Bonsai Barber is a WiiWare barber-sim made by Zoonami, a team led by the director of Goldeneye N64. Inspired by the Japanese art of bonsai and the barbershop experience, it involves giving charming anthropomorphic plants a fresh trim, with styles ranging from simple shapes to bizarre structures.
Goal
This game has a real-time system where you can only cut 5 characters' hair per real-world day. It also has no definitive ending. So the only interesting goal is to complete the Perfect Day achievement - getting five stars for all of one day's trims. It can be noted that it would be faster to achieve this from dirty SRAM to not have the tutorial trim, but I chose to start from a clean slate. It is also aiming for speed but see the speed or entertainment section below for why that doesn't matter too much in the end.
End timing is another thing. I decided to end input at opening the achievement. While it could technically work to end when getting 5 stars from the last trim, the achievement doesn't actually save in the book until it's opened.
Control
Control was difficult with this TAS. Despite TAS Input allowing you to rotate the hand cursor in the menuing, it wouldn't work at all with the barber tools; the IR control worked but not rotating with the orientation sliders. Instead, I did the cardinal sin of TASing and used a controller's analog stick to control the left and right Tilt found in Dolphin's controller settings (this also meant controlling the IR with the same controller). While it was a pain for efficiency, I made sure I was accurate.
Speed or entertainment?
So there are two major bottlenecks during the trim sessions (one obsoletes the other):
- Sounding the gong to finish before the first star appears is considered ending too early - 0 stars and restart
- Even when sounding the gong, all the stars have to appear before getting the ending textbox
- Even after the textbox is closed, it doesn't leave to the waiting room until the 5-star celebration has gone on long enough.
Essentially, as long as the gong sounds before the fourth star appears (besides Spudsworth who has an extra ending textbox), there's no timeloss. So speed is not of the essence. Considering all that, while it was optimised for time, the value is in the messaround. If there's even value in this goofy game, it's an April 1st submission for a reason.
Optimisation
Since the trim sessions are so rigid, there are only a couple of noteworthy optimisations. One is of character position when selecting between multiple, because the transition to the chair can be faster. It is 4 frames of difference between characters, with the one on the right being fastest.
However, the exception was when selecting Bristly Bob. If you leave a character in the waiting room too long, they'll try to talk as soon as you re-enter, taking up 28 frames. But by doing Bristly Bob before Reg Wedge (yes, these are their names), there's no talking afterwards. So trade-off 8 frames for 20 saved overall.
The other optimisation is only seen at the end. There's a frame-perfect window to select the gift and two awards before Spudsworth starts talking. Unfortunately this window isn't enough when selecting a character for trimming, otherwise all those intros could've gone.
Trimmed to perfection?
Most trims won't be absolutely pixel perfect, not just because of poor skill, but also because the leaves and branches swing about and are interconnected, so something that looks clean will then look rough a few seconds later. I tried to find a balance between swings.
Messarounds
There are a few neat Easter eggs with the different tools that can be done in time. The main one used here is that painting the bird makes it sing a nursery rhyme, with each colour having its own tune. I tried to match up some tunes with the other things I was doing (London Bridge to the Union Jack, Pop Goes the Weasel to blowing up an apple, Twinkle Twinkle to the sun).
With so much time to spare, I spiced up the last trim by not trimming at all and instead using the comb to drag the branches into the dome mould.
Sidenotes
Don't copy the game description from Nintendo... it might be technically correct, but "first-person groomer" isn't a term anyone would want to use.
It's a shame we don't get to see the secret agent guy who gifts you a laser-sighted trowel. Or the butterfly that makes your tools gold. What a G.
Can you believe I joined this site nearly 10 years ago and this is my first submission? Maybe I was the real G all along.
Screenshots
3198 - Clown Barf
3900 - I'm British btw
5401 - Making a rainbow
Sync notes if this does get accepted
Don't try to play from the start if you have any savedata, as this will skip the opening save creation - despite mostly looking okay, it will desync on Spudsworth as the scissors are already out.
Controller settings are just a Wiimote, no extensions. Followed the recommended config settings (JIT recompiler, no Dual Core, HLE audio, not sure about XFB on this version)
Forgot to put on widescreen for my encode, but it might mess with IR?
feos: Claiming for judging.
