Zing Zing Zip TAS

[xy2_]

Hello!

I am currently making a Zing Zing Zip TAS. You can find a short WIP of it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZnhcRnRS9k

This game is, to say the least, very weird. That's about all I have to comment on it. P2 because of faster horizontal movement.

A particular trick which is hard to spot but makes the game much more interesting is what I call ghosting. The diagonal missiles are an interesting subweapon, much more than any other weapon in the game, and they are also ridiculously powerful. However, their functionality wasn't implemented very well, and they are also ridiculously broken..

ZZZ uses bullet scoring (pretty much the bane of my existence): hit an enemy, you get 10 points. Kill an enemy, you get their base value as score. That's about it in terms of scoring. However, it gets a little more interesting with diagonal missiles, and their interaction with other enemies.. The diagonal missile has a 'grinding' mechanic where it will, after its initial explosion, continue its path. Combine this in conjunction with broken hitboxes, and you now have an interesting mechanic: what if it was possible to trigger grinding of your missiles without actually killing the enemies? This didn't prove to be successful in most cases, but it was succesful in one case: the moving black helicopters.

As far as I've been able to notice, certain types of moving black helicopters actually move slightly ahead of their hitbox. Normally, this would be a one hit kill with all weapons, but if we hit the 'grinding' hitbox with the heli's hitbox, a rather surprising result happens: you get points without dealing damage at all (a whooping 10 points). This can be taken even further by managing to hit the actual missile itself off the displaced hitbox, for a huge 100 points without killing the helicopter at all.

This ghosting mechanic is very hard to optimise, and does not give many points, but I still optimised it as much as I could because it made for a more interesting run.

[CStarFlare]

It seems like you're quite interest about shmup TASing and are quite good at noticing/figuring out system oddities. Zing Zing Zip is an interesting choice - what made you pick it up?

If you're ever looking for another shooter, I may suggest Imperium/Kidou Soukou Dion for the SNES. When I was playing (I played the Dion version; the US version has different weapons and maybe other changes) I noticed that enemies occasionally gave double or even triple score - I never quite figured out why, but it seems like the kind of thing a TASer could unravel and exploit.

[xy2_]

What made me pick up ZZZ:

<xy3_> trap15: for trp-stgt, I'm probably up with doing tases of the proposed games each week (a week is more than enough to make a respectable tas)
<dex|work> is it zing zing zip

the next day

<xy2_> trying zzz out
<Kaiseroo> oh god zing zing zip
<Kaiseroo> you mad

I'll look into Kidou Soukou Dion, thanks for the heads up.

[Shepardus]

Zing Zing Zip loops infinitely, so are you planning on doing one loop?

[gimebe]

You can milk the zako helicopters that spawn periodically during the stage 1 boss for minor points. The bigger milk is on Stage 3 boss, where its missiles are worth quite a bit. Maybe Stage 2 boss also has milkable helicopter spawns for its duration? I'm not sure.

[ProjectAKo]

this is the hypest shit

[xy2_]

You can milk the zako helicopters that spawn periodically during the stage 1 boss for minor points. The bigger milk is on Stage 3 boss, where its missiles are worth quite a bit. Maybe Stage 2 boss also has milkable helicopter spawns for its duration? I'm not sure.

Know about the Stage 1 milk: I redid the boss with a perfect kill earlier but was too lazy to reencode it. The helicopters spawns are limited, which means I can just time the kill very specifically so that the last spawn is killed at (almost) the same time as the end of level screen.

I'll check for Stage 2/3.

Zing Zing Zip loops infinitely, so are you planning on doing one loop?

One loop for now, then I'm looking into hopefully doing more.

[ProjectAKo]

The WR reached 4-3 or something so that's really what I want to see, but tasing that much is kind of a lot.

I could just credit feed up to that point but I'm too fuckin lazy

[copy-paster]

One loop for now, then I'm looking into hopefully doing more.

Reach the fourth loop, and you'll be modern day sisyphus.

[xy2_]

One loop for now, then I'm looking into hopefully doing more.

Reach the fourth loop, and you'll be modern day sisyphus.

Challenge accepted! I went a step farther and got to the fifth loop: https://youtu.be/Poz7kc35gxk (I didn't actually play the game leading up to that, just used random emulator input)

And here's stage 2: https://youtu.be/vF0lNLhaHD0

What can I say? Zing Zing Zip is truly one of the best and most glorious shmups in existence. I really like how I did this level, as I spend extra thought on doing clean patterns and clever kills with diagonal missiles.

One thing I should talk about: why do I bomb the end of stage picture? It turns out the end of stage picture is actually just an arrangement of a lot of small sprites bundled together (this is, I assume, how Allumer created the bouncing effect, although this is a very hacky solution.) These sprites are immune to shots, so everything is good so far. But here's the thing: it isn't immune to bombs!!!! Furthermore, these sprites explode like missiles with 3 medals. There's actually a lot more sprites killed than you can see here, but only 12 medals can be onscreen at a time (easily observable by simply standing in a different positon, which changes which sprites drop medals.)

Also, here's the obligatory enemy manipulation to make an face out of bullets:

[Perikles]

Speaking of faces: when you fly over the huge battleship in the second stage you'll see a portrait at the very end of it (around 0:46 in the second video), there's another one of these battleships in the seventh stage. I'm not sure about the latter, but I do know there are at least two different drawings in the second stage, and I'm not sure what determines which one will appear. Does it have any importance whatsoever? Is there any rhyme or reason to this?

[ProjectAKo]

They're chosen randomly but who knows if they actually do anything

[xy2_]

For the flying ships: the faces aren't chosen randomly at the start of the stage, but are determined by RNG, and can be manipulated very easily by simply shooting. (They are fully determined around 30 frames before appearing on screen.)

There's an array of three faces to choose from (respectively the three characters in the game.) I looked into it extensively and they don't seem to have any influence on gameplay at all, so I just chose the one who looked the silliest.

[Shepardus]

Challenge accepted! I went a step farther and got to the fifth loop: https://youtu.be/Poz7kc35gxk (I didn't actually play the game leading up to that, just used random emulator input)

So basically nothing ever dies. Now I'm even more curious how someone actually made it to the fourth loop in a single credit.

[ProjectAKo]

For the flying ships: the faces aren't chosen randomly at the start of the stage, but are determined by RNG, and can be manipulated very easily by simply shooting. (They are fully determined around 30 frames before appearing on screen.)

There's an array of three faces to choose from (respectively the three characters in the game.) I looked into it extensively and they don't seem to have any influence on gameplay at all, so I just chose the one who looked the silliest.

cool

[SMC]

Please do SOS next