Tool-assisted movies

007 is ready for his incredibly popular first person shooter for the Nintendo 64. Rather than taking the usual stealthy strategy, secret agent 007 treats this first person shooter like any other and runs around shooting things with a complete disregard for human life, including his own.

NOTE: There are many graphical emulation issues with this game. Most notably the sky is not rendered correctly. This makes the last level look extremely strange. In addition, the AVI was encoded with a plugin that does not play all of the music effects for most stages.

Turok has been famous for being the first fog navigation simulator of its time. The omnipresent fog was included to obscure the low rendering distance that was used in order to increase performance on N64's hardware, but it also resulted in a somewhat claustrophobic feeling throughout the game. To further confuse the disoriented player, the majority of wall textures are nondescript and repetitive, making it easy to get lost at times.

Disclaimer: Due to various complaints of motion sickness caused by the strafe-running technique utilized, the viewer is encouraged to keep an airsickness bag handy in case of sudden nausea.

The American version of this game is a lot more difficult than the Japanese one (Mad City), although this video makes it seem easy.

This is a 56 second improvement over the previous movie by Phil.

Interesting fact about this game is that Konami used to implement an unconventional way of piracy protection, in this particular case by making each hit or "wrong" collision in the game result in an instant death if you play it illegitimately. Apparently, this was how a large amount of people were used to play it in pre-emulation era, without even realizing Konami's little sabotage.

This movie by AnS is set up in a fashion that imitates this known handicap by playing the game in hard mode (accessing it through a password), where every hit counts as death. Other than that, it also improves the previous movie by 2 minutes 48.7 seconds, using several major glitches and a lot of small tricks explained in great detail in the author's comments.

Whereas the previous movie's goals went for both speed and points, this movie's primary goal is speed, and only gets as many points as possible when it doesn't waste time. For example, targets and swimmers are deliberately missed to reduce score-counting at the end of levels. Altogether, this is 54 seconds faster than the previous version.

Stray shots are used to manipulate luck.

Trivia: This game was released as Probotector in Europe with slightly modified graphics. It is also known as GryZor on some other systems.

This movie is 46.95 seconds faster than the preceding version due to better boss fights, a jumping glitch in lv 3, and the use of the spread gun. The ROM change counts for about 27 seconds of the improvement. Also, the author better achieves the pacifist goal by not killing the level 5 tanks costing about 9 seconds.

By continuously switching between the two modes, it allows the player to go as fast as possible, which makes an otherwise boring game interesting.

Fantasy Zone is originally an arcade game, and this movie uses the Japanese (Sunsoft) version because it is closer the arcade version than the USA (Tengen) version.

This is probably one of the best illustrations on how to create art out of a simplistic and otherwise uninteresting game to watch.

What is also different about this movie is an extra warp which significantly shortens the game, and the use of a new tool (input macro) as described in the submission text. Bots were occasionally used to generate pseudorandom input while still avoiding death.

Unfortunately, Red from the last year's carnage got into an accident involving a badly thrown grenade and a few land mines, so Green takes it on all by himself in this new episode of Jackal.

Not having to deal with the larger amount of two-player mayhem also means the game goes faster, which is a win for everybody. (Except that Red guy.) Coupled with better playing, this constitutes the 9 second improvement over the previous movie by xipo.

This video uses a password to go directly to the second, harder version of the game. Note that the password shown on screen is not the one actually accepted by the game - the password is entered so fast the graphic function glitches. Another (more useful) glitch is that you can stand on spikes and other sorts of materials which ultra-powerful gigantic mechadroids have a natural weakness against if you jump all the time.

The fireball form used for the first few levels more or less grants invulnerability when used constantly, as well as being a strong offensive weapon. It is not very effective against the last boss, so the author switches to a better projectile weapon before that. This switch entails that the rematches against the earlier bosses are slower, but the improvement on the last boss makes up for it.

The guy who has an infinite supply of ammo and who destroys worlds bare-chested is back!

This movie is a 19-second improvement over the previous version by Genisto.

Since the main character drives a wheeled vehicle, this game shows to be the rare kind of a variable scrolling speed shooter, where you can slow the car down if you can't keep up with the action (which obviously never happens in a TAS). The core gameplay holds true to its spiritual predecessor, but this time it's spiced up with stage bosses and various sorts of powerups.

