Tool-assisted movies (15)

When played at full speed, Super Bomberman 2 is a straightforward action game, but if it's played in slow motion, it becomes an extremely tactical puzzle game. The author of this movie uses several tactics that are difficult to understand if one is watching the movie at full speed. These include setting up chain reactions and clearing up the end of the level before even reaching it. To get a better grasp of the techniques used, read the author's comments.

If you are having trouble playing the .SMV file correctly without desynchs, check the author's instructions on how to view it at the submission page.

Disappointed with slow paced movies that may be good but just move too slowly?

Look no further, nitsuja in this extremely high-speed run demonstrates how to break the sound barrier and why Sonic is the fastest character in the video game universe.

The average character movement speed in this movie is probably the highest of all the movies on this site.

This movie doesn't collect any of the Chaos Emeralds, but does demonstrate almost every single move that Sonic is capable of in this game.

The Battle of Olympus (オリュンポスの戦い) is set in ancient Greece. A mortal man named Orpheus receives help from the gods and nymphs in his quest to save his lover Helene from Hades. People often compare this game with Zelda 2 because of its similar gameplay.

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 GameResources/NES/BattleOfOlympus.

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

In this run, adelikat picks up maximum speed upgrades and has fun with perfect reflexes, much like the previous movie. That is certainly something nice to do, because the game scrolls automatically and the player cannot affect the speed. However, the point of this movie is not just to beat this game as fast as possible, but rather to do all kinds of unpredictable and awe-inspiring things rarely seen in any TAS — without losing time. See for yourself.

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 are occasionally used to generate pseudorandom input while still avoiding death.

Also be sure to check out this movie being played back on an actual NES.

Mega Man 2 is a game that hardly needs any introduction. This movie plays Rockman 2, the Japanese version, which is essentially Mega Man 2 in difficult mode.

This new movie, played by Shinryuu, is about 8 seconds faster than the previous movie by Shinryuu and Bisqwit. The major timesaver in this movie is:

Other new tricks were also used.
Most of the techniques in this movie have been architected by Finalfighter and Morimoto.

See Rockman Tricks and the submission message for in-depth explanation and answers to various questions regarding this movie.

The original Castlevania is set in the year 1691. Simon Belmont must fight his way through the castle and destroy Count Dracula.

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 MSX version has been TASed as well!

There is also a run of this game which destroys as little as possible.

Gunstar Heroes (1993) is widely considered to be one of the best action games on the Sega Genesis, but, ironically, was commercially unsuccessful due to poor promotion. It features a variety of melee attacks, as well as 4 basic weapons which can be combined in pairs (making a total of 14 combinations) — all densely packed in a swift and explosion-heavy gameplay spanning over seven uniquely designed stages. The author takes special care to showcase all the moves the game is capable of, using every possible attack and having lots of fun playing around in autoscrolling sections.

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 encodes for this movie are 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.

arkiandruski has provided an audio commentary for this movie, available here. He watches his run's encode and speaks along, play back your own copy as you listen to him.

Samus' first adventure is retold in Metroid Zero Mission with extra storyline, extra items and on a system with a better graphics processor. This run completes the game with 100% item collection. At least as far as the end-of-game display is concerned.

In-game completion time is 42:28.

Surprise Super Mario Bros 3. improvement from nowhere!

Apparently, the team of adelikat, Deign, Cardboard and JXQ had been working some time on this movie, which improves the previous movie by some 5.5 seconds (no small feat at this point), due to a wide variety of different improvements discussed in the submission message.

And of course, a wadload of extra lives are again achieved in the mandatorily slow autoscrolling levels.

For those that still prefer to see 99+ lives, the authors have also put together an alternate run that sacrifices time in order to gain those extra lives.

This run played on a real NES.

Surprisingly fast bouncing around. The lack of spin-dash makes the strategy a bit different than the other Sonic runs, since it becomes a lot more important to preserve your momentum. However, this doesn't prevent the authors from achieving crazy velocities even with such a significant limitation.
Completed without collecting any emeralds.

This is the fourth run of this game, improving on the previous effort by almost two minutes.

Every second encode link leads to a camhacked version.

Legend of Zelda II glitched heavily.

Most of this run features Link racing across Hyrule so fast that the screen can't keep up, inexplicably warping between places that shouldn't be connected, and collecting just three items, one spell, and one sword technique needed to beat the final palace.

Dark Link, the final boss, takes the same amount of damage no matter what level attack you have. This is especially convenient for the author because he reaches Dark Link without ever leveling, or, indeed, even killing another monster.

This is a 29-second improvement to the author's previous movie due to a different route choice and better manipulation optimization. See the author's comments for details.

There is also additional audio commentary by the author available here.

On this site, we make perfect movies, and then we surpass them. Of course, if we can surpass them, they were not perfect in the first place, but who would have known?

When "perfection" is defined as "as fast as possible", it requires some sacrifices. Indeed, this movie sacrifices a lot in the playability of the game. Full of tricks to pass through walls, tricks to avoid mandatory battles, tricks to pass through enemies relatively unharmed, tricks to acquire weapon refills in little time — there is very little in this movie left that resembles normal playing. Even death is used as a viable playing strategy that saves time. All of the tricks are still performed by the means of mere controller input, even though portions of the input were calculated by a computer program (approximately 26 seconds in total).

This movie is a significant improvement of 9 seconds to the previous movie; consisting of many micro-optimizations and a few major ones, including a new trick or two in the Cutman stage.

Note: This movie works on both the US and Japanese versions.

Ludicrous-speed bouncing around. Completed without collecting any emeralds, with both Sonic and Tails controlled by the player.

This run takes everything you know about Sonic and Knuckles and turns it upside-down. It extensively uses the "scroll objects offscreen to pass through them" trick to zip and warp to places that shouldn't be reached, break bosses, and effectively skip entire stages.

It is worth noting that nitsuja did not directly participate in the creation of this movie; instead, upthorn incorporated newly discovered tricks in several stages and spliced them in for a total improvement of 49 seconds.

Super Mario World is a game which needs no introduction.

This movie beats the previous SMW movie by 2 seconds with little improvements in each stage. For details, read the author's comments.

See also: SMW 100% completion (96 exits) in 1:14:37 by bahamete, Kaizoman666 & Masterjun

The first quest completion time of this fast paced game got nearly cut as much as 2/3 thanks to Juste's ability to sink into walls when going at very high speed. Please, don't try this at home!

This is a 171-second improvement over zggzdydp's movie. Like in the previous movies, the author picked up an item to display those cool CRITICAL's for entertainment, at the cost of some time.

However, if you still think there is not enough zipping through walls, make sure to see the second quest completed in less than half a minute!