Tool-assisted movies

This movie is ~11 seconds faster than the previous version by the same author, due to better control of the boy's acceleration.

This is a 43 second improvement over the previous movie.

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.

Although Lolo is a puzzle game, it is surprisingly nontrivial for speedrunning, as proven by the fact that this is the author's ninth version.

This one is about 2 seconds faster than the previous due to various optimizations. You can read the full list in the submission message.

This movie is actually a result of competition/co-operation between Baxter, Randil and Hanzou.

This run aims to beat every room as fast as possible, often by strategies the game developers had not intended, including glitch abuse. In addition to Hanzou, strategies were developed by many players, such as Bag of Magic Food, CtrlAltDestroy, Deign, Nitrodon, and Randil.

This update beats the previous submission by 39.13 seconds.

There is also a Game Boy sequel that is known as Kid Dracula.

Tailz's second version, about 40 seconds faster than his first.

See the author's comments for more information on this glitch.

This improves the author's previous movie by about 5 seconds.

This incredible TAS of Arkanoid, made by Baxter, inspires awe in a manner comparable to the Gradius movie. No ball is ever lost, even though three balls are juggled in every level where possible.

Astyanax is a somewhat clumsy game. For one, Astyanax is twice as big as he appears, and so he is easily hit unless one plays carefully. The controls are also very bad. The sum of these factors is that it's a difficult game to play, but that's part of what makes this movie interesting—especially for those who have played this game.

This run is Walker Boh's second attempt at this game. It is more than 3 minutes faster than the first attempt.

This is an improvement of only 6 frames (0.1 seconds) over the previous version by the same author.

It's an optimized version of the fast walkthrough of the game originally devised by Morimoto.

Here Aglar has managed to improved the previous movie by 2.5 seconds.

Enjoy the movie, and the excellent soundtrack and the graphics of this game.

On Feb. 12, 2008, the .avi was replaced. Please redownload if you downloaded prior to this.

The gameplay has undergone some changes compared to its predecessor. A welcome addition to it is a slide movement, similar to the one in the Mega Man series. A not-so-welcome addition is that half the stages are autoscrolling, and there are no close combat weapons now.

This movie is 9:11 faster than Arc's version, mostly because of the utilization of a gameplay-altering glitch: pressing Left+Right simultaneously in order to make Orpheus move with almost unlimited velocity growth. The trick is documented at Battle of Olympus Tricks.

The route used in this movie is decided by a few things the hero (Orpheus) must do:

• Collect three fragments of love in order to activate the Tartarus entry.
• Get a key to access the second fragment's location.
• Get the Eyeball of Graeae to see invisible doors (to access the first fragment's location).
• Get a sword in Peloponnesus. It is needed to kill the three-headed guardian with respawning heads (Cerberus) in Tartarus.
• Collect 60 olives in order to buy the ocarina, which will be needed to cross the sea to get to Crete and Tartarus.
• Get a harp in order to call Pegasus. It makes the route faster.

This run has two players and does not use warps.

As always, a bug on level 11 prevents player 2 from moving, so he gets a gameover for that level. Player 1 plays level 11 alone and player 2 comes back for level 12. This is a bug in Battletoads itself.

Maybe you thought Battletoads was a game full of amphibians, but it is actually full of bugs. Those beta testers really should have spent a little more time on this game...

This is Cardboard's and JXQ's second contribution to Bionic Commando, this time improved by about 4.5 seconds.

This game is considered to be very difficult to beat.

This game is really fast-paced. Do a TAS of it, and… see for yourself. :)

This new version is about 14 seconds faster than the previous movie by Acmlm.

Normally, standing under any falling object or just getting close to an enemy means instant death, but in this movie the player fearlessly dives through heaps of falling objects and walks past enemies without a scratch.

It's quite pleasureable to watch if you have ever sat screaming at this game for getting stuck or killed repeatedly.

