Shove It! ...The Warehouse Game

Introduction

This is my longest movie so far. It solves all 160 rooms (16 stages x 10 rooms) in the game.

I came to this way in a rather indirect way. As I was working in implementing DOSBox as core for Bizhawk, I started to fantasize about those old DOS games I used to play and how I could TAS them very comfortably now. Among those games was Sokoban, a puzzle game where you play as a warehouse worker having to push boxes to their designated places. It was hard and I couldn't beat more than two levels (hey, I was a kid).

So now I thought, I could surely program a very lightweight version of the game in C++, transcribe the levels, and then brute force it using JaffarPlus. However, turns out people had that same idea a long time ago and an abundance of spectacularly well optimized solvers already exist. Then I figured I might as well use those.

So I set up to transcribing Sokoban levels for use on those solvers / optimizers I found. However, transcription took a lot of effort and the glooming thought that perhaps a significant change in the DOSBox core would mean it'll desync in the end made me think this would have to wait. That is, unless I found a similar kind of game for an already well supported console. Then I found this game.

The process went as follows:

• Grab transcriptions of the levels from this Game FAQ. I had to fix a bunch of them that had transcription errors.
• Use Festival to solve them all in batch
• Use Jsoko to iteratively optimize the solutions
• Use my own translator that took .sok format solutions to Bizhawk inputs
• In the improved movie ([UserFiles/Info/638788723424797950]) I used YASO 2.153 Optimizer which yielded better results

I know 5781M (TASVideos) followed a similar approach. However, I find it unsatisfying that they only solved the minimal number of rooms to advance. I find it more entertaining to see all levels, including the large ones. There is a relaxing aspect of spending 4 hours watching a very efficient worker do his job with extreme precision.

One little caveat is that, for some stages, I had to skip room 8 to reach rooms 9 and 10, before going back to 8. This is because, for some of the stages, beating room 8 will automatically advance you to the next one and making rooms 9 and 10 unreachable. Very strange progress mechanics.

In any case, I will also probably improve on the any% movie. I'm pretty sure I can cut a bunch of frames off that one, even if I have to build my own optimizer.

Software + Hardware

Rom Information

• Name: Shove It! - The Warehouse Game (USA)
• ROM: Shove It! - The Warehouse Game (U) [!].bin
• SHA1:E4094C5A575F8D7325E7EC7425ECF022A6BF434E
• MD5:2C6A960F66D1C87855424E6528D6EAC6

Emulator

• EmuHawk 2.10 (Core: GPGX)

Additional Tools

• Source Transcriptions: FAQ by Sean Shannon
• Solver: Festival
• Optimizer: JSoko
• Second round optimizer: YASS