Submission Text Full Submission Page
Emulator Used: BizHawk 2.3.0
Frames: 34181
Re-record count: 3600
Time:9:22.29
Minnesota Fats: Pool Legend is a pocket billiards video game for the Sega Genesis and Sega Saturn, featuring famed billiards player Rudolf "Minnesota Fats" Wanderone. It was released as a sequel to Data East's earlier success, Side Pocket.
The Saturn version of the game largely plays the same as the Genesis version, but includes a training mode, a short documentary on Minnesota Fats, and a completely different plot in the story mode. In the Genesis version, the player takes the role of an unnamed rookie pool player seeking to challenge Minnesota Fats, and cutscenes are computer-animation. In the Saturn version, the player takes the role of Minnesota Fats himself, in his quest to challenge fictional pool hustlers from around the United States; live-action, full-motion videos (FMVs) are used for the cutscenes.
In Japan, the title Side Pocket 2 is only used in the Saturn version, whereas the Genesis version retains the Minnesota Fats: Pool Legend title.
Comments: Here's my second TAS of this game called "Minnesota Fats Pool Legend" on the Genesis. I love this game since I was a child, It has a good music, memorable pattern, Tournament mode, trick shot mode, and many more!!!
(Story Mode selected) next is trick game mode
I can't find any speedrun of this game, so I decided to TAS it and upload it here
Easy to TAS with, is 9-ball mode. The hard one is 8-ball which it slows the time, again.
Please don't give negative feedbacks or I'm not doin any TAS game that hasn't TASsed yet.
I apologize to my first speedrun.
Please give advice, im so depressed. im sorry
Samsara: Judging.
Samsara: There are numerous issues with the optimization present throughout the run, ranging from mashed input to just suboptimal execution of strategies. I gave some advice in the thread that you already took to heart, but I'd like to repeat it here and expound upon it a little bit.
First, you want to make absolutely sure that you're not mashing buttons randomly at any point. You want to always find the first possible frame to do whatever it is you need to do. Even auto-firing a button can lose frames, so just keep trying things earlier and earlier until you can't possibly do it any earlier. This is time-consuming, but that's kind of the point of TASing: You have an infinite amount of time to optimize your submission, you should be using that infinite time to the best of your capability. Even if you only have 30 minutes a day to work on a run, the beauty of TASing is that you can just save your progress at the end of that 30 minutes and load it back up the next day, and you will eventually still make a proper, finished TAS if you keep it up. I often tell people that the greatest skill for a TASer to have is simply patience. I've spent upwards of a year on a single run, others have spent several years working on a single run. Patience is a blessing. Use it wisely.
Second, you picked a complicated game to TAS. I respect that immensely, but I'd also advise against it in this particular case. Pool's a really tricky thing to optimize, it either requires knowledge of the game engine or an immense amount of patience to brute force every possible option to see not only if the strategies used are the best possible strategies, but also if they're being performed as efficiently as possible. While it's unlikely that I would actually reject a run for not using perfect strategies, it should be clear that different strategies were tested in the first place, and I don't exactly feel that coming from this run. 9-ball is likely fine (though I imagine the same thing can happen from a faster point on the board), 8-ball just has too many possible variants to be confident that there were multiple attempts at finding the best solution.
I highly recommend openly engaging with the community instead of sticking to private messages as well. We're here to help, even if sometimes it comes off a little aggressive (and I'm personally sorry if anything I said came off that way). We don't mean to offend or be hostile or try to drive people away, we're just passionate about TASing and it occasionally doesn't come out quite right.
Rejecting for suboptimality.
Samsara: I've restored the original content of the submission after the author attempted to nuke it. Don't do this.

Show more

Hide
Posted: 4/21/2021 12:45 PM
Quote
TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 14884
Location: 127.0.0.1
This topic is for the purpose of discussing #7106: RN22's Genesis Minnesota Fats: Pool Legend "100%, story mode only" in 09:30.42
Posted: 4/21/2021 1:25 PM
Quote
Spikestuff
They/Them
Editor, Publisher, Expert player (2297)
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6337
Location: The land down under.
Flash TASer of 2022 PSX TASer of 2016
I'm not here to give counseling so I'm just going to talk about the mash happy input that is-- your input. This is just almost borderline RTA play with some TAS input thrown in to spice the pot up a bit, I'm not fixing this input cause it's too much to fix. This is the tutorial level, or nine-ball done in a faster time on 2.6.1.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account. Something better for yourself and also others.
