To get some more Amiga feeling to it. Or maybe because it's made of polygons, so it's too advanced for SNES to handle. You can notice it slows down at times, and only runs at an average of 20 FPS maybe. It could also be because the original Amiga version had loading screens, so they were too lazy to edit them out, or they didn't know how to do it.
A TAS of the original Amiga version could be better, it has better sound, resolution (maybe), and it doesn't have slow-downs, so it would be faster. But maybe there still isn't a good Amiga emulator for TASing? Strange, considering that it's older than SNES. Some things are better in this version though (music).
The music was most likely done because there wasn't enough room for all the digital samples the original had. I agree it is a big improvement, though.
In my opinion, the new PC version of the game, with the SNES versions additional music, would be the definitive version of the game.
I remember this game fondly.
The guard that you are supposed to drop the green ball on it's head CAN in fact be killed in real time.
It requires very clever shield and blast use, but he CAN be defeated. you also have to jump the grenade he will roll when you shield yourself, and land behind the shield, but close enough to blast through it.
I never realized that you were supposed to drop the ball, so i killed him the hard way. :)
Go try it someday.
you can see it done in this speedrun http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLHxf4wt1Ro
Wow. this new route turned the skip from boring back to entertaining, and now looks more diffiuclt to do in real time.
While i still miss the older skips that were all doable unassisted, this has much better WTF factor than the movie it obsoletes.
I'm not entirely sure enemy kill order is everything.
There's a swooping bird a ways into level 1 that has a strong tendency to drop crowns when killed repeatedly and nothing i do before i reach it seems to make a difference.
it's visible at the 50 second mark, and i'm very surprised it didn't get killed.
I believe the bubbler challenge would go as follows.
If you (or whoever) is going to do something so unlikely to get accepted here, you might as well break one more rule to make the challenge more extreme and simplify the rules: Start the game with a level 3 Nemesis and 1 max HP, and never switch weapons (and, uh, level it up immediately in the Last Cave and Hell, if you get that far). (example) (save file)
The thing is the bubbler is actually a pretty effective weapon at level 3 when used properly but is somewhat challenging to use. With manual rapid fire, it has the longest range of anything short of a charged spur shot and appears to have no shot limit at all, and with the button held down you get the handy bubble shield.
I'm not entirely sure it would make an interesting TAS, as clearly any TAS not using the machine gun is obviously very suboptimal.
Actually, a normal pacifist run might be interesting though. It would be slower, but it would showcase a LOT of skill. The bosses that summon other monsters would be very problematic, as we may have to keep them alive instead of killing them for powerups.
I believe the bubbler challenge would go as follows.
Only bubbler may be used, except on enemies immune to it AND required by the plot. If you don't have the bubbler you may use another weapon, but only if the enemy must be fought(the door mimic, destructible blocks in your way, most bosses, etc.). The first jellyfish juice must be used to collect the bubbler ASAP.
I think just for the sake of playability going hog wild with the polar star in the area with the jellyfish should be allowed when collecting the first juice (but only the first one). Unless you are a TASing god and can kill the big one without killing the other stuff. :)
All other optional weapons must be skipped. This includes the missile launcher, machine gun, snake, nemesis, Whimsical Star, and Spur (i'm not sure about the fireball). I suspect the blade is not optional.
After collecting the bubbler, you may use the experience dropped by enemies killed with it to level up other non optional weapons, should one be needed to destroy something immune to bubbler level 3.
Curly will of course use her machine gun, and later the Nemesis if you get into sacred grounds. There is no way to avoid using either one.
Unless pixel himself says it's official, it's not.
And I think he doesn't consider it official, since it has one translation error.
The password for the hideout is supposed to be the games title, written backwards. The translators missed that fact, and thus we have "Litagano Motscoud" instead of "yrotS evaC"
Original title.
洞窟物語
Romanji for original title
Doukutsu Monogatari
romanji for password.
ri ta ga no mo tsu ku dou (you have to keep the syllables unreversed)
This confused the poor translators, so they just left it untranslated.
It is otherwise a superb translation.
This was very impressive, and is one of the greatest TASes on ths site. While it doesn't sequence break much or use heavy glitch abuse, it shows inhuman skill and speed very well.
The official english translation for wii DOES have "yrotS evaC" as the password.
I know people were disappointed at "Oh, yeah!" instead of "Huzzah!" though...
I agree this is a great TAS.
In my opinion, unless there are serious sequence breaks that are difficult to do unassisted (beyond save state abuse), then the adventure game is a poor choice to TAS.
This one was clearly not a poor choice.
There is no entertainment value in watching an adventure game being played as fast as possible as intended. But it's certainly entertaining skipping stuff that's not supposed to be skippable. :)
"You were supposed to frame war it"....
It seems the issue is clear.
Gia didn't want to submit it at first, because he wasn't convinced it was optimized, and had no problem with someone else optimizing his strategy. But his original file apparently has the *exact same frame count*, and thus wasn't an improvement, and he doesn't want his video to be beaten on here by one that tied it.
