a low super on Aran, it deals *20* damage, and an uppercut deals *23* damage, which is a *massive* increase in damage output, even compared to the weakest boxer in the game!This fight is designed this way in order to make sure that you're skillful enough to maintain and effectively use your super meter to the fullest. If you are having trouble doing that in general, then you're going to be stuck on this fight until you pass that skill check and are reasonably capable of putting up a good offense with those supers.Despite Aran's ridiculous defense against normal punches, he ends up being a really simple and straightforward fight to get the record on, with barely any randomness, and only really 2 things that you need to time perfectly in order to master this strategy.Start the fight by holding "Up" for the first frame of the fight to manipulate Aran's gloves to be up, and then letting go and pressing "Y' to do a left handed gut punch. From here, buffer another left gut punch, then buffer a right jab into a left jab to intercept Aran's next 2 attacks. Aran will then leap to the left side of the ring, and you'll need to time a left jab as quickly as you possibly can. I try to time this jab around when I see the start of Aran's leap animation. The dizzy meter is somewhat tight, with you needing to hit this jab within a 4 frame window in order for Aran to successfully go into dizzy status.Once you land that timed jab, then buffer 2 more left gut punches to send Aran reeling to the side in dizzy status. From there, you want to buffer a left gut punch, into a right gut punch, into a low super to knock him down, which is actually identical to the buffer used in the NTSC version of the fight interestingly enough.Once Aran gets up, just hold "A" to buffer a low super to come out on the first frame. On NTSC, Aran will take this super punch 5/8's of the time, but oddly, the speed difference between the two versions actually makes this punch guaranteed to land in the PAL version. Once the super lands, Aran will reel backward and attempt to grab you, but can do 2 different delays before actually committing to it, and has a 50% chance of doing either one, making this the only luck event in this version of the fight.In order to hit the faster of the two delays with your super, you can buffer a left gut punch into a quick dodge that's cancelled with a low super, which is the only strategy difference in this fight compared to NTSC (the buffer for NTSC is a left jab into a quick duck). This will ensure that you hit Aran with your low super on the first possible frame if he throws out the fastest delay.Sorry for the lack of uploads this past week; health has been a little bit of a rollercoaster between good and bad, and I've had a couple of doctor appointments lately. I should hopefully get around to finishing up the PAL uploads soon.Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Mr. Sandman [01309] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-02-25 | This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.Mr. Sandman is a breath of fresh air in the Major Circuit, as he has a completely set pattern with no random elements, making him a completely skill based fight. Back when I initially was matching the TAS on the NTSC fights for the first time, I discovered a pretty handy quirk that ends up being applicable to other fights. This strategy also happens to be almost completely identical to the NTSC version of this fight, only really gaining time over it due to NTSC/PAL clock differences. If you would like to compared the fights to each other, you can check out the NTSC one here: youtube.com/watch?v=EIYq3sQ2QOEThis fight starts with you not pressing anything for the first frame of the fight, then pressing "Up" and "Y" to throw a left jab for the second frame. This manipulates his gloves down, which allows you to freely punch Sandman in the face. Once you've landed your first left jab, follow it up by buffering 3 more, then buffer a left gut punch. From here, you need to do a very slightly delayed left gut punch to intercept his slow uppercut, but *don't* counter the uppercut itself. From there, just buffer one final left jab to get him dizzy!Now here's that quirk I mentioned briefly before; you have the ability to delay your dizzy knockdown in order to make Sandman's next attack come out a little faster! Fights in this game have what's called "move timers" which effectively boils down opponents having moves that are "scheduled" to come out after a set number of frames on the in-game timer. This seems like an idea that's simple and makes sense, but what if I told you that we could take complete advantage of this mechanic in certain scenarios to make execution more consistent on certain punches?Let's take this fight for example! PAL Sandman's first punch in the second phase begins to come out in 4 frames (for NTSC, it's 5 frames). In order to intercept that like the TAS does, you would need to manually delay for those 4 frames before you throw your uppercut. This is reasonable to pull off for people, but wouldn't it be better if it could land frame perfectly every time?The quirk I found is that you can burn frames off of an opponent's move timer *while* they are dizzy! What this means is that I could find a different buffer strategy while the dizzy animation is going off to waste those 4 frames *there* instead of having to wait out those 4 frames in the next phase before throwing the uppercut. Once you throw that final jab to get Sandman dizzy, you can throw a left jab, into a right jab, into a full dodge where you hold the dodge button until your character centers himself, into an uppercut to burn those extra frames I was talking about earlier. However, I opt to throw a low super for the phase 1 knockdown for a slightly faster real-time knockdown animation (40 frames faster), which meant finding a different buffer strategy since I don't think one was used for any other completions of this fight, so I found that quick duck, into left jab, into quick duck, into left jab, into quick duck will set up a low super perfectly as well.When Sandman gets up, you do NOT have to delay those 4 frames like the TAS does, because of the setup during the dizzy, you can just HOLD "Up" and "A" to buffer an uppercut to hit him frame perfectly every time!It's worth noting that Mr. Sandman is special, in that he is specifically hard coded to have a KO be completely impossible on him, even via methods of hacking. This means that despite how much you've dominated in phases 1 and 2, Sandman will get up on his 3rd knockdown with a *massive* health refill, which is unlike how this works for any other fight in the game.For phase 3, you start by throwing an uppercut with a slight delay. I like to time this uppercut immediately after I hear the first note in the Major Circuit theme, which still works really well for setups that are playing on an actual Super Nintendo on a CRT (or RetroTink with lagless monitor). From there, Sandman goes into his signature move, the Dreamland Express. In this game, the Dreamland Express is pretty slow, so you just have to cut the final quick dodge as tightly as possible. Also, once you've dodged the 3rd uppercut, you need to stun him with your RIGHT hand, because this jab deals slightly extra damage that you NEED in order for this strategy to work, and then follow it with an uppercut. Finally, Sandman will throw another hook, similar to how the phase started, and you'll also need to land an uppercut into it.Once the uppercut lands, then Sandman will be down for the TKO! This was overall still easier than the NTSC fight, mostly just because the game runs at 50fps instead of 60fps, which makes frame perfect punches easier due to the marginally larger window.Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Masked Muscle [00632] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-02-20 | This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.Masked Muscle is a fairly innocuous fight in the full game speedrun. He doesn't dish out luck that can outright kill your entire lead due to a couple of backup strategies, but despite this, he has a fair bit of randomness that can make getting the perfect fight on him mildly annoying.The fight starts off with the usual guard manipulation that you've been seeing in other fights where you hold up for the first frame of the fight, then let go and hold punch for the second frame, however this fight introduces something new into the mix: random blocking from the opponent.This happens to be a very similar strategy as the newer NTSC one that McHazard found in his 2014 TAS (I know it's weird to call that "new" but it still feels "new" to me lol). If you'd like to directly compare this fight to its NTSC counterpart, you can check it out here: youtube.com/watch?v=spDuMYzQo9AWith this strategy, Muscle can block the first two punches, and the final punch that sends Masked Muscle into dizzy status. These are the only luck events in the fight, and the first blockable punch has a 3/4 chance of going through, while the second and third blockable punches have a (3/4)^2 chance of going through since they're buffered punches. This means the odds of the strategy working are:(3/4) * (9/16) * (9/16) = 243 / 1024, or about 1 in 4.214 (~23.7%)Once you’ve landed your first left gut punch of the fight, then immediately buffer a second one and pray he doesn’t block either of those. Thankfully, the next 2 left gut punches you’re about to buffer here will land 100% of the time, since Muscle is attempting to throw hooks here, and while he commits to throwing an attack, he cannot commit to randomly dodging during that time. It's also worth noting that this is technically different than the NTSC version of the fight, as you cannot buffer left jabs here since Muscle blocks them in the PAL version. You can technically do left jabs and get the same time, but you would have to delay them, which is silly to do when you can just do gut punches.After the 2nd jab, you need to do a slight delay and counter an uppercut that Muscle is about to throw on your right side, to which, you counter with a right gut punch. From here, you need to hit a frame perfect delayed punch such that when the punch lands, you get 2 extra arrows, as well as speed up Muscle's recoil animation.You can either time this delayed punch manually, or do a buffer that involves you to do 2 "quick ducks" which are actually pretty tricky, because this means you have to tap "Down" and "Up" extremely quickly one after the other.Several years ago, Hootey had actually found that if you do not have your super meter completely filled up, that holding the "A" button will actually automatically cancel your dodges for you, which effectively eliminates the "Up" portions of the quick duck inputs, meaning now your only obstacle is to quickly press the "Down" inputs at the correct rhythm. It's still fairly tricky to get it down just right because of how fast the ducks come out now.If you hold "Down" too long, then you end up getting a quick duck that isn't actually the fastest, which makes the punch get blocked. If you over compensate for that by going too fast, then you'll only have one duck actually come out.Once you get the double quick duck, buffer a right gut punch into a left gut punch, which should hopefully get Muscle dizzy (remember he can block the final punch if he wants), and just hold "Left" until you start to see your character start to dodge, then immediately let go of "Left" and throw a low super as your character centers himself for an instant knockdown!For phase 2, the NTSC version has you throw a low super exactly *1* frame after the fight starts back up again, otherwise he'll dodge your punch outright, however, inexplicably the PAL version doesn't have this issue at all. You can simply hold the super punch button and just automatically hit Muscle on the first frame possible with a low super. From there, Muscle will not be able to get up, which nets you a KO if you followed this strategy perfectly!Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Dragon Chan [00733] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-02-15 | This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.Dragon Chan is a fight that also tends to cause headaches when it comes to full game runs, because if he wants to, he can take nearly 5 seconds away from you compared to an optimal fight. If you're going for an individual level record on this fight, he's not too bad thankfully. His first phase requires a decent bit of execution, but thankfully that part has no luck requirements.The fight starts out by holding "Up" for the first frame of the fight, then for the next frame, you want to throw a left gut punch, followed by buffering a second gut punch. For these next 2 right gut punches, you need to do very small delays for both of them so that he gets far enough in his punch animation to where he doesn't block them.Then, you want to do a delayed left gut punch to counter the hook he's about to throw, then buffer a right gut punch as he's stunned, then press left and IMMEDIATELY press B to buffer a right gut punch while simultaneously cancelling your dodge into a quick dodge. This will end his stun early, while getting you everything you need in order to set up phase 2 for the KO.For the super knockdown, you can easily buffer a right gut into a low super, which also happens to get you a faster knockdown animation just like for NTSC, and the buffer is much easier too, so it's a win-win.When Dragon gets up, he's going to do one of 3 patterns, which will either be him doing 3 kicks on random sides (this is the worst pattern) which is 50% likely, a heal with a slow delay which is 25% likely, or a heal with a fast delay, which is the one that we need. Thankfully, the buffer is just to do a tap duck (basically tap down but don't hold it), into a quick duck (tap down, then up), into an uppercut, and your super will hit Dragon on the first possible frame that he's vulnerable when he does the fast heal! This fight ends up slightly slower than its NTSC counterpart, which is an uncommon outcome for PAL, but it happens sometimes. If you'd like to compare this fight to my NTSC one, you can check it out here: youtube.com/watch?v=8Mjjf6hyTHAAnyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch-Out!! - Bob Charlie [00546] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-02-11 | This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.Bob Charlie is mostly known in the full game speedrun as "that guy who makes you reset" because he dances so often and makes the dizzy a bit harder to get consistently. The TAS strategy for Bob is honestly one of the easiest to execute in the game, and the only real opposition he has for you is an abundance of random dances to break out of the strategy.To start the fight, don't press anything for the first frame of the fight, and then press Up+Y to throw a left jab during the second frame of the fight. This punch is the only punch in this strategy that determines your final time, since the rest of the punches are completely buffered, so if you do this one frame perfect, then congratulations! You just need the luck to cooperate from that point forward.After you land the first punch, you need to buffer 3 more left jabs, then buffer a right jab, then two more left jabs to get Bob dizzy. With this strategy, Bob has the capability of sidestepping punches 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7 at 25% each. Punches 4 and 5 should be guaranteed, because Bob is attempting to throw 2 consecutive jabs during those punches of yours, and cannot commit to sidestepping during those. As a sidenote, it technically doesn't matter where the right jab is in this phase 1, although it's argued that it's best thrown for either jabs 4 or 5 since he's committed to trying to hit you during those punches, and therefore may reduce the odds of him dancing away, since right jab is slightly slower. Just don't throw the right jab on punches #6 or #7, otherwise he can block you, because his move timer will be running during those 2 jabs, and it ends up coinciding with your final jab if the right jab ends up being either of those punches. Once you land the 7th jab, buffer a right gut punch into 2 consecutive uppercuts for an instant knockdown as Bob wanders back to the center of the ring.For phase 3, all you have to do is hold Up+A and pray that Bob doesn't commit to the jab that he winds up for, and does a feint to the left, which has a 3/8 chance of happening. If he doesn't do that feint, then he just lands a jab before your uppercut can land, but if he does do that feint, then he's stuck in an animation in which he cannot dodge, and your uppercut will land and knock him out for good. The total odds for this strategy to work comes down to the following:Bob not dancing during punches 1,2,3,6,7: (3/4)^5 = 243/1024Bob doing a feint at the start of phase 2: 3/8Total odds: (243/1024)*(3/8) = 729/8192 which is approximately 1 in 11.24, or about 8.9%This happens to also be the fastest possible fight in the entire Punch-Out series, including every region of every game officially released by Nintendo, and it mostly has to do with how the clock works in the PAL version, as this strategy is completely identical to its NTSC counterpart. If you'd like to compare the two, you can check out my NTSC fight here: youtube.com/watch?v=P_snYeeSOBoAnyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Bald Bull [00819] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-02-08 | This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.PAL Bald Bull has a pretty different phase 1 compared to his NTSC counterpart, which results in a very slightly lower time by comparison (if you did the NTSC strategy here, you would get an 8.23). This is another adjustment found by lixunis, and it only works in the PAL version, since you just barely cannot dizzy Bull with this strategy on NTSC by 1 frame, and with an adjustment to a gut punch to add extra points to the dizzy meter, the dizzy is slower than the other NTSC strategy by 3 frames. You must start the fight by holding "Up" for the first frame of the fight, and throwing two consecutive right gut punches. Unlike the NTSC version of Bull, you thankfully do not need to keep a super strict pace in order to get Bull dizzy. If you'd like to look at the NTSC version of this record for comparison, you can check it out here: youtube.com/watch?v=a8afkrb9mT4To add context, there's a mechanic called the "Dizzy Meter" that determines when an opponent gets dizzy. The meter fills up every time you land a punch, which will add a weighted number to it depending on how strong it was, and then they'll go dizzy when a certain threshold is reached, which is different for every character. This meter will also go down by 1 point for every single frame that elapses in the fight, which means you need these punches to land *fast* in a short period of time to get them dizzy.By the time you've landed the first punch in this fight, you cannot lose more than 5 frames collectively on every punch up until you throw the low super that gets Bull dizzy, otherwise the dizzy meter just barely doesn't reach Bull's dizzy threshold. For the NTSC version, you couldn't lose more than 2 frames, making this strategy far easier to complete.After the first 2 right gut punches, you need to counter Bull's hook with a delayed right gut punch. From here, you start the deviation from the NTSC strategy and buffer a left jab, then you need to perform a frame perfect delayed punch so that Bull's recoil animation is very slightly faster, and your punch gains you a couple of extra arrows. If you're too early, Bull's recoil will be a normal speed, but if you're too late, Bull ends up blocking you. I buffer a left dodge and punch right around when my character fully centers himself.Once you land the frame perfect delayed punch, then you need to counter Bull's jab with a delayed left jab of your own, and then you'll actually need to *pause* the fight here to let your super meter arrows catch up with the 7 you just gained from that single punch. Once it's filled, unpause the fight and immediately throw a low super to get Bull dizzy. As he gets dizzy, you have a variety of buffer strategies that work, but the simplest and fastest way is the one I used here, which is left jab, right jab, uppercut.For phase 2, you pretty much start the exact same way you start the fight, by holding "Up" for the first frame of the phase, then buffering a right gut punch. However, this time you want to just do one gut punch, and immediately buffer an uppercut out of it. If you do the gut punch within the first 2 possible frames, then Bull will still be idle when the uppercut tries to hit him, which means he can randomly dodge the uppercut 3/8's of the time.Phase 3 is just the bull charge, which apparently there's a buffer that counters both delays he can do for the PAL version of Bull, but I never learned it because I'm opting for real-time optimizations too. I decided to commit to Bull doing the faster delay, which means I might as well go for the low super bull charge counter for the TKO, which thankfully has a nice buffer that I used in my 2014 blindfolded run. This just involves throwing a left hook into a low super, which gets you the TKO!Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Piston Hurricane [00549] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-02-04 | This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.PAL Piston Hurricane is an interesting anomaly in that it's the only fight in the PAL version of Super Punch Out where the best possible time actually exactly matches its NTSC counterpart! This is rare mostly because the timers between NTSC and PAL have different possible timer values because one version runs at 60 frames a second, and the other runs at 50, yet every second needs to be a real time second on the in-game timer.The strategy for this version of Piston Hurricane is also identical to his NTSC counterpart, so I would suggest checking that out as well to compare to this one if you're curious on the different timer behavior: youtube.com/watch?v=56mkj9oIPs0Normally, this is a fight that is designed to teach you the importance of blocking high and low for when he attempts to hit you with his "Hurricane rush" attack consisting of alternating jabs and hooks, however for the speedrun, he gets to show off none of this.Start by not pressing anything for the first frame of the fight, then for the second frame, hold the input for a left jab. Follow that up with 2 more buffered jabs, then you'll need to *delay* a left body blow here. For this strategy to actually get Piston dizzy, you need this delayed punch to either be the earliest frame where he doesn't block, or one frame later than that. If you punch later than that 2 frame window, then this strategy will *not* work at all, but if you want to match the TAS time, you need to hit it on the earliest frame.After the delayed hit, just buffer another left jab, followed by a left gut punch, and another left jab to get him dizzy. For the dizzy knockdown, a jab into quick dodge buffer sets up a low super punch perfectly for an optimal super knockdown. From here, you're home free to just hold the super punch button and it'll just land instantly and KO him in phase 2!There's really not a lot to this fight, even on the PAL version. It has one tricky punch for the TAS strategy, but aside from that, it's about as basic as it gets.Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Bear Hugger [01233] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-02-01 | This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.Bear Hugger's main mechanic that he forces players to learn is that ducking may be necessary for victory. This is because unlike Gabby, you cannot damage Bear Hugger with punches to the gut. If you try to punch his gut, the fight just freezes as Bear Hugger just does a raspberry at you and receives zero damage. This leaves you to try punching him the face, to which he'll retaliate with a bear hug that you cannot dodge from the left or right, but you can duck it.However, Bear will also taunt at you periodically, and during this very brief taunt, you can actually punch him in the stomach! It will deal zero damage, but it will still add to your dizzy meter and give you . If you don't know what that is, the dizzy meter is a mechanic that exists for every fight in this game. It is basically a hidden value in the game's memory that will get a weighted value added to it for every punch you successfully land; the stronger the punch, the higher the number is that gets added to the meter. When the meter reaches a certain high number, then the opponent will be forced into a dizzy state where a well timed punch will instantly knock them down! However, the challenging part of this mechanic is that this value will go down by 1 point per frame, which means in order for you to get them dizzy, you need to have a lot of punches dealt in a very short amount of time.This fight deviates from the NTSC Bear Hugger fight that has a perfect time of 0'12"92, since PAL Bear can just barely be dizzied earlier than his NTSC counterpart with a completely different strategy for phase 1 found by lixunis. If you'd like to see the NTSC counterpart for this fight, you can check it out here: youtube.com/watch?v=wi2yAWfFbTEFor the start of this fight, you do not want to do a guard manipulated jab, since they don't work here. Instead, you'll start the fight out with a buffered left jab to provoke Bear to do his signature "hug" attack. From here, you can actually do a double quick duck buffer by tapping down and up 2 times consecutively, and end it with another left jab to stun Bear on the first possible frame. You’ll then throw 5 stunned left jabs to build up your super arrows and keep Bear’s stun meter up. Bear will then become idle, and his feet will move in and out. When his feet go out, I throw a gut punch that should intercept when Bear points to his stomach on the earliest frame when timed correctly. From there, throw 2 more left jabs for more arrows on the super meter, and to get Bear closer to dizzy status.Repeat that for his next taunt, which will fully fill the super meter and get you ready to finish off that stun with an uppercut instead of a 2nd left jab. From there, buffer a quick dodge into an uppercut to intercept his next taunt on the first possible frame. Bear can randomly dodge super punches when he’s idle, so you’ll need to win 1 in 4 odds for it to land.The dizzy meter has ZERO room for error in that if you are late on a single punch by 1 frame, you will NOT dizzy Bear with this strategy! With the way this works out, you only have to time the 2 gut punches, so effectively this means that your 2nd gut punch is mandatorily frame perfect if you want this dizzy to work. I tried to do a buffer strategy for the dizzy knockdown, but I messed it up and just hit it manually. Thankfully, it wasted no frames.Once Bear gets up for phase 2, he’s going to immediately go to the back of the ring and rush towards you. You want to buffer a left jab, left body blow, and left jab, and similar to the unstunned super that you land near the end of the last phase, you also have to get 1 in 4 odds *again* for this uppercut to land as well, making the total odds in the fight 1 in 16. This fight also requires 2 frame perfect inputs to match the TAS time (both of the gut punches). I got this time on my 2nd attempt that got a frame perfect dizzy, so my leaderboard is pretty empty except for this time lol.Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Gabby Jay [00623] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-01-28 | This run was done on an original Spanish Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.So here's what's going on, because I know people will have questions about why I'm "reuploading Gabby Jay" here. Super Punch Out has 3 distinct versions of the game: the NTSC version, which is what I was uploading on my channel already, the NTSC-J version, which is almost identical for speedruns aside from Rick Bruiser having a slightly faster time, and then there's the PAL version, which has COMPLETELY different possible times for MANY fights, sometimes solely because the PAL timer has different timer increments due to running at 50 frames a second.I can't count the number of times people have left comments on my NTSC fights, telling me that MeLeeak has already beaten my times, even though MeLeeak was actually playing on the PAL version all along. I totally get the confusion, because MeLeeak's videos were never labelled as PAL, so it's kind of just lumped together with the NTSC times to random people who don't know any better. And like I said on the PAL Narcis video I wanted to go through matching the TAS/WR times for the PAL version because my muscle memory is still a bit strange from the stroke. It's getting better and better over time, but I figured I may as well take advantage of this situation and knock these out before going back to finishing up NTSC Narcis Prince.The tech setup for this is also kind of weird. I'm playing on an actual PAL Super Nintendo on an original cartridge, but the CRT I usually play on can't be used because it can't accept 50Hz PAL signals and display them properly, so I actually had to do these runs through a RetroTink5X. The feed from the RetroTink was kind of weird though, like it was overly dark and super letterboxed and stretched, but it was playable! It looked kind of terrible though, but my console is also a 1Chip console, so I was able to run it through my usual RGB capture setup with the Datapath E1, and it clearly looks amazing through that. Anyways, let's talk about Gabby Jay! Yay! This is the easiest fight in the game to match the TAS on. You start the fight by pressing nothing for the first frame (0'00"02 on the timer), then for the next frame, you press and hold Up+Y to buffer a left jab. This delay sets Gabby's guard to be down for the next several punches, since he reads your input for the first frame of the fight and guards accordingly.From here, just let go of Up+Y and press it again before your next punch animation starts, which will ensure your next punch comes out on the first frame possible. Just repeat that until you've thrown out 4 left jabs, then throw a right jab immediately after. The right jab deals more damage, but the main purpose of it is to waste a couple of frames since the right jab is also slower than left jab. This sets you up for either a quick dodge or quick duck to perfectly counter his jab. If you feel like you were 1 frame slow on your first input, you should opt for a quick dodge into a right jab to perfectly set yourself up for a free counter, since his first attack comes out at a predetermined number of frames of Gabby being idle. Quick ducks are one frame slower than quick dodges, so if you think you were frame perfect on the first punch, then you need to opt for a quick duck to waste the extra frame so your punch doesn't come out too early and miss.Once your counter hits, you need to pause the fight, because when you do a counter punch, you get rewarded 7 arrows in your super meter, but your meter doesn't fill up quickly, so you need to make sure you can throw a super instantly when the game unpauses. When you unpause, just hold A and your super should send Gabby into dizzy status. While he's dizzy, if you hold Y, then let go and hold B while your punch is going off, then you'll automatically do the right gut punch after the left one goes off, and then hold Up+A for an uppercut, then Gabby will go down instantly for a KO!Since I've gotten PAL Narcis out of the way, the rest of the game's fights have magnitudes less luck, and the execution is all very reasonable. I'll be uploading a PAL TAS tie every other couple of days, just because I don't like spamming anyone's inbox with an influx of videos all at once. Also, some of the explanations of fights may re-tread the same content as their NTSC counterparts if they end up being similar strategies, and I'll likely be pointing you towards the NTSC fights as well.I've actually matched all 16 records in this version of the game, making me the 4th person to have matched all the TAS times for the PAL version, and the first person to have done it on actual original hardware, as the other runners did their runs on emulator, mainly because PAL SNES hardware is pretty awkward to import and do runs on, as I've come to find out, haha.Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Narcis Prince [00832] (PAL WR) zallard1 2024-01-25 | This run was done on an original PAL Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original PAL Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Borti RGB amp.I've been meaning to get around to the PAL ILs for the longest time, but never found the right time to start. After my stroke, my muscle memory for games have been thrown off a bit, so I figure this is the best time to get these taken care of, because switching between the NTSC and PAL versions of this game is very confusing on the muscle memory anyways. I'll talk more about why I'm doing the PAL fights in the description of my next video I'll upload (Gabby Jay), since I'd like to spend the rest of this description talking about this fight.Compared to the NTSC version of this fight, matching this TAS time is far less annoying, but still fairly annoying anyways lol. You have slightly less luck you have to put up with, due to it being impossible to do a triple gutter on PAL, making the strategy and pattern needed completely different.Narcis can literally end your attempt on the 1st frame of the fight if he dances or walks to the side. Start the fight starts by holding "Up" for the 1st frame, then letting go and buffering a right gut for the 2nd frame. After that 1st gut punch, follow it up with another right gut punch. You'll then be set up to buffer a quick duck to automatically counter his hook. You can actually adjust to this if you can tell if your first punch is a frame slow, and do a quick dodge instead, which is 1 frame faster than a quick duck, but I had a hard time telling on my janky PAL setup, so I mostly stuck to just doing the quick duck every time.In addition to the dances I mentioned before, he can also end your attempt before either gut punch by: twirling left or right, side stepping left or right and sliding away side to side. He can ALSO end your attempts during the punches themselves, by randomly block them outright, or doing a random retaliation in response.Once you counter the hook, you just buffer a left jab while he's stunned. Punching Narcis in the face will make Narcis angry, and when he's angry, he'll go to the back of the ring and comes back to throw one of 3 main patterns at you. The first 2 patterns are the one where he throws 2 jabs on your right side, which has 2 variants where he'll either follow up with uppercuts or hooks, and we NEED the uppercuts for this strategy to work. The next pattern is 2 jabs on your left side, which will also be a reset, but it's worth noting that if you can react and counter the hook frame perfectly and throw a stunned punch, you can get a time of 8.34, which is still really good. The final pattern is the one where he can throw a hook on your left side, then right side, which is also a reset.After the jab lands, you need to buffer the following in any order that you prefer: 3 tap dodges, 1 low left gut, 1 left jab, and finally, end the sequence with 1 right jab. This jab will hit Narcis on the first frame that he's vulnerable from walking back after getting angry. Once it lands, you need to buffer another right jab, which will land on the first possible frame, then you need to pause as soon as the jab connects. This lets the super meter fill so that you can throw rapid jabs instantly when you unpause. Buffering them has a 6 frame window to repress the A button, otherwise you'll be slow and you'll lose time once the rapids are finished. With the correct pattern, Narcis can still dodge rapid jabs 2, 3, and 4, but if they all land he goes dizzy! Just do a quick duck into low super for a knockdown!Phase 2 involves throwing a rapid jab into his jab that he tries to throw. I used a pseudo buffer of a duck into a quick duck, which worked fine for me, but I had two completed 8.34's before getting this one lol. Once the rapid lands, you'll need to do a buffer for the final uppercut (I went with right gut, quick dodge, right got, into uppercut). This final uppercut can still kill your run at the very end if you get bad luck with him dodging or blocking, but I thankfully got it this time. This took 4 days of attempts, with just small half hour bursts here and there. The video quality has an annoying issue during transitions where you can see power supply noise, which sucks but I'm not redoing this fight lol. I found the issue so it won't show up for future videos (power supply needs to not be plugged into a power strip with other stuff active). I have the attempt session from power-on in an unlisted video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=es1MJZ3zDz0The total odds for this fight come out to 1 in about ~931, which is a decent bit better than NTSC's 1 in 1600. If you'd like to see the math & events, it'll be in the attempt session YouTube description.With this fight done, the rest of the PAL ILs should be an absolute cakewalk. I'll do the rest chronologically and upload them every other couple of days.Total stats:3.39's: 986.75's: 4Thanks for watching!
