(Link to video)
Submission Text Full Submission Page
"Unlike most 2D Mario games, Super Mario Bros. Special didn't have any warps, and this was faithfully kept in this romhack. This means that every level has to be completed." A quote from the movie page of the newly published TAS of this hack.
But that's not true. In fact, not every level has to be completed, because you can freely choose a starting world in the title screen.
The goal of my TAS is clear: fastest completion. The real any% run of this hack should start at World 8.
This is not cheating, because it's simply allowed by the hack creator (Frantik). He stated it in "Readme.txt": "There are two special features accessible from the main title screen: Press B to select the starting world..."
After saving the princess, you'll get the very same ending text & credits. I see no reason not to use it in an any% TAS.
Other than that, it's just an ordinary SMB hack TAS.
Frankly, it's not my favourite hack, and far from my favourite TAS. But to me, if this hack is allowed to be published on this site, it deserves a real any% run.

Suggested screenshot (frame #9175)


Samsara: Claiming for judging.
Samsara: Well, this was quite a ride.
HappyLee has been banned from TASVideos for 3 months for repeated disruptive behavior in this submission's thread. Given the author's arguments and accusations, I would like to summarize and explain the situation from a rules and judgement perspective.
First, I must clarify up front that the decision made for this run is mostly independent of HappyLee's temporary ban, in that the ban only affects one possible outcome, and only temporarily. While it is true that the run would have been cancelled or rejected had his ban been indefinite, the defining factor behind this decision is based entirely off of the nature of the TAS itself. On TASVideos, we occasionally receive submissions that require us to re-evaluate our MovieRules. This is in no way a bad thing, this is something that we want as staff. For myself especially as Senior Judge, I want nothing more than to ensure our rules are clear, readable, understandable, and malleable. If the community decides that there needs to be a change, there will be a change. This has been happening quite often lately, and I'm proud of the work we have all done as a community to make things easier and more reasonable, from the TAS authors who make runs that challenge the rules to the community members who discuss them and come to a consensus.
This was, in a way, one of those submissions. It found a weakness in the rules, and that weakness was corrected. However, unlike other submissions that lead to edits of the rules, this one found a weakness of omission and not a weakness of complication. The usage of this form of level selection as a time saving technique has never been allowed on TASVideos, and in my opinion it's unlikely that it ever will be. I don't believe any speedrunning community, RTA included, would ever count skipping 87.5% of a game through a level selection system as a legitimate strategy for an any% speedrun. Keep in mind, however, that this is an opinion and not a firm statement. There is a possibility the overall community's thoughts on this could change in the future, and we will change accordingly to fit the desires of the community.
That being said, there are ways in which this run could have been treated differently, and I'd like to go over three of the more notable ones.
The first is that this could be considered an individual level TAS. These are normally not allowed as they are incomplete runs, but we have accepted them in the past, whether it was because of the site's past focus on pure entertainment showcases, the game presenting itself as disconnected levels or level sets or, um, through a former staff member's flagrant abuse of power. That last one should never have happened and will never happen again, but I feel it should be mentioned for accountability purposes and to illustrate that individual level TASes have been frowned upon since the very beginning of the site.
In cases where we accept individual level TASes, we have a clause in the rules that handles how to treat these runs, namely that they will always be obsoleted by full game runs of their respective games, due to what we call "full content overlap". That is, the entirety of an individual level run will be contained in a full game run, so there is no need to have both published alongside each other. Were someone to create and submit a full run of Biker Mice From Mars, it would obsolete the "final round" TAS linked above. For this run, though, the full game run already exists and has been published. so even if we determined this run to be a valid individual level run, we still cannot accept it. Of course, since this is an SMB1 ROM hack, it is following SMB1's presentation of a long series of connected stages, and as such any usage of the title screen level select is explicitly skipping required content. This is confirmed further by the published run's statement that there are no warp zones, meaning all worlds and levels are normally required to be played. In short, we have to rule out this run being acceptable as an individual level.