This movie is a 1 minute 14 second improvement over the previous one thanks to increased precision, lag reduction, and better boss fighting.

The run itself is very entertaining. Even if you haven't played the game, the game's fast pace guarantees that you won't get bored watching this movie. The author has aimed for 100% kills and 100% items in the autoscrolling stages, but getting 100% of everything isn't always possible without slowing down.

If you have any more questions about the movie, check the author's comments at the submission page to see if your questions have already been answered.

Due to the highly repetitive nature of this game, the hidden 9th input button (the console's Reset button) is used to warp to the last level. This results in an unsually long grey screen at the start of the movie. Starting on the final level with 3 lives and only the initial pea-shooter for a weapon normally makes the game near impossible to win.

The author takes advantage of frame perfect timing to upgrade rapid fire to the maximum in a single level; this allows for an improvement of 3 seconds during the boss fight.

This game has four completely different final stages, each with a different ending, depending on the choices you make earlier.

The Japanese version was chosen because, for some reason, it gives the players a health bar, allowing them to take some damage without dying.

Fang is used due to a glitch that allows him to deliver fully charged D weapon shots, without taking time to charge it.

In this movie the author takes the secret "fifth ending", thereby skipping most of the game. The Japanese version was chosen because, for some reason, it gives the players a health bar, allowing them to take some damage without dying.

This is a 2.19 second improvement over the previous movie.

This movie is 3 minutes longer than the previous one due to playing on hardest difficulty and using both Gunstars at the same time. See the author's comments for more details.

The AVI for this movie is also slightly larger than usual — this is due to an amount of colors and on-screen motion even the best codecs have problems coping with.

This is a 26.5 second improvement over the previous movie. Details can be found in the author's comments. A password is used to access the hardest difficulty level.

Selected quotes from the author:
Story: an evil enemy kidnaps the hero's family. The hero is pleased, as this gives him a reason to wear a tight sleaveless shirt and blow up stuff with big guns.

In this run enemies blindly spray bullets at the main characters, naturally missing every shot as bad guys generally do. (Heroes, no matter where or when, can be assumed to have plasma shields.)

The author initiates a glitch involving the character dying and gaining a 1-up during the fadeout to a Game Over screen. This allows him to skip many levels and complete the game in just 3 and half minutes!

For fast completion that does not use this glitch there is the 2-player version.

This is Cpadolf's take at the shmupping carnage, resulting in a significant improvement in both speed and style over the previous movie by Krocketneo. In total, 2 minutes 53 seconds are saved thanks to lag reduction and faster boss fights. The author also kills a greater percentage of enemies (still not fully 100%, though — read the comments for more details).

The game is completed in Arcade mode (still a far cry from the actual arcade game), which is accessed by tapping A on the main menu screen. It is strongly recommended to read the congratulatory text appearing after the end credits. ;)

Emulation of this game is not correct. Lag present on the SNES is not represented in this run. Expect the speed to be higher than actually seen on a real console. For this reason, the audio track lags severely behind the rest of the run. As a result, some of the bosses can be defeated before the boss music begins.

In a nutshell, the series' plot is about the evil Bydo empire, which is a highly developed alien lifeform with hivemind mentality (Borg, Zerg, etc.). The player pilots a spacecraft on a mission to destroy it. The craft itself has a force — an indestructible (yet living!) orb pod that can be used for both bullet absorption and offensive action. The core gameplay thus boils down to two things: memorization (all R•Type games are very unforgiving, and require the player to learn the paths thoroughly to succeed) and tactical use of the force orb to protect the ship and do high damage to enemies.

The author of this TAS, however, opted for playing around with enemies and killing most of them with the force orb. Don't try this in realtime. (Really, don't.)
Other than that, the movie uses a password to access the second loop's difficulty level ("PRO") without having to beat the game twice. It still doesn't get the good ending, though.

This run is played in two-player mode with the author controlling both characters. It aims for showing off and being entertaining while still being reasonably fast. A code is used to access the highest difficulty level.

Surprisingly, the author started working on this video over 2.5 years before the submission, which makes it one of TASvideos's longest projects to date.

This is nearly a 6 minute improvement over the previous movie due to the use of 2 players, more accuracy, and some nice tricks. The author has also embedded a few subliminal message throughout the movie. Details can be found in the author's comments.