"Fastest stage 3" is like someone doing a fastest "World 8" run in SMB. It's an arbitrary goal and there's no real reason to stop on Stage 3 if there are more stages afterwards. It's like you gave up on going any further because it got harder.
No.
From the description:
"The run is only of the first three stages, because the game doesn't really change anymore after stage 3, it only gets a bit faster."
So it's not the hardest level, but it's the only non-arbitrary point to stop at (unless it ever gets so fast it becomes literally impossible, or there is integer overflow)
My hand slipped and hit the 'Yes' button somewhere around when Yoshi spat out a buzzsaw.
This run was AMAZING. Every level seemed set up to display a different aspect of Mario and Yoshi's amazing athleticism and repetoire glitches. The run was even more fun to watch on nicovideo with all the comment spam whenever something amazing happened. Entertainment level off the charts :D
My highlights. Did you notice all of these?
和歌山 (わかやま, Wakayama)
-Invisible/wrap around yoshi glitch
死の山 (死のやま, Death Mountain)
-Alchemizing a rainbow shell from nowhere
なばなの里 (なばなのさと, Nabana no Sato)
-Imprisoning and freeing Mega Mole
-The mysterious case of the 1up on the lone Bullet Bill
-Discovering Podoboo-Yoshi
-Riding a Mega Mole
-Discovering Baby Yoshi-Yoshi
-Glitched sprite Lakitu kill
-Mario demonstrating Koopa Shell arithmetic (1 + 1 = 3)
-Swapping a buzzsaw and goal tape into yoshi's mouth
一等地物件 (いっとうちぶっけん, Prime Property)
-Mario pretends Fishin' Boo and their trolltastic hitboxes don't exist - two at once!
-Ending 1 frame from death
博多湾 (はかたわん, Hakata Bay)
-The ultra fast underwater ascension + clipping through the maze
スカイツリー (スカイツリー, Skytree)
-Ascending so fast the camera can't keep up *2 or more
-Block duplicating an elevator for Yoshi
-Yoshi gulpin' down a whole Pokey at once
-Chargin' Chuck looking back as he realized he missed his one shot at jumping on Mario from above
-Recharging, juggling and ascending with multiple throw blocks (and doing some block duplication while we're at it)
クッパ城東京支部 (クッパじょう とうきょうしぶ, the Tokyo branch of Bowser Castle)
梅田地下街 (うめだちかがい, Umeda underground shopping center)
-'OK, I got Yoshi - cya later level' *clips downwards through everything and ditches Yoshi*
地獄 (じごく, Hell)
-All the instances where you sent mario and Yoshi down different paths and rejoined them later
-Some interestingly multistaged clip setups
天国 (てんごく, Heaven)
-Landing on the same shell you threw to grab a rainbow shell and break everything
-Mario getting stuck on thin air and flailing his arms trying not to fall down, Looney Tunes style
-ON/OFF block duplication to go up... and down
-Extended item playaround
-Doing some P-switch jumps to pretend the ending puzzle doesn't exist
クッパ城京都本部 (クッパじょう きょうとほんぶ, the Kyoto headquarters of Bowser Castle)
-Three wall jumps in a row
-Pausing the game (THE WORLD)
-Ending input
The reasoning goes like this: Imagine if a new glitch was discovered, called super-RBA. Super-RBA puts everything in the game into your inventory. 100% now consists of the any% route with a short detour to do super-RBA. Is it interesting?
You can't skip dungeons with it, as you'd lose light medallion.
You can get light medallion back by wrong warping from fire temple into the 'got master sword' cutscene where you first get the light medallion. (this is used in 'All Medallions' category to skip beating a bunch of dungeons)
The game resource page mentions that you can form a keyhole using the stunned sprite glitch. I know https://www.youtube.com/user/SomeGuy712x uses this a lot for his challenge runs like 'level X with no A button', but are there any places in the game where this was not quite fast enough? Same for the stunned sprite glitch with Pokey
I've consumed huge amounts of super mario world glitch videos, TASes, romhack playthroughs and raocow's let's plays and I still managed to get surprised and impressed. That means yes vote :D
Do we have a rough estimate on ETA for this run? I've been waiting so eagerly for this; it'll undoubtedly be the most incredible run this site has ever produced.
