Eliminator Boat Duel (ntscus) (nes) [Any %] [Single Segment] [Expert] [0:30:26]
Run Information
Completion Date Dec. 9, 2014
State Obsolete
Internal Comments:
Comment State Information Checkpoint None

RTA is 30:30 - SDA time will probably be a few seconds shorter.

I've been working on this game for a couple of months now and just landed an extremely fortunate run where a ton of things come together and gold splits pile up.

This game has never been run before as far as I know, and it took me a fair bit of time to figure out the proper routes and strats, but I'm really happy with this time.

Other than my adjustment on Mangler Mike, most of the information on my route can be found here: https://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/eliminator_boat_duel_nes.html

Level specific comments will include more detail.

Links
Verification Thread
Run Comments

Some general notes about running this game:

On the expert difficulty, which is also the any% for this game, there are 5 opponents who must be defeated three times each. By and large the huge timesaves in this run come from employing _assassination strats_. This means that races can be ended early by reducing the opponents' boat's hitpoints to 0. This is primarily done by jumping on them with your boat, though there are other objects that can damage both boats.

Each race has multiple legs, the number of which is indicated at the top or bottom of the UI by dashes. The first leg is always the starting line, and everything else is either a chase cam or overhead cam section. With one notable exception, these always alternate. Most of the time saves are worked in during the overhead legs. There are three types of overhead legs in descending order of awesomeness as far as damage dealing opportunities

1. Ocean section
2. Swamp Section
3. River section

There are also two types of chase sections

1. Swamp section (only appears later)
2. Standard (ocean?) section

Unlike the overhead sections which are completely static, the chase sections are very RNG heavy. I did some TAS work for this game and discovered that both the nitro and log generation are inconsistent from game to game, and change wildly based on player inputs. Of these the two types, the later swamp sections seem to afford better RNG, which really just means more logs (which are maybe also alligators?)

Boat destruction is a bit of a fine art. There are 6 graphical states that tell you how damaged a boat is. This correspond to 0 through 5 bars of the boat's damage repair stat in drydock. However, hitting a boat with 0 repair points left will NOT sink it. Instead, it will reduce one of the other four permanent stats mid-race. It is not until ALL of these other stats have reached 0 that an additional hit sinks the boat. You do NOT always want to sink an opponent as soon as possible. This is because when they sink, they automatically come back to the next race with two bars in every stat. However, if you can allow them to finish a race with NO stats remaining, they will potentially be much more sinkable early in the next race. Part of the challenge of routing this game was determining which races one should go for an assassination on.

There are two gotchas to be aware of that needlessly waste time. The first is a false start, which happens if you accelerate too early. It is fastest to win the first leg of the race straight off the line, but it is second fastest to let the opponent win as soon as possible so as to not prolong the first leg any further than necessary. Mistiming a start will cause you to be fined $2000 and will restart the race for a four second time loss. The second thing to be aware of is a slow-mo finish (I thought these were the coolest thing ever when I was little and would cause them intentionally), but in a speed run it's just an 8 second time waste. They occur when you finish the race narrowly ahead or behind your opponent and are unskippable. While a slow-mo finish is still better than losing the race, they are to be avoided if at all possible.

Specific Race Commentary:

Surfer Bob 1 - This is the only race where it's absolutely imperative to win off the line. I reset right away if I don't get it because I want to be in a position to grab the first nitros and use the fantastic ocean course layout to start applying damage over and over again. This first race is one of the hardest to deal with because you have no stats at all and MinBoat handles like a bathtub. In this run I managed to get quite a bit of damage in on the second leg, and was gifted in the third and final chase leg with some additional logs. Surfer Bob's boat ends the race one hit away from sinking which is EXACTLY what I want to happen and quite difficult to pull off.

Surfer Bob 2 - Finally some time in drydock. Expert mode starts you out with a fair bit of cash, and my build is to max out acceleration immediately and handling next. Surfer Bob is hurting badly here, and this 5 leg race is a great opportunity for a huge time save. The second leg is fairly short and uneventful, and the third leg is the same delicious overhead section from Surfer Bob 1. I sink him here earlier than in any of my other previous runs. In a good run you don't even want to go past the third leg of the race.

Surfer Bob 3 - Surfer Bob comes back with the rebuilt boat mentioned above, but this race proves enough opportunity to sink him a second time. The plan was to put him under early into the fourth leg of the race... instead he went down midway through the third. The second leg of the race went better than expected and the boat was already nearly finished going into the third (chase cam) leg. All it took was a little bit of good luck for this to turn into the earliest retirement Surfer Bob has ever had to suffer through.

Surfer Bob Segment ended up being my Gold split at 3:19 (prior best was 3:30)

Weird Willy 1 - I play this similar to Surfer Bob 1. The three leg race isn't really long enough to sink him most of the time, but I would have liked to have gotten a few more hits in. Overall Weird Willy 1 went _just okay_.

Weird Willy 2 - Weird Willy forgets to accelerate off the line, and then the second leg is a your big opportunity to get damage in. Here I made up a little bit of the time that I could have saved on the previous race by going for some aggressive jumps and making liberal use of my nitros. The second leg kill is the goal here, and I didn't miss that mark.

