Tool-assisted movies (33)

In Bubble Bobble, two magical, bubble-blowing dinosaurs (Bub and Bob) fight through an evil, deep forest in order to rescue their kidnapped dinosaur friends.

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.

Note: Famtasia emulates the sound incorrectly for this game, resulting in harsh beeping during gameplay. The current encodes were edited to remove as much of the beeping as possible.

This track is known to be hard.

Selected notes from the author:
It is not a complete [walkthrough] but single track only.
It is for competition purpose.
The track is: Bordeaux/France as fast as possible and the total timeunits is 3'24"76.

Bonanza Bros. (1991) is a shooter-platform game that was first released in the arcades and then ported to the Sega Genesis, and can be played in a cooperative 2 player mode.

The plot involves the Bonanza Brothers: Robo and Mobo, who resemble the Blues Brothers, but are thieves who steal many treasures from banks, mansions and casinos.

In this run, the author steals as many treasures as he can and avoids the police by controlling the 2 players... at the same time!

Eggerland is a predecessor of the NES Adventures of Lolo games, and in certain ways, it has much more features than Adventures of Lolo 1. The author has explained the game (and the movie) very well, so we recommend reading his comments.
This movie abuses a couple of the game bugs in a surprising way.

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

Combatribes is a side-scrolling fighter without much side-scrolling, but all the more fighting. Mostly jumping on poor defenseless bad guys and repeatedly polishing the sidewalk with their faces.

In this game, the hero—Duke Geraden—travels to Darklarza Castle in order to rescue Princess Amoreena from the Dragon Master. Castle of Dragon has all the elements of a bad game: it's clumsy, it looks and sounds horrible, and it has been made almost impossible to beat by implementing a lot of random factors into it. Keeping these things in mind... Josh's movie is not far from perfect, but it will probably impress only hardcore fans of the game who know how hard it is to beat this game.

Lagoon is a low-tempo adventure game much like Zelda.

It is up to Nasir, Hero of Light, to save Lakeland from Zerah. Zerah is attempting to release the Evil Sprit and pollute all the water. This game is difficult due to the length of Nasir's sword.

We recommend reading the author's comments.

Rad is a slang term, short for radical. This movie shows what radical sports is when applied to car driving on NES.

Curiously, the game Rad Racer was made by Square, which is probably best known for its Final Fantasy game series. Quite a different game, this here...

If you decide to play this game, we recommend the Power Glove. It's so bad.

Some longlegged secret agent has to rescue his female partner who was kidnapped by Ku Klux Klan-wannabe terrorists led by some space alien wizard. Between the levels, the terrorists dance in front of a giant widescreen TV showing pictures of the woman in risqué positions and of their alien leader. (We wish we were making this up, but NES games can be pretty weird sometimes.)

This movie uses a password to get the hardest difficulty, thus not having to finish the game twice.

On the way to pick up his date, our robotic hero is thrown off course and must fight his way off an alien planet.

Played on the PAL (Europe) version of the game.

No damage is taken except due to a bug in the game where health is lost after the clock runs out due to time being converted into points.

This movie completes the 32 mountains of Ice Climber as fast as the author could do. It catches the bird in every bonus stage, which almost doubles the movie length.

It's not a very exciting movie as whole, but due to how hard the character is control, the game is difficult to beat by normal playing. This fact might make the movie a bit more interesting.

This movie is 2.5 minutes faster than the previous version by the same author.

A rather simple, unique classic game.

The hero of this game is a spy/agent who raids buildings infested with men in black. He collects important documents from various apartments/closets (which, for the sake of simplicity, are colored indicatively), and then leaves by his car to the next raid.

After raiding the last building, he goes to raid the same buildings once again, ad infinitum.

Even a small game like this isn't free of bugs. The unsafe elevators of this game offer a few maneuvers that should not be attempted in real life.

Four levels were played.