Mike Tysons Punch-Out!! - Mike Tyson [2:07] - PB since stroke zallard1 2023-12-16 | Today's my birthday! The last couple of days, I've tried to see if I am still capable of completing a perfectly executed Mike Tyson fight on my Twitch stream.For context, at the start of May, I suffered a stroke. I got to the hospital quickly and my recovery has been good so far, but if you want to catch up on how I've been doing (and what exactly happened), this thread has everything, including the incident itself described in the pastebin, my gradual recovery, and any struggles I've had along the way: twitter.com/zallard1/status/1653471339100119041Despite my good outlook, this has still affected me and my every day life. I also have been hesitant to fully committing to speedrunning again, because I know my gameplay has been affected by this incident too. I've fought Tyson in very brief bursts here and there, and my consistency on him has been undeniably worsened.Through my efforts, I think I've been able to get back to the same level of consistency with the uppercut frame perfect punches on Tyson in phases 1 and 2, but my phase 3 frame perfect punches are still considerably less consistent now.Ever since the stroke, I had been completely unable to finish a perfect fight because of this consistency dip. It's a massive barrier keeping me from speedrunning the entire game again, because this fight matters more than any other fight in the speedrun, so if I can't match or do better than my 2:15 in my full game PB, I have no chance being competitive with it again.Tonight, I finally was able to pull it together enough in phase 3 to prove to myself that I still have what it takes, despite all odds. Here's the Twitch VOD just for completeness: twitch.tv/videos/2005431274It's going to be a long and hard road to get back to where I was, but I see hope if I've been able to get this far. Thanks for watching!
(TAS) Super Punch Out (PAL) in 2:14.81 In-Game Time zallard1 2023-11-30 | This is a TAS I actually did a while ago, but never uploaded it because the reason I did it in the first place was to try to find new strategies. I never did, so I never uploaded any of it. Nolan in the Punch Out speedrunning server mentioned that someone should make a TAS of the PAL version of Super Punch Out, and I was basically like "...I kind of did actually" so here we are. It sounded like it wouldn't hurt to have a complete TAS out there publicly, especially since the work for it had already been finished, although I needed to update Macho, and re-manipulate the luck for the rest of the game after that point. Getting that taken care of didn't take long at all thankfully.For those unfamiliar, a TAS is a run done frame by frame on an emulator where you put in perfect inputs at perfect times in order to do things like manipulate perfect luck, and get perfect execution. It's a great way to find new strategies and understand a game more in-depth, as well as demonstrate what the best possible theoretical times in any game could be.The PAL version of Super Punch Out has quite a few differences than the NTSC version for speedrun purposes. The game runs at 50 frames a second, which causes a discrepancy between how your character moves, and the opponent boxers, enabling worse times, better times, or sometimes even completely different strategies entirely. This TAS has the current best known strategies for this version of the game, including some of the more recent developments for fights like Bear Hugger, Bald Bull, Super Machoman, and Hoy Quarlow.I'm thinking of matching these times at some point, since I did end up securing a PAL Super Nintendo from Mysteryman a couple years ago (also known as Frame By Frame Animation on YouTube). Matching the TAS times in any version of Super Punch Out is relatively pretty easy for this series of games, so it might be a reasonable way to get my toes wet with speedrunning Punch Out games again, especially since my muscle memory still feels a bit off from what I've gone through. From what it looks like, the PAL version's TAS times should be quite a bit easier to match than their NTSC counterparts. It being 50 frames a second means that any frame perfect input is slightly easier to hit since the window is 1/50th of a second instead of 1/60th of a second. The luck also appears to be either identical, or slightly better in every fight, aside from Hoy.Anyways, I won't go into detail on fights here. I'll probably leave that for whenever I match them on console. Thanks for watching!
Streets of Rage 2 - Deathless Playthrough with Max on Normal Difficulty zallard1 2023-10-19 | I love this game. It's got probably my favorite soundtrack of any game out there and it's just endlessly replayable with a great amount of challenge no matter your skill level. Streets of Rage 2 is probably my favorite Genesis game because those reasons.There's a part of me that is considering picking up the normal difficulty speedrun with Max at a casual level at some point just because I like playing through this game multiple times already. Who knows if I'll follow through with that, but just letting it be known that I might upload more of this game eventually :)There isn't too much to cover on the run itself I think. Max is just a powerhouse that can delete healthbars if you grab enemies from behind. Slide kicks can get you into this position pretty often if you get good at the spacing needed for it. It helps to understand how enemies react to situations in order to do it effectively though. I've done a deathless playthrough offline before, but this is the first time I had it recorded, which I also streamed on Twitch here!: twitch.tv/videos/1952158777This was played on a Sega Genesis Model 1 console with a VA7 motherboard that I installed a "Triple Bypass" on to improve the audio & video quite a bit. The VA7 is notorious for having terrible audio, and this mod effectively puts the audio quality on the level of the early Model 1's which are mostly agreed upon to have the "ideal" audio for the Sega Genesis.I had mentioned in my last video that I've taken up soldering as a hobby, and this console took quite a bit of work to get working. My friend from Australia sent this to me after having an honest accident trying to install the Triple Bypass, where he dripped solder on the chip which is effectively the brains of the Genesis, which is the VDP. Effectively, some legs got soldered together and they became fatigued enough to where when I tried to correct them, they just broke off.Undeterred, I decided to attempt taking a dremel to the top of the VDP to expose the broken legs inside the chip as a last ditch effort to save the console. I hadn't done this before on a Genesis, and accidentally went too far and the legs I needed to solder magnet wire to were in pretty awkward positions now. Because I had nothing to lose at this point, I attempted the repair anyways, which you can see in this Twitter thread: twitter.com/zallard1/status/1714810965047566803My idea was to use UV curable solder mask to cover up previously soldered legs so I wouldn't accidentally undo them as I continued along in the repair. I also opt for this mask instead of some kind of glue because if something breaks, I can at least go back and clear off the mask easily for repairs, whereas I'd be screwed if I had to get under superglue or something, which would probably cause more damage if it needed to be cleared. Once I got the repair completed to the best of my ability, I decided to test it, with the complete expectation that I was probably not going to see any life out of this Genesis again, due to how many things can go wrong in a repair like this. You can see the first time I test the console here: twitter.com/zallard1/status/1714812523877433731From there, I installed the Triple Bypass mod that was originally intended for this console in the first place, and it works great! I've streamed this console over the last couple of Twitch streams I've done, and I've seen absolutely no issues with it whatsoever, even beyond offline testing which has also been extensive.There's just something really cool to me about taking a console that was destined to be unusable junk, and making it not only fully work against all odds, but also making it something actually desirable.Thanks for watching!
Pokémon Snap - Mew [10,000 points] (WR) zallard1 2023-10-01 | Oh boy how do I start this description off. Well first off before I talk about why I uploaded this, I should mention that at the start of May, I suffered a stroke. I got to the hospital quickly and my recovery has been good so far, but if you want to catch up on how I've been doing (and what exactly happened), this thread has everything, including the incident itself described in the pastebin, my gradual recovery, and any struggles I've had along the way: twitter.com/zallard1/status/1653471339100119041A side hobby I've had over the past few years has been soldering, primarily for console modding and repair. As a way to gauge my precision with hand-eye coordination after the stroke, I started doing small soldering projects and have been gradually ramping them up as I see fit. Like recently I ended up fixing a bundle of N64 Expansion Paks that I got for cheap with very small resistor soldering, and then later I ended up installing an advanced RGB mod in my childhood N64 that can reverse some of the blurring on the graphics on a hardware level. You can check out both of these here in these two threads:twitter.com/zallard1/status/1664461054188064768twitter.com/zallard1/status/1665234475301650438I decided I wanted to upload something super different from what I usually upload to kind of set the tone that I probably will be taking it easy on seriously speedrunning things like Punch-Out for a little while, and will likely upload things that are a bit more chill in nature and slowly work my way up to harder things as I continue recover.So to start, I decided to upload something from probably one of the most relaxing games I played as a kid, Pokémon Snap. I never got the perfect Mew picture as a kid, which is (I believe) a frame perfect picture right before it disappears by going through you, while it does its pose before it vanishes, and is fully centered.This is almost definitely the easiest score record to tie in the game, as you have an entire several minute autoscrolling stage to bully this one Pokémon and exhaust your entire roll of film on it. This took me maybe 2 hours collectively of trying off and on to get the picture, so it wasn't bad at all. For those same reasons, I'm pretty sure it's the most tied record in the game too, likely with the original perfect 10,000 score set by someone back in 1999 when the game was released. Still harder than the comically easy tied world record for MTPO Glass Joe though, haha. It's a pretty fun and relaxing record to get; I'd highly recommend giving it a shot if you feel like you're in a mood to play N64 for some reason.I remember back when this came out, I actually got to rent the game from Blockbuster, beat it, and print out stickers on their special kiosk that they had specifically for Pokémon Snap. I still have a VHS tape somewhere with my best photos from back then recorded on it, along with some of those stickers still on it! Not sure if anyone would want to see it, but if I ever find that tape again, would people be interested in seeing the footage on it, as well as what the stickers looked like? I don't think any of my scores were any good, but it might be fun to document it?I'm not sure if I want to try any other picture score tied records, but this was a nice way to test out recording this console with a Datapath capture card and upscaling it to 4K. I think it looks great for footage off of a real N64, and the deblur function combined with that probably makes this the best quality Mew score record off of an actual N64 uploaded to YouTube right now, lol.I just started streaming again on Twitch yesterday too. It'll likely just be very very easy going stuff, like maybe a playthrough or two of a few RPGs, with some action games here and there depending on how I feel on any given day. For yesterday, I started a playthrough of Paper Mario on this exact same RGB modded N64, then I ended the stream with a round 1 Tyson just to see if I still got it or not, haha. If anyone would like to keep up with me and my streams, I'll be streaming again in a couple days at: http://www.twitch.tv/zallard1Anyways, thanks so much for checking this out and taking the time to read this. Hopefully I'll be fully back to speedrunning sooner rather than later.
Running With Speed - Clip from AGDQ 2020 Mike Tysons Punch-Out blindfolded section zallard1 2023-01-13 | This is a small clip from the speedrunning documentary Running With Speed, of the Mike Tyson's Punch-Out section, which focuses on the 2 player 1 controller blindfolded run that me and @Sinister1 did at AGDQ 2020!Today, and through the end of AGDQ 2023, $1 from each purchase of Running With Speed goes to Prevent Cancer Foundation! This feature length speedrunning documentary has several incredible speedrunners, and I had the honor of being featured in it for a little bit!If you'd like to check out more of this film, It's available on Apple TV, Amazon, YouTube movies, and several other places, and you can look at options to buy it here: gooddeedentertainment.com/running-with-speedAnd if you would like to watch AGDQ 2023, you can check out the ongoing stream here: twitch.tv/gamesdonequick#runningwithspeed #agdq #speedrunning #gamers #gaming #documentary #indiefilm #indiedoc
Running With Speed - A Feature Length Speedrunning Documentary - Trailer zallard1 2023-01-07 | A massive professional documentary that's been in the works for the past 4 to 5 years has just been released today! This contains countless amazing speedrunners, some great interviews, as well as narration by Summoningsalt.These directors have travelled to several GDQ events, to smaller scale speedrunning events like Calithon, and even to places like Japan to make sure that they got the likes of Hotarubi in this docuseries. They've gone to great lengths to capture the passion of this community in this project, and I hope people who watch this will agree with that assessment.If you follow me, this is something you'll absolutely be into. I also kind of make an appearance at one point or another in this feature length documentary, so there's that to look out for too...Now Available on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube Movies, and more!Apple TV - itunes.apple.com/us/movie/running-with-speed/id1652990505?ls=1Amazon - amazon.com/dp/B0B75GR1XRVudu - vudu.com/content/movies/details/Running-With-Speed/2197086Microsoft - microsoft.com/en-us/p/running-with-speed/8d6kgwxz361k?activetab=pivot%3aoverviewtabOfficial site: runningwithspeed.com#runningwithspeed #speedrunning #gamers #gaming #documentary #indiefilm #indiedoc
Mike Tysons Punch-Out!! - Soda Popinski [0:45.25] zallard1 2022-12-27 | This run was done on an original cartridge of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! on an NES that was modded with the Tim Worthington NESRGB kit. For some more in depth information about my RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/m7tzR5CqI've also decided to include a non-stretched version of this fight in an unlisted video. If you'd like to learn more about why I'm including this too, you can check out the description in the second video here: youtube.com/watch?v=TVJnjU1KbnUI've also got my full attempt session from power-on to the successful attempt right here: youtube.com/watch?v=rqbN3hAE-30Soda finally gave me the luck to finish a single attempt with a misdirected gut punch in phase 1. It paid off to switch to the WR strategy, but it took quite a bit more effort due to a couple factors I'll get into a little later. However, the change let me finally get an improvement that's larger than a single increment (skipped 45.48 & went straight to 45.25), however I missed lucandor158's 45.00 world record by a couple of frames of execution. This fight starts off with Soda attempting to throw 2 hooks at you, and they need to be cancelled with 2 blocked hooks from Mac. It's more consistent to throw 2 right gut punches, but you can opt to instead buffer a left gut punch as your 2nd. It will save a couple of frames, since left gut punches are faster, but it will also whiff about 25% of the time, which would instantly end your attempt. At this point for me, the faster 2nd cancel is mandatory.Ok, so here's the scoop on the spicy tech; the misdirected gut punch. This punch is not exactly exclusive to Soda, since the speedruns of other fights like Kaiser/Bull/Honda2/Macho also have misdirected punches too, but it's very clear when you land any of those successfully, but for Soda, you can only tell if it lands 25% of the time, and unlike Bull 2, it's a bit vague to tell if you got that luck or not. To complicate things more, the execution is deceptively fast, and it's very easy for the misdirect to not go off due to execution.This 1st phase starts by holding "Up" and waiting for Soda to raise his gloves. As soon as they go up, you need to let go of "Up" for the shortest amount of time you can, and during that window, press A. Instantly after, you need to let go of A and hold Up, THEN buffer B and quickly let go of Up. All of these have to happen in a split second! If you see Soda's guard stay up between your 1st and 2nd punches, it's a good sign that at the very least, the input was likely correct. I definitely have to thank lucandor for helping me understand this trick a bit better, because otherwise it's VERY cryptic.After the cancels, Soda can either throw 2 uppercuts, or throw 2 more hooks. He'll throw uppercuts about 75% of the time, which is the luck we need to continue the strategy. Off of the 2nd cancel, a right dodge is buffered, which is a perfect setup to land a gut punch into Soda's ducking uppercut stance, assuming that he does the fastest delay anyways. Soda can do one of 4 different delays, each 25% likely. When Mac is about centered, you need to buffer a left gut punch, then immediately press "Down" as the punch goes off. This technique is called the Screwdriver, and it was discovered by Jack Wedge back in 2015.A somewhat newer discovery is that by holding "Right" for the entire duration of when you're doing the Screwdriver's dodge, you will effectively eliminate 2 of the 4 possible delays for Soda's uppercut, making it ~50% likely instead of ~25% each time its used. Once the gut punch lands, you just need to do a delayed gut punch to cancel his 2nd uppercut, and buffer a star out of it. No matter what Soda does after that, the star will land, and since you landed a gut punch while he attempted to throw an uppercut, it enables Soda to be knocked down instantly from a star punch!Phases 2 and 3 are the same, and they can be handled in a couple of different ways. The normal way is to counter his 1st hook with a right jab, then buffer a right gut, then perform the Screwdriver. I go for the harder approach, which is to cancel the 1st hook with a right gut, then throw a jab into his 2nd hook. You're supposed to buffer a jab and let go of "Up" on a specific frame, which allows the jab to be bufferable and land, but I've opted to let go of all inputs as soon as I land my gut punch, then quickly press Up+A in isolation, which *can* land on the same frame as the buffered one, but doesn't kill an attempt outright if I let go of "Up" a frame late like the other approach. I'll be sticking with this for attempts.My weakest phase was definitely phase 3, since I was nervous to even get that far (I keep losing attempts to P3 due to luck). I'm still going to throw attempts at this since I'm so close. Assuming the record doesn't dip to a 44.XX, the next PB of mine in this fight will at the very least be a tied record.Thanks for watching!
