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Very nice. Here's hoping that there are no more huge improvements to be found. My favourite stars were: 'Wall Kicks Will Work', 'To the Top of the Fortress' and 'Shoot to the Island in the Sky' (the last one I had to rewind because I couldn't believe it).
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This may well be the best tool-assisted speedrun I have ever seen, so I guess I can give it a yes vote.
This is certainly star material.
This run demonstrates outside the box thinking to a greater extent than anything else on the site. Every room shows something that, not only would I have never thought of, but that is often downright counter-intuitive (I am not only talking about sequence breaks, but the huge amount of subtleties to optimise every part of the run). This type of intellectual work is so abundant throughout that it would be beyond me to provide a list at this moment. Throw this in a bag with great glitches, graphics, music, popular appeal and non-linearity and you've got yourself a star.
Also, thank you for taking the time to improve my run as it badly needed done (the fact that it is now slower than the SDA record has been annoying me for quite some time).
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If my memory serves, one of the reasons for returning some submissions to the workbench was in response to some users losing faith in the judging process. As the present system relies on the goodwill of the TASing community taking steps to remedy such feelings is desirable.
Do any of you still feel this way?
If some users genuinely feel as if a decision has been unfair then it is good practice to investigate, however ungruing may not necessarily be the best means of doing so. Perhaps allowing an author, or user, to refer questionable decisions to DarkKobold (as senior judge) would be a less arbitrary way of doing this, rather than allowing a small window of opportunity every ~2 years (though I guess that this is already theoretically the case, but I question how many users feel encouraged to do this).
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Despite these setbacks I'm going to finish the run on the route that we have. It has already taken a year and a ton of work. Expect this in a few weeks.
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Agreed. This is becoming particularly annoying in the case of SNES publications.
Emulators can be quite consistent for some consoles (i.e. Gens), but quite varied for others (i.e. SNES, GBx). Will we add tags to all entries, or just those that are problematic? A notice in the movie description would suffice imo, rather than adding a slew of new tags.
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What would be more interesting is if lua could be used to keep track of when a rerecord is used on a frame. Then, on playback, the viewer could see which areas required the most rerecords to optimise. (Though it would probably get quite messy when the count is very dense.)
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Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku is an interesting read. He looks into various technologies that we now consider impossible (i.e. invisibiility, time travel, perpetual motion) and categorises them according to how likely they are to come to fruition. He explains various ways in which they may be possible.
Why does E=mc2? by Brian Cox is a nice beginners guide to relativity. Cox attempts to follow Einstein's thought process to demonstrate how he arrived at the theory.
I'd second Guns, Germs and Steel as I enjoyed it, though I'm not sure if anthropology is what your friend is looking for. I also enjoyed A Brief History of Time, but it may be a little to complex for the total lay person.
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Very nice manipulation. This is probably the game that I'd most like to see TASed that hasn't already been done. It's good to see that things are happening in this thread.
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Looks good. Also...
emu wrote:
Very nice run, fast paced and entertaining.
I thoroughly enjoyed watching it and I'm happy to see that THPS games see some love again.
I haven't posted for a long time, that should say something ;)
Welcome back emu! I think that you should post more often ;)
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Very nice! I deliberately avoided watching the WIPs (a tough task) so that I could enjoy the full thing afresh at submission. A great improvement, everything looked different in every way and the effort put into optimisation really shows.
My favorite parts were the end of AR2 and CN1 (which now reminds me a lot of CN1 in S3&K). Also, Sonik, good work on SC, I didn't expect so much to be squeezed out of it.
Yes vote.
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Brushy wrote:
1. I will be attending an entrance exam to study English in the University of Turku this June. I thought that this might help me get back in touch with English, as my skills are quite rusty from lack of proper use.
As Fabian's intention was to stimulate conversation on what he saw as an ailing board I shall follow a similar motive. I found this quite interesting as I have been thinking about this recently, so prepare for a bombardment of superficially related questions.
In which context do you hope to study English? Do you hope to study the literature, or are you interested in the more everyday functional, or perhaps technical, application of the language? I have recently considered doing a postgraduate degree in English, however as a British citizen it would be geared towards literature and I wonder how representative that would be of other English degrees throughout the world.
As the English language seems to be something of a legacy of the British Empire, do you feel pressured to learn it in order to get full enjoyment out of the internet and modern culture? In other words, do you hope to study out of necessity or out of genuine enjoyment of the language as opposed to others? Do you know people with less proficiency in English and feel that they are losing out in some way?
I remember learning French back in High School and the language was taught as being inextricably tied to the culture itself (i.e. examples would always be set in a stereotypical parisian setup with questions based on widely known French culture). Do you feel that the study of English requires a meaningful understanding of British (or North American) culture, or do you find it to be more worldly than that?