This movie here is one that makes little to no sense to someone who isn't familiar with the game. The main character can move very fast and the dark graphics don't help in figuring out what's going on. There is a lot more going on in this movie than meets the eye. For example, the player uses a secret warp involving combining the alchemy potions that are scattered throughout the levels.

For more information about what's going on in this game, we recommend reading the author's comments at the submission page.

NOTE: Don't be fooled by the fake credits after the final level. The game is not quite over yet.

Tri-Ace's Star Ocean 1 is an RPG game similar to Namco's Tales of Phantasia or Square's Final Fantasy VI.

Because it was only released in Japan, and the first (almost) complete fan translation of the game was finished in 2003, this game isn't well known in western countries. Moreover, it has only been supported by SNES emulators for a short time, due to a graphics compression chip used in the game to fit the huge amount of beautiful graphics into the 6 MB ROM chip.

This is a tool-assisted speedrun of the Japanese version (the rules of the TASvideos site forbid the use of fan-translations when making speedruns).

We are sorry for the broken speech in the game intro. This is an emulation glitch. (Yes, the game actually includes English dialogue, which coincidentally has an identical twin in Star Trek.)

For a guide of the strategy used in this run, please read the author's comments.

As usual with RPG runs, we recommend everyone to first play through this game before watching the movie. It will normally take a few days to complete the game once ― a few months to uncover all the features: secret characters and abilities and items. Beware, it's fun, and addictive.

The first of the series. F-Zero is a racing game of the future, with machines that reach more than 470 km/h top-speed.

This movie uses the Fire Stingray to surpass the world record time and best lap time on Mute City 1, the first stage.

This game is considered to be extremely hard, especially for a speedrun. One hit equals death, and your character moves very slowly. Some quotes about this game:

The only things keeping Toki alive during this movie are the buggy hit detection and about two metric tonnes of luck.

Quarth might be best described as a mix of a shooter and Tetris. You control a ship that moves horizontally at the bottom, and shoot incoming blocks or groups of blocks (adding tiles to them) to give them a rectangular shape and make them disappear. Each level scrolls at an increasing speed until you reach the end, and you lose if a block reaches the line floating above the ship.

This is a TAS of the game Deja Vu 2, the sequel to the popular Deja Vu for NES. This time, however, you do remember who you are, and you also remember that you owe some mobster a lot of money.

The goal in the game, however, is not to get the money - instead you're supposed to frame the mobsters. You do this by planting certain items in desks and stuff like that.

Overall, this movie is a lot like the other storybook TAS: super-fast menu navigation, a lot of route planning, and the general feeling of "What in the world is going on in this movie?"

Yo dude!

Skate or Die 2 is an NES game infamous for its unresponsive controls and other obvious problems. Luckily, bad programming can work to one's advantage in a project like this. Luck manipulation is also a big part of getting through this game quickly.

Skate straight!

Phantasy Star III is often considered to be the black sheep of the series, but is still a unique RPG on its own, featuring 3 generations and multiple paths through the game. However, this run breaks the plot halfway through by glitching past the second generation quickly.

Like in other RPG runs, luck has been manipulated for many things. Although random encounters can't be completely avoided, no damage is ever taken except from bosses, and most of the leveling is done in a final rush.

Read the author's comments for more details on luck manipulation and the path taken through the game.

Anyone up for some fishing?

In this TAS of Jaws, the attack level is upgraded to 3, which is the minimum required to kill Jaws in a single encounter. 30,000 points are needed to get the mini-sub which has double attack power. Because of this, a regular encounter is substituted for a Jaws encounter, so that Jaws can be hit for more points.

This movie is a 42.6 sec improvement over the previous one.

This GBC game is based off the popular television series Mission: Impossible.

Following the spirit of that series, this is a stealth-based game. Supposedly tricky tasks are to be performed covertly. But in this movie, stealth is clearly not one of the author's highest priorities. It's all running through guards, as if they weren't there. Yet the player does not die.

A simple platformer (similar to some Mario games) that illustrates damage abuse well. The player does not go out of the way to pick up items.

