Karisa's Atypical Touhou Challenges (on hold again)

[Karisa]

New challenges posted.

Since I posted the new round a bit earlier than usual (normally I'd wait until Monday, but I'm concerned I'd forget again), it's fine to submit to one of last round's challenges in the next few hours.

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Results archive:

#20 - MoF scoring, without capturing any spellcards

- Score as high as you can in MoF!
- You may not capture any spells. It doesn't matter how you fail the spells, as long as you never receive any spell bonuses.
- All difficulties and shot types allowed.

Format:
Challenge number - Difficulty
Player - Score - Stage - Shot type - Slowdown - Replay

Example:
#20 - Normal
Sample - 700,000,000 - C - ReimuB - 0.1% - Replay

Rankings:
Easy
dxk - 869,579,480 - C - ReimuA - 0.1% - Replay

#21 - UFO low graze

- Clear UFO with as little graze as possible!
- Only 1ccs allowed.
- All shot types allowed.
- Easy and Extra allowed.

Format:
Challenge number - Difficulty
Player - Graze - Shot type - Slowdown - Replay

Example:
#21 - Easy
Sample - 1234 - ReimuA - 0.3% - Replay

Rankings:
Easy
chum - 362 - ReimuA - 0.0% - Replay
Emerald - 451 - ReimuA - 0.3% - Replay

Deadline: Sunday, February 2

[Oh]

#20 - Easy
dxk - 869,579,480 - C - ReimuA - 0.1% - Replay

i even died lol

[Emerald Mint]

#21 - Easy
Emerald - 451 - ReimuA - 0.0% - Replay

[chum]

#21 - Easy
chum - 362 - ReimuA - 0.0% - Replay

No planning. I got like 100-150 graze on Nueball and lots of other stupid graze, should be easily beatable.

[Karisa]

It seems the last few challenges haven't had much activity. Since it's also becoming more difficult for me to find new ideas, I think I'll pause the challenges for now. Perhaps they'll resume in the summer or something.

If you have any comments/suggestions in the meantime, feel free to post.

(Also my policy that submissions will still be included even after the deadline, as long as it's before the next round is posted, still applies)

[Karisa]

Challenges resumed I guess? I think I'll go with only 1 per round, to avoid having to find 2 different challenge ideas every 2 weeks.

As always, if you have any ideas for potential rounds, feel free to suggest them.

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Results archive:

#22 - TD life part collection

- Collect as many life parts as you can in TD!
- Ranked by lives gained, then remaining parts.
- All difficulties and shot types allowed.

Format:
Challenge number - Difficulty
Player - Lives/parts gained - Shot type - Stage - Slowdown - Replay

(quick list to determine lives gained: 3 lives = x/15, 4 lives = x/18, 5 lives = x/20, 6 lives = x/25)

Example:
#22 - Hard
Sample - 5 15/20 - Reimu - C - 0.1% - Replay

Rankings:
Hard
Inadequate - 6 13/25 - Marisa - 6 - 0.170% - Replay
Mino - 6 1/25 - Reimu - C - 0.030% - Replay
Mero - 5 18/20 - Reimu - 6 - 1.1% - Replay

Lunatic
Free - 6 5/25 - Marisa - C - 0.000% - Replay
Mino - 5 19/20 - Reimu - C - 0.050% - Replay

Deadline: Sunday, July 20

[Mero]

#22 - Hard
Mero - 5 18/20 - Reimu - 6 - 1.1% - Replay
Rammed into a bullet in Miko's penultimate to active my not-so-full trance for the last life piece, so game over.

You do allow gameovers, right?

[Karisa]

You do allow gameovers, right?

Yes, except in specific cases like for the low-graze challenges (where it wouldn't make sense to rank non-clears).

[Mero]

Yes, except in specific cases like for the low-graze challenges (where it wouldn't make sense to rank non-clears).

okay, I thought it would be like that, but felt it wouldn't hurt to ask

[Esper]

I've got ideas for potential rounds, but I think they might be a bit hard to imagine.

Maybe, for more tangible challenges, 90fps survival? 75fps survival? No-focus grazecounting? 90FPS scoring?

MoF MarisaA or ReimuC Nofocus? SA MarisaA No UnFocus (I suppose this one would be really hard to use considering you would need to have a program force a button to be held down, which would be really freaking weird)?

Maybe upside-down challenges A'la ZillionBrain's PoFV Upside Down Lunatic clear?

EDIT: NoBomb MoF scoring? Maybe we could try scoring challenges associated with Danmakufu scripts that are free and have multiple reasonable difficulty modes for scoring?

[Mino ☆]

#22 - Lunatic
Mino - 5 6/20 - Reimu - C - 0.020% - Replay

Silly first attempt that hardly got many resources. Definitely going back to this.

