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Golvellius is a classic Zelda-esque SMS game where you play as a young wanderer named Kelesis. He learns about the dying queen and ventures off into the Valley of Doom to look for a cure for the queen's disease. A wise woman sees the boy's utter unpreparedness and fits the bill of the "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this!" role. Take Kelesis on an adventure through platforming and autoscrolling "shmup" caves and a large valley littered with monsters and hobbit holes. Kill monsters for gold to pay off the greedy wise women who sell swords, bibles that magically augment your ability to carry gold, invincibility rings that don't make you invincible, magical boots, magic mirrors, and a handful of other items I don't get. Yeah, everything you need to make progress has to be bought, so there is quite a hefty amount of grinding in a casual run. A TAS on the other hand, not so much. I routed it to minimize that nonsense, meaning I also skip a lot of crap.
This run is only one item too many for a Low% run. I grab the Valley Sword after defeating Bachular because it allows me to do 3x damage to normal enemies and 2x to bosses. Due to the invincibility periods of enemies and bosses, this makes killing things more than 3x faster, so it's definitely worth the time. But due to the time required to grind for gold to buy other items, I only get what is absolutely necessary besides that. I could also get the Legendary sword, but since it isn't available until late and would require 50k of grinding (That's over twice as long as the longest grinding section), I skip it. Even with being fully refilled on gold when beating a boss, it's not really practical to put it in the TAS route.
A few mechanics to note about this game is that enemies have an invulnerable period (really more like a secondary HP that isn't affected by sword power) after taking damage, however, enemies will be stunned as long as the sword is touching them. You can hold your sword out almost long enough to do 3 damage. I assure you that even when you don't hear the damage sound, I am doing something of effect with nearly every swing of the sword. On the overworld, you are restricted to moving on the 8x8 grid, though you can move on any pixel as well as diagonally in the boss rooms, making bosses easier to work with than overworld grinding. Taking damage also causes you to be stunned for a moment. Also note that in the sidescroller caves, you cannot change your jumping height, making placement of jumps very important. A handful of jumps made in the run are frame perfect. When you take damage, you are knocked back about 3 tiles or until you hit a wall, in which case, you can begin to move forward again. You also cannot move horizontally while the sword is out unless you just took damage and have already touched a back wall.
I do not take damage very often, as it usually costs time rather than saving it.
I routed the game myself. There is still a little room for optimization, but really not much. You could save 30 seconds at the most by tweaking the route.
This run heavily manipulates RNG to get favorable spawns. It turns out to be a very manipulatable RNG- which is influenced by both the frame count and player 1 inputs. (I tried player 2, and it actually makes no difference, unfortunately.) There are quite a few places where I try several input sequences/combinations until I get a spawn I can work with. There are even instances where I manipulate the boss patterns (Especially the third boss).
I abuse only one noteworthy glitch that allows you to crouch and stab in midair in the sidescrolling caves. It saves a few frames, possibly up to a second throughout the run. The midair crouch also reduces how much knockback you suffer. I discovered this around the fourth dungeon, so that opens room for improvement (a few frames) in the first cave.
I used RAM watch. These are the watches I used for most of the run:
083E	Gold /10
012D	Sword Timer
0175	Enemy 1 / Boss HP
017F	Enemy 1 Invincibility Timer
0168	Enemy 1 Spawn Timer
0195	Enemy 2 HP
019F	Enemy 2 Invincibility Timer
0188	Enemy 2 Spawn Timer
01B5	Enemy 3 HP
01BF	Enemy 3 Invincibility Timer
01A8	Enemy 3 Spawn Timer
01D5	Enemy 4 HP
01DF	Enemy 4 Invincibility Timer
01C8	Enemy 4 Spawn Timer
01F5	Enemy 5 HP
01FF	Enemy 5 Invincibility Timer
01E8	Enemy 5 Spawn Timer
0215	Enemy 6 HP
021F	Enemy 6 Invincibility Timer
0208	Enemy 6 Spawn Timer
The gold counter is rather interesting, because, rather than just storing the value like you would expect it, it treats each hex digit as a decimal digit. There are a handful of other values that do this as well, but they weren't important in making the run.
