Tool-assisted movies (32)

Altered Beast is a game that looks like it could have been found in an arcade playing machine. In each level, the player must beat collect 3 powerups in order to transform into a powerful beast and fight the boss of that level. This game was one of the first games of the Sega Genesis system.

This might look like it's an auto-scrolling game, but in fact the scroll speed depends on if there are any enemies on screen. The player tries to kill all enemies as soon as possible to increase the scroll speed.

A classic hack'n'slash arcade type game, which sports ridable creatures and magic. The author uses luck manipulation to make enemies commit suicide by jumping off cliffs!

This movie is 2:40 faster than the previous version by CherryMay due to increased precision and all around efficiency.

This movie plays Excitebike really, really fast.

Times for each track were:

Information about the techniques used in this video are viewable in the author's submission.

A movie aiming for fastest possible completion of Donkey Kong Country without bothering to enter all the bonus rooms, now 39 seconds faster than previously. This movie also uses a secret warp to skip many levels.

Many new tricks have been found to make this movie faster, some of which are only subtle adjustments that may not be easy to notice. Read the author's comments at the submission page for more information.

Ninja Gaiden involves an ultra superior ninja, capable of defying the laws of physics by climbing through walls, making dogs explode with his sword, and all while beating bad guys in record time.

This run is about 10 seconds faster than the prior submission due to the ninja thinking more like a ninja.

This movie has an Atlas Map encode of Act 5-3, which shows the standard encode overlaid on a zoomed out map.

Yet another Sonic run by nitsuja. This time around the game doesn't allow running faster than the camera can follow. However it does allow team play constantly. This run is refreshing compared to other Sonic runs because of how different it is. Yet like the others, it does not collect the Chaos Emeralds.

It is recommended to read the author's novel to see why he chose to do many of the things he did.

Super fast bouncing around. Completed without collecting any emeralds, with Sonic and Tails (both controlled by the player).

If you like Genesis Sonic games but dislike level wrapping glitches, this is the TAS that you are looking for.

This movie has an Atlas Map encode of the Wing Fortress zone, which shows the standard encode overlaid on a zoomed out map.

This little-known Japanese wire-action platformer, with a very well-made rubber wire physics simulating engine, sports a schoolgirl setting out to rid the world of giant mutant fish.

The game is very easy to win, but very difficult to play (try it). This video demonstrates one of the fastest paths to the ending, including quite a few almost impossible maneuvers ― whether playing tool-assisted or not.

This video is a 7 seconds improvement to the previous version.

See the Umihara Kawase page for more information about this game, and the author's comments for more information about this movie.

The other installments of Castlevania on the GBA have extreme warping glitches, and this game is no exception. Using enemy platforms and selected soul abilities to disregard the boundaries of the game, pirate_sephiroth manages to cut off nearly half the time from the normal route. Moreover, the author proves glitch warping to be so effective that the usual teleporters are left completely ignored, and several parts of the castle have been skipped entirely.

You may notice some tiny slowdowns before getting a certain item or soul: those are done for the means of luck manipulation, which is very tough in this game. You may want to read the author's comments for more details.

Note: this run is played on hard mode where the previous movie by Atma left off. We do not usually accept movies beginning from a save. Please read our rules to see our reasons.

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.

In this run, JXQ makes good use of the various items available and performs many feats of wonder to practically fly or slide through the game, occasionally stopping to deliver a couple dozen of critical hits to a nearby boss. That said, it is the fastest paced GBA Castlevania run (despite being the longest of them all) — so if you like the series, this is the movie to watch.

However, if you still find this movie to be too long, make sure to see the second quest completed in less than half a minute!

Selected quotes from the author: Come follow on the adventure through a castle that contains no less than eighty clashing colors in each room! Be amazed as Juste Belmont, Simon's grandson, has to do the usual vampire hunting despite looking nothing like his grandfather (or a man at all). Question his motives when he takes time out of his rescue mission to decorate the basement he will soon destroy! Feel the pain as Juste struggles to understand that there actually are two castles!! (Ouch my brain!)