Some rhythm games would be interesting to TAS, where either the scoring is non-trivial (Rock Band Blitz) or you can fail or remix the song in interesting ways (IIDX's keysounding)
In that case, would it be feasible to combine all three goals?
Have a single movie that first beats the game as quickly as possible using warps, thus unlocking the Yoshi Challenge. Then go through all 20 stages, getting all A-Coins and Yoshi Eggs. This would mean that 8 stages would be played twice in the run.
The movie goal could still be nicely summarized as "Gets all A-Coins and Yoshi Eggs as fast as possible (from blank save data)", since you need to first beat the game as fast as possible in order to get all Yoshi Eggs as fast as possible.
Combining the second two goals with the first doesn't create any interesting routing decisions, since you ignore A-coins until the second run through. If they're separate they may as well be separate TASes so they're easier to update.
I could see it being done, if Project64 would be integrated into Bizhawk. But right now, with an N64 emulator that is worse than the GC and Wii emulator, I'm with Grunz.
I think for a run of such ridiculous complexity to route and optimize, an exception should be made to the 'TASes should be PERFECT' rule and it should merely be incredibly, incredibly, incredibly awesome to watch. :D
I'm looking forward to a Tomba 2 TAS. A few questions:
1) Do illegal d-pad combinations (u+d, l+r, u+d+l and so on) do anything interesting? Check in every 'movement state', menu and so on.
2) Have you found the memory addresses for x/y speed and position? In some games running with the directional button held down is not the fastest way to move under TAS conditions, due to oscillating speeds you can freeze (super mario world) or acceleration/top speed being different in the air or slopes or land.
1) Do you mean if I do an illegal d-pad combination while turning at an intersection or opening the menu, it may cause the action to go faster? I hardly know anything about TASing so I could be wrong.
I mean things like what you can do in Link to the Past. If you use items with illegal d-pad combinations then the game gets confused and writes absurd values for position and velocity:
http://tasvideos.org/GameResources/GBx/LinksAwakening.html#UpDownLeftRightGlitches
So every 'different way' the game can use the value of which d-pad buttons are pushed own should be tested with illegal combinations to see if glitches occur. It's not the only way to find glitches, but a common one.
2) You lost me here lol. I understand what you mean by different acceleration speeds in the air and ground. I still have to test whether I accelerate at different speeds on the ground and in the air, but so far it seems like it's the same. I do not understand what you mean by "memory addresses for x/y speed and position."
Almost every game has a set of memory addresses, the values of which indicate the player character's x position, y position, x speed and y speed (x being horizontal, y being vertical). For example, Super Mario Bros: http://tasvideos.org/Addresses-11.html
To find such a memory address, in most emulators with memory watch there is a feature that lets you do the following:
Search memory
Move right
Ssearch memory for all values that increased since the last check, narrow possibilities
Move left
Search memory for all values that decreased since the last check, narrow possibilities
And by doing this over and over again the program narrows down all values that could be x position - until you have only one. Then you can do the same for y position, x velocity, y velocity and whatever else you can think of measuring.
And now, you can verify that methods of movement are as fast/as slow as you think they are :)
I'm looking forward to a Tomba 2 TAS. A few questions:
1) Do illegal d-pad combinations (u+d, l+r, u+d+l and so on) do anything interesting? Check in every 'movement state', menu and so on.
2) Have you found the memory addresses for x/y speed and position? In some games running with the directional button held down is not the fastest way to move under TAS conditions, due to oscillating speeds you can freeze (super mario world) or acceleration/top speed being different in the air or slopes or land.
