Lost age is the sequel to the first Golden sun. It's a pretty typical RPG which takes inspiration from mythical things like Atlantis, alchemy and magic. It's got some pretty good music too.
I made this ridiculously long TAS a couple of years ago. I didn't use the "Retreat glitch" which allows you to pretty much skip all dungeons. It would probably save a couple of HOURS of time since the dungeons are so long. The ingame time of this run is 6:01.
You can't skip random encounters in this game. Sometimes I fight instead of running away because running away would take a longer time.
I use a glitch to "walk on lava" in the Magma Rock dungeon, but other than that I don't think there's any glitches used.
I use resets several times to warp from a dungeon back to a sanctum.
The vbm movie file has some desync issues. It worked nice when I had made the TAS, but later when I accidentally screwed up my computer and had to format my harddrive, the TAS was lost, and when I recovered it, I guess it got messed up somehow. But at least one user (badpotato) got it to work, and he made a mkv of it which you can download on the topic: Forum/Topics/8159
I also made some hex-editing which made it sync for me almost to the end.
Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 2227
Location: Georgia, USA
Wow, this is a record breaker. I'd be interested in watching this gradually, and I usually prefer watching from the .vbm itself since it takes up less space. So I have two questions:
1) Does this submission file actually play through to the end? (If it doesn't, we can't make encodes either...)
2) Could you provide a few savestates, so that we can watch it incrementally as opposed to leaving the emulator running for 6 hours?
Thanks!
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically.
Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.)
Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html)
Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature!
Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Oh my God, and I thought Breath of Fire was long.
I played it on 5x speed, the max my computer could handle. It synced fine for me until the end. I used VBA v23 svn217. Try deleting your vba settings file and it may sync.
Given the run's incredible length and the site's tradition to accept well-made runs of long RPG games, we certainly need different considerations to vote on this.
At first, I looked away from this submission because I didn't think 12k rerecords were enough to optimize a 6-hour movie. However, I must admit that, at least on fast-forward, it seemed well done. I liked how you used the last-sanctum trick to save time, and the walk-over-lava glitch near the end. Boss battles looked long, especially Doom Dragon, but I don't know how they could be shortened.
In general, the run resembled a good Let's Play, and the game is pretty well known and a good addition to the site.
I'm inclined to vote Yes, but I'll marathon it in real time in the weekend to give more constructive comments.
Anyway, congratulations for the longest TAS submitted (apart from Desert Bus...). I suggest that you clean the run tag and put the attribute "Forgoes time-saving glitches".
1) Does this submission file actually play through to the end? (If it doesn't, we can't make encodes either...)
For me it doesn't even go past the 'name entering screen' for some reason, but some get it to play to the end (I'll have to try what p4wn3r said, but I've tried pretty much everything). Badpotato made some save states for this, you can download them in the topic I linked to.
Can't get to sync. It writes a name like crazy and then writes AAAAAAAA... as the password, just to be told it doesn't work.
I tried with VBA20, 21, 22 and 23.
Nice to see someone else that got it synced. Now thinking about it, I got a desync with an another computer running with a 64bit operating system. So you might want to try it with a 32bit OS.
@mklip2001 if you can sync the movie about 20 seconds, you should be able to sync it all the way!
About the movie, very nice but still, I feel somewhat puzzled if this look like more as a "test run" or a "run". Thought, since the game is very long and require a lot of determination to go all the way, I'll yes vote on this if you plan to work on a subtitle commentary. This would be very appreciated :)
edith: could someone mirror my old encode, dropbox seem to dislike this:
Oops! (509)
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Hi everybody,
I'm pretty new to these forums, and I actually started tasing this game three days ago without even knowing, that a run was in progress, because I really wanted to see a run of this game on the site.
But I have to say, that this run is pretty unoptimized. I've only tased the very first part of the game so far, because I was playing around alot and stuff like that, but even until the second fight, my run is nearly 400 frames ahead, although this part is almost only dialogue.
That's mostly because of better running and menu scrolling.
I didn't watch the entire movie yet, but I think, planning is good and all, but execution is not really that good that it could be. Maybe the run should nonetheless be published, because I don't know, if I will actually finish my run and even if I do, it would take a long time to do so.
