(Link to video)
Flash back to late 2012. A run of the Atari 2600 game Spider-Man was submitted to the site by NitroGenesis. It played through one stage, and slowly at that. Then adelikat beat it. Then I beat that. Then TehSeven beat that. Then I beat that again. Finally, that run was published. (I won the framewar, woohoo.) We now had a run of the Atari 2600 game Spider-Man published on the site, which still played through one stage. And everything was happy forever and ever.
However, I recently found that the subsequent stages are not in fact "it just repeat with different colors after the first level"[1]. In fact, the subsequent stages are different - they are longer and harder, with more and faster moving Green Goblins, taller towers, and stricter time limits. The first thing that clued me into this was pressing select on the console, which displayed 6 similarly looking but, upon playing those, not quite identical venues. The second thing that clued me in was actually playing the game for once, and discovering that the game indeed actually has a variety of levels, that are not just different by color.
We're not quite sure how this game got published in this stage, but it's most likely due to the fact that not a single person involved actually played the game, because really, the game is just awful.
Anyhow, this submission aims to correct our former mistake, and clears all 6 stages. I made sure this time around that that is actually all there is to the game; after the sixth stage, the game will just repeat the same stage over again. This is shown by the fact that the stage color doesn't change at all after clearing the sixth stage, and its layout remains the same as well.
So...enjoy the run that expands less than 20 seconds of bad game to just over three minutes of bad game, I guess.
[1] (Quote from adelikat)

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: BizHawk v1.6.1
  • Aims for fastest time
  • Actually clears every stage in the game

Stage by stage comments

Generally, each stage requires some fairly different strategies to go through them optimally. This is because the layout of each stage is different (even if it just consists of the same structures in similar patterns) and because of the Green Goblin(s) roaming the stages, which in each stage are in different positions, and have varying speeds. There's a lot of strategy involved with each route through each stage.

Stage 1

Copied from the published run. I didn't find any way to improve it.

Stage 2

Astute observation, which basically nobody did last time around, would make clear that this building is several times taller than the last. However, nobody noticed.

Stage 3

Apparently the Green Goblin cloned himself repeatedly, as there are like 3 of them on this stage. As if Spidey's life didn't already suck enough with just one of them.

Stage 4

My favorite stage. It is white.

Stage 5

That red bar at the bottom right of the screen is a timer. If it runs out, Spidey automatically falls down to his doom. I'm saying it here because goddamn that thing runs out fast from this stage on. You can refill it slightly by picking up bombs and abducting people, but goddamn.

Stage 6

The fun thing is that the first part of this building is actually shorter than the first part in the first stage (and any other stage). It also has less Green Goblins than some of the previous stages. It's still hard though, with the rapidly dwindling timer and Green Goblins on jet-engine hoverboards or something.

Thanks

The people I frame-warred with. Even though that was kind of a long time ago. Can't think of anyone else to thank for this run.
Random fun fact: this run, after the final stage jingle, ends with 1981 lag frames. That's just one less than the year it was released in.
Bonus: This alternate version of the run keeps on playing on through the game infinitely. (Also proves that after stage 6, the game keeps looping over stage 6 again). Requires BizHawk v1.4.1, or v1.7.0 and later.
Recommended screenshot:

feos: Rejecting Judging... Accepting this improvement to Vault.
Guga: ? Processing...