This playthrough uses a password to skip to level 19-1, which begins the hardest set of levels. The amoeba levels have long unavoidable waits, it is advised to fast-forward through these.

This movie features one player controlling two characters simultaneously.

Despite the movie's being so long, it's nearly the fastest possible warpless time through Bubble Bobble. There are 113 levels, and each level ends with 10.75 seconds of unskippable time.

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.

This TAS is about 13.6 seconds faster than the previous version by the coauthor of this movie, Morrison.

In this joint effort by Phil and Morrison, thorough optimizations are carried out at all levels of magnitude in order to get the maximum completion speed as well as lots of score points in the process.

The timeunit count for this movie is 03:01:08, which is 9 "minutes" better than the previous version by Walker Boh. The actual movie is 27.35 seconds faster because of significant improvements in two mansions.
It also abuses the falling-through-floor glitch, which is insanely difficult to perform.

There are several items that are required for the completion of the game, and you can't buy them without killing a certain amount of monsters; thus, this movie has some running back and forth in order to collect hearts. There's also the factor that shops are open only at daytime and monsters are twice as evil at nighttime... Hence, there is some necessary waits that may appear as sloppy, but are not.

This game has a technically high-quality soundtrack because it uses a VRC6 sound chip that works in the Japanese Famicom but not in the NES. Thus, the movie was made with the Japanese version of the game instead of the USA version.

This movie takes the path that recruits Sypha. There's also a Grant path movie and an Alucard path movie.

This game has a technically high-quality soundtrack because it uses a VRC6 sound chip that works in the Japanese Famicom but not in the NES. Thus, the movie was made with the Japanese version of the game instead of the USA version.

This movie takes the path that recruits Grant. It is about two minutes faster than the previous version. There is also a Sypha path movie and an Alucard path movie.

This game has a technically high-quality soundtrack because it uses a VRC6 sound chip that works in the Japanese Famicom but not in the NES. Thus, the movie was made with the Japanese version of the game instead of the USA version.

This movie takes the path that recruits Alucard. It is about 39 seconds faster than the previous movie, played by Genisto. There's also a Grant path movie and a Sypha path movie.

This game has a glitch enabling one-frame boss fights. To quote the author: If the team leader executes a level three ninpo attack on the first frame of combat, the boss is dead. Right there, dead, even the ones that don't show up immediately. As pulling this off requires your weapon to be maxed out, this saves anywhere from a great deal of time (first level) to a little bit (last level).

This movie was recorded with a bad ROM dump (b1); see the author's submission notes for more information regarding this.

This is a 18.55 second improvement over the previous movie.

This nine second improvement came from thorough lag reduction and a new glitch among other things. You can find more information in the author's comments.

Genisto shaves another 4 seconds off of this single-player movie by using some new techniques that involve zipping through certain objects.

This movie probably qualifies for "Quickest Giant Robot Fights."

This movie plays "1 player game A" (easy). Ironically, this is MORE challenging for tool-assisted gameplay.

Stage times: 3410, 3560, 3750, 3890, 4270.

Yet another "perfect" movie beaten. This time by 18 frames.

This movie certainly does not lack speed or complexity. The movie is especially entertaining if you have played the game and know how hard it is.

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.

This movie is a joint venture between AnS and Randil to improve the previous Darkwing Duck run by Walker Boh, resulting in 35.7 seconds saved through means of extensive optimization, luck manipulation and lag removal. We recommend reading the authors' comments for more details.

This game suffers from sprite overload very frequently.

In this one you star as Ace Harding, a detective who wakes up having no idea who or where he is. As the game progresses you discover that you have been framed for a crime you didn't commit, and must find a way to clear your name.

This is a 22 second improvement over the author's previous attempt by a slight route change and improved menu navigation.

Further reading:

• GameFAQs knowledge about this game

It features a hero named Victar, who can easily jump on a tall tree (and sometimes over it, since he can't jump much lower) and is willing to defeat the evil demon that conquered the world. The key to defeating him is Victar's sword, which is conveniently broken into pieces that must be collected over the span of the game.