[Ghost]

Similar route to the one I used to clear the game, so not optimized at all (there's at least two easy life pieces in stage 3 i missed >.>)
With tonnes of mistakes in the latter stages, but oh well

Free - 5 6/20 - Marisa - C - 0.000% - Replay

0% slowdown how even

Free - 5 9/20 - Marisa - C - 0.000% - Replay

Slightly better, except for derping and forgetting to collect two life pieces in trance at the beginning of stage 6,  should be able to get at least 12/20 with the same route.

[Mino ☆]

#22 - Lunatic
Mino - 5 19/20 - Reimu - C - 0.050% - Replay

ACK! So many things could have made up for missing that last life! Oh well! At least I know this is improvable!

Since I had so many lives at Miko, I went ahead and just suicided a bunch in order to force a trance for extra pieces. It was definitely worth it.

I wonder if it's possible to get the 6th extend without suiciding. Then you could max out your lives.

[Karisa]

Free - 5 9/20 - Marisa - C - 0.000% - Replay

Don't forget the difficulty-- I can retrieve it from the replay uploader, but it takes a bit longer.

I wonder if it's possible to get the 6th extend without suiciding. Then you could max out your lives.

I've done it on Hard. I think I reached 6 2/25 on a failed run (that happened to trance an extra life part or two with the death) when going for this-- I'd expect at least a few more parts to be possible with a route that suicides away all 8 extra lives.

I've even seen max resource (8/9) clears on Royalflare, including on Lunatic and even Easy(!!). I was pretty surprised the 6th extend is possible on Easy without either suicides or the extra spirits from Hard. Though an 8/9 route would be suboptimal for this challenge since extra life parts matter while leftover lives/bombs don't.

The theoretical maximum is 6 13/25 (trancing every single life part), though I'd be pretty surprised if that's possible. (A TAS could point-blank shoot nearly every boss phase to avoid consuming bombs, though, so they could be spent on speedkilling stage enemies and farming trance from boss invincibility between phases. Not sure if that'd help.)

[Mino ☆]

Phew. After a few hours of playing, I managed to get this run.

#22 - Hard
Mino - 6 1/25 - Reimu - C - 0.030% - Replay

Gave Hard mode a shot. Missed trancing the two purple fairies after Kogasa, costing 2 life pieces. I also killed Futo's first spell when she was off screen, causing me to miss another life spirit. This could have been a 4/25 run, and probably more with a better route!

EDIT: I just realized I didn't kill one of the purple spirits in stage 6. So I missed another 2 life pieces! That means this run had 6/25 potential!

[Ghost]

Don't forget the difficulty-- I can retrieve it from the replay uploader, but it takes a bit longer.

Ah yea, my bad.

#22 - Lunatic
Free - 5 17/20 - Sanae - 6 - 0.000% - Replay

Should have been 6 0/25 if I got through her last 4 spells >.>
Up next, I'll try and get a run where I don't completely flub stage 4......

[Inadequate]

#22 - Hard
Inadequate - 6 4/25 - Marisa - C -0.080% - Replay

I remember doing a somewhat similar run way back in 2011 (or maybe it was 2012), back when the game was new. I think it was on Reimu, but the same rules apply for the most of it. Played for a couple of credits, this is the first one that cleared. I left out some suicides just in case I'd make mistakes during the final boss (since my notes were lacking and I didn't feel like practicing it), which indeed did happen. Overall direction of the run was downhill ever since I accidentally died on Seiga's first non, anyway.

Taking note of the missing suicides and how badly I fared during the two final stages, I'm rather positive of 10/25. Maybe someone even did it way back then and there's a replay laying around, I don't remember.


#22 - Hard
Inadequate - 6 5/25 - Marisa - C - 0.010% - Replay

Things looked so good when I entered stage 6 with only one life fragment untranced, and enough resources to just XXC the shit out of Miko. Then it went into the trash. Maybe I should practice the stage, assuming I wanted to continue. - I enjoy creating routes for this game a bit, especially silly ones, but that's about as far as it goes for me with this game, the actual execution feels so lacking.

13/25 is possible.

[Ghost]

Stage 4 and 6 were pretty terrible but it's an improvement on what I got before so eh.
#22 - Lunatic
Free - 6 1/25 - Sanae - C - 0.000% - Replay

Switching back to Marisa after this because getting 7 life pieces from stage 1 is way too hard without Marisa's broken trance damage.

#22 - Lunatic
Free - 6 5/25 - Marisa - C - 0.000% - Replay

Missed a few life pieces but overall went pretty well, still a lot of room for improvement

[Inadequate]

#22 - Hard
Inadequate - 6 13/25 - 6 - 0.170% - Replay

I was pushing my luck on Miko's penultimate spell, wanting to dodge one or two waves up front before using the bomb, and of course that got me. Had I gone the other way around, this would've cleared. Well, I don't think I'm going to push it. Other people can clear, add scoring strategies or do whatever, I just wanted to trance every single life piece. Maybe I'll do Lunatic, but that's unlikely.

[Karisa]

Looks like I underestimated the value of waiting out trances without shooting and/or collecting spirits. Good job on 13/25.