What are your opinions on being bilingual? Do you feel that the extra vocabularly has allowed you to express yourself in ways that would otherwise be impossible, or more difficult? Have you found the experience of engaging with those of a different tongue to be worthwhile? Last year, on a whim, I asked a German friend of mine which language she thought in, she said English, as it was faster. Do you find merit in this?
Finally, most native English speakers do not have a second language due to the vast numbers of English speaking people in the world. As a person who has made the effort to learn English as a second language, do you find this attitude of native English speakers to be distasteful in any way? Do you feel that it contributes to a sense of isolationism that may manifest itself in foreign policy decisions of English speaking nations?
In Fabian's spirit, these questions are for anyone who feels that they have something intersting to add.
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Ha! That's fantastic news, I never suspected that your Crash 2 strats would be applicable here. Turbofa your life has become painful, optimising this in conjunction with the spinning bug, I imagine, is pretty nasty indeed. You should probably go back to the start to incorporate it properly.
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Yes, that looked much better. Spinning and jumping is important. Make sure that Crash jumps before his leg is raised at the end of the spin and you won't lose any time. Also, make sure that you are constantly comparing to the published run to make sure that you are not losing frames. Keep posting WIPs every few levels and I'll give some feedback. I didn't notice anything major so feel free to continue.
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Thanks for the input! This is already known. It is used in the upcoming low-glitch run. It probably won't be used in this category unless more improvements are found as the goal is always for fastest in-game time.
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I watched the first few levels and your jumping and spinning is not optimal. Spinning gives you a small speed boost, but your speed is then cut considerably when the spin warms down. This can be avoided by jumping a frame before the velocity cut takes effect. I go into this in detail in my submission text for the any%. Some of the levels should be directly comparable to a 100% run. This game is difficult to optimise for other reasons set out in that text (the game has a bug where it stops you spinning consistently, therefore you must carefully plan where and when you spin in order to maximise gains). Don't rush it! Post level by level WIPs in the thread and people will watch them and point out mistakes. Otherwise you will continue to make the same mistakes and your work will be wasted.
I won't vote since I haven't had a chance to watch the whole thing yet, but based on the strength of what I did watch it would probably be a no vote.
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Excellent work! I was made aware of this show a few weeks ago and have been hoping that someone would translate it. I don't have any specific episode requests, but I'm sure that I'll watch them all as they come out.
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That looked fantastic! Great to see that you are working on this again.
As to the velocity thing, I am assuming that pushing the joystick all the way allows speed that isn't normally possible due to the plastic of the controller. It probably falls within the same reasoning governing the use of left/right and, if so, then it is certainly allowed.
However, this is just what I have gathered from your posts. The lua RAM watch is difficult to see in the video. If you upload the lua file somewhere I can check this out.
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I think that the new SMB2U warpless run is certainly star-worthy. It's relatively short, it's quick, it's clever and it's a good game.
However, I do think that 2D Mario would be over represented should it be given a star. The most appropriate stars for it to take would be SMW or SMB3. I believe that both SMB2U and SMB3 are star-worthy for different reasons. As long as a purpose of the star list is to introduce newcomers to the art of TASing it is difficult to justify the removal of the SMB3 'Warped' star as it is probably the run that brought most of us here. Though SMB2U is now more entertaining the game is underplayed in some parts of the world, in comparison with SMB3, and not played at all in others (in its original form at least).
So, yeah, I agree with it taking the SMW star. As they are both somewhat similar games and, more importantly, would hold their respective stars for similar reasons (i.e. distinction in entertainment, rather than being of particular value to a newcomer).
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Simply stunning. I cannot remember the last time I saw such a genuinely creative improvement, especially as I thought there was so little left to work with. 3-2 was the highlight of my day. Yes vote.
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So I was recently reminded of this short story and this short thread. I think that some of you guys may find this interesting so I'll post it here.
It is called Ms fnd in a lbry by Hal Draper and it is a science fiction satire of what would become the information age (it was written back in 1961). I think you will be pleasantly surprised at how the information age as we know it now has been represented here. Bear in mind that this was written before the internet or many of the means of data storage that we now know, and also consider the significance of, what we would now call, textese in the title and its purpose in the story.
This short piece of writing is set billions of years in the future and is told from the perspective of an alien anthropologist writing about the fate of Earth through over-information.
The text is here:
http://home.comcast.net/~bcleere/texts/draper.html
It is by no means a masterpiece, but it is interesting and quite amusing nonetheless, and I'm sure that there are some users here that will get get a kick out of it.
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Yes, if you wish, however I am still sceptical as to how entertaining this run will be. The bonus levels are rather long and dull, but I guess that that is the same in all Sonic games...