Another possibility is that the input itself could be salvageable outside of being published. If this is a strict improvement to the published run's World 8, perhaps the two runs could be spliced together as a compromise solution. This presents a (thankfully) much simpler to describe set of problems, namely that this run and the published run cannot be adequately compared. Any improvement that this run contains would need to be recontextualized in the full game run, as conditions between the two could be completely different due to the level select. Notably, the full game run is fully powered up through World 8 while this run remains small Mario, which leads to this run actually being slower overall as it needs to wait for a piranha plant in 8-4 that the full game run can just kill, so there's no real compromise solution here either.
The final possibility is to accept the run as a new branch altogether, putting it in Alternative or Playground. Alternative is clearly ruled out by the community reaction, with the run receiving a wealth of No votes. PG, on the other hand, was quite literally made to support runs like this. There is a major problem with this option, though: The run was submitted as an any% run of the hack. As such, without any changes, it does not qualify for Playground. Placing it there would require us to change the run and treat it as something else. Not only is this going against HappyLee's original intention for the run, but given his temporary ban, he is unable to make any statements regarding how the run is presented. We should not, under any circumstances, make any changes to an author's work without their explicit consent, so as of right now we will continue to treat this run as HappyLee submitted it, which means it cannot currently be placed in Playground. However, it is still an option for the future, once HappyLee returns and is able to publicly consent to it.
I believe that's everything I would like to address. If anyone has any questions about how this submission was handled from a judgement and rules perspective, feel free to ask me directly. If need be, I will continue to update this judgement with further notes and clarifications to ensure that my thoughts and actions are understood and not misinterpreted.

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GMP
He/Him
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I think a dumb way of putting this would be that the run is "true ending" but not "true starting"
Player (50)
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I think when HappyLee brought up the true ending, he was referring to the fact that The Mystery of Luigi and Extra Mario Bros have two endings.
DJ Incendration Believe in Michael Girard and every speedrunner and TASer!
Αsumeh
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DJ Incendration wrote:
I think when HappyLee brought up the true ending, he was referring to the fact that The Mystery of Luigi and Extra Mario Bros have two endings.
True, but as far as I know, there is only one ending, and that is achieved when you complete the last level of the hack, World 8-4. I doubt there is a unique second quest (thus, no second ending) after initially completing the game. I say "unique second quest" because, in the original Super Mario Bros., this "new quest" is merely faster enemies, World 5-3+ difficulty increases, and Buzzy Beetles replacing Goombas (in case anyone isn't aware yet). While I've been reading through the discussion, there have actually been two other questions on my mind.
  • What was the creator's (frantik) thought process when he included the World Select from Power On? I understand that the submission's description states that the creator has allowed this feature, but I feel that it is not quite clear why specifically he allowed it.
  • Will we ever have an emulator that can TAS games like Super Mario Bros. Special sometime soon?
Regardless, I still agree with the fact that the World Select is a known "password skip" (whatever you want to call it), despite HappyLee's attempts to defend the fact that it isn't and is still technically allowed. Personally, I feel like he should've known better; maybe if he could find improvements (if any) in specific points from the "all levels" run, he would've had a better run to submit. Even if his run was the first to be submitted, it still would've likely been rejected or, if published, would be obsoleted later by said run. Hopefully, though, there are still plenty of other ROM hacks that he could try in the meantime.
I'm Asumeh, semi-expert SMB1 TASer. :) Check out some of the TASes I don't submit/upload to TASVideos on my YouTube channel, if you'd like: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyDD727I6LYNJTPEKCzauCw In progress: - Record my older TASes (excluding any obsolete TASes) and upload to YouTube; other than that, nothing at the moment.
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Αsumeh wrote:
Will we ever have an emulator that can TAS games like Super Mario Bros. Special sometime soon?
If it works in https://github.com/TASEmulators/NP2kai it can be TASed through libTAS https://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources/NekoProject2
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
fsvgm777
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feos wrote:
Αsumeh wrote:
Will we ever have an emulator that can TAS games like Super Mario Bros. Special sometime soon?