Anyway I was hoping for at least one Extra submission, but this round actually had a surprisingly high number of submissions, particularly for TD. I wonder if it's because it's the summer, or because there haven't been many challenge rounds lately, or some other reason?

[Karisa]

Challenge #23 posted.

I haven't tested this out-- if it's too hard to avoid gaining a bit of graze in dense patterns before you can break your border, I'll allow a small amount of cherrymax gained (maybe up to 1500 or so). Right now, though, you aren't allowed to gain any cherrymax.

[Sakurei]

This challenge is kinda, uhhh, Not so fun. It's probably the most unfun challenge you could have chosen for PCB. The cherry+ control is dumb, since you can't get a border from the cancel of the last spell of a boss fight, so you have to get it sooner and in most cases lose the spellcard value of the last spell of the stage. I gave up when I grazed one bullet on Alice before I could press x. (After a handful of resets before of other stuff that happened on stage 1 and 2) And that was on easy mode, mind you. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to avoid grazing some bullets on higher difficulties. This may very well be just me being whiny, but I really think this challenge isn't very well though out.

[Mino ☆]

I'm not sure why this is ranked by score, perhaps it should have been ranked by your cherrymax at the end, with score being a tiebreaker?

I'm not sure how feasible a "no CherryMAX" run would be, seeing as I haven't even tried a run yet.

[Inadequate]

Thinking about it a bit and trying out some problematic spots (I did a quick Lunatic stage 4 & 6 practice), I don't think it's that bad of a challenge at all. (I'm honestly fairly interested in routing this, and the execution should be quite good as well)  I don't see it being much trouble, assuming you route your borders so that they activate at suitable spots. - It's very much the usual play, although you will need to unfocus a lot less than usually.

It is a bit difficult to approach, though, as it requires quite a bit of knowledge over the game in order to route out, and you will have to remember a lot of different cherry+ gains, from cancels and shooting. A challenge ranked by cherrymax and then score tiebreaker sounds a bit more approachable, at least.

The cherry+ control is dumb, since you can't get a border from the cancel of the last spell of a boss fight, so you have to get it sooner and in most cases lose the spellcard value of the last spell of the stage.

This makes no sense. Just route it so that you get the borders in between spellcards or just at the start of the following stage. Especially on easy, the cancels aren't that large.

This may very well be just me being whiny, but I really think this challenge isn't very well though out.

I do not think you're forced to take part, there have been many challenges I didn't like, I just didn't participate. No use complaining. It might as well be one of the more interesting challenges, since the general route will change, and the execution isn't super bland.

[Sakurei]

But I'm dumb and can't route. I couldn't make a proper route for IN even if I tried and that's arguably the easiest game to route. How do you expect me to route PCB, a game I have practically no experience with? Many other people will face the same issue. PCB is a complicated game to route especially with such restrictions.

Yeah, I'm free to not participate, that's true. But I'm also free to express my dislike for the challenge after having tried that. I didn't know it was forbidden to express opinions now.

[Mino ☆]

Yeah, I'm free to not participate, that's true. But I'm also free to express my dislike for the challenge after having tried that. I didn't know it was forbidden to express opinions now.

No one said you were forbidden. Anyway, Inadequate wasn't saying you couldn't express your own opinion, he's just stating that not every challenge will suit everyone, so it's best to just not participate and wait for the next one.

-

I'm going to try putting together a few runs to see what I can put together. Extra actually looks quit interesting for this challenge. Though it will be a little challenging trying to avoid getting borders during Ran's spellcards.

[Karisa]

I suppose cherrymax then score seems like a better idea. Runs that avoid cherrymax entirely would be ranked the same way anyway, while it wouldn't be as reset-oriented to disallow more casual runs.

[SomeGuy712x]

#23 - Easy
SomeGuy712x - 200,000 - 423,185,220 - Reimu B - C - 0.070% - Replay

Decided to give this a shot. It took several tries before I was able to complete the game without accidentally increasing CherryMax somewhere, but I made it!

I intentionally suicided at the start of stage 1 to boost my power a little faster, and later on I had derp deaths against the first mid-boss Alice and mid-boss Youmu, because I briefly forgot what their opening attacks were. I had a close call near the end of stage 4 where I was near a cluster of bullets when a border activated, but after I broke the border, I looked down at my CherryMax, and it was still 200,000, so I guess I got lucky there. Also, I can't believe I flat-out failed Yuyuko's fourth spell, and the border timing forced me to fail her fifth one, but at least I managed to capture the final survival spell, by intentionally avoiding enough cherry items so that I didn't get a border during it.

EDIT: Added my CherryMax to my stats up there.

[Mino ☆]

I just realized that doing Extra/Phantasm is going to involve timing out all the nonspells to prevent getting cherry items from the bullet cancel and then timing out the spellcards to milk spellcard bonus.

Hmm...

[Oh]

#23 - Extra
dxk - 400,000 - 716,143,000 - ReimuB - C - 0.092% - Replay

Just popped every border.