This is actually my second attempt at a TAS of this game, and it's actually a couple minutes faster than my first attempt. My original attempt is quite sloppy, but you can watch it if you want.
This is the first run of this game on this site, so I'm not sure what the timing criteria would be. I suggest calling time either at the finishing blow (frame 145674) or the blackout shortly after (frame 146004), as I'm still in control for a brief period after landing said hit.
ars4326: (replaced movie file with version that ends on last decisive input) Judging!
ars4326: Hello, Beefster09. As you stated in the submission text, it's good that you went ahead and made a second pass through this game before deciding to submit. However, as others in the thread have observed and pointed out, there are still places in the run where significant time can be saved. I went ahead and made a brief test WIP to show this (linked in the thread). In addition, I listed out how I saved time in spots and also included a couple of useful tricks found, in the process.
All in all, you've done well so far in studying this game and making strides in uncovering improvements. I hope you'll continue to work on this and create a tighter run worthy of publication. Keep at it!
Rejecting due to sub-optimality.

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #4806: Beefster's SMS Golvellius in 40:31.00
Samsara
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TAS timing ends when no further input is needed to reach the credits of the game. If you provide a movie file that ends on the final input, someone can replace the submission file for you. If you don't provide that movie file, someone else will. Why BizHawk 1.5.3? That release is nearly two years old.
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warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
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I have a strong feeling you can improve your final boss battle.
Nitrogenesis wrote:
Guys I come from the DidyKnogRacist communite, and you are all wrong, tihs is the run of the mileniun and everyone who says otherwise dosnt know any bater! I found this run vary ease to masturbate too!!!! Don't fuck with me, I know this game so that mean I'm always right!StupedfackincommunityTASVideoz!!!!!!
Arc wrote:
I enjoyed this movie in which hands firmly gripping a shaft lead to balls deep in multiple holes.
natt wrote:
I don't want to get involved in this discussion, but as a point of fact C# is literally the first goddamn thing on that fucking page you linked did you even fucking read it
Cooljay wrote:
Mayor Haggar and Cody are such nice people for the community. Metro City's hospitals reached an all time new record of incoming patients due to their great efforts :P
Spikestuff
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Stares at Samsara Yea, I'll be back in a bit. Back. 145671 - 40:27.85 Okay time for a simple explanation. Your input is lazy you hold down for way, way longer than you need to when attacking, your movement is sloppy. Heck, now don't get me wrong 'cause I don't know much on the game, I think you can get this boss killed on the very opening. This most likely would include all the other bosses. This is further backed by the laziness by the amount of re-records you put in this game.
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Hi Beefster09, always nice to see submissions from new players!
Spikestuff wrote:
laziness
You know nothing about the player, so please don't make assumptions about laziness. Maybe the run is made by someone suffering from dwarfism? Maybe it spent 1000 hours on the run with its chubby fingers or tentacles? That would not be lazy.
Post subject: Re: #4806: Beefster09's SMS Golvellius in 43:41.53
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TASVideoAgent wrote:
There is still a little room for optimization, but really not much. You could save 30 seconds at the most by tweaking the route.
If the movie is known to be suboptimal, it'll be rejected.
Post subject: Re: #4806: Beefster09's SMS Golvellius in 43:41.53
mklip2001
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TheRealThingy wrote:
TASVideoAgent wrote:
There is still a little room for optimization, but really not much. You could save 30 seconds at the most by tweaking the route.
If the movie is known to be suboptimal, it'll be rejected.