Mike Tysons Punch-Out!! - Soda Popinski [0:45.61] zallard1 2022-12-17 | This run was done on an original cartridge of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! on an NES that was modded with the Tim Worthington NESRGB kit. For some more in depth information about my RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/m7tzR5CqI've also decided to include a non-stretched version of this fight in an unlisted video. If you'd like to learn more about why I'm including this too, you can check out the description in the second video here: youtube.com/watch?v=OvVAOkRYjNQI've also got my full attempt session from power-on to the successful attempt right here: youtube.com/watch?v=JTujaOUPizsThe Soda improvement train continues to chug along, this time getting faster by, you guessed it, yet another single timer increment lol. This PB doesn't change my ranking/placement, since I'm still 3rd place, behind jefeman's 45.48, and lucandor's 45.00, but I think the execution here is decent enough to where I have a much higher chance of getting improvements to my PB by finally incorporating the misdirected uppercut cancel for future attempts. I've practiced it a bit with savestates, and I can get it rarely, but the challenging part is getting the luck and execution for it, in addition to a tightly executed phase 2 and 3 to tie lucandor. It's technically possible to beat luc with the same strategy, as a 44.97 is barely possible if you are frame perfect on every punch on the fight, but it's just not realistic.The fight starts off with Soda attempting to throw 2 hooks at you, and they need to be cancelled immediately with 2 blocked hooks from Mac. It's more consistent to throw 2 right gut punches, but you can opt to instead buffer a left gut punch as your 2nd. It will save a couple of frames, since left gut punches are faster, but it will also whiff about 25% of the time, which would instantly end your attempt. I opt for the faster 2nd cancel.After the cancels, Soda can take one of 2 different routes; throw 2 uppercuts, or throw 2 more hooks. He'll throw the uppercuts about 75% of the time, which is part of the luck we need to continue the strategy, but we also need something else that I'll go into next. Off of the 2nd cancel, a right dodge is buffered, which is a perfect setup to land a gut punch into Soda's ducking uppercut stance, assuming that he does the fastest delay anyways. Soda can do one of 4 different delays, each 25% likely. When Mac is about centered, you need to buffer a left gut punch, then immediately press "Down" as the punch goes off. This technique is called the Screwdriver, and it was discovered by Jack Wedge days before I set my last PB in this fight. A somewhat newer discovery is that by holding "Right" for the entire duration of when you're doing the Screwdriver's dodge, you will effectively eliminate 2 of the 4 possible delays for Soda's uppercut, making it ~50% likely instead of ~25% each time its used. Once the gut punch lands, you just need to do a delayed gut punch to cancel his 2nd uppercut, and buffer a star punch out of it. No matter what Soda does after that, the star will land, and since you landed a gut punch while he attempted to throw an uppercut, it enables Soda to be knocked down instantly from a star punch!Phases 2 and 3 are the same, and they can be handled in a couple of different ways. The traditional way is to counter his first hook with a right jab, then buffer a right gut punch, then perform the Screwdriver just like in phase. I opt for a harder variation that theoretically should save frames over the standard approach though.I instead cancel the first hook with a right gut punch, then throw a jab into his 2nd hook. You are supposed to buffer a jab and let go of "Up" on the first possible frame, which allows the jab to be bufferable and land, but I've opted to let go of all inputs as soon as I land my gut punch, then quickly press Up+A in isolation, which theoretically should be possible to land on the same frame as the buffered one, but doesn't kill an attempt outright if I let go of "Up" a frame late like the other approach. I may switch to the fully buffered method later when saving those frames become more necessary.Like I said before, I'm definitely going to be attempting the misdirect strategy for future Soda attempts. I'll probably just be aiming to tie lucandor's record as opposed to beating it, because the execution to beat it is very very unlikely when coupled with the current luck needed to complete the fight. The luck is about 1 in 114 for the misdirect strategy, so for MTPO standards it's not the worst ever, but it's not exactly fantastic when coupled with hitting every punch possible frame perfectly. Adding another misdirected punch in phase 2 would give us more time save, but it will make the odds roughly 4 times worse, and to me, the execution of phase 2's misdirect is harder than in phase 1, so I'm not exactly jumping at the thought of attempting that :PThanks for watching!
Mike Tysons Punch-Out!! - Soda Popinski [0:45.82] zallard1 2022-12-12 | This run was done on an original cartridge of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! on an NES that was modded with the Tim Worthington NESRGB kit. For some more in depth information about my RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/m7tzR5CqI've also decided to include a non-stretched version of this fight in an unlisted video. If you'd like to learn more about why I'm including this too, you can check out the description in the second video here: youtube.com/watch?v=mVb4GvSod2cI've also got my full attempt session from power-on to the successful attempt right here: youtube.com/watch?v=XHr_EoSzGcwDespite being a small PB, this is actually a fairly large tie break, as there are several people who have a PB of 45.97 for Soda. With that 45.82, this currently puts me solidly in 3rd place, behind jefeman's 45.48, and lucandor's 45.00. My execution is starting to tighten up a little bit, and I'm thinking the main punches I timed better in this fight over my last one are the jabs after cancelling Soda's first hook in phases 2 and 3.As far as the fight itself, Soda is a very fast opponent with a couple of random elements, but has a massive weakness to exploit. The fight starts off with Soda attempting to throw 2 hooks at you, and they need to be cancelled immediately with 2 blocked hooks from Mac. It's more consistent to throw 2 right gut punches, but you can opt to instead buffer a left gut punch as your 2nd. It will save a couple of frames, since left gut punches are faster, but it will also whiff about 25% of the time, which would instantly end your attempt. I opt for the faster 2nd cancel.After the cancels, Soda can take one of 2 different routes; throw 2 uppercuts, or throw 2 more hooks. He'll throw the uppercuts about 75% of the time, which is part of the luck we need to continue the strategy, but we also need something else that I'll go into next. Off of the 2nd cancel, a right dodge is buffered, which is a perfect setup to land a gut punch into Soda's ducking uppercut stance, assuming that he does the fastest delay anyways. Soda can do one of 4 different delays, each 25% likely. When Mac is about centered, you need to buffer a left gut punch, then immediately press "Down" as the punch goes off. This technique is called the Screwdriver, and it was discovered by Jack Wedge days before I set my last PB in this fight. A somewhat newer discovery is that by holding "Right" for the entire duration of when you're doing the Screwdriver's dodge, you will effectively eliminate 2 of the 4 possible delays for Soda's uppercut, making it ~50% likely instead of ~25% each time its used. Once the gut punch lands, you just need to do a delayed gut punch to cancel his 2nd uppercut, and buffer a star punch out of it. No matter what Soda does after that, the star will land, and since you landed a gut punch while he attempted to throw an uppercut, it enables Soda to be knocked down instantly from a star punch!Phases 2 and 3 are the same, and they can be handled in a couple of different ways. The traditional way is to counter his first hook with a right jab, then buffer a right gut punch, then perform the Screwdriver just like in phase. I opt for a harder variation that theoretically should save frames over the standard approach though.I instead cancel the first hook with a right gut punch, then throw a jab into his 2nd hook. You are supposed to buffer a jab and let go of "Up" on the first possible frame, which allows the jab to be bufferable and land, but I've opted to let go of all inputs as soon as I land my gut punch, then quickly press Up+A in isolation, which theoretically should be possible to land on the same frame as the buffered one, but doesn't kill an attempt outright if I let go of "Up" a frame late like the other approach. I may switch to the fully buffered method later when saving those frames become more necessary.The world record is a 45.00 by lucandor158, which currently uses a misdirected gut punch in the first phase of the fight. It's a very tricky input, and the odds of it even working at all are about 1 in 4, making completing the strategy a bit more rare than it is now. On top of that, lucandor's fight is very very optimized compared to the theory TAS for his strategy (44.97), so chances are very high that if I wanted to attempt to match his time, I would need to get the luck multiple times because of the execution needed to be that fast. I'll probably talk about the misdirect more when I start using it in attempts, because I'm still learning about it myself, but until then...Thanks for watching!
Mike Tysons Punch-Out!! - Soda Popinski [0:45.97] zallard1 2022-12-09 | This run was done on an original cartridge of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! on an NES that was modded with the Tim Worthington NESRGB kit. For some more in depth information about my RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/m7tzR5CqI've also decided to include a non-stretched version of this fight in an unlisted video. If you'd like to learn more about why I'm including this too, you can check out the description in the second video here: youtube.com/watch?v=6S7zVZ5RxZcI've also got my full attempt session from power-on to the successful attempt right here: youtube.com/watch?v=D8yOtYlqL5YSo yeah, I already got a sub 46 lol. The luck for this fight in its current form is honestly really not that bad. It obviously gets much much worse the more you add to it, but as of right now, this is shaping up to be a great way to get more comfortable with the execution of the advanced phases 2 and 3.Soda is a very fast opponent with a couple of random elements, but has a massive weakness to exploit. The fight starts off with Soda attempting to throw 2 hooks at you, and they need to be cancelled immediately with 2 blocked hooks from Mac. It's more consistent to throw 2 right gut punches, but you can opt to instead buffer a left gut punch as your 2nd. It will save a couple of frames, since left gut punches are faster, but it will also whiff about 25% of the time, which would instantly end your attempt. I opt for the faster 2nd cancel.After the cancels, Soda can take one of 2 different routes; throw 2 uppercuts, or throw 2 more hooks. He'll throw the uppercuts about 75% of the time, which is part of the luck we need to continue the strategy, but we also need something else that I'll go into next. Off of the 2nd cancel, a right dodge is buffered, which is a perfect setup to land a gut punch into Soda's ducking uppercut stance, assuming that he does the fastest delay anyways. Soda can do one of 4 different delays, each 25% likely. When Mac is about centered, you need to buffer a left gut punch, then immediately press "Down" as the punch goes off. This technique is called the Screwdriver, and it was discovered by Jack Wedge days before I set my last PB in this fight. A somewhat newer discovery is that by holding "Right" for the entire duration of when you're doing the Screwdriver's dodge, you will effectively eliminate 2 of the 4 possible delays for Soda's uppercut, making it ~50% likely instead of ~25% each time its used. Once the gut punch lands, you just need to do a delayed gut punch to cancel his 2nd uppercut, and buffer a star punch out of it. No matter what Soda does after that, the star will land, and since you landed a gut punch while he attempted to throw an uppercut, it enables Soda to be knocked down instantly from a star punch!Phases 2 and 3 are the same, and they can be handled in a couple of different ways. The traditional way is to counter his first hook with a right jab, then buffer a right gut punch, then perform the Screwdriver just like in phase. I opt for a harder variation that theoretically should save frames over the standard approach though.I instead cancel the first hook with a right gut punch, then throw a jab into his 2nd hook. You are supposed to buffer a jab and let go of "Up" on the first possible frame, which allows the jab to be bufferable and land, but I've opted to let go of all inputs as soon as I land my gut punch, then quickly press Up+A in isolation, which theoretically should be possible to land on the same frame as the buffered one, but doesn't kill an attempt outright if I let go of "Up" a frame late like the other approach. I may switch to the fully buffered method later when saving those frames become more necessary.I definitely was better at the timing of the new adjustments compared to the 46.00 I got recently, but there's still quite a bit of room for improvement. I'm probably going to be sticking with this strategy for a bit longer, because my potential for new PBs with it is still very high. For comparison, Jefeman, who's in 2nd place for Soda, has a 45.48 with this same strategy, and I'm reasonably certain that's the lowest timer increment that you can get with it. I'd like to get either a .61 or .48 before I even consider learning/attempting the WR strategy, because I clearly still need to practice these adjustments.The world record is a 45.00 by lucandor158, which is leagues more advanced than what I'm doing here. I still have a ways to go before attempting his strategy, because I have a lot of practice & possible PBs that I should get before I need to resort to anything faster. Whenever I feel comfortable switching over to that strategy I'll talk about why it's such a monster of a record, but until then...Thanks for watching!
Mike Tysons Punch-Out!! - Soda Popinski [0:46.00] zallard1 2022-12-05 | This run was done on an original cartridge of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! on an NES that was modded with the Tim Worthington NESRGB kit. For some more in depth information about my RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/m7tzR5CqI've also decided to include a non-stretched version of this fight in an unlisted video. If you'd like to learn more about why I'm including this too, you can check out the description in the second video here: youtube.com/watch?v=lTeOdzExiEAI've also got my full attempt session from power-on to the successful attempt right here: youtube.com/watch?v=FLKKUUnPdfEHere's a fight I haven't improved since my 46.25 I got when I initially beat Matt Turk's final untied record in Punch Out in January of 2015... almost 8 years ago. I had asked on one of my streams what my most likely IL PB would be for me to get in this game, and the suggestion that stood out was Soda. Since I got my 46.25, there had been a new development for the fight that allows for better luck, which in turn would make it more reasonable to push luck in other ways.Soda is a very fast opponent with a couple of random elements, but has a massive weakness to exploit. The fight starts off with Soda attempting to throw 2 hooks at you, and they need to be cancelled immediately with 2 blocked hooks from Mac. It's more consistent to throw 2 right gut punches, but you can opt to instead buffer a left gut punch as your 2nd. It will save a couple of frames, since left gut punches are faster, but it will also whiff about 25% of the time, which would instantly end your attempt. I opt for the faster 2nd cancel.After the cancels, Soda can take one of 2 different routes; throw 2 uppercuts, or throw 2 more hooks. He'll throw the uppercuts about 75% of the time, which is part of the luck we need to continue the strategy, but we also need something else that I'll go into next. Off of the 2nd cancel, a right dodge is buffered, which is a perfect setup to land a gut punch into Soda's ducking uppercut stance, assuming that he does the fastest delay anyways. Soda can do one of 4 different delays, each 25% likely. When Mac is about centered, you need to buffer a left gut punch, then immediately press "Down" as the punch goes off. This technique is called the Screwdriver, and it was discovered by Jack Wedge days before I set my last PB in this fight. A somewhat newer discovery is that by holding "Right" for the entire duration of when you're doing the Screwdriver's dodge, you will effectively eliminate 2 of the 4 possible delays for Soda's uppercut, making it ~50% likely instead of ~25% each time its used. Once the gut punch lands, you just need to do a delayed gut punch to cancel his 2nd uppercut, and buffer a star punch out of it. No matter what Soda does after that, the star will land, and since you landed a gut punch while he attempted to throw an uppercut, it enables Soda to be knocked down instantly from a star punch!Phases 2 and 3 are the same, and they can be handled in a couple of different ways. The traditional way is to counter his first hook with a right jab, then buffer a right gut punch, then perform the Screwdriver just like in phase. I opt for a harder variation that theoretically should save frames over the standard approach though.I instead cancel the first hook with a right gut punch, then throw a jab into his 2nd hook. You are supposed to buffer a jab and let go of "Up" on the first possible frame, which allows the jab to be bufferable and land, but I've opted to let go of all inputs as soon as I land my gut punch, then quickly press Up+A in isolation, which theoretically should be possible to land on the same frame as the buffered one, but doesn't kill an attempt outright if I let go of "Up" a frame late like the other approach. I may switch to the fully buffered method later when saving those frames become more necessary.I end up losing quite a few frames from all these adjustments, probably more than if I had just played it safe and done the standard strategy that I got the 46.25 with, and that could be attributed to not being used to these timings yet. However, despite my mistakes, it seems I saved enough time for a meager total net gain of frames, and scraped by with a small PB.This took about 20 minutes, which you can see in the unlisted attempt video I linked above. My chat was pretty spot on with how easy it would be for me to PB on this fight, haha. I'll definitely beat this, hopefully sooner rather than later. The world record is a 45.00 by lucandor158, which is leagues more advanced than what I'm doing here. I'll have to lower my PB a ton before I ever even consider attempting his strategy, because his fight is absolutely amazing. If I ever switch over to that strategy I'll talk about why it's such a monster of a record, but until then...Thanks for watching!
