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I am the wind, I am the sun... oh wait...

Summary

  • Colors a Castlevania
  • Takes Damage To Save Time
  • Manipulates Luck
  • Unofficial Encodes [1]
  • Emulator used: VBA-RR (v23svn217)
  • Length:15:14 Frames:54829 Lag Frames:13643 Re-records:8823


About the movie

This is a (02:53.37) improvement over the previous rejected movie.

(some copy paste from wiki)
Castlevania Adventure takes place before Castlevania events, you play an ancestor of Simon, Christopher.
The game consists of four stages, and unlike other Castlevania games, there are no sub-weapons, hearts are used to restore health.
Whip can be upgraded with crystals, but any enemy damage will downgrade an upgraded weapon. (start with leather whip, then chain, and chain+fireballs)
There are no stairs, unlike other Castlevania games. At the end of each level, there is a "primary evil" to confront.
There is also a point counter, and at 10,000 points, a player receives an extra life, and also receives one for every 20,000 points after that. Each stage also has a time limit in which to complete the level.

The main improvement come simply from trying to manage the lag instead of fully submitting to it, the rejected run yielded 23676 lag frames, and this one 10'000 less.
Lag is the main problem while tasing this game, the previous runner just ignored it, although i think he didn’t have a lag counter, he obviously didn’t care about the issue.
In this game, even if there’s nothing on screens (no enemy, no candles, no animation) it will still lag a lot, apparently the lag would come from the music, in boss sequences, there’s no lag (the music is looping and very short).
Basically the main strategy for lag reduction i used was to kill enemies as fast as possible, avoid destroying candles, don’t "land" jump on a lag frame etc... etc... nothing too fancy.
Taking damage is not very cool since you would loose whip power, in first stage i take damage from an eyeball because it shorten a rope climbing, and i regain power 2 candles farther.
For Dracula it went very helpful to take damage, this shortened the fight considerably compared to rejected.
Although the quality of the rejected run is more than doubtful, he did find some neat trick (luck?), depending on subpixel adjustment, you can jump toward a rope and get to the bottom of it, this sadly only works in 1 place but save a bunch of frames.
I didn’t take care to note it, but i get a higher score than the rejected movie.

Improvements


Ill list here all know improvements
  • The start screen can be shorten by about 20 frames, im not sure why or how but i missed it (found by mugg)
  • Manipulating the second boss could be better, i get 2 top holes spawn (the rejected movie get 3), if dropping to 1 or 0 would save some here (100 frames per top hole, can use pause to manipulate, found by mugg).
  • In stage4, on rejected movie the runner managed in 7th room to get on the floor before the boomerang would hit him, this was impossible in my run somehow, i tried many things to manipulate it but nothing worked, few frames can be saved maybe.
  • Dracula might be improvable, i don’t know how though
  • More later!

Closing

This movie is not perfect, and could be better eventually, yet i hope youll enjoy it, i have to say this game was assy to tas.
Its really not fun and extremely rigid controls, on top the lag is the biggest i ever had to deal with, this is also the worse Castlevania game on consoles i think.
Btw, the reason im not using the Konami Collection (J) is simply vba hang on loading games, there’s no usa release, also the color game is less laggy than old grey usa one (not by a lot thought).
Special thanks to fsvgm777 for pointing me a rope shortcut in stage4 while i was broadcasting :p Also thanks to Nach for convincing me to do this tas.

Nach: Votes for this run were rather interesting. Many many yes votes, as well as excited comments about the run in IRC, but also more than a handful of no votes. This game is a bit ridiculous in how hard it is to jump, and to the extent the player gets attacked unexpectedly. For those familiar with the game, this run is easily identifiable as a superplay, as enemies are consistently shot at before they appear on screen, no missed jumps, things manipulated well enough that Christopher is never unexpectedly attacked, as well as insanely fast boss fights. This run it is also much faster than other runs made for this game till now. Based on the demand for this game, and positive responses, I'd be willing to discount no votes by those unfamiliar with the game. Some runs like Gradius look amazing to anyone, even those unfamiliar with the game. Some runs like Super Metroid are appraised highly by the majority of members, but those unfamiliar with the game find it long and boring, and it gets its share of low ratings. Castlevania Adventure suffers from being less well known, like most early Gameboy games, hence several thinking the run looks too easy. However, there were several no votes by those who were familiar with the game for this run being noticeably suboptimal to them. Therefore, I'm going to reject this run because it needs more improvement.
arukAdo: Allright