And because gia couldn't beat this TAS either, he can't change his mind and submit it now, because it would be rejected. THAT'S why he's mad. because he failed to submit it earlier, he can't submit his TAS now that turned out to be optimized after all.
In plain english. He wants the TAS removed because it was not the first one to reach that frame count on that game. As soon as someone figures out a way to save a frame, he will be perfectly fine with it being submitted.
This doesn't even meet it's goal of minimal kill counter.
There's a glitch involving the stopwatch and getting hit as it runs out and killing the boss at the same time that lets you not increase the kill count or get exp! People have reached the final save point with a kill count of ONE without tool assistance. Perhaps with that glitch, a kill count of 0 is possible.
Wow. Color me impressed. I didn't think the harder skips were doable realtime.
On the good news, this increases confidence that the game is properly emulated. :)
The thing about an optimized 16 star run is that 16 stars can be performed without tool assistance.
I personally have BLJed up the endless stairs on the real console.
SO that is why this category is not arbitrary.
Here's the deal with this hack.
When you complete air, and play the second loop you can now access a secret passage that is blocked by a goomba normally, which gives you the password to open the zip for this hack, which is meant to be an extra hard, extra short version of AIR.
Like AIR before it, the author realizes that you can turbo-a through blocks, and you can come back from a death off the bottom of the screen without tool assistance, but these techniques are FORBIDDEN, because the author couldn't figure out how to stop them.
This is why AIR 2 was made. to give the TASers something they can't cheat on. :)
I vote for an encode with a pokemon caught counter. :)
Also I think a linked movie would be awesome, with both games maxing their pokemon count and trading to fill in the gaps.
A speed runner would walk up to the arcade, plunk in their quarter, start the camera, and play.
Most speed runners reset until they are lucky. You reset until you have the 1/50 chance that a special item appears or you reset until one of 50 pseudo random boards appear. Where is the difference?
Right, but that's fair on a HOME game. speed running on an arcade machine itself is a whole different matter. An honest console player can just keep resetting til they get it right. An arcade game player has to put in the coins unless they own the machine.
There's a difference between knowing a level and knowing a random sequence.
A speed runner would walk up to the arcade, plunk in their quarter, start the camera, and play.
That's what in my opinion makes this a proto-TAS.
From a speed running perspective, those superplays from the poweron pattern are cheating, removing part of the challenge of the game.
Yup. videotaped episodes and freeeze framed them to work out all the spinner patterns so that he knew the safe times to stop and gain additional spins.
Contains speed/entertainment tradeoffs.
Manipulates luck.
Abuses programming errors. (regardless of sequence picked for the game, there were safe times to try, even without foreknowledge of the arrangement chosen for that episode)
Actually, the competition cart seeds the RNG based on your score in the mario section, and then collects no more entropy.
Sega tetris instead walks through a fixed seed list after every game.
Either way, the seed can be changed through player input.
My point is that a very basic TASing technique (luck abuse) was used long before emulators existed.
And I'm pretty sure nes tetris collects entropy during gameplay. Usually people messed with the cart by playing super mario brothers most of the time and abusing turtle stair.
Sega Tetris, from Japan.
This TAS predates emulators.
You see, the game always generates the same 1000 piece looping sequence from poweron with a clear nvram. (the pieces are supposed to be truly random, you see)
It also gave a 10X bonus for line clears that emptied the field completely.
So what the japanese players did was map out the sequence, and work out how to score bravo after bravo to most efficiently max the score counter in the smallest number of line clears.
The tool in this case was the piece sequence list. No "legitimate" player could possibly max out the score that fast. BUT, armed with the tool of foreknowledge of all upcoming pieces, the hardcore japanese players would max out the counter much faster.
It would be tagged "aims for fastest time, abuses luck".
Because of the way the random generator worked, this is one case where luck could be abused in real time.
I'm on the side of no continues in arcade games.
The reason is because using continues to get more bombs so speed up the game is not superhuman.
ANYONE with sufficient funds can do that to save lots of time.
I vote no.
To complete the game you have to get all four characters through all the levels. That's just not entertaining. Super Mario BRos 2 (usa version) is truly the better game.
Well, if all four characters does the same thing, then of course it will be boring.
However, if each character doesn't something different (maybe even slightly different paths), then it can be entertaining.
Imagine, even in SMB2(USA), the plays are different between Princess, Mario, Luigi and Toad.
As long as there are enough differences between each character's run, I think Doki doki panic will be entertaining to watch.
I'm not saying a run of one character cannot be entertaining.
The problem is you have to do all four of them in the same game to get the ending.
It would be like sitting through four suboptimal TASes.
Well, it seems the question of TAS on real hardware has been answered by NESBot. :)
Provided a game doesn't abuse the DMC channel or uninitialized RAM, it's tasable on hardware.