(TAS) Super Punch Out!! - 2 Player Mode [2P Wins All Fights] (0:55.64 In-Game Time) zallard1 2022-11-28 | I started this TAS several months ago, but left it unfinished due to various other distractions that took my attention away from it. There's likely several improvements that others could make over this, but I felt like this might be a decent starting point for others to build onto if they wanted.For people who might be unfamiliar with what this is all about, a fellow by the name of @new_cheats_news on Twitter found several undiscovered cheat codes for all releases of Super Punch Out!twitter.com/new_cheats_news/status/1556727895778856960The 1st one is by pressing and holding Y+R with the 2nd controller while 1p presses A or Start on the title screen. This brings you to a secret menu where you can fight any opponent. If you select a character on that hidden menu, then hold B+Y with the 2p controller during the pre-fight text while pressing A or Start, then the 2nd controller lets you control the opponents!This TAS was made to try answer the question of: "What are the best possible times you can get as player 2 if player 1 happened to throw out whatever attacks that are beneficial for player 2?"This is the opposite of the TAS I released a while back, which attempted to get the lowest player 1 times possible, which can be seen here: youtube.com/watch?v=GSb-hLWcMyMThere are quite a few fights that end up being weirdly trivial, while some others end up being either interesting, or really silly. I'll give some descriptions of each.Gabby: For this TAS, both players hitting each other on the same frame will cancel some of the end-lag of player 2's attacks, which ends up saving time in some cases! I fit some in to complement the damage from Gabby's "C'mon!" charges, which freeze the clock. These fights are optimized for in-game time, so attacks like these will be used when available.Bear: Pretty similar fight to Gabby, but exchange the charges for bear hugs.Piston: This one likely took the most effort out of the entire TAS lol. I went through several drafts of this strategy, since the first several strategies had so many double hits that Piston would go dizzy, meaning I would have to make him back up to freeze the clock and let his meter drop back down. This version ended up being the best damage per second for double hits that I could find. Piston also starts phases with uppercuts automatically, meaning it needed to be worked around. I'm not convinced this is the best strategy, but it's good for now.Bull: Similar to the other TAS, but Bull takes the win each charge.Bob: The fast hooks are filthy on Bob, and mixing it with his windmill charges make this fight a really quick one.Dragon: His kicks freeze the timer and are instant knockdowns, making this ridiculously short.Muscle: Muscle's quick jabs, punctuated with headbutt, makes short work of phase 1. It's worth noting that moves with a lot of end-lag ends up usually working out to be faster at the end of knockdowns, since the timer stops immediately when the final blow connects. This is also the first fight where a P1 KO seems to be possible, due to how short phase 2 ends up being, combined with how low health P1 has right before the knockdown. KO mechanics against P1 appear fairly similar compared to the normal game.Sandman: This might be my favorite, because Sandman's big jab is so ABSURDLY powerful, and its speed is hilarious when cancelled with double hits. I also have Sandman take P1 out with 2 fast jabs, because if you throw a powerful hit for a faster phase 2, P1 doesn't get KO'd, and the KO ends up faster.Aran: I tried a lot of different stuff for this fight, but fast attacks + 1 normal jab always ended up being the winning strategy. Heike: The same disgusting hook from Bob shows up again, and it's very clearly the most lucrative button as far as damage and speed. Hair, while powerful, has a very long startup, and ending a phase with it gives P1 a big refill for phase 2, making a KO not quickly feasible, since Heike automatically starts phase 2 with a scripted uppercut.Clown: Instant knockdowns too strong.Macho: Super spin freezes time & connects 1 frame after the timer starts again, making this the shortest possible time for a fight to end with in the game.Narcis: The fast 3 jab combo lends itself well to setting up a KO, and just being better than every other button he has.Hoy: Stick partially freezes the clock & deals massive damage, making it the move of choice for this kind of TAS. It also happens to leave P1's health just low enough for a 1 phase KO.Rick: Instant knockdown + fast hook secures yet another ridiculously fast KO.Nick: Instant knockdown + fast uppercut makes short work of this fight.The ending I go to at the end of this video is actually unlockable through another code that @new_cheats_news found which you can see here:twitter.com/new_cheats_news/status/1557458843361333250Anyways, thanks for watching!
Punch-Out!! (NES) - Mr. Dream [2:06.00] zallard1 2022-11-11 | This run was done on an original cartridge of Punch-Out!! on an NES that was modded with the Tim Worthington NESRGB kit. For some more in depth information about my RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/m7tzR5CqI've also decided to include a non-stretched version of this fight in an unlisted video. If you'd like to learn more about why I'm including this too, you can check out the description in the second video here: youtube.com/watch?v=2jxZsQx2_88I uploaded a 2:06.61 on Mr. Dream a while back, since I figured it would be sort of fun, albeit kind of silly, to kind of track what my best Dream fight is alongside my Tyson fight. My Tyson PB is a 2:05.82, so this is now my current "Mr. Dream PB" even though the fight itself is considered completely equivalent to the Tyson fight, and is ranked as such on leaderboards. I also feel like it would be kind of fun to get my Dream/Tyson PBs to match each other if possible, and with this, they're now pretty close. The exact time for this fight is a 2:06 on the 3rd frame of the .00 increment, according to the Tyson Finder spreadsheet created by Omnigamer.Despite the difficulty of this fight, it's actually pretty simple to explain. To deal maximum damage on Dream in the uppercut phase, you need to mirror what side he throws his punch on when you throw a jab to stun him. Each time you do this, it deals 5 damage to his 96HP health bar, as opposed to 1 damage if you stunned him with the opposite fist. The 2nd punch for each of these also needs to be delayed to the very last frame of the stun. If you land it, it'll also deal 5 damage, otherwise you'll be blocked or deal 1 damage. Phase 1 requires you to hit 9 out of 10 of these, while getting decent enough luck to get past phase 1 at 56 seconds or below (or below 1:00 if you just care about him throwing 6 uppercuts in phase 2).Phase 2 is pretty much the same as phase 1, except you won't see the 8 second delay from Dream. You only have to hit 5 of 6 frame perfect punches here, due to his 56HP health refill, which he gets if you have full health when he's knocked down. For being in contention of the best non-phase-3-uppercut time, you need Dream down by 1:28 or earlier.Phase 3 will start with Dream going into his hook phase at 1:30, and you need to hit 8 hooks frame perfectly in order to get a perfectly executed fight. His health refill is 40HP this time, and dodging/punching will get you 2 damage per punch, whereas if you wait until the very end of Dream's hook, and punch on the very last frame, you'll land 1 punch that deals 5 damage. As long as you get to the start of this phase at an early enough time, your final time is completely dictated by what pattern you get from Dream, with the very best phase 3 pattern netting you a 2:05.25. This phase 3 pattern is literally the only difference between this fight, and my 2:05.82 on Tyson.Another big reason I wanted to upload this is to use this as an opportunity to mention to people here that I've been actively de-rusting and doing full game runs of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out on my Twitch channel lately. Stop by if you want, and maybe you might catch a new PB live! http://www.twitch.tv/zallard1Anyways, thanks for watching!
Mike Tysons Punch-Out!! - Piston Honda 2 [0:39.97] (NTSC WR) zallard1 2022-10-30 | This run was done on an original cartridge of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! on an NES that was modded with the Tim Worthington NESRGB kit. For some more in depth information about my RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/m7tzR5CqI've also decided to include a non-stretched version of this fight in an unlisted video. If you'd like to learn more about why I'm including this too, you can check out the description in the second video here: youtube.com/watch?v=ONGOXtSkuHQSo I haven't uploaded anything in a while since I've been going through various difficult IRL things. I won't get into them, but they've been making it pretty brutal on me, so I haven't been able or willing to commit time to speedrunning stuff. I did a charity drive recently for Starlight, and had a bid war between which Punchout game I should derust: MTPO or SPO. MTPO won handily, so I've been gradually derusting the game while making sure my direct captures are ready for if I land any PBs.I ended up landing this during a time where I was testing my recording quality with my Datapath card settings, which was extremely unexpected considering how hard I was struggling with this IL a couple years back trying to get sub 40. You can check out my offline attempt session here to check out how brief this was: youtube.com/watch?v=MbkeQcF6a_oThis fight is extremely complicated and brutally difficult. Just like the 39.99 I uploaded a while back, this fight executes the TAS strategy for the fight, which has a couple of specific quirks to it.For the entirety of the first phase of the fight, you CANNOT lose more than 1 frame across the ENTIRE knockdown. If you lose 2 or more frames collectively throughout the first knockdown, then Honda will block your face jab at the start of phase 2.This fight heavily uses two techniques, one of which is called a dizzy destroyer, which is a 2 punch combo that involves exploiting Honda 2 & Macho's guard in a very specific way. Honda 2 follows your gloves when you tap up, which leaves him open for a gut punch, then you are capable of holding up and punch for an immediate jab after, which will successfully land only on the condition that you let go of up while Mac's punch animation is going off, but before the punch actually connects.The second technique is called a max damage uppercut. This is where you throw a star punch and tap up in a special way in the Honda 2 & Macho fights where the opponent is busy trying to follow your guard, but cannot block their face in time before the uppercut lands, which results in dealing more damage than usual, as well as preventing them from dodging the uppercut outright. For Honda 2 in particular, there is an addendum to this, because Honda 2's max damage uppercut has a sizable window where you can throw the star punch, but there is a single frame window that's several frames before that sizable window where you can still have the max damage uppercut work. I need to go for specifically these frame perfect max damage uppercuts.Phew, let's finally talk about the fight itself. The fight opens with 2 dizzy destroyer combos, which is the fastest way to land 4 successful hits, which always results in your first guaranteed star. Immediately throw a frame perfect max damage uppercut, followed by another dizzy destroyer to get 2 more stars (1st one is 100% likely, the 2nd is 50%), then hold up while Honda 2 is recovering from the previous star punch, and as soon as you see Honda's sprite fully centered while he starts to do his eyebrow pattern, throw a star and IMMEDIATELY let go of up. If you're reasonably fast, this star should deal max damage as he attempts to throw a punch, and you should be able to knock him down at 23 seconds with a buffered jab.The start of phase 2 is just holding up + punch, then letting go of up as soon as Mac's punch animation starts. If and only if you are on TAS pace, this punch will land and you will get a guaranteed star. From here, throw a frame perfect max damage uppercut, then follow it up with another dizzy destroyer combo, then throwing another frame perfect max damage star for a knockdown at 36 seconds. For this to work, you NEED the good health refill (50% likely) and the lucky star on the final face jab (also 50% likely). This puts the total odds of this fight to 1/8.Phase 3 consists of landing the final star punch for an instant knockdown since Honda got up on a 1 count. When throwing the star, you need to do the max damage input, and you can tell if it's perfect if Honda lowers his guard near the very end of the star punch.Compared to McHazard's TAS, I only lost 1 frame on the first dizzy destroyer in phase 1; everything else in the entire fight was performed frame perfectly. The record was a 3 way tie between Summoningsalt, Jlet, and Jefeman, so it's nice to finally add my name to that list and not have to think about this strategy ever again.Thanks for watching!
Are double TKOs possible in Super Punch Out? zallard1 2022-08-27 | I've known about this topic for many years, but have been too lazy to put a video together about it. Due to a couple of people asking me about it lately, and because I'm currently messing with TASing stuff in 2 player mode, I've decided to put this video together, since I've found that this mode makes demonstrating this topic way, *way* more convenient then ever before.If you're not familiar with what the 2 player mode is Super Punch Out is, then this video does a good job showing when the cheats codes were discovered, and several entertaining fights with several people: youtube.com/watch?v=OdVWQpeSupoThis is also kind of a question to everyone watching, but do people enjoy these kinds of videos and want to see more of them from me? If you have any opinions on those questions, let me know in the comments!