So watch his sword getting bigger and more powerful every few minutes, until its wielder finally reaches maturity decides it's big enough to save the world.

This is a yet another large improvement for this game. This time 61 seconds were saved over the previous movie by Yunshui.

The battling style of this game can be described like Final Fantasy meets Pokémon; your team of warriors versus the opposing team of warriors, and any opponents freed from their posts can be later picked up in the wilds and converted to your side!

We recommend reading the rest of the author’s comments; it helps understanding the movie better.

In Bisqwit's opinion, the soundtrack of this game has a lot in common with Duck Tales.

This is the NES version of the series completed fast by the use of creative routes and of course maximum speed.

The previous movie was considered perfect. But as we demonstrate time and time again, perceived perfection can be trumped by persistence.

The author improved the movie by 8 seconds due to an unexpected glitch in the first level. This also proves that even the most simple games can be broken!

Donkey Kong Jr. (read Wikipedia article), among with Donkey Kong, were classic games that were played by millions of players on different consoles, including NES, Atari 2600 and Game and Watch.

Although one would not expect a movie of Donkey Kong Jr. to be interesting to watch, except in the retro sense, this movie is actually quite surprising. The vines are cleverly utilized to move the hero forward faster than any member of the Kong family before or after this game.

This is a 6 frame optimization of level 4 compared to the previous movie by the same authors. The rest of the levels are copied without changes.

Released on many systems, this game was so popular they even released it for cellular phones and made a board game. Even a hollywood movie has been made.

This movie shows the true value of teamwork. Despite sibling rivalry, Billy and Jimmy help expedite their common goal with well-timed knees to each other's faces.

This is the author's 2nd version and is an improvement of about 25 seconds over his previous movie.

The USA version is almost twice as slow as the Japanese version.

We recommend reading the author's annotation of this movie.

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

• All unnecessary random encounters have been manipulated into not happening
• The player dies several times in order to get transported back to the beginning
• Action commands are often intentionally not entered as soon as possible to manipulate critical hits and such

Note: The first AVI release of this movie had wrong author name in it. The AVI was replaced a couple of hours later. Download statistics of 91 downloads was lost.

Dragon Warrior is an epic RPG series which now spans 8 games across many systems. The second game greatly expands on the first to include a party of three heroes (all descendents of Erdrick and the hero of DW1) and battles that may include many enemies.
The world is much bigger and there are many big dungeons to explore as well. Luckily there are new abilities and items to make this easier. Enemies can randomly drop items when defeated and there is a lottery which is the precursor to the casinos which appear in each later DW game. Finally, you might notice that many of the enemies in this game appear in later games, particularly DW8.

The author has left detailed comments explaining this glitch.

This game is known in the TAS world as being a pain to play due to the RNG (random number generator) being much harder to manipulate than most other games. As a result, seemingly random actions throughout the game are actually intentional manipulation of the RNG to ensure favourable outcomes, such as avoiding monsters or good battle outcomes.

To give you an idea of how surprising this time is to most players, the previous run is about 24 minutes longer than this one. Even before that, any run that was under 3 hours long was deemed to be very difficult to perform.

The author intentionally kills off his party in order to save some travel time.

This is the fourth TAS of Duck Tales. This time, due to a bug in the Moon level found by HHS, it is almost a minute shorter! Other minor tricks here and there contributed an additional few seconds of improvement.

A new TAS of Duck Tales 2. adelikat completes this new version of Duck Tales 2 in a little more than 5 seconds faster than the previous movie by himself and Guybrush

Quote from Exim (the author of the first Duck Tales 2 TAS):
This one has the "bad" end. (not the worst)
There are 3 endings: no money earned; earned some money and found all 7 map pieces. I'm thinking about doing the best end but I don't know if this would be interesting because I'd have to visit some places twice and it would be a lot longer.

Note that this is a Famicom Disk System game. Read What is FDS for more information.