Not always. The judges tend to be pretty reasonable about missing fixes that cannot be easily edited into the movie file. For example, if you fix one second's worth of work in the first few minutes of the movie, but that throws off the randomness for the rest of the game, then you can't change that early work without effectively redoing the whole movie. Usually, if the improvements are small, judges can forgive that. (See the recent Kid Dracula movie, for instance.) Now, I haven't seen this movie yet, so I don't know optimized it is. But yeah, it's not likely that 3000 rerecords is enough to really optimize a platforming game with a 40+ minute movie. Beefster, I'm glad to see this isn't your first attempt and you've already made some serious improvements to your first run, but there may still be more to go. Hopefully we can keep the criticism constructive here. Anyway, I won't be able to watch this for a little while. I'll put up some comments after I do. In the meantime, keep on TASing!
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.
Post subject: Re: #4806: Beefster09's SMS Golvellius in 43:41.53
Joined: 3/9/2009
Posts: 530
mklip2001 wrote:
TheRealThingy wrote:
TASVideoAgent wrote:
There is still a little room for optimization, but really not much. You could save 30 seconds at the most by tweaking the route.
If the movie is known to be suboptimal, it'll be rejected.
Not always. The judges tend to be pretty reasonable about missing fixes that cannot be easily edited into the movie file. For example, if you fix one second's worth of work in the first few minutes of the movie, but that throws off the randomness for the rest of the game, then you can't change that early work without effectively redoing the whole movie. Usually, if the improvements are small, judges can forgive that. (See the recent Kid Dracula movie, for instance.)
And sometimes, they'll accept things even when they're demonstrably majorly suboptimal as long as the topic doesn't get enough attention. At this point though, we're past that mark.
Beefster
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Spikestuff wrote:
Your input is lazy you hold down for way, way longer than you need to when attacking, your movement is sloppy.
This is actually intentional. The way damage works makes this necessary. There is an invincibility counter that drains only while the sword is touching. This is actually the fastest way to do damage. And the movement looks sloppy mainly because you're stuck to the 8x8 grid. It's very difficult to work with. That, and sometimes the weird movement is used to manipulate RNG. EDIT: also note that I'm not sure if the route change I'm thinking of would actually save time. AFAIK, other than a few minor things here and there, there is very little room for optimization. More meticulous RNG manipulation might help, though not likely by much.
Post subject: Re: #4806: Beefster09's SMS Golvellius in 43:41.53
NitroGenesis
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Tangent wrote:
mklip2001 wrote:
TheRealThingy wrote:
TASVideoAgent wrote:
There is still a little room for optimization, but really not much. You could save 30 seconds at the most by tweaking the route.
If the movie is known to be suboptimal, it'll be rejected.
Not always. The judges tend to be pretty reasonable about missing fixes that cannot be easily edited into the movie file. For example, if you fix one second's worth of work in the first few minutes of the movie, but that throws off the randomness for the rest of the game, then you can't change that early work without effectively redoing the whole movie. Usually, if the improvements are small, judges can forgive that. (See the recent Kid Dracula movie, for instance.)
And sometimes, they'll accept things even when they're demonstrably majorly suboptimal as long as the topic doesn't get enough attention. At this point though, we're past that mark.
? Examples?
YoungJ1997lol wrote:
Normally i would say Yes, but thennI thought "its not the same hack" so ill stick with meh.
mklip2001
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NitroGenesis: Not quite the same thing, but the first publication of New Super Mario Bros for the DS was noticeably suboptimal, but it got published anyway largely to put out the first DS publication and publicize the DS movies on the site. A more relevant example would be the NES Super Turrican movie by Luke, which had a major improvement suggestion by Bisqwit completely overlooked at the time. The movie was still published since it was still an improvement and because the author had gone AWOL. Alyosha is currently looking to modernize that run with the new tricks known for that game and better optimization. I would say, though, that it's more often the case that potentially good movies are killed off in the forums, and then interest dies down on improving them. For instance, the run for Legend of Toki is horribly out of date, and Diman made an improvement that was better but not good enough, but nobody's attempted a submission since Diman's movie got rejected.
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.
