(Link to video)
Submission Text Full Submission Page
Did this because that's what I promised, right? ;)
Anyway, Happy New Year!

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: DeSmuME_0.9.8_r4382
  • 100%
  • Fastest Time
  • Slight luck manipulation

Comments

Well, I promised that I would TAS a G3 MlP game, so here it is! This is what you guys meant, right? Btw, you can't skip any of the minigames, unlike the first game for the GBA.

Stage by stage comments

The Overworld

4 Ponies, Toola-Roola, Rainbow Dash, Sweetie Belle, and Starsong starts a fetch quest that when talked to, makes a present pop out of a house as shown on the minimap. During these epic quests, you CANNOT start any minigames at all; This is the reason why I had to backtrack to Toola-Roola, Rainbow Dash, and Starsong so I can complete their respective minigames.

Scootaloo

The first minigame is very straight-forward - just move right to win.
The second minigame requires washing the scooters; again, nothing too special here.
The final minigame I manipulate the butterflies to be close together so I can draw triangles to catch them all. Then I made a poorly done drawing of G3 Pinkie.

Sweetie Belle

This minigame can go die in a hole.

Cheerilee

2 garden based minigames that require the stylus. Drawing triangles is the quickest way for the well section.

Starsong

Not much to do with the 1st and 3rd minigame, but I did playaround with the stylus at the 2nd one. ;)

Toola-Roola

I glitched the first minigame's menu to quickly skip most of it slightly faster and the 2nd game is like Cheerilee's 2nd game.

Rainbow Dash

With Tools, this game becomes a piece of cake.

Other comments

Suggested Screenshot

Frame 7289

Baxter: Even with the introduction of the vault, there are still some standards. Gameplay must stand out from non-assisted play, and it must be a "serious game". This TAS does not meet these requirements in a satisfying way. Rejecting.