King's Bounty is a turn-based strategy game. The objective is to recover the Sceptre of Order. Map pieces that reveal the location of the sceptre are gained by defeating villains and finding special artifacts.

A normal play session would involve exploring four large continents and battling hundreds of creatures, but in this movie nobody gets killed and everyone is happy.

The input length is 10 seconds long, only 25 frames of which is actual gameplay!

Trying to strike a compromise with peace activists, the guy who destroys the world bare-chested has been ordered to stop an alien invasion while taking as few lives as possible. As such, this run completes Contra III: The Alien Wars by only killing the minimum number of enemies required to win the game. This requires much more careful dodging than the any% run does.

Our hero takes the dodging one step further by adding the limitation that he cannot shoot enemy projectiles. However, frustrated by the lack of carnage and by the political pressure, our hero lets off steam sometimes by shooting the scenery and doing entertaining dances and poses.

A Nintendo 64 installment to the Mortal Kombat series. This run aims for a fast and entertaining completion of the Master II destiny match.

Note: This movie is unofficially rated "PG-13" for having lots of blood and gibs. Viewer discretion is advised.

Super Metroid is a sequel to NES Metroid, with bigger and better graphics and music.

Due to how the game tracks time, the in-game completion time is 25 minutes, and 18% of items were collected. However, this movie aims for lowest real time as opposed to lowest in-game time. Compared to the predecessor movie, it accomplishes that 5 minutes and 39 seconds faster.

We also have a movie by Cpadolf which aims for in-game time, making use of the fact that the in-game timer is stopped during certain events. It's 4 seconds slower in real time, but completes the game in 23 minutes and 45 seconds by its timer. It is available only in emulator movie format.

After a major surgery, Samus's Power Suit has been reduced in appearance. To compensate, she decides to arm herself to the teeth with 250 missiles and more power bombs than she really needs. There's no such thing as overkill.

This run collects all 100 capacity increasing items for Samus's health, missiles and power bombs. The abilities recovered from the Core-X are not part of this number.

In-game completion time is 0:57.

In accordance with standard procedure, Samus discarded all of the items she collected on previous adventures before embarking on this one. This run aims for 100% item collection in the fastest time.

Super Metroid has a wide variety of time-saving glitches to exploit, many of which are explained on the Super Metroid Tricks page.

The in-game completion time of this run is 00:37:54, but since game timers have never really been good at rounding things up, it is shown as 00:37 after the game has been completed.

If you prefer to watch the fastest completion without getting all the items, check out Super Metroid in 38:41 by Taco & Kriole.

The first streaming YouTube link leads to a high definition encode without input display. There is a second video encode that shows the gamepad input over the game video. The author has hidden some secret messages in it that might be interesting to see!

Nathan Graves is a vampire hunter trying to save his master, Morris, from the clutches of Dracula. Normally this would require collecting lots of different items as well as hours of leveling, but Cardboard proves collectible cards passé by gathering almost none of the cards required for spells and blazing through the game at warp speed without regard to levels or his own safety.

This movie is an 11 second improvement over the author's previous movie by skipping two more save rooms, heavier item abuse, and other minor changes.

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 warp to places that shouldn't be reached, break bosses, and effectively skip entire stages.

Approximately 65 seconds of in-game time are saved in this run of Sonic 3. For details about what's changed, we recommend reading the author's comments of this movie.

The downloadable encodes in the second set use a camhack, which attempts to always keep Sonic onscreen and puts HD sprites on top of the background to make the TAS look even better.

NINJA外伝2 — The Dark Sword of Chaos, now completed about 4 seconds faster than the previous version by the same author, due to lots of small optimizations throughout every level.

The shadow clones are a unique gameplay element not seen elsewhere in the series, but in this movie they are used mainly to make extremely short work of bosses and entertain the viewer immediately afterwards.

The game has a rich plot with lots of cutscenes. Because of this, the author has also supplied the "story" version of the movie, which exhibits the same gameplay but includes all the cutscenes skipped by pressing start (which sum up to about 3/4 of the entire movie). It can be obtained here.
A good sense of humor is strongly advised to note the irony present in some of the later dialogues between characters.