Mitjitsu
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Banned User, Experienced player (532)
Joined: 4/24/2006
Posts: 2997
Voted no because of super slow movements, lag and nothing special about the movie from a technical aspect. Aside, I have to question the movies technical competence given Mugg's claims.
Joined: 6/4/2009
Posts: 893
yes vote, the run looks pretty solid to me, even if the game is slow, i was so sleepy when i watched it that it looked like normal speed for me...
Joined: 5/23/2007
Posts: 14
Location: abroad
i do know this game somewhat well, because at the time it was published, i was in love with it and liked to play it (and still remember the 'moves'). 1. it was very sluggish on the actual device too 2. sometimes this did even help (level 3) @arukAdo from what did you get the boost while climbing up some ropes (level 1) and how did you manage to deliver that much impact on the level 3 boss ('death bat', had to look it up though, bec. cartridge is lost) and dracula with your whip? anyway: i don't like the annoying clours* but i do like your run and would've voted yes. ps *these colours need to be fixed in favour for a solid grey-scale! cheers EDIT: i was granted voting rights (?!), so i did vote 'yes'
Joined: 5/2/2009
Posts: 656
no. It's way too slow paced. the character is way slow, almost nothing happens along the way. It's just a set of slow platform action with eventual monsters. But, then again, kinda keeps that Castlevania feel, and a barely good.
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
TASVideosGrue
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Joined: 10/1/2008
Posts: 2739
Location: The dark corners of the TASVideos server
om, nom, nom... blech, salty!
Skilled player (1308)
Joined: 9/7/2007
Posts: 1354
Location: U.S.
Woah, What happened? I leave for a few days and then a feud breaks out? TASVideos sure has been having a lot of fights break out lately.
NitroGenesis
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Editor, Experienced player (551)
Joined: 12/24/2009
Posts: 1873
???
YoungJ1997lol wrote:
Normally i would say Yes, but thennI thought "its not the same hack" so ill stick with meh.
mklip2001
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Editor
Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 2224
Location: Georgia, USA
Sonikkustar: Really, it's not worth getting into. It seems that tensions flared up because of misunderstandings between two people who communicated about working on a run together. That's really all it is, and the drama isn't really anyone else's business. It also seems like it's been popular to hate on this submission technically, making claims about serious improvements but not backing up those claims. I'm not sure why. Though I guess that if the game still looks slow even when a lot of work was put into getting rid of lag, that's just a sign of a bad game for running. EDIT: Thanks, p4wn3r, for the clarification. Sounds good to me.
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Player (42)
Joined: 12/27/2008
Posts: 873
Location: Germany
mklip2001 wrote:
It also seems like it's been popular to hate on this submission technically, making claims about serious improvements but not backing up those claims. I'm not sure why.
Most of the backup for the improvements you seem to be asking was discussed via IRC, hence not being accessible this thread. I talked to arukAdo myself and he considered cancelling the submission and redoing the run, implementing the things he outlined in his text. However, he decided to let the submission go and see if it was rejected by poor game choice, which would practically disqualify future attempts at this game. What I mean by this post is that what happened with this movie shouldn't be taken as "some players didn't like the movie and said it was technically bad to put the audience against it". It's only my opinion, but I think there's exaggeration on Sonikkustar's post. I've been very active lately and haven't seen any fights break out, only a lot of controversial submissions appearing and people disagreeing on their publication, which is completely normal. Besides, many users in the site, myself included, don't have English as their native language and may misread or write something with a different "tone" they originally intended, and that can spark conflict as well.