Posted: 4/21/2021 3:10 PM
Quote
moozooh
Senior Moderator
Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5770
Location: Away
If you're depressed enough to talk about it in your submission comments, please consider seeking help. If you let it fester long enough, depression can ruin your life. Making demands and conditions such as "don't give negative feedback" is not something we appreciate, however. And I doubt you'd find any community centered around public feedback that would oblige. When you submit your work for feedback, whether you get positive or negative feedback depends entirely on your effort, and censoring it just to ensure more content from you or to take pity on you is something we will never do. Please understand this.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Posted: 4/22/2021 6:23 AM
Quote
Spikestuff
They/Them
Editor, Publisher, Expert player (2297)
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6337
Location: The land down under.
Flash TASer of 2022 PSX TASer of 2016
Oh right. Author DM'd me this like 5 hours later it's probably important enough for the discussion of this movie that has glaring issues looking at the input alone:
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account. Something better for yourself and also others.
Posted: 4/24/2021 9:25 PM
Quote
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2122)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Homebrew TAS of 2023 Exotic platforms TAS of 2020 Sega TAS of 2016
The input really needs to be cleaned up and tightened. You're losing several seconds that could easily be saved by just figuring out exactly when the first possible frame to do things is. The input in menus is pretty much all random mashing, losing frames everywhere. The main strategy used in 9-ball rounds can be tightened up by about 10 frames every time just by utilizing diagonals more and shooting faster. Cutscenes can be skipped with the C button, which isn't always used. Input in 8-ball rounds looks noticeably suboptimal and likely could be optimized by several seconds even using the same strategies, which I doubt is optimal in and of itself. That part's not even your fault, pool is complicated to optimize and is usually botted instead of being done by hand. User movie #71008889489639367 I tweaked your input up through the first couple shots of the second match, and it's about 6 seconds faster. I imagine that doing this to the entire submission could bring it down to sub-9 minutes. Laziness should never be an excuse in TASing, the entire point is that you have all the time in the world to optimize your run, an infinite number of tries to ensure that everything is as fast as possible. You need to use that time and those infinite tries to the best of your ability.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Posted: 4/27/2021 6:45 PM
Quote
Viewer
Joined: 6/4/2004
Posts: 284
Spikestuff wrote:
Oh right. Author DM'd me this like 5 hours later it's probably important enough for the discussion of this movie that has glaring issues looking at the input alone:
If you know you have depression (clinical depression), make sure you see a doctor and ask about antidepressants if you aren't already on them. If you are, make sure you're taking the proper dosage, and possibly discuss increasing it if you're still feeling symptoms of depression. If you feel you have other mental issues, look into seeing a qualified professional such as a psychiatrist who can properly diagnose and prescribe appropriate medication. If you're saying you're depressed to try and deflect criticism, GROW THE F*CK UP. Signed, Someone with clinical depression.
Posted: 4/27/2021 10:07 PM
(Edited: 4/28/2021 9:22 AM)
Quote
Samsara
She/They
Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player (2122)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Homebrew TAS of 2023 Exotic platforms TAS of 2020 Sega TAS of 2016
Viewer wrote:
If you're saying you're depressed to try and deflect criticism, GROW THE F*CK UP.
You'd think someone who suffers from depression would know better than to take this kind of tone in this situation. RN22 is being receptive to the feedback, he's just responding in PMs rather than publicly in the thread. It's likely that the line about depression was just a kneejerk reaction to the confusion over the first submission, and I'll even admit I was harsher than I should have been over there. Even if the rest of your post is relatively decent advice (although it is extremely hard for some people to just go out and get help, and saying usually comes off as dismissive more than anything else), throwing in that line kinda undoes all that, because it's basically saying "I don't trust you, I think you're faking", which, as someone else who suffers from it, the last thing I want to hear is that someone thinks I might be faking it for attention or pity. I heard that for years. I'm still recovering. Since it looks like the depression thing is the only thing people are going to focus on about this run, I think I'll just handle it now and try to respectfully ask that any future posts in this thread actually be related to the TAS or TASing in general.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Posted: 4/27/2021 10:37 PM
Quote
TASVideosGrue
They/Them
Joined: 10/1/2008
Posts: 2738
Location: The dark corners of the TASVideos server
om, nom, nom