Weird Willy 3 - This is actually the shortest of the three races, and the most difficult to end prematurely. The chase cam section is not long enough to do significant damage with anything but phenomenal RNG, and the final river leg is the hardest of the overhead types to punish the opponent on. I played aggressively but have never been able to get any time saves here.

Weird Willy Segment time 4:25 (best is 4:12)

Mangler Mike 1 - Similar to Weird Willy 3 there are not a lot of damage opportunities here, and it's one of the scarier races because the threat of a loss is real if you run out of nitros. I tried to weaken the boat as best as possible but this isn't a stage where I ever plan to sink the opponent.

Mangler Mike 2 - Manger Mike's boat was still doing okay here, and the race is again defined by frustratingly long chase legs. The overhead ocean leg is insultingly short, and so the best you can hope to do is damage him enough to negate some of the repairs.

Manger Mike 3 - This is where I deviated from my intended route when I noticed that Manger Mike had no points in durability. This meant that once I started putting the hurt on him, he was going to drop his other stats immediately. Usually I want to be coming into Verionica Alabaster with maximum nitros, but I saw an opportunity for an early Manger Mike kill and went for it hard. I burned through a few nitros in the third leg (an overhead ocean segment) and ended this race with a major time save.

Manger Mike Segment time was a big Gold split coming in at 4:58 (prior best was 5:25 with a standard finish)

Veronica Alabaster 1 - Veronica Alabaster stands as proof that distinct AI personalities were coded into this game. She starts with 6 nitros and cannot stand when you are in front of her. She will usually burn through them immediately when you get ahead of her. My primary function in this race is to get that number down to 0 as soon as possible. This is much more of a problem on the chase sections where she will nitro to the front and get more nitros as a result. I managed to block her from having much success this time around, and by the fourth leg she was out of nitros from trying to stay ahead of me. I used the rest of the race to put a little bit of damage on and recoup the nitros that I had burned through earlier while trying to stay in the lead.

Veronica Alabaster 2 - Here she uses her considerable financial resources to build her boat back up to maximum. Usually if I don't win off the line I will immediately stop accelerating to move to the next leg, but in this case I sacrificed a few seconds to try to deny her the pair of nitros in the second leg. She picked them up anyway and so began a crazy nitro battle that had us nearly outpacing the game's scroll rate. When this settled down I went back to standard damage dealing operations. Even though Veronica Alabaster has a nearly maxed out boat, this lengthy six leg race affords a number of opportunities to try to rip those stats off. In the fifth leg she decided to line up and for some reason eat three concrete flags in a row for additional damage. At this point I calculated that she was very close to sinking, and so decided to blast through the final leg as quickly as possible on my own so I would be set up for the quick kill in the next race.

Veronica Alabaster 3 - This is the biggest single time save of the run. The slower pace of Veronica Alabaster 2 paid off by allowing me to get enough damage in to be perfectly set up for the quick kill here. To my delight... for some reason Veronica Alabaster elected not to add any additional stats to her boat beyond the base repair. Unfortunately the second leg of the race is a chase section, so you need a little help from RNGesus to end this one early and it can easily go into the third leg. Happily the course elected to throw a large number of alligators(??) at us early on, and Veronica Alabaster flipped over early into the second leg of what is normally a five leg race for an enormous time save.

My prior best on Veronica Alabaster was 5:38 and it blew away any other runs' splits here. It's quite normal for this segment to go north of 6 minutes... this run did it in 5:27.

Disaster Don 1 - This strategy is a total change of gears from the other four opponents. Disaster Don does not take damage like a normal opponent, and often times just ignores it entirely. Even when the game indicates that he has taken damage, his boat doesn't go as slowly as a damaged boat is supposed to. He's the boss of the game, and he cheats. Assassination strats go out the window here because near as I can tell he simply cannot be sunk, even in this monstrously long eight leg race. You really just want to do two things - finish the race as quickly as possible, and don't take damage yourself.

Disaster Don 2 - Not a lot to talk about here. Disaster Don hits a number of logs and doesn't seem to care whatsoever until the seventh leg of the race. Nitros are pretty sparse here so I tried to save for when it really counts.

Disaster Don 3 - The last race of the game features a special double chase cam finish (both the seventh and eighth legs). Unless you run out of nitros or sink yourself, it's a pretty straightforward win.

Disaster Don was finished in 12:19, shaving a few seconds from my prior best segment of 12:25.

Final time 30:30.

I'm really happy with this run overall and pleased to have turned in a run with 0 false starts and 0 slow-mo finishes. The weakest segment was Weird Willy, but the other four opponents were all dealt with in exceptionally fast fashion. Surfer Bob 3 and Veronica Alabaster 3 are the big time saves that I was counting on, and to get them both to happen so early in the same run was very fortuitous. The Mangler Mike 3 kill was a huge bonus that turned a medium-large cut on my PB into a huge one. While I feel like it's definitely possible to knock some time off of any individual race compared to my performance, getting them all to line up requires both skill and good luck. Still I know the run is improvable, and hope that having the run on the site will encourage others to challenge the time, develop more strats, and maybe even figure out a way to break the game in an interesting way. I really enjoy this game, and hope that others enjoyed watching this run. It would be great to get this obscure title more attention.