Hypothetical question time:
Say that I have been involved in a very passionate speed running community for
Spider-man 3 for several years. It's a game that features fast paced action, with a variety of fighting moves and many different ways to travel through the short levels. In this speedrunning community, goals such as aiming for fastest time to complete the game, and fastest time to collect all the web and power tokens, are commonplace. Because the community has been around for so long, many members have begun to get creative with their goals. One such goal that has popped up is beating the game without web-zipping (max speed 1800), and using only web-swinging (max speed 1280), as this makes it easier for the enemies to try to attack you. This goal is often combined with the goal of only using punches to kill enemies (since they deal about 3/4 of the damage as kicks), as this makes the game harder to complete for speedrunners. For argument's sake, let's say that when you do complete the game using only punches, you get a nice "Thumbs Up" graphic at the end of the game to validate your accomplishment. Members have a great time competing to find new and inventive ways of getting through each level with these restrictions, and new techniques are found every 3-4 months (some of which are only reproducible with frame precision).
Now, bring this hypothetical situation into reality. SM (Super Metroid, not Spider-man) has a long-standing speedrunning community, with many competitive members. Since typical goals have long been thoroughly mastered, some more inventive goals have popped up to increase the difficulty for speedrunners. Trying to complete the game with as few items as possible would certainly challenge a speedrunner in real life. However, it is essentially an artificial challenge, much as the example I outlined above is. Both artificial challenges cause some non-negligible total movie time increase, due to decreased speed of movement, and longer boss fights, which isn't a big deal for speed-runners, as the trade-off in the form of increased difficulty, to further prove their mastery of the game.
For a TAS however, the artificial challenge provides very little extra challenge, due to perfect reflexes and boss HP watching. Sure, there's some differences in route planning, due to some TAS-only tricks that aren't available to regular speedrunners. But once the planning is done, the rest of the movie is roughly as hard to make as a regular any% run. If I were to submit a Spider-man 3 movie to TASvideos.org with the above restrictions, just because it's a valid category for another community, I would likely get laughed at. The TAS would be slower than other published runs due to less than optimal movement speed (no speedbooster), and less than optimal boss fights (very little ammo). Both restrictions make the run slower to watch, slower to complete, and all for the sake of a graphical reward (whether it be a "thumbs up", or an "items collected 14%"). True, some of the techniques used may be only available to a TAS, but due to the depth of research into the game, many of the new tricks will be lost on the general audience.
Arguing that this movie should be accepted because the goal is thought of as valid in another community is argumentation without proper logic. This site is its own community with its own set of rules, rules which shouldn't be influenced by another community's prior history. If this run showed something new and different to the general public that the previous 4 runs did, it would likely be given much more thought. However, the artificial restrictions in this run make both the general rate of movement slower than the other runs, but also lengthen the boss fights considerably, all in an effort to see the number "14" at the end of the game, and to demonstrate some new techniques that likely will only be noticed by people who intimately know the game.
This is not a bad movie, nor is it lacking in entertainment. But it does not conform to the rules of the site as they are written right now. If you'd like to go about trying to change the rules of this site, feel free to do so. But criticizing those who enforce the rules simply because you wish this site was more like a SM speed-running community is both childish and counter-productive. As has been said before, the core audience of this movie is likely to be those involved with SM speedrunning, in which case, I would suggest you proudly post it in a thread on a site such as mk2k. In any case, I'm done weighing in on this topic, unless it's via PM for clarification of something already said.