Selected quote from author: Introduction: Tom and Jerry is a kid’s cartoon where the mouse generally triumphs, with the cat being ignominiously defeated. The video game is a side scroller, with a lot of up-and-down motion as well. Jerry can take 4 hits before dying – the fifth kills him.

Dragon Warrior 3 completed quickly by using a bizarre glitch that allows the author to fill his inventory with useful items, manipulate his stats, and even add places to his return list! This allows most of the game to be skipped.

The author has left detailed comments explaining this glitch.

This game is a little similar to Bubble Bobble. Two players defeat hordes of enemies in fifty stages, only progressing when all enemies are gone. Enemies can either be turned into snowballs or can be killed by rolling a snowball on them. Unlike Bubble Bobble, though, there are boss fights every ten stages.

This is a 2 minute 48 second improvement over the previous movie. Like the previous movie it uses 2 players and does not take warps.

This movie is slower than the one-player version primarily because the slot machine bonus game after bosses takes longer with two players.

Enix decided to hop on the monster collection/battling bandwagon with Dragon Warrior Monsters, in which the main character, Terry, makes friends with various monsters from previous DW games so he can win the Starry Night Tournament and rescue his sister.

Here, DonamerDragon obliterates what is normally a many hours-long game through heavy luck manipulation.

Fatal Labyrinth is an early Genesis turn-based dungeon crawler. It consists of 30 floors/levels and a final battle.

The object of each floor is to reach the stairs that take you up to the next floor. Normally this involves lots of exploring, collecting equipment, and fighting with numerous monsters; but, this being a TAS, you don't see so much of that.

This is a long RPG-like adventure game with lots of witty dialog and the hero equipped with a yoyo.

This is a ~4 minute improvement to the previous movie by Sami O..

A major part of this shortening comes from a glitch that skips the last chapter of the game, ignoring certain plot details. If you want to see the actual ending, watch the previous movie.

In this first game in the popular Wonder Boy series, Tom-Tom is out to rescue his beloved girlfriend Tanya from the wicked monster Drancon. Our nearly naked hero must travel through a variety of different environments, using a hatchet and several powerups to defend himself against the dangerous enemies along the way. The game was later ported to the NES (with altered graphics and music) as Hudson's Adventure Island.

AngerFist runs, jumps, shoots, and shreds his way to Drancon, beating the game in a little under 45 minutes.

April 1st submissions rarely manage to gather overwhelmingly positive user feedback, but this movie is a pleasant exception.

Solitaire is actually a family of single-player card games. The particular form featured on the NES is called Klondike, and you can find it distributed with many desktop operating systems, such as Windows.

Amazingly, despite the game being almost as asexual as possible, mmbossman manages to cop a good feel of one of the Queens.

John Romero's Daikatana is set in 2455 AD, in a dystopian future brought on by the actions of a man named Kage Mishima, who now rules the earth. However, this future is actually an alternate timeline created by the mystical Daikatana sword, which allows the one who wields it to travel through time. A martial arts teacher, Hiro Miyamoto (no relation to Shigeru), journeys to recover the Daikatana and return the universe to its natural timeline.

Super Spy Hunter (1992) was originally released in Japan under the name Battle Formula (バトルフォーミュラ). The game has "become" a sequel to Spy Hunter, the arcade classic from 1983, already after its initial release — when the developer purchased the license from Midway.

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 Ninja Warriors Again (1994) is a single player adaptation of the popular beat 'em up arcade game The Ninja Warriors (1988). It allows the player to choose one of three robotic ninjas: Ninja, Kunoichi or Kamaitachi, to find and eliminate the evil tyrant Benglar. The characters play differently, but share some common controls. Each can attack, jump, grab the enemy, block attacks or unleash a special attack on the entire screen. This special attack charges up gradually and can be reset by being knocked to the ground.

This action packed TAS by Sp00ky features the female ninja, Kunoichi, on a mission to leave no crotch unpunched.