This game, aka. Probotector II Return of the Evil Forces, is, implicitly, Contra 2. The guy who has an infinite supply of ammo and who destroys worlds bare-chested is back!

There is also a one-player run of this game.

Vectorman (1995) is one of the later games for Genesis; it sports multiple gameplay modes, pre-rendered 3D models and some very nice visual effects.

According to its plot, the Earth's population decided they have polluted it enough, and migrated elsewhere, leaving robots made of orbs ("orbots") behind to clean up the mess. One of the higher level orbots gets his head accidentally attached to a nuclear warhead, goes insane and usurps total control over all mechanical beings left on the planet. This is the state the main hero, orbot Vectorman, finds it in after returning from one of his garbage discharging missions.

There have been multiple attempts at TASing this game, yet this is the first one to get published.

Metroid: Zero Mission is a retelling of the original Metroid's story with a couple of new plot twists and updated gameplay.

This movie is a long-awaited improvement to the 1st GBA TAS by BoltR. Much of the almost 3 minute improvement came from a different route (Kraid was fought before Ridley), increased precision, the lack of emulator lag*, and other tricks explained in the author's comments.

The in-game clear time is 0:21:39. The item collection rate is 22%.

* — The previous version was done before lag reduction was programmed into VisualBoy Advance, so the movie times aren't directly comparable.

This is the any% TAS of Donkey Kong Country 2. The movie aims for overall fastest completion and doesn't give a flying banana about bonus rooms. Warp barrels are used whenever possible, meaning a large part of almost every stage in the first two worlds is skipped.

This is a huge improvement over the previous movie (5 minutes and 6.33 seconds to be exact) thanks to greatly increased precision and a multitude of new tricks, all of which are explained in detail in the author's lengthy comments. The author claims this movie took him a year to produce.

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.

This is a really, really fast TAS through Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance played with Maxim who is only available after the game is beaten once. Most of the game is glitched through by being stuck in different walls, so it's hard to explain what happened in this; see it for yourself.

This is a 124 frame improvement over Comicalflop's previous movie.

Note: This movie starts where the main quest movie left off. We do not usually accept movies beginning from a save. Please read our rules to see our reasons.

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.

Metroid II: Return of Samus is the second game in the Metroid series, taking place immediately after the events of the NES Metroid. Samus arrives at the planet SR388 to exterminate all metroids and eventually succeeds.

This movie by Cardboard puts the Spring Ball and Spider Ball to great use to compensate for the lack of items, and achieves victory in the shortest time possible.

This is a 69 second improvement over the author's previous movie. The in-game time is 43 minutes.

Note: This movie does not use secret worlds, also known as "the select glitch".

This game has a lot of bosses, to say the least. Because the author speeds through levels so quickly, the amount of time spent fighting bosses is actually greater than the amount of time completing the level in order to reach them.

This is a 7 minute 38 second improvement over the previous movie. Much of this improvement is simply due to defeating bosses more quickly. The author has left detailed comments about these improvements.

Arkanoid (1987) strongly resembles the arcade game Breakout (1976). In Arkanoid, the paddle is actually a spaceship, and the bricks are space walls. The goal of the game is to break through the space walls and defeat the villainous Doh in order to escape from the space labyrinth.

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.

This movie has a full Atlas Map encode, which shows the standard encode overlaid on a zoomed out map.

This is Metroid II: Return of Samus completed with all the items collected. Being truthful to the original Metroid values, the game holds many items cleverly hidden, so finding all of them is not an easy task.

That being said, Metroid II doesn't keep track of the collected items' percentage. Moreover, the game has two excessive Energy tanks and an additional copy of each beam. It's been agreed that the author should take all the E-tanks, and at least one copy of each beam. However, due to the apparent linearity of this game, collecting so many additional items doesn't make the movie dramatically slower.

This movie is nearly 6 minutes faster than Alter's previous movie due to better precision, faster Metroid fights, and missile planning.

Note: This movie does not use secret worlds, also known as "select glitch".

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.