Samsara
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Is there any reason you kill all the enemies along your path in the very first sidescroller area? There's no mention of it in the submission text and it looks like a lot of time can be saved by just skipping them. The sidescroller segments in general seem like they could use a bit more work as well, though what I'm seeing as suboptimality might just be the game itself. Your boss strategies seem inconsistent: Sometimes you do single hits and other times you hold out the sword to do 2 hits in one swing. Are they both the same speed? You seem like you know the game well, and it's great that you submitted your second effort instead of your first, but I'd still recommend giving it another shot just in case. You mention yourself that 30 seconds can possibly be saved, which is pretty significant even for a longer run like this. I'd also recommend interacting with the forum a bit more instead of posting finished runs: Post your works-in-progress, explain what you're doing and why you're doing it, ask people for advice if need be. For a first-time TASer, it's still a good effort! It just needs that extra push to be great. Also you can save a frame on the title screen by pressing 1 > 2 instead of 1 > blank > 1, but that's just me nitpicking.
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warmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Post subject: Re: #4806: Beefster09's SMS Golvellius in 43:41.53
Joined: 3/9/2009
Posts: 530
NitroGenesis wrote:
? Examples?
Besides Super Turricane ( http://tasvideos.org/3460S.html ), a few others surprised me when they were accepted. http://tasvideos.org/4012S.html Tons of suboptimal parts and a totally different strategy posted, but the author didn't want to do it, and then it was almost immediately accepted (to the vault) after multiple resubmissions despite every previous one needing improvement. http://tasvideos.org/3910S.html Tons of suboptimal parts, and slower than a Japanese TAS on both single player and a harder difficulty in tons of places.
Beefster
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Samsara wrote:
Is there any reason you kill all the enemies along your path in the very first sidescroller area? There's no mention of it in the submission text and it looks like a lot of time can be saved by just skipping them. The sidescroller segments in general seem like they could use a bit more work as well, though what I'm seeing as suboptimality might just be the game itself. Your boss strategies seem inconsistent: Sometimes you do single hits and other times you hold out the sword to do 2 hits in one swing. Are they both the same speed?
For the optimal gold route, I need to kill 180G worth of enemies in that cave- and that's about as many as are conveniently in the way. There is a possibility of getting less and just killing an extra enemy or two in the overworld, though due to spawning times, that is not likely to save time. I suppose I could try to figure that out, as you can manipulate the spawn timers. Getting the right type of spawns can be difficult, especially since I couldn't find the RAM location that determined enemy spawn types. The blue worm thingies have 2 health, whereas the red snakes only have 1, so I have to hold the sword out longer (see my post on how damage works) to kill them.
You seem like you know the game well, and it's great that you submitted your second effort instead of your first, but I'd still recommend giving it another shot just in case. You mention yourself that 30 seconds can possibly be saved, which is pretty significant even for a longer run like this. I'd also recommend interacting with the forum a bit more instead of posting finished runs: Post your works-in-progress, explain what you're doing and why you're doing it, ask people for advice if need be. For a first-time TASer, it's still a good effort! It just needs that extra push to be great.
It's probably going to be a while before I make another attempt, but I suppose that's fair. It's just annoying when I discover how useful certain glitches are halfway through the run... I hope it gets accepted anyway since I didn't really think of the improvements until after it was too much of a pain to fix them, but I do plan on obsoleting it within the next 6-8 months, sooner if I can get BizHawk working on Linux, so it wouldn't be heartbreaking if it didn't make it. I will keep your advice in mind though. I'm not sure what game I'll TAS next or when that will happen, but I'll open it up to the boards when it does.
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At first glance it looks like there can be much better manipulation of enemies to farm gold in the overworld. There is just a lot of walking around and chasing after them, whereas with proper RNG manipulation you should be able to minimize this. It looks like you made a good effort to try to corral enemies together to kill multiples at a time, but not enough effort to actually control their movements to accomplish an optimal strategy. For instance, many enemies are usually left on each screen as you move to the next one, and sometimes you have to walk quite a distance to the edge of a screen after killing the last one. With better planning you should be able to kill more enemies closer to the edge of the screen and accomplish that in less time. If someone can prove that time can be saved this way, then I definitely think this should be rejected.
