Princess Rescuer
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Mar 15, 2018
Party Girls for the PS2 is a minigame collection with only 15 minigames. It is classified as shovelware. In fact, it is part of the Simple 2000 series, a series mostly exclusive to Japan and Europe infamous for being a particularly large collection of PS2 shovelware. My profile picture is the box cover for the PAL version of another Simple 2000 game, Pink Pong, featuring some of the same characters.
Anyway, I speedrun this game. I am the only one who does, at least right now. Despite the color, the music, and the cute girls, this game is absolutely brutal to speedrun because of the massive amounts of bloat put into this game. Before every minigame, you get a minigame intro and intros for both competitors. After every minigame, you get a full replay (not a highlight) and after every set of 5 minigames (of which there are 3 sets, meaning one of them will be played more often if you're going for 100% completion) you will watch an interview with whoever won (that being whoever you picked in single player mode, as sets do not continue until you win) followed by a 2-minute-long credits sequence. This makes speedrunning the game difficult because losing in the second set of a run (meaning you won't unlock a character and have to do that set again) means you will have to restart the run, do the first set, and sit through the interview and credits again, not to mention all the cutscenes (runs are not smooth sailing until the third set).
On October 3, when I was on the final minigame of what I thought would be the category-killing run, I happened upon a discovery that revolutionized the game. By tapping the "cancel" button, you could skip every type of cutscene in the game. This means much of the length and difficulty was mitigated and runs now go by much faster, not to mention can be done more often and feature no breaks. I quickly did another run that same night and the time went from a 1:27:38 to a 33:56. I also had another category, Longest Path, which was brought down from 1:52:02 (the day before) to a 41:54.
This feature greatly enhances the playability of the game in addition to making speedruns much faster and more doable. But here's the problem- the developers never bothered to tell anyone. It's not in the manual, nor is it an any review or video you can find online. Only over a decade later did it become public knowledge. Imagine how much more popular and better received the game would have been if that feature had been known about earlier!
TLDR, it went from this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLhnCUR6VaQ
to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9V_kIpjJCA&t=127s
You can see the improvement for yourself.
Anyway, I speedrun this game. I am the only one who does, at least right now. Despite the color, the music, and the cute girls, this game is absolutely brutal to speedrun because of the massive amounts of bloat put into this game. Before every minigame, you get a minigame intro and intros for both competitors. After every minigame, you get a full replay (not a highlight) and after every set of 5 minigames (of which there are 3 sets, meaning one of them will be played more often if you're going for 100% completion) you will watch an interview with whoever won (that being whoever you picked in single player mode, as sets do not continue until you win) followed by a 2-minute-long credits sequence. This makes speedrunning the game difficult because losing in the second set of a run (meaning you won't unlock a character and have to do that set again) means you will have to restart the run, do the first set, and sit through the interview and credits again, not to mention all the cutscenes (runs are not smooth sailing until the third set).
On October 3, when I was on the final minigame of what I thought would be the category-killing run, I happened upon a discovery that revolutionized the game. By tapping the "cancel" button, you could skip every type of cutscene in the game. This means much of the length and difficulty was mitigated and runs now go by much faster, not to mention can be done more often and feature no breaks. I quickly did another run that same night and the time went from a 1:27:38 to a 33:56. I also had another category, Longest Path, which was brought down from 1:52:02 (the day before) to a 41:54.
This feature greatly enhances the playability of the game in addition to making speedruns much faster and more doable. But here's the problem- the developers never bothered to tell anyone. It's not in the manual, nor is it an any review or video you can find online. Only over a decade later did it become public knowledge. Imagine how much more popular and better received the game would have been if that feature had been known about earlier!
TLDR, it went from this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLhnCUR6VaQ
to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9V_kIpjJCA&t=127s
You can see the improvement for yourself.