(TAS) Super Punch Out!! - 2 Player Mode [1P Wins All Fights] (1:09.29 In-Game Time) zallard1 2022-08-24 | I've been occasionally messing around with TASing strategies for the newly revealed 2 player debug mode, mostly out of curiosity. There's likely several improvements that others could make over this, but I felt like this might be a decent starting point for others to build onto if they wanted.For people who might be unfamiliar with what this is all about, a fellow by the name of @new_cheats_news on Twitter found several undiscovered cheat codes for all releases of Super Punch Out!twitter.com/new_cheats_news/status/1556727895778856960The 1st one is by pressing and holding Y+R with the 2nd controller while 1p presses A or Start on the title screen. This brings you to a secret menu where you can fight any opponent. If you select a character on that hidden menu, then hold B+Y with the 2p controller during the pre-fight text while pressing A or Start, then the 2nd controller lets you control the opponents!This TAS was made to try answer the question of: "What are the best possible times you can get as player 1 if player 2 happened to throw out whatever attacks that are beneficial for player 1?"There are quite a few fights that end up being weirdly trivial, while some others end up being either interesting, or really silly. I'll give some descriptions of each.Gabby: His special attack freezes the clock and has an instant knockdown window at the end, making the fight time stupidly short, and the fight itself ends up being a funny footnote, but not too interesting. There will be a few more fights like this.Bear: This one's great, because his "taunt" where he runs to the back of the ring freezes the clock. I use this multiple times to land right jabs exactly as he walks in. These punches are slower usually, but since the slow startup of the punch isn't counted on the timer, it ends up being a nice way to deal extra damage. Because of this extra damage, I'm able to KO him without him getting back up for phase 2, saving about 3 frames of in-game time at the cost of several seconds of real time, which is just so ridiculous that I love it.Piston: This one is similar to Gabby, except Piston does a scripted uppercut after a knockdown no matter what P2 presses, so the fastest way I could cancel it was landing a delayed gut punch for phases 2 and 3.Bull: This is just a completely comical in-game time of 0'00"11 seconds for the entire fight. Bull charge is just not a good button for P2 to hit, hahaha.Bob: 3 windmill attacks that freeze the clock = 3 instant knockdowns for a ridiculously short fight.Dragon: The first knockdown is actually kind of similar to another 3 second knockdown that you can do on the real version of this fight, but since you can swap 2P's guard at will, you can fit in faster jabs while also getting enough gut punches for the early dizzy. Rapid jabs in phase 2 make Dragon dizzy very fast, which makes his phase 2 refill irrelevant.Muscle: Headbutt has an instant knockdown window lol.Sandman: I tried a bunch of stuff, but this really bland simple pattern was the best I could find. As a side note, since P2 controls the opponent's guard, you can have him allow as many rapid punches as you want to go through, which comes into play a lot in this weird TAS.Aran: Pretty similar story to Sandman, however, it's worth keeping in mind that landing a super that isn't rapids will make Aran attempt to get you into a clinch, which is not good for the purposes of this TAS.Heike: This pattern just *barely* allows a KO to be possible this early, due to the timer barely being under 8"03 off of a high 4 second phase 1. Rapids on phase 2 are a must, because just like Piston, Heike always throws a hook to start a new phase regardless of buttons pressed.Clown: The end of the balls rush where Clown flips to chop you has an instant knockdown window, so we get yet another one of these silly fights.Macho: I tried a handful of tricky things that would get low 6 second times, but this phase 1 blew all of those out of the water. Phase 2 is super similar to the real version of this fight, except we can get a left jab counter, which is faster.Narcis: Ok so, Narcis has access to the triple jab pattern from when he flashes, which has a very fast startup w/o any flashing, but is still counterable! This happens to be very abusable in this fight, which makes this fight look pretty hilarious.Hoy: Stick has an instant knockdown, so another quick TKO.Rick: I actually messed around with this one the most, because refills are critically important here. Phase 1 ends up being really similar to the real fight, because all that damage is absolutely necessary for phases 2 and 3.Nick: The rush from the back of the ring has an instant knockdown, so 3 = the final quick TKO.The ending I go to at the end of this video is actually unlockable through another code that @new_cheats_news found which you can see here:twitter.com/new_cheats_news/status/1557458843361333250Anyways, thanks for watching!
NEW SUPER PUNCH OUT 2P MODE REACTION & 1V1S W/ TWITCH CHAT! zallard1 2022-08-09 | This is easily the most significant day in Super Punch Out history aside from the day that the game was originally released.Today, it was found out by @new_cheats_news on Twitter that the original release of Super Punch Out had two NEVER before seen SECRET codes! twitter.com/new_cheats_news/status/1556727895778856960The first one is by pressing and holding Y+R with the 2nd controller while 1p presses A or Start on the title screen. This will bring you to a hidden menu where you can fight any fighter in the game, even if you don't have the actual fighters unlocked yet! This is pretty amazing that this has gone undiscovered for so long, but it's nothing compared to the next code found today...If you select a character on that hidden menu from the first code, then hold B+Y with the 2p controller during the pre-fight text while pressing A or Start... then the 2nd controller will ACTUALLY BE CONTROLLING THE OPPONENT IN THE FIGHT!!!All these years, ever since the game came out, this has solely been a single player game, but now, suddenly the game is a ridiculously wild 2 player experience. This is so amazing, especially with the Wii game having a multiplayer experience somewhat similar to this... but you couldn't actually pick any actual *unique* characters like in this game.The first part of this video is me playing the game on my actual Super Nintendo with an original cartridge of Super Punch Out and reacting for the first time to the amazing newly discovered code. I go through each fighter in order, methodically messing around with what attacks you're able to do with each of them.The second part of the video is me asking Twitch chat to fight me with Nintendo Switch Online's multiplayer Super Nintendo service. For anyone unfamiliar, this method of playing multiplayer Super Nintendo is pretty janky, which ends up making these fights far more hilarious than they would be otherwise. I may end up doing a part 2 to this, where I try this on Fightcade2, which has actually competent rollback netcode.Major shoutouts to @SummoningSalt who kindly offered to help me out with this supercut of my Twitch stream today where I first got to experience this. He was able to quickly and easily put this together for me within a couple of hours, whereas it would take me far, far longer since I don't have nearly as much video editing experience as he does.Anyways, thank you so much for watching, and I really hope you enjoy this as much as I have!
Super Punch Out!! - Mad Clown [00901] (NTSC WR) zallard1 2022-06-06 | This run was done on an original Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Voultar RGB amp to restore the correct color intensity. For some more in depth information about my general RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/TtXx1PQxAdditionally, I've decided to include a non-stretched version of this fight in an unlisted video. If you'd like to learn more about why I'm including this too, you can check out the description in the second video here: youtube.com/watch?v=Q1bddZn6DtASo, the longstanding 9"05 strategy on Mad Clown that was first published in the Super Punch Out TAS back in 5/29/2007 has been improved 2 times recently. To see that original strategy, you can check out my recent upload of it here: youtube.com/watch?v=Rs6AEtl-HMsLixunis was finding strategies for the PAL version of Super Punch Out recently, which actually has several wildly different strategies from the NTSC version, but ended up checking the NTSC version for things recently for full game speedrun stuff. On 3/14/2022, he posted an improvement from 9"05 to 9"03 in the Super Punch Out speedrunning discord server.That strategy involved 6 frame perfect things you needed to time, as well as an extra unstunned jab, which increases the luck needed greatly. However on 4/4/2022, he found *another* improvement that cut it down to 9"01, but requires *another* frame perfect punch, bringing the total to 7, making this fight the most difficult strategy to execute that this game has to offer.I had a weirdly hard time matching this tied record, because despite how quickly I hit the 9"03, I kept messing up phase 2 every time I got there on pace during attempts. The phase 2 counter was the main culprit, as I just didn't have a great cue that worked for me consistently.Usually you have to resort to "feel" on punches like this, but I simply wasn't great at getting the feel for that spacing down. I ended up not playing the game for ~2 weeks, but came back to it today and thankfully got it very quickly with no practice.This fight starts with you pressing nothing for the first frame, and then pressing "Up" and "Y" to throw a left jab on the next frame. Follow that up with another buffered left jab, with Mad Clown hopefully standing still without random retaliations and not randomly blocking. From there, Clown will throw a jab on your left side, and you'll need to do a delayed left jab to counter it.Once the jab is countered, you'll have to land a right jab on the same frame that Clown's stun ends, which is a very awkward timing. I opted to do a pseudo buffer by timing a quick duck shortly after I visually see Clown's sprite change into his stunned sprite. Then you have to throw a left jab with a *very* small delay, then delay a right jab by 1 frame so Clown's move timer advances just enough to do buffered rapid jabs on Clown's upcoming hook.Buffering rapid jabs requires pressing A, letting go when you see your character start his super, then repressing it. That rapid jab will hit him out of that hook animation and make him instantly go dizzy. Since rapid jabs made him dizzy, the buffer strategy needs to be different than the one in the 9"05. Hold left, and don't let go until your character centers himself, then press "Left" then "Up" in rapid succession, along with "A" to throw an uppercut to knock Clown down.Clown opens phase 2 by either him doing a taunt where he's pointing to his stomach, which means he'll retaliate when you attempt to throw a punch, or by standing there. Start by pressing nothing on the first frame the fight starts back up, then press "Up" + "A" to throw an uppercut (there's a 3/8 chance he dodges). Once that lands, Clown will do a jab on your right, that you need to counter with a right jab, and then buffer another uppercut for knockdown 2.If you got this far, then congratulations, because you've basically finished the fight! For phase 3, Mad Clown always opens with "Show Time", which involves him throwing really fast jabs. Because of Show Time, you can easily counter his first jab by buffering a right jab as soon as the phase begins, and because of how fast phase 2 was, he'll come back with so little health that he'll go right back down when the jab lands.I did this fight offline while watching other streams, so unfortunately there's no live reaction. I did record the full attempt session, which totals to about 11 and a half minutes, so I figured I might as well upload it in its entirety too. You can check it out here: youtube.com/watch?v=dxNGng8q4DIAlso here are some stats on how many frame perfect phase 1's I got, as well as how each of them failed to net me 9"01.Frame perfect phase 1's: 35Dodged in phase 2: 9Taunted in phase 2: 10Too slow in phase 2: 8Too fast on phase 2 uppercut: 3Too fast on phase 2 counter: 4Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Narcis Prince [00824] zallard1 2022-05-26 | This run was done on an original Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Voultar RGB amp to restore the correct color intensity. For some more in depth information about my general RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/TtXx1PQxAdditionally, I've decided to include a non-stretched version of this fight in an unlisted video. If you'd like to learn more about why I'm including this too, you can check out the description in the second video here: youtube.com/watch?v=fyI4BFUxskUNarcis Prince is the most random fight in the game, and is the only one that doesn't have dozens of people tying the TAS because of it. A few people have been able to match it recently during the pandemic, but it's a huge range from being a quick one to get, to taking close to a year of consistent effort to get. My PB on this fight was an 8"28 set in 2014, until I improved it recently to the 8"26, and now the 8"24 that you see here.I've been grinding mostly this on my Twitch channel, with several stats I've been tracking, and a running timer during attempts. I've also been exporting streams of this grind to my alt account on YouTube. You can check out the playlist for that (with more comments) here: youtube.com/watch?v=ZXiI-lPUXEQ&list=PLt0miTqQ0e4i4dz-YRuBp4TJw-2DfmPiINarcis can literally end your attempt on the 1st frame of the fight if he dances or walks to the side. Start the fight starts by holding "Up" for the 1st frame, then letting go and buffering a left gut for the 2nd frame. After that 1st gut punch, follow it up with 2 more left gut punches. You have a 2 frame window to do that guard manipulation, otherwise Narcis will block your 3rd gut punch due to him starting his scheduled hook.Landing those 3 gut punches is an absolute ordeal. In addition to the dances I mentioned before, he can also end your attempt before *every* gut punch by: twirling left or right, side stepping left or right and sliding away side to side. He can ALSO end your attempts during the punches themselves, by randomly block them outright, or doing a random retaliation in response.If you land the 3 gut punches, Narcis will throw a hook that you'll need to counter with a low left gut punch. After landing it, you need to hit Narcis on the final frame of his stun animation from the counterpunch, which thankfully has a buffer that works every time, although it's just finicky enough to where you could lose attempts on it sometimes. To do it, tap and hold left or right until you see your character start to dodge, then IMMEDIATELY let go of dodge so that you go through your dodge animation. As soon as you're about to center yourself, press "Up" plus "Y" to throw a jab, which should hit Narcis to where his recoil animation is faster and he instantly becomes angry.When Narcis is angry, he'll go to the back of the ring (which resets the dizzy meter entirely) and comes back to throw one of 3 main patterns at you. The first (and most common) pattern is the one where he throws 2 jabs on your right side, which is an immediate reset if it happens, because he'll block it. The next pattern is 2 jabs on your left side, which will also be a reset. The final pattern is the one where he can throw a hook on your left side, then right side, which is the one we *need* to have a chance.When the delayed jab lands, you need to buffer the following: left gut, quick duck, left gut, right jab, then finally left jab. You NEED to pause the game mid-punch to let the super meter catch up; if you don't, then Narcis can't dizzy. Then you need to buffer rapid jabs, which has a 6 frame window to repress the A button, otherwise you'll be too slow Narcis won't get dizzy off of the 4th rapid. With the good pattern, Narcis can still dodge the initial jab, as well as your 1st and 4th rapid jabs, but if all rapid jabs land, just do a quick duck into low super for a knockdown!Phase 2 just has you throwing a rapid jab into his jab that he attempts to throw. I've changed over to a buffer that's been known about for a long time, but was one I always thought was too hard to do consistently. Murakuma ended up convincing me that the buffer is worth going for, since I had subconsciously assumed that this game would ruin quick dodges from hitting diagonals, similar to Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, but this game doesn't do that at all! Sliding from down on the dpad, to hitting up, left, up, left gets you in position for the buffered rapid punch on the perfect frame.From there, you'll need to do a buffer for the final uppercut (I went with right gut, quick duck, right jab, into uppercut this time). This final uppercut is really awful too, and can easily kill your run at the very end. I lost 2 frames vs the TAS (1 from the counter in phase 1, and one from not starting my quick dodge out of my duck in phase 2 fast enough).Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Nick Bruiser [00752] (NTSC WR) zallard1 2022-05-14 | This run was done on an original Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Voultar RGB amp to restore the correct color intensity. For some more in depth information about my general RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/TtXx1PQxAdditionally, I've decided to include a non-stretched version of this fight in an unlisted video. If you'd like to learn more about why I'm including this too, you can check out the description in the second video here: youtube.com/watch?v=B4TaqyEa2rIJust a couple of things I should talk about here before I get into the final fight of this game. First off, it should be reiterated that a lot of these recent Super Punch Out videos I've been uploading are fights that I matched nearly a decade ago, and my main incentive in uploading these again is to update the quality to all be consistent with each other, and be as high quality as possible now that I have an RGB setup.Secondly, most of these uploads were all recorded within a 3 stream span back in January, with a couple of exceptions (Bald Bull needed to be redone due to a real-time improvement, Clown's strategy got improved twice, and Narcis is just bad). If you'd like to check out those 3 streams, they're right here:twitch.tv/videos/1271807030twitch.tv/videos/1271810274twitch.tv/videos/1271812421I figured uploading these gradually would give me time to get the high quality encodes done in my spare time, and I could take my time on research that I do in my YouTube descriptions for each of these videos. It also prevents inbox bombing everyone, which in general, can be kind of annoying to some people.Anyways, so Nick Bruiser is the final opponent in the game. In terms of a single segment run, he can be a pretty tense fight, in that you need to react to the height of his punches in order to successfully KO him, although this is only realistic on a setup that has little to no input lag.However, despite that daunting version of the fight, this one is nothing like that. This fight starts with... just buffering 2 left face jabs. Despite all the times we've needed to manipulate the opponent's guard, Nick just doesn't have any guard for the first 25 seconds of the fight.Once you buffer 2 jabs, then you need several things to align. You *must* assume that Nick'll throw a jab on your right. Secondly, you need to hit this jab on the first frame possible, which'll make Nick recoil faster than usual. I time this frame perfect jab immediately around when I hear the music get to its high note, which seems to work pretty often. This punch is the only frame perfect thing you need to hit to match this record.Once you land the jab, you need to buffer a left jab, then do a "tap duck" which involves holding "Down" on the dpad until the instant you see your character start to duck, then immediately let go. Once your character is almost centered, buffer B to hit Nick on the final frame of his stun. From there, just buffer 2 left jabs and he should go dizzy assuming he doesn't block at all. From there, just buffer 2 right guts into 2 low supers for the knockdown (low super is also 99 frames faster in real time than uppercut for dizzy knockdown, just like Rick).Phase 2 is trivial, as you just need to buffer 2 consecutive uppercuts. Why doesn't everyone do this in full game runs, you might ask? Well the luck is pretty terrible, since you need Nick to throw high (1/2), the 80 frame delay so he can't block in phase 1 & attacks at the perfect time in phase 2 (1/4), Nick to throw high in phase 2 (1/2), Nick to take an uppercut (5/8), AND for Nick to not get the 24 frame delay in phase 2 which allows him to block the final super (7/8). With all of this, we get a probability of [(1/2)^2]*(1/4)*(5/8)*(7/8) = 35/1024 ~ 3.4% of success with this strategy. Fairly rare, but certainly not the worst that the Punch-Out series (or even SPO for that matter) has to offer, lol.And that finishes off the new Super Punch Out NTSC IL playlist as far as fighters go! You can check it all out here: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMMZaQu-GKrM067s6sgWpy-9ZgjWgpGoJ If you'd like to see the original uploads for most of these fights when I did them nearly a