TASVideoAgent
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RachelB
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Cool submission message.
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rog wrote:
Cool submission message.
It's midnight atm, can't be bothered to type much, cya tomorrow. Oh, and this run, despite the submission text, DOES COMPLETE THE GAME.
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More MLP :D. Imma watch this later
IronSlayer wrote:
Your counterargument would be like me saying that the Earth is round and then you telling me that I need to show it's flat so I can "prove us all wrong".
Seems legit.
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Agh... enough of these ugly G3 ponies. When will we see a G4 pony game TASed?
Spikestuff
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Warp wrote:
Agh... enough of these ugly G3 ponies. When will we see a G4 pony game TASed?
When they actually bother making a G4 one... excuse me for a moment *walks off cliff* I'll wait for an encode (slight issues with ds) before I vote
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<Explain>
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I tried TASing this for the opening of Season 3, but not-Scootaloo's scooter had an invisible pixel that completely threw me off. I gave up after that. Ten and a half minutes seems awfully quick. I was expecting Starsong's dance to take up more time. Will watch later.
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<encode>
My first language is not English, so please excuse myself if I write something wrong. I'll do my best do write as cleary as I can, so cope with me here =) (ノಥ益ಥ)ノ
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Warp wrote:
Agh... enough of these ugly G3 ponies. When will we see a G4 pony game TASed?
Spikestuff wrote:
When they actually bother making a G4 one... excuse me for a moment *walks off cliff* I'll wait for an encode (slight issues with ds) before I vote
You mean like this?
Ferret Warlord wrote:
I tried TASing this for the opening of Season 3, but not-Scootaloo's scooter had an invisible pixel that completely threw me off. I gave up after that. Ten and a half minutes seems awfully quick. I was expecting Starsong's dance to take up more time. Will watch later.
The hardest minigames for me to TAS was Sweetie Belle's. :P Also, it would've been longer if I had to open the presents to view the credits, but luckily, I didn't have to.
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Well Done! That was fun!
My first language is not English, so please excuse myself if I write something wrong. I'll do my best do write as cleary as I can, so cope with me here =) (ノಥ益ಥ)ノ
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Hey, thanks for the youtube! Now for some comments from the peanut gallery. If I were to asses publishability, I'd say, sure, why not? Not-Pinkie Pie moves at a decent clip, we're not bogged down by cutscenes, and the minigames are reasonably fun to watch. Plus some light route planning. Maybe not the most exciting thing to see, but sure, why not? Some other thoughts... Lag can be reduced by picking up objects early and manipulating the ponies to not appear on the street. This can be accomplished by pressing random buttons during a screen fadeout. I noticed you found the "turn around in a door" trick. You can also speed up the turning animation by grabbing objects and talking to ponies a frame or two after you initiate changing a direction. It's only worth it when picking up an object, though, since talking to ponies on the street accomplishes nothing and ends up slowing you down a few frames due to lag. I also question the route, but I guess the proper way to challenge that is to dig up the run I started and finish it. Good job, though! I'll commemorate you by posting something a little later.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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jlun2 wrote:
You mean like this?
- Firstly it should be this: - Not web-based
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Holy shit this was boring.
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om, nom, nom... crunchy!
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Baxter wrote:
Even with the introduction of the vault, there are still some standards. Gameplay must stand out from non-assisted play, and it must be a "serious game". This TAS does not meet these requirements in a satisfying way. Rejecting.
Please define "serious game".
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Warp wrote:
Baxter wrote:
Even with the introduction of the vault, there are still some standards. Gameplay must stand out from non-assisted play, and it must be a "serious game". This TAS does not meet these requirements in a satisfying way. Rejecting.
Please define "serious game".
The term "serious game" is not something I came up with. I got it from the description of vault movies where it is not clearly defined, but where examples are given of games that are not considered to be "serious". I quote: "a game which is a board game, sports game, or game show game is not defined as a serious game". This is probably a subjective thing, but I judged this TAS to have some of the features that were meant in this remark about serious games on the vault description page. This, in combination with the gameplay not standing out from non-assisted play, lead my to the decision to reject the movie. Note that this had nothing to do with it being a game about ponies. Feel free to disagree and discuss though :).
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Baxter wrote:
This is probably a subjective thing, but I judged this TAS to have some of the features that were meant in this remark about serious games on the vault description page. This, in combination with the gameplay not standing out from non-assisted play, lead my to the decision to reject the movie. Note that this had nothing to do with it being a game about ponies. Feel free to disagree and discuss though :).
Atari in general. Nah, the games back then were like that, it can be excused. But how about "You have to burn the rope", "Myst", "Salary Man Champ: Tatakau Salary Man? The first one is a tivial flash game based homebrew, the second has no luck manipulation, and the third is a 18 - minute button masher. Edit: All the runs I've listed are vault runs, btw.
Post subject: wait, wait, wait, wait, wait....
Spikestuff
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jlun2 wrote:
But how about "You have to burn the rope", "Myst", "Salary Man Champ: Tatakau Salary Man? and the third is a 18 - minute button masher.
Salary Man Champ in some stages played in real time requires luck but when tassing all that luck disappears and you have crazy button mashing (except for the microphone stage in 2/3player because it goes crazy and luck is needed).
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What about "Myst"? It's just fast menu navigation. The real time runs look almost identical to it minus the faster navigation.
This TAS only differs from the speedrun in reaction time, which is even less of a difference than for instance minesweeper, where also the thinking time is avoided, and luck manipulation required. This is not the fault of the TASer, but the game.
From the Myst first rejection message. Edit: Given the above message, the fact that it still got accepted means this should too. :P
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You are actually quoting me from when I rejected Myst, not accepted (also from when there was no Vault, so I'm not sure why it matters either way). Given what I've read about movies being eligible for the Vault, and what I generally understand from it, I've come to the conclusion that this movie does not meet the outlined requirements. What is eligible for the Vault is not defined relative to the most peculiar TASes that are in the Vault. Judging is done by several people who could have slightly different interpretations of the guidelines or just a different experience when seeing the movie. This may be why, when comparing two decisions made different judges, they may seem inconsistent. This is not to say that a single judge was inconsequent: I was not the one who accepted any of those movies you linked.
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Baxter wrote:
You are actually quoting me from when I rejected Myst, not accepted (also from when there was no Vault, so I'm not sure why it matters either way). Given what I've read about movies being eligible for the Vault, and what I generally understand from it, I've come to the conclusion that this movie does not meet the outlined requirements. What is eligible for the Vault is not defined relative to the most peculiar TASes that are in the Vault. Judging is done by several people who could have slightly different interpretations of the guidelines or just a different experience when seeing the movie. This may be why, when comparing two decisions made different judges, they may seem inconsistent. This is not to say that a single judge was inconsequent: I was not the one who accepted any of those movies you linked.
I took that quote because it pretty much applies to this run too, but for some reason, that meets the outline requirements more than this run. I mean, I can accept the GBA run being rejected for this reason (note that I haven't even bothered to comment on it untill now), but this run has more TAS-like elements to it. While not alot, but it resembles something you can't do in real time more so than the Myst and the GBA MlP run. :P
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I really think that "serious game" is too vague and ill-defined to be used in any kind of judging decisions (especially now that the vault tier exists so that we can get closer to the goal of "every game deserves a TAS."(*)) I'd say that if a game has a clearly-defined ending, then it's at least 99% eligible for TASing (the 1% reserved for very special exceptions.) Currently it isn't even a question of whether it's "boring" or not. (*) Yes, I know that's not the actual core principle behind it, but I think the idea of the tiers has been at least partially inspired by that notion.
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Serious game is indeed vague. When adelikat and I were creating that page, we came up with a couple of examples of games which were not serious. Such as the NES Sesame Street game, or Elmo's Fun with Numbers/Letters. Another example is Color a Dinosaur. The principal being is this seriously a game people play? Or is it some educational "game" without serious gaming components? Perhaps only some group trivia thing which you can play in a group, but makes no sense to play against a computer, or where one person is controlling all the action. adelikat and I want to allow records for TASs that actually mean something. We don't want TASs for random software where the TAS is pretty much meaningless. (I welcome your Microsoft Excel submissions this April 1)
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.