Oh, and if my english is bad, that's because I use a translator for most of my english text :P
Edit: I just looked at my run again, and I'm actually over 500 frames ahead after the 2. fight.
Why No retreat glitch? If it can save time, then you should use it.
Also, 12357 rerecords for a 6 hour long movie seems low. Are you sure this is optimized?
Nice to see someone else that got it synced. Now thinking about it, I got a desync with an another computer running with a 64bit operating system. So you might want to try it with a 32bit OS.
I don't have a 32-bit OS. Unless there's nothing to do with the number of bits, I think I might give up and let someone who has a 32-bit OS to do the job.
Anyway, I'm seeing complaints about unoptimization. I don't know if it's a good idea to waste at least 20 hours on encoding this.
I intend to watch this over the weekend. I've done some work with this game, and was intending to TAS the first game at some point.
NinG wrote:
I actually started tasing this game three days ago
Do you intend to use the retreat glitch and the save retreat glitch as shown in my video here?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i6c6BfK_u0
I can show some more uses for this as they relate to the first game.
Honestly, I think TASing Golden Sun 1 is a much simpler run than The Lost Age. I think it makes more sense to learn things while TASing a shorter game before investing 6 hours in doing The Lost Age optimally.
We should move discussion to here: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8159
Boss battles looked long, especially Doom Dragon, but I don't know how they could be shortened.
the last boss battle could have been done a few seconds faster if i had killed my first party earlier so that i would have had time to use more of the summons of the other party. this last part was a little annoying to do because loading and saving states took like 1 second, maybe because of the large size of the vbm file or the save states, plus i did it on my old slower computer.
I'm inclined to vote Yes, but I'll marathon it in real time in the weekend to give more constructive comments.
thanks, that would be useful if i do another TAS of this in the future.
jlun2 wrote:
Also, 12357 rerecords for a 6 hour long movie seems low. Are you sure this is optimized?
lol... not 100% sure, but 99... nah, i know it's a little unoptimized, at least the execution, like walking in perfectly straight lines and doing stuff in menus, but the route and planning should be decent. in a long TAS like this, it's hard to find out the best route and strategies, so if there's a mistake somewhere, all that effort that it took to perfect it would have to be redone, so i didn't put that much time on the execution. perfect execution would only save maybe 10 minutes from this run (and it would be very time consuming), while a simple strat change could save 30 minutes (for example, kirkQQ mentioned sacred feathers, which could probably be used to save several minutes).
another reason for the low rerecord count is because there's so much text and walking. the text doesn't require any rerecords, just autofire (except if you really want to optimize it, you might have to do it frame by frame).
NinG wrote:
for some reason, i can't get this to sync either (i have a 32-bit OS btw). maybe there's something wrong with my rom. that would have been interesting to see, even though it's short. maybe you could post your progress on your youtube channel if you have one?
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these no-exp boss fights are quite impressive: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVgme8nOkq4
there's probably some useful strategies there that could be used in a TAS.
To quote GameFaqs:
Hard Mode
You need to have a ''Clear Data'' file and an empty file. Select ''New Game'' and after you transfer data or choose not to, then it will ask you if you want to play ''Easy Mode''. Select the ''No'' option and it will ask if you want to play ''Hard Mode''. Select ''Yes''. Hard Mode is like Regular mode except all enemies are a lot stronger.
Higher difficulties are preferable even if it's a NewGame+, right?
And what's this I hear about transfering data from the first Golden Sun?
Why, oh, why do I even <i>try</i> to understand my own species?
Higher difficulties are usually preferable, but it depends on how they're made harder. For example, if the additional difficulty just results in each fight taking longer as you must whittle away more hitpoints and stop more often to heal (i.e. fights are longer but do not have new strategies), then hard mode is not preferable. This often happens in beat-em-up games, for example.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Just another person thinking this nifty in general and waiting to view an encode. Giant runs that don't wind up skipping much of a game in order to satisfy the "blazing through it" criteria tend to be lots of fun to marathon in my experience. If some ultra-perfect run along the same lines comes later, ok, that'll be cool for then and this for now---not to mention possibly inspiring other TAsfolk.