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #4299: Noxxa's A2600 Spider-Man in 03:04.04
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The thing that impresses me most about this game is that they implemented an accurate line-drawing algorithm for Spidey's webslinging. What I'm saying is, this game isn't very impressive. Anyway, uh, congrats for actually "finishing" it, I guess.
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This run goes to show the quality control we do at tasvideos these days. I bet what really happens is you need to find the secret key on stage 4 to access the rest of the game, but no one has figured that out yet.
Spikestuff
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The daily life of Spikestuff @ Uni. 8:58 Loaded up TASVideos' front page, saw 3 new runs. "Alright then." Skimmed the forums section. "Nothing interesting." 8:59 Returned to home screen. *A2600 Spider-Man* I was shocked. I'm lucky my lecturer did not notice what I was looking at. Bloody hell. Yes Vote.
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I'm glad you made a new run after finding out there were more actual levels in the game. I never got bored while watching this, so I'm going to vote Yes.
adelikat
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I voted no on entertainment. But I am glad this run was made, and thus fixing a big oversight we had with the current publication not "completing" the game.
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Noxxa
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Side note: the infinite run really does go on infinitely (at least, long enough for score to overflow and to go way past any threshold that could've possibly constituted something like a kill screen). Fun fact: you get an extra life at 10000 points, and this is the only extra life you'll get in the entire game. Even overflowing the score and reaching 10000 again doesn't award an extra life. The infinite TAS reaches this after about 17 minutes. Score can go up to 999990. If it reaches 1 million, it overflows back to 0. I made a screenshot of the maximum score shown below: (The "3 fps" is due to using frame advance at this point. For the course of the run, it actually was turboed at a whopping ~170 fps. That's still pretty slow for experiments like this.) It took exactly 1:03:50:18.70 (6005380 frames) to reach maximum score.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa <dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects. <Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits <adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
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Nice find. I vote “yes”, as it beats the whole game, unlike the predcessors.
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No Vote. This game sucks and I'm not really surprised noone actually played this game given how bad it is.
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This is remarkable by being the first boring TAS with grappling hook.
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I guess I should have mentioned about the other stages. I played a lot of this game back in those halcyon days. :) And despite the usual mockery, this is certainly not a bad game for the console.
negative_seven
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I agree with £e Nécroyeur. This is not such a bad game, and while it is just a longer version of the previous TAS, I enjoyed it. Yes vote.
Noxxa
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£e Nécroyeur wrote:
And despite the usual mockery, this is certainly not a bad game for the console.
TehSeven wrote:
I agree with £e Nécroyeur. This is not such a bad game
I agree, this game isn't really bad (although it isn't really that great either). It was just more fun to write "the usual mockery" in the submission text :)
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa <dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects. <Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits <adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
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Ha! It was also fun for me to post it in the Forum. :)
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haha so everybody got so bored with that game that we missed 5 stages and nobody noticed it... it's almost on par with anoobis shadow of the beast II run... oh good and rare memories... yes vote and thanks for the laugh
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So... what happens to the old movie? Is it just obsoleted or should it be retroactively rejected? I know this breaks the site's rules but this really is an exceptional case.
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thatguy wrote:
So... what happens to the old movie? Is it just obsoleted or should it be retroactively rejected? I know this breaks the site's rules but this really is an exceptional case.
There are some cases where a 1 loop TAS has been obsoleted by a 2 loop TAS or vice versa (I'm thinking of the super ghosts and ghouls style games)
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thatguy wrote:
So... what happens to the old movie? Is it just obsoleted or should it be retroactively rejected? I know this breaks the site's rules but this really is an exceptional case.
There is no such thing as retroactive rejection/obsoletion or unpublication on the site. For that reason, other runs like [516] SNES F-Zero "first track" by Saturn in 02:22.03 are still up despite being incomplete. I expect the old run to be obsoleted by this run (even though it is longer). That's the best way to 'correct' publications like this.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa <dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects. <Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits <adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Post subject: If you don't get it. It means I agree and here's 2 examples.
Spikestuff
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Mothrayas wrote:
I expect the old run to be obsoleted by this run (even though it is longer). That's the best way to 'correct' publications like this.
cough Punch-Out! cough Excitebike
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Well, there is a slight difference in that, in all the other examples people have given, the incomplete movies were not pretending to complete the game. Shouldn't the old Spiderman movie at least be labelled "first level" or something?
adelikat
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Labeling the previous publications as "first level" sounds like a good idea, so they aren't misleading at least. There is no precedent or code infrastructure to wipe a publication from history and restore it to a submission (and set to rejected). And even if there was, there are encodes, streaming sites, and archive.org to consider. A retroactive unpublish/reject would be a big effort and a huge precedent setter. I don't think this situation warrants it.
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Cool find. It's nice that you actually bothered to "fix" the old TAS instead of leaving it there for no one to obsolete. No vote however because the run is not entertaining.
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Post subject: Movie published
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [2595] A2600 Spider-Man by Noxxa in 03:04.04