Beefster
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I could see how more detailed planning would help. I basically just went with the flow. RNG didn't need to be manipulated everywhere (and in many cases, it was just to make sure that no enemies were in the way), though it could be used a lot better in the extended grinding sections. I think at this point, that's where the biggest improvements could be made. Yeah, you can go ahead and reject it. I'll open up a WIP thread for this game and chip away at a superior run over the next few months. I suppose it takes more than a week to make a great TAS.
Samsara
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Beefster wrote:
I could see how more detailed planning would help. I basically just went with the flow. RNG didn't need to be manipulated everywhere (and in many cases, it was just to make sure that no enemies were in the way), though it could be used a lot better in the extended grinding sections. I think at this point, that's where the biggest improvements could be made. Yeah, you can go ahead and reject it. I'll open up a WIP thread for this game and chip away at a superior run over the next few months. I suppose it takes more than a week to make a great TAS.
To focus on the bolded part specifically: Yes, it often takes much longer than a week to make a great TAS, but it also depends on a lot of extra factors: The game, the knowledge of the TASer, and the TASer's efficiency can all play into how long it can take. The most important things here are that you're listening to constructive criticism and learning from what could be considered your "mistakes". That's an excellent attitude to have! I think the game has potential, despite some of the weirdness with it, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with for V3.
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ars4326
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I went ahead and updated the movie file with a version that ends on the last decisive input. This brings the official time to 40:31.0. I should have an official judgement made here in a couple of hours. edit: I did forget to mention that I got this to sync on the latest version of BizHawk (1.11). Hence, the reason why it's giving a different time. Sorry about that!
"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." - 1 Corinthians 2:9
Spikestuff
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ars4326 wrote:
This brings the official time to 40:31.0.
INCORRECT
Spikestuff wrote:
145671 - 40:27.85
Edit: This is probably because of a version differences between the two Hawks. I used 1.6 to access the bkm and ars used 1.11 which converted it to a .bk2
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om, nom, nom... om, nom, nom... nom nom
Post subject: Improved WIP to get you started.
ars4326
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Beefster, to get you started on your next pass through this, I made a brief WIP up to the point where you purchased the first money upgrade. It is about 266 frames faster. In particular, it would be helpful for you to observe a couple of things that I did to save more time, which includes the following: * In the first cave, I avoided trying to kill anything that either took more than 1 hit, or was simply out of the way. By the time you reach the overworld, those bees on the third screen net 100G per kill -- far more than any enemy encounter in the cave, and much quicker to farm, as well. * In addition to timing better jumps, I came across two useful frame-dependent tricks that can save additional time in certain spots. One is being able to jump off the absolute edge of a platform by waiting for a single frame, and then pressing 2 to jump immediately afterwards (this won't work if you're trying to move and jump at the same time, though). The second trick is being able to crouch in mid-air immediately after a sword attack. This was useful in taking out those breakaway blocks behind the giant snake sub-boss, for example. * Also, during dialogue screens in shops, I noticed it was slightly faster to keep the 1 button held down until all lines of dialogue appeared on screen. From here, you can press the 2 button after 4 or 5 frames to exit the dialogue screen (or advance to the next page, move the cursor to confirm a purchase, etc.). So all in all, I hope to see an improved run from you down the road :) I've done a few RPG runs in the past which took me at least a solid 4-6 weeks of work before they were good enough to submit. Just take your time and work towards steadily knocking things out. Posting your progress, and asking any questions you may have, in the forums is also a good idea.
"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." - 1 Corinthians 2:9
Beefster
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I've been working on improving my route and I actually found a couple of improvements already- just from moving differently between screens. The improvements so far are well above a second. Maybe 2. I'm also working on optimizing the farming route. I'm not sure how much faster it is yet, but it's at least a lot more efficient. Yeah... I'm going to start the WIP thread now.