decade ago, they're in this playlist here for historical reasons: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMMZaQu-GKrM_mriNjkLBhEX17nojFQgHI'm still working on Mad Clown's newest improvement, and Narcis Prince's outlandish luck to match those two records, but once I finally get those two, then this playlist will effectively be permanently finished, barring any unforeseen improvements to fighters in this game. I hope people enjoyed checking these out with the in-depth descriptions and higher quality. If you'd like to see me attempt either of these fights live, you can check out my Twitch page: twitch.tv/zallard1Thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Rick Bruiser [01065] (NTSC-U WR) zallard1 2022-04-29 | This run was done on an original Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Voultar RGB amp to restore the correct color intensity. For some more in depth information about my general RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/TtXx1PQxAdditionally, I've decided to include a non-stretched version of this fight in an unlisted video. If you'd like to learn more about why I'm including this too, you can check out the description in the second video here: youtube.com/watch?v=UUD_A5pFeb8The reason for the distinction on "NTSC-U" in the title is because on the Japanese version of Super Punch Out, Rick Bruiser has the one and only speed difference between the US and JP versions of the game, since JP Rick does *not* do the leaning back animation before going dizzy that US Rick does. This results in a faster time of 10"37, which you can watch me do here if you're interested in seeing the differences between the two versions firsthand: youtube.com/watch?v=ZE37xPqLWikDespite needing to be frame perfect in 5 places, this feels like the "easiest" fight to finish with that difficulty for me. To re-match the TAS on the J version of Rick, it took me like 8 minutes, and for this one, it took about 12. It might be because 3 of these inputs are guard manipulation, which is more than the other 5 input fights (Bull, Sandman, Macho), and is something that you have to use in nearly every fight anyways, so it requires less practice than other punches. This fight also has a little bit of luck, in that you need to win two 5/8 luck rolls for landing uppercuts, and two 7/8 luck rolls for his sidesteps in order to complete this strategy, meaning a 1225/4096 probability (or almost a 30% chance of success), which is honestly not bad at all for Punch-Out luck standards.The fight starts with, you guessed it, guard manipulation. Don't press anything for the first frame of the fight, then press Up+Y for the second frame to get a left jab to sneak past his guard. Rick is unique in that he will reel back and retaliate with a jab every time you sneak a punch through his guard, so keep that in mind whenever you fight him!Dodge his retaliation jab, and Rick will immediately attempt 2 jabs on your right side, followed by a hook on your left side. Immediately upon being centered from your previous dodge, throw a right jab to counter Rick's jab, then proceed to buffer the following sequence: right jab, right body, right jab, right body, then another right body to interrupt his hook. This deals *exactly* the amount of damage needed to get you the ideal phase 2 and 3 refills of 25HP and 14HP, which is exactly enough HP for a single uppercut in phase 3 to TKO Rick. Upon throwing that final right body, Rick will go dizzy, and buffering 2 left body punches into a low super will net you the first knockdown of the fight. It's worth noting that if you get a 6.99 or lower for your phase 1 knockdown, you are hard committed into going for the TAS phase 2, because of the 4 second rule for knockdowns, you will only have ~3 seconds to get the second knockdown, and the usual phase 2 for single segment runs will be too slow to get you the good refill for phase 3. If you find yourself wanting to do that safe strategy, throw an uppercut during the dizzy instead of the low super to fix that issue. This also happens to only really be a concern with the US version of the game, as the JP version has way more wiggle room for phases. As a random tidbit since we're on this topic, throwing a low super for the dizzy knockdown is 99 frames faster in real time than knocking Rick down with an uppercut, just because he spins around a bunch in the animation, haha.For phase 2, you will need to do a guard manipulated uppercut, which means pressing nothing at all for the first frame, then Up+A for the second frame. This allows Rick to take an uppercut, although he has the ability to dodge the uppercut 5/8's of the time, as well as doing a sidestep jump, which is 1/8 likely each time he shuffles his feet. Assuming he does neither of these, he'll be hit with the uppercut, and attempt to counter-jab you for it, to which you just dodge to the right, and then dodge to the left to avoid his hook, and cancel the dodge by pressing the A button to do a low super for the 2nd knockdown of the fight. You want to do this low super cancel as tightly as you can in order to match the TAS time, and I don't have a great cue for it, but it's one that's relatively easy to get the hang of by feel thankfully.Phase 3 is simply the exact same as the start of phase 2 thankfully, which just involves another guard manipulated uppercut, which means pressing nothing at all for the first frame, then Up+A for the second frame. The same odds apply, where you need to win a 5/8's luck roll, and not get the 1/8 Rick sidestep.Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Hoy Quarlow [00835] (NTSC WR) zallard1 2022-04-16 | This run was done on an original Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Voultar RGB amp to restore the correct color intensity. For some more in depth information about my general RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/TtXx1PQxAdditionally, I've decided to include a non-stretched version of this fight in an unlisted video. If you'd like to learn more about why I'm including this too, you can check out the description in the second video here: youtube.com/watch?v=kvq6b76k70UHoy Quarlow is an infamously random fight for full game speedruns, and from what I've seen as far as general opinions go with this game, is widely considered to be the hardest fight in the game as far as casual playthroughs go. Thankfully, with some of the speedrun strategies you can pull off on Hoy, you'll be able to skip all of his more elaborate attack patterns that he would be able to pull out later in the fight, with a bit of luck anyways.The fight begins as you would expect by this point, with you doing a guard manipulation at the start of the fight by pressing nothing for the first frame, and "Up" + "Y" on the second frame, which will allow a left jab through his guard. From there, buffer another left jab, then Hoy will go into a crane stance before attempting to attack you. His sprite will twitch for a brief moment, and immediately following that twitch, you want to throw out a delayed left jab to intercept it.After intercepting that jab, follow it up by buffering a left gut punch to intercept an attack of his, then 2 random left jabs, then finally a left body blow to intercept another attack of his. This will dizzy him, to which you can buffer a low right gut into a low super take him down. The TAS ends up knocking Hoy down with a right jab, which would normally be detrimental, since you end up with a much larger refill for phase 2 when you don't knock an opponent down with a super.This paragraph doesn't cover how to do the strategy at all, and instead talks about some neat data on optimizing real time; you can skip ahead if you just want to know how to do the fight. Because of the way Hoy's pattern shakes out, even if you go into phase 2 with a low refill to where you could take him down with 2 low supers, you end up waiting in phase 3, because you don't have enough time to sneak in a meaningful attack due to his scheduled low attack coming out too quick. Because of this, it's actually faster in real time to do the right jab in phase 1, since he has a way faster knockdown animation (51 frames faster to be exact), then ends up behind by 4 frames by the time phase 2 is done, but since Hoy's move timer is more depleted by the time phase 3 starts, the only real time lost is 4 frames from the uppercut knockdown animation, meaning you'll come out ahead with a net profit of 47 frames vs if you just did low supers every time in the fight.If you only care about in-game time, a really easy buffer for the dizzy knockdown would be a right gut punch, into a low super. For phase 2, I actually want to do guard manipulated uppercuts here for a specific reason. Since your entire fight time for phases 2 + 3 is dictated by Hoy's move timer for his low attack, I'm doing uppercuts to intentionally waste time such that I can buffer either a quick duck or a quick dodge in phase 3. I try to aim my uppercuts right around when I visually see Hoy's guard drop, as opposed to aiming for the first frame guard manipulation. The best case scenario is that Hoy takes both of the supers that you chose to go with, which are 5/8's likely each.Phase 3 involves throwing a low super into Hoy's low attack. If you opted for the low super approach in phase 2, then you'll need to time this manually, which involves throwing the super right around when you see Hoy go into his attack stance. If you opted for the phase 2 uppercut approach, depending on the times you go for phases 1 and 2, you may be able to buffer a quick dodge/duck to easily land it frame perfectly.For example, if phase 1 was 5"28, and phase 2 was 7"49, then you can buffer a quick duck for an 8"35. If you got 7"50 for phase 2, then you can instead do a quick dodge into low super to get an 8"35. Outside of those two situations for that phase 1 time, you'll need to time it manually, but also note that the attack comes out way sooner than in the phase 2 low super scenario. This concept extends to any situation where you get Hoy dizzy before he's idle after his 2 low attacks in phase 1, but the times to do dodge/duck are obviously different. Thankfully, there exists a calculator that accounts for the exact quirks of the timer if you aren't comfortable with doing the math & accounting for timer quirks that you can copy from this spreadsheet: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17GVICkDVWth1TOl7azFd-0sHj3rTGrXygktjxAYrFoQAnyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Heike Kagero [01049] (TKO strategy) zallard1 2022-03-30 | This run was done on an original Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Voultar RGB amp to restore the correct color intensity. For some more in depth information about my general RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/TtXx1PQxSo, lixunis found a great strategy (with the bizarre name "Brunch of Eggs and Ham and Stuff") for full game runs that actually improves on the old TAS of 10"60 by a few frames (to 10"52 in fact).Phase 1 is super easy here, because you just need to hold up for the first frame of the fight, then buffer 6 left guts, 2 right jabs, then quick duck into low super to get him to the mat. This is the classic phase one that's been optimal for years and years as far as a quick first knockdown goes anyways.For phase 2, by buffering a low left punch to interrupt Heike's first hook, you can set his guard to be high on the next punch by holding "Up" until the first frame Heike gets out of his recovery animation and becomes idle again. Then you just buffer 1 more left gut punch, into rapid punches, which effectively you just hold "A" and repress it as soon as you see your character wind up to throw a super.Heike will get dizzy off of this, then you just need to throw a left gut into a low super to knock him down again. For lixunis's strategy, he does low rapid punches for phase 3, which gets the 10"52.Now, I ended up playing around with finding backup strategies for missing the rapid punches in phase 3 the other night, because a good friend of mine, Hootey, has lost some great runs on great paces because hitting the rapids can be pretty strict and unforgiving if you miss.When I was loading the savestate to mess with backups, I would also just mess around randomly sometimes, and stumbled into an adjustment that not only gets rid of the rapid punches altogether, but is *faster* by 2 frames! This was never found before, because this low super strategy working is a direct consequence of the new strategy that lixunis found, since phase 3 has a lower refill here compared to normal.Lixunis found a perfect buffer for this new phase 3, which involves a quick left dodge, into a quick right dodge, into a low super. It's important to note that double left quick dodge does *not* work, because Heike's hook "hitbox" lingers for an extra frame on the left side, probably because that's where the punch is coming from.For this buffer, I'm going with just holding left until the fight starts, then double tapping "right" as soon as my character moves, since tapping the opposite direction also gets you a quick dodge & the 2nd tap gets you to start your next dodge. From there, I just quickly hit A and it's all good.Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Narcis Prince (No face punches) [03431] zallard1 2022-03-24 | This run was done on an original Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Voultar RGB amp to restore the correct color intensity. For some more in depth information about my general RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/TtXx1PQxWhen I've streamed attempts of this fight, I've gotten a handful of questions on if it's possible to beat Narcis Prince without ever punching him in the face. Narcis is a fighter that has a pretty well known quirk where he boxes extremely defensively while guarding his face constantly, forcing you to either counter an attack of his outright, or dodge an uppercut of his to stun him and punch him in the face.Landing a face punch changes the entire fight dramatically, because Narcis gets angry and fights recklessly for a while, leaving his face completely open. The intended strategy to beat this fight is to get him mad and punch him in the face repeatedly, because face punches deal a TON of damage to him, whereas gut punches don't deal much at all.The basic rules I follow are:-Do not land a punch on Narcis's face, or even attempt to throw a jab-Do not throw high supers of any kindBack in 2013 or so, I ended up messing around with the fight to where I set some time of 35.xx seconds on him, but I lost the video file of it. I figured I might as well try to beat that old PB to obsolete the lost video, so I came up with this in an afternoon as a fun distraction.As a side note, this is not optimized at all like the fights I've usually been uploading, since I got several instances of bad luck, and the strategy here is mostly just me winging it and hoping I beat my old PB lol.The main strategy here is basically provoking retaliations from Narcis several times in between sets of attacks to deal some damage to his gut, while trying to get to his next set of 2 hooks later on in phase 1. I generally felt like the single punches that he did weren't worth the time to dodge and punch always, so I usually tried to cancel them. Of the phase 1 times I got when messing with this, this was the fastest I ended up getting today.Phase 2 always seemed to end up with me needing to land a low super to start the phase to get his HP low enough for the subsequent attacks to knock him down, so I attempted it here, but the phase 1 was so fast that it actually gave me a lower refill than I was expecting, and could've just not attempted a super at all, and landed counters and low supers to take him down.Phase 3 I basically just tried to get a random gut punch in and hope he'd retaliate after landing one, which would be enough to get him down for a TKO. Unfortunately I ended up getting a dance, then misjudged when he would start his next hooks, so I ended up countering them and sending him to the mat with a normal gut punch. It would be better in that scenario if I had timed a delayed super to intercept his hook, but I played it safe because the phase 1 and 2 times were far better than what I had gotten previously.Obviously this is super improvable if you put some effort in getting better luck and putting together an actual strategy to follow, but I just wanted to get something up here that was relatively fast just to show that Narcis is totally possible without face punches, and is kind of a fun challenge! Worth a try if you want some extra replay value out of this game!Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Narcis Prince [00826] zallard1 2022-03-18 | This run was done on an original Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Voultar RGB amp to restore the correct color intensity. For some more in depth information about my general RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/TtXx1PQxAdditionally, I've decided to include a non-stretched version of this fight in an unlisted video. If you'd like to learn more about why I'm including this too, you can check out the description in the second video here: youtube.com/watch?v=RWRlCMDAGysNarcis Prince is the most random fight in the game, and is the only one that doesn't have dozens of people tying the TAS because of it. A few people have been able to match it recently during the pandemic, but it's a huge range from being a quick one to get, to taking close to a year of consistent effort to get. This fight is the entire reason I've redone my ILs in RGB quality, to motivate me to improve my time and inch closer to, and eventually match, the record of 8"20. My PB on this fight was an 8"28 set in 2014, until I improved it recently to the 8"26 you see right here.I've been grinding mostly just this fight on my Twitch channel, with several stats I've been tracking, and a running timer during attempts. I've also been exporting streams of this grind to my alt account on YouTube. You can check out the playlist for that (with more comments) here: youtube.com/watch?v=ZXiI-lPUXEQ&list=PLt0miTqQ0e4i4dz-YRuBp4TJw-2DfmPiINarcis can end your attempt on the 1st frame of the fight if he dances or walks to the side, before you even get to do anything. The fight starts by holding "Up" for the 1st frame, then letting go and buffering a left gut for the 2nd frame. After that 1st gut punch, follow it up with 2 more left gut punches. You have a 2 frame window to do that guard manipulation, otherwise Narcis will block your 3rd gut punch due to him starting his scheduled hook.Landing those 3 gut punches is an absolute ordeal. In addition to the dances I mentioned before, he can also end your attempt before *every* gut punch by: twirling left or right, side stepping left or right and sliding away side to side. He can ALSO end your attempts during the punches themselves, by randomly block them outright, or doing a random retaliation in response.After landing the 3 gut punches, Narcis will throw a hook on your left, which you'll need to counter with a low left gut punch. Once you land it, you need to hit Narcis on the final frame of his stun animation from the counterpunch, which thankfully has a buffer that works every time, although it's just finicky enough to where you could lose attempts on it once a blue moon. To do it, tap and hold left or right until you see your character start to dodge, then IMMEDIATELY let go of dodge so that your boxer goes through his dodge animation. As soon as your character is about to center himself, then press "Up" plus "Y" to throw a jab, which should hit Narcis to where his recoil animation is faster and he instantly becomes angry.When Narcis is in his angry phase, he'll go to the back of the ring (which resets the dizzy meter entirely) and comes back to throw one of 3 main patterns at you. The first (and most common) pattern is the one where he throws 2 jabs on your right side, which is an immediate reset if it happens, because he'll block it. The next pattern is 2 jabs on your left side, which will also be a reset. The final pattern is the one where he can throw a hook on your left side, then right side, which is the one we *need* to have a chance.As soon as the delayed jab lands that makes Narcis angry, you need to buffer a left gut, into a quick duck, then cancel that with another left gut, into right jab, then left jab. Once the left jab lands, you NEED to pause the game to let the super meter catch up; if you don't, then Narcis can't get dizzy. Then you need to buffer rapid jabs, which has a 6 frame window to repress the A button, otherwise you'll be too slow and Narcis can't get dizzy. With the good pattern, Narcis can still dodge the initial jab, as well as your 1st and 4th rapid jabs. Once all rapid jabs land, just do a quick duck into low super for a knockdown!Phase 2 just has you throwing a rapid jab into his jab that he attempts to throw. I do a pseudo buffer where I tap duck, into a quick duck, but I time that 2nd duck exactly when I see my boxer fully centered. Once your rapid jab lands, buffer a quick dodge, into a right jab, low jab, and uppercut. This uppercut is so awful and rare, but if it lands, then you've finished the fight! To put it in perspective, back in 2014, I got this uppercut to land 1 time out of 30+ attempts, which is abysmal luck.I'll still try to improve this closer to the record periodically, but it's a brutal grind. Hoping I'll get some nice improvements sooner rather than later!Anyways, thanks for watching!