If it works in https://github.com/TASEmulators/NP2kai it can be TASed through libTAS https://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources/NekoProject2
It wasn't released for the PC-98, though, but on the PC-88 and the Sharp X1. So it wouldn't run in NP2kai at all, I don't think. EDIT: Or maybe it caaaaaaaan? Apparently, the PC-98 has backwards compatibility with the PC-88.
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Memory
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So I have a lot to address so there will be multiple posts. I have been a bit busy with work lately so I haven't had much time to respond to things. Two things will be addressed in this post, the full rationale behind the HappyLee ban will be discussed in another post probably done tomorrow. First off, it has come to our attention, albeit indirectly that HappyLee's alt account was created to continue pm conversation with feos. I realize that the methods of contacting staff while banned aren't exactly readily apparent at the moment so I'm going to revert the proposed unban timeline to the initial 3 months. feos has gotten in contact with happylee outside of the site. Secondly, it might not have been immediately apparent what we meant by "this is not a new rule". In 2021 Samsara started work on a complete overhaul of the movie rules. They had become long and bloated. Through collaborative work, a new rules write up was presented by the end of 2021 and was accepted as the new tasvideos rules. However, a copy of the old rules was kept in case something was overlooked or was in fact more pertinent to users than we realized. When this submission occurred we realized that an extremely crucial section was missing from the new rules: Movie Must Play The Game From The Beginning This section says "Giving yourself a headstart is not allowed. The game must start from a common starting point, which is the very beginning." Of course not all methods of giving yourself a headstart were listed but any method of giving yourself a headstart was blanket banned by this passage. When this submission came up, it was realized that we were missing this passage so we attempted to band-aid fix it. This isn't a new rule, it's an old rule that wasn't explicitly mentioned in the newest revision. I personally discussed with Samsara addressing the rule to achieve the coverage we used to have. If you take this literally, it is adding a rule that wasn't present at the time of submission, but the staff team has to be focused on the bigger picture. Asking the whole community for confirmation on every single clarification would be unreasonably slow, so I see no need to restrict in such a manner. The next post I make will go into the full ban rationale, expect that tomorrow as I am a bit tired.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
TASVideosGrue
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om, nom, nom... crunchy!
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Thank goodness, the ban has been lowered to the original time. However, even 3 months is too much. He was trying to tell the truth about what happened in the thread, saying who said certain things. This was not meant as an attack on anyone. He was not trying to be disruptive; he was trying to address the omission in the rules.
DJ Incendration Believe in Michael Girard and every speedrunner and TASer!
TiKevin83
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DJ Incendration wrote:
Thank goodness, the ban has been lowered to the original time. However, even 3 months is too much. He was trying to tell the truth about what happened in the thread, saying who said certain things. This was not meant as an attack on anyone. He was not trying to be disruptive; he was trying to address the omission in the rules.
DJ, this is a formal warning: please stop attempting to debate bans with staff. Our moderators discuss and make ban decisions as a group and these decisions are not made lightly. Also, please exercise more caution when posting in general, your last post on an old top gear publication didn't make sense with any of the context I read in that thread.
Post subject: HL Unban and Brief Explanation
Samsara
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It has been 3 months, so HappyLee's ban has been lifted. This submission is Playground-eligible as a result, now that he is able to consent to that happening. I've explained this to a few people who've asked already, so I figured it was best to address it publicly: After some internal discussion, we decided that the "full rationale post" we were planning to make regarding HL's ban wasn't really necessary. The heat of the moment and the gravity of the situation at the time made us feel it was worth wrapping up in a bigger box with a bigger bow, but as time went on it sounded less and less like a good idea. At best, it would have just been a lot of words that all summed up to "he was disruptively making accusations towards senior staff and repeatedly ignored all warnings to stop", and at worst it would have kept the discussion alive to a point where it may not have been salvageable. Apologies to anyone who may have been waiting for this, and further apologies for not addressing it sooner! I'd like to ask that this post be the end of this particular discussion in this thread, and that any and all further posts stay on the topic of the submission itself. To clarify, I'm not intending to silence discussion of these events entirely, I just want this submission thread to finally be about the submission in case there's a consensus to move it over to Playground. Any questions about this can be directed to me, and I'll be happy to answer them.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | Cohost
warmCabin wrote:
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