Super Punch Out!! - Mad Clown [00903] zallard1 2022-03-16 | This run was done on an original Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Voultar RGB amp to restore the correct color intensity. For some more in depth information about my general RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/TtXx1PQxAdditionally, I've decided to include a non-stretched version of this fight in an unlisted video. If you'd like to learn more about why I'm including this too, you can check out the description in the second video here: youtube.com/watch?v=y9DXD6Lge1USo this is exciting, because the longstanding 9"05 strategy on Mad Clown that was first published in the Super Punch Out TAS back in 5/29/2007 has been improved! To see that strategy, you can check out my recent upload of it here: youtube.com/watch?v=Rs6AEtl-HMsIt's been nearly 15 years since Mad Clown has had a legitimate strategy improvement, which is amazing. Strategies in this game don't really get obsoleted that often, with the next most recent improvements being from McHazard all the way back in 2014 on Muscle, Heike, Narcis, and Rick, so this is quite the treat.Lixunis has been finding strategies for the PAL version of Super Punch Out recently, which actually has several wildly different strategies from the NTSC version, but ended up checking the NTSC version for things recently for full game speedrun stuff. On 3/14/2022, he posted this in the Super Punch Out speedrunning discord server: youtube.com/watch?v=WzclfYoSIFIThis strategy involved 6 frame perfect things you needed to time, as well as an extra unstunned jab, which increases the luck needed greatly. These difficulty increases mean that this new Mad Clown is now the hardest fight to match the TAS on that isn't Narcis Prince. It was a mad dash to match the new TAS time, but fellow Super Punch Out runner Murakuma was able to seal the deal the next afternoon! Be sure to check his out here: youtube.com/watch?v=QPu2Lc96jXsLater on that day, McHazard showed up and found a large strategy adjustment that ends up getting you the same exact time with the exact same luck, but removes the delayed rapid jab in Lixunis's strategy, making it fully buffered, which makes it far less annoying for runners to hit. I decided to shift gears and go for this new phase 1.This fight starts with you pressing nothing for the first frame, and then pressing "Up" and "Y" to throw a left jab on the next frame. Follow up from that left jab with two more buffered left jabs, with Mad Clown hopefully standing still without random retaliations and not randomly blocking for the first 2 of these 3 jabs. From there, Clown will throw a hook on your right side, and you'll need to do a delayed right jab to counter it.Once the hook is countered, you'll have to do land a left jab on the first frame AFTER Clown's stun ends, which is a very awkward timing. I opted to do a pseudo buffer by timing a quick duck shortly after I visually see Clown's sprite change into his stunned sprite, then buffer 2 left jabs out of it and also and hope they both land without him randomly blocking, or doing random retaliations during them. Once they land, Clown will attempt to throw another hook, to which you will have to buffer rapid jabs by pressing A, letting go when you see your character start his super, then repressing it. That rapid jab will hit him out of that animation, and make him instantly go dizzy. Since rapid jabs made him dizzy, the buffer strategy needs to be different than the one in the 9"05 run. Hold left, and don't let go until your character centers himself, then press "Left" then "Up" in rapid succession, along with "A" to throw an uppercut to knock Clown down.Clown opens phase 2 by either doing a taunt where he's pointing to his stomach, which means he'll retaliate when you attempt to throw a punch, or he'll randomly dodge a punch being thrown at him. Start by pressing nothing on the first frame the fight starts back up, then press "Up" + "A" to throw an uppercut. Once that lands, Clown will do a jab, that you just need to counter with a right jab, and then buffer another uppercut for knockdown 2.If you got this far, then congratulations, because you've effectively finished the fight! For phase 3, Mad Clown will always open with "Show Time", which involves him throwing really fast jabs that people usually block. But since Clown always opens with jabs on your right, you can easily counter them by buffering a right jab as soon as the phase begins! Because of how fast phase 2 was, he'll come back with so little health that he'll instantly go right back down when the jab lands.I did this fight on stream, with this attempt being my 7th time I got a frame perfect phase 1. You can check out my reaction to landing this fight here: twitch.tv/videos/1427123420Anyways, thanks for watching!
The Big Dance-Off (TAS) zallard1 2022-03-05 | **Occasional flickering from my boxer & frequent camera motion warning**When you finally reach the end of the World Circuit and face off against the champion, only to realize partway through that this is no boxing match... this is a dance competition... and you're facing off against the very best...When I was checking stuff for my SPO Super Machoman youtube description (which can be found here: youtube.com/watch?v=tb-dTAbaBSc), I was reminded of back when I was preparing for AGDQ 2014's blindfolded Super Punch-Out run, which involved a fair bit of extra blindfolded practice onsite. The big Super Metroid race was happening that Friday, which was the same day as the Punch-Out block, which meant Super Nintendos were on short supply, since those runners were constantly practicing to get ready.I did have the fortunate opportunity to play on one semi-neglected Super Nintendo that no one else wanted to practice on for whatever reason, which was owned by PJ (@TheSuperSNES), who is a pretty well known speedrunner and good friend of mine. This Super Nintendo had a chunk of plastic missing from the front, as well as had strong discoloring like some Super Nintendos do, plus was substantially heavier than other Super Nintendos.I'm going into detail about this SNES because the owner of this console has a bit of a reputation with extraordinarily bad luck, which sounds silly and maybe comes off as a bit of an overreaction, but no, you really have no idea unless you've met this man in person, and his Super Nintendo is of no exception.I was undeterred by it though, because I figured "If I get the worst luck on my practice, I'll be better prepared for my run anyways" which... yes, but also no.In one of my practice blindfolded runs, I got to Super Machoman, and for me that's a big accomplishment because at that point in time, I had only beaten the game fully one time ever. In this fight, I already missed the dizzy opportunity at the start of the fight, because Macho opened with dancing twice in a row, something that's extremely rare for him to do, but not unheard of.The fight spiraled out of control quickly, and I desperately tried to brawl through this fight to secure a narrow victory... but then Macho decided to do something I hadn't (and still haven't) seen before, which was him dancing FIVE TIMES IN A ROW, which I panicked about, and started dodging wildly, then immediately followed that up with a spin punch while I was already hard committed to a dodge... which lost me the fight. It's so rare for such a thing to happen, because dances are just uncommon in general to see from Macho, and it especially gets ridiculous and rare when you see multiple in a row.Remembering this absurd memory had me like "...what if I made a TAS that manipulated as many dances as I possibly could?"I decided that this was stupid enough to where I really wanted to see it exist, so I bit the bullet and made this. For anyone unfamiliar, this fight was done using slowdown and rewinding to basically put in inputs from a controller done perfectly frame by frame, which makes my character do several things frame perfectly, and I have the ability to manipulate the opponent to have whatever luck events that I want, so long as it's technically possible within the confines of the game itself.Manipulating Macho to dance is a tedious process, involving pressing random buttons between certain animations until you finally get Macho to bust out a dance. There are certain limits to this, because Macho will only dance when he's idle, and sometimes the game schedules him to throw out certain attacks at certain times, and you can't really force him to never throw any attack in the fight, even with all the luck manipulation in the world.I got him to dance 108 times in total, with the biggest streak I could manipulate in a row was SEVEN DANCES without anything else coming in between, which is pretty hilarious to see in motion. The odds of 108 dances in a row are 1 in 34,175,792,574,734,561,318,320,347,298,712,833,833,643,272,357,706,444,319,152,665,725,155,515,612,490,248,800,367,393,390,985,216.This certainly isn't perfect or anything, nor was I really aiming for it, because I'm pretty sure you could manipulate his pattern even more to have more dances, but just didn't care enough to go that far into it, lol. I also decided to manipulate maximum super spin punches (which I found was 8) every time it showed up.This TAS ends in a loss, because... I mean... you can't outdance Macho. It cannot be done. I promise. His win was totally earned here, and I think once you see this match, you'll agree.
Super Punch Out!! - Super Machoman [00943] (NTSC WR) zallard1 2022-03-03 | This run was done on an original Super Nintendo cartridge of Super Punch-Out, as well as an original Super Nintendo 1chip console that was recapped and modded with the Voultar RGB amp to restore the correct color intensity. For some more in depth information about my general RGB setup, you can check out this pastebin here: pastebin.com/TtXx1PQxAdditionally, I've decided to include a non-stretched version of this fight in an unlisted video. If you'd like to learn more about why I'm including this too, you can check out the description in the second video here: youtube.com/watch?v=t5EvG_pqQBgSuper Machoman is probably considered the hardest of the usual 15 records that people usually match in this game. Even despite this, this strategy is still not that awful with a bit of determination and good execution.This fight starts by pressing nothing on the first frame, then pressing "Up" and "Y" for the second frame, and unlike other fights that I've mentioned these inputs on, this set has to be EXACTLY like this, because if you are not frame perfect on the first jab, then you will not be able to sneak in 2 left jabs before Macho starts to wind up for his first punch, to which he would just block your 2nd jab if you're too late.After landing the frame perfect left jab and buffering your second left jab, Macho is going to wind up for a jab on your right, and you'll need to land a right jab of your own to counter it. I try to aim these jabs at the exact frame Macho's sprite changes from him being punched from your previous punch, to him starting to wind up for his own jab. Once you land that jab, just buffer 2 left gut punches, then Macho will throw out another identical jab that you need to counter in the exact same way, so counter it, and then buffer a low left gut punch into a low super.Now, the phase 1 for this strategy is fairly strict. The dizzy meter never reaches 0 once you've landed the first frame perfect punch of the fight, which means the timing of your 2 counters are the deciding factor on whether or not Macho will get dizzy off of this strategy. With the way the dizzy meter shakes out, you can not lose a total of 4 frames across these two counters, which sounds lenient, but can be fairly tricky if you're not confident on how early you can actually land these counters, since they both come out pretty fast.Once that low super goes off and you haven't lost those frames, then Macho will become dizzy. To knock him down with a super punch, we have a few options for buffer strategies. The original one that works fine is 3 left jabs into a low super, which will take him down. However, since I'm also optimizing the real time of this fight, I wanted to knock Macho down with an uppercut here for a different super knockdown animation that's 7 frames faster. If you buffer a tap duck (by tapping "Down" and waiting for your boxer to center on his own), then chain that into a left gut, then right gut, and buffer an uppercut out of this will take Macho down in an optimal real time too!For phase 2, there are a couple of things to consider here. Macho has a couple of random things that he can do at the start of phase 2. First off, before the fight even starts, the game has decided whether or not Macho will do an exercise program at the start of phase 2. If he's destined to do one here, then your attempt is immediately over, because the primary thing we need for this strategy to work is for him to be in a position to take a punch immediately, and with any of the 3 programs, he's basically invincible until the animation is over.The other thing is that Macho can do dances at the start of phase 2. It's actually fine if Macho dances one time, because he'll be idle again before your first punch lands, but if he decides to dodge a second time, then your attempt will be instantly over. Macho also has the potential to randomly dodge super punches, and him doing that will end your attempt.Despite his ability to do so in phase 1, I couldn't confirm whether or not Macho is capable of randomly blocking in phase 2. It could just be some weird luck I'm locked into every time I check, but it doesn't seem to be a thing? I'll amend this statement if this doesn't end up being the case.Considering all of this, phase 2 starts with you holding "Up" for the first frame of the phase to set Macho's guard high, then immediately letting go of the Dpad and pressing "A" to throw a low super. If you're lucky, it will land without Macho dodging, exercising, or dancing twice. Once you land the super, Macho will try to throw a hook on your left side, which can be countered with a delayed left body blow. Once you land this counter, just buffer a low super and you should be home free!If you can pull this off and get the record on it, you can absolutely get the record on any other fights this game has to offer, with only Narcis being one that you will likely not have the patience for.Anyways, thanks for watching!
![Splatterhouse (Arcade) - Speed Run [13:37]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Uvgl8DadM6M/hqdefault.jpg)