This topic is for the purpose of discussing #996: Diman's NES Gradius in 13:15.15

Forewords: I haven't welcomed submissions for Gradius. Morimoto's Gradius movie does not aim for speed; it aims for style. Styles are hard to compare, and I don't want to get into that position. Looks like, Diman put me into that position anyway. Here goes. - In the eruptive mountain scene, I liked Morimoto's work more. Two points off Diman. - Boss1 fight wasn't anything special. - More weapons... that's may be a good thing. A point for Diman. - In level 2, Morimoto created diagonal holes that aren't actually holes at all, and demonstrated multiple times that he can go through them at will. Diman didn't do this. One point off Diman. - Level 2 preboss: The method of choosing what to shoot and in which order didn't make sense. It failed to impress. - Level 3 beginning: I liked Morimoto's style more. I understand Diman didn't want to copy him, but Diman didn't bring anything interesting to watch. A point off Diman. - Level 3: Not enough playing with danger. Enemies are neutralized before they can impress with difficulty, shots are avoided from far, with little motion. Two points off Diman. I stopped watching at this point. Diman's points: -5, unlikely to recover from that. My vote is no.

I remember Morimoto's movie especially from that mountain scene. That blew my mind. Diman's version was... boring... Also this movie's goals are pretty dumb. No from me.

Have to agree with Bisqwit here... I liked Morimoto's movie better, so I'm voting no. I do think it should be possible to obsolete Morimoto's movie.

I don't remember the old movie too well, but I did notice how he didn't use his super speed to travel through walls in the blue level. I did like how Diman at least picked up a shield at the end. If this idea was carried further, I think this would be loads more fun to watch. You can only upgrade speed so many times - why not get some missles or a different gun to show off the game's arsenal?

i agree with Bisqwit too... you can't compare Morimoto's movie to yours.. you should make a topic or ask someone about the games before you are making any TASes.. absolutely NO vote

Boring movie, Voting NO

Well, it's got one of the funniest "Sit there and beat the boss with no input" endings I've seen in a while...

I also have a "no" vote. None of the enemies are being played with. The player gets into no danger whatsoever, it just kills things. Not even 100% kills, just kills at random that don't add to the entertainment value. Morimoto's video kills every enemy that has a powerup and very, very few others. And he plays tag with all the other enemies, running circles around them or otherwise getting near them and showing off. It's much more fun to watch.

I watched the old run once, a long time ago, and I deleted the .avi, so I can't really compare. I won't vote. This run didn't entertain me much though. You evaded everything (how surprising!), but I didn't see anything special - like showing off interesting glitches, embedding messages into shootable walls, flying complex figures while dodging enemy fire... Quite often you just stood there until you were forced to move, and then just moved a few pixels - to entertain, you shouldn't just react, you should act. If you just react to enemy fire, it looks like the game is controlling you. You should make it look as if you were controlling the game. I liked the last boss though. :)

Morimoto's Gradius movie is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. He just flies around between the enemies over and over and over and over... after a minute or two it's like: okay, I get it. How many thousand times does he have to do it before this movie comes to an end? Show off a little and it's impressive; show off 100% of the time and it stops looking skillful. I can't watch the whole thing. It's just too painful; the urge to gouge out my eyes becomes too great. At least in this movie Diman mercifully kills the enemies quickly instead of torturing us by endlessly circling around them. At least I was able to watch the whole thing, but NES Gradius sure isn't R-Type. The weapons and levels are so unimaginative. Perhaps there isn't a way to make this game worth watching. Killing them quickly is definitely more entertaining than what we have now, though. I wonder if killing everthing as quickly as possible would be worth watching? Congratulations, Diman. Your run is 10 times more entertaining than Morimoto's. Hopeless as the cause may be, I'm voting Yes and hoping that your run will obsolete the current Chinese Water Torture run.

I kinda agree with hopper. I really don't know whether Diman's or Morimoto's movie is better (and it's been too long since I watched the latter one, anyway), but Gradius just isn't that interesting a game - at least not for a TAS run. That, coupled with the fact that the general consensus seems to be that in this particular case, style should take precedence over a faster time, makes it pretty impossible for me to vote anything but "meh" (which I'll take as "I have no idea whether it should be published or not really, but I want to see the poll results anyway" here :)). But I do want to say one thing - no matter what everyone thinks, I think Diman did invest time and effort, so I'd like to thanks for that, at least, and hope you'll do more runs in the future. It doesn't currently look like this one's gonna be published, but if you don't give up, I'm sure you'll see a run of yours published soon (presumably one for a less controversial game ^_~).

I think style + speed can coexist. It's just that both movies failed at it. I am voting no for this movie and Morimoto's movie.

I haven't watched the new one, but I agree with Phil that Morimoto's movie just isn't entertaining.

I haven't watched this movie yet, but so far, Morimoto's Movie is one of the most popular among everybody I have exposed to TASes. Even so, I agree that it should be improved, mostly because the "flying spaghetti monsters" part, but the new movie should keep the stunts. Another reason to improve it, is that it would obsolete another Famtasia movie.

i agree with Bisqwit too... you can't compare Morimoto's movie to yours.. you should make a topic or ask someone about the games before you are making any TASes.. absolutely NO vote

You do realise how rude you sound in your post, right? It's one thing to say that you think he could have done something differently. It's another to tell someone "you should do it like this and this." There is also the possibility to avoid writing that you "absolutely" vote "No". It's like this post is a mission to let everybody know how wrong and horrible this person is for not doing it the way you prefer. Easy, easy.. Andreas

i agree with Bisqwit too... you can't compare Morimoto's movie to yours.. you should make a topic or ask someone about the games before you are making any TASes.. absolutely NO vote

You do realise how rude you sound in your post, right? It's one thing to say that you think he could have done something differently. It's another to tell someone "you should do it like this and this." There is also the possibility to avoid writing that you "absolutely" vote "No". It's like this post is a mission to let everybody know how wrong and horrible this person is for not doing it the way you prefer. Easy, easy.. Andreas

Of course i didn't meant what i said i feel sorry now..but it would be good if Diman makes some topics or talks more usually in iRC/e-mail to avoid mistakes.. :)

Voted no too. I watched this yesterday and today the TAS from Morimoto. Morimoto runs looks much better then this one. The run is faster sure. But the movements looks not so good. By Morimoto it looks great and he show great tricks. This run show near nothing new, only the last Boss is interesting how you kill him without doing something, great that you can stop the movie so early. I know no other game in the moment where you can stop the movie before finish the last Boss. Sure Morimoto start the game later and some Bosses takes maybe to long. But its much more entertainent how he play the game. Play with the enemies. And he play it only for entertainment, not for fastest speed. Only a TAS which is as much entertainment as Morimoto and maybe faster should absolted the old one. But not this one here. I think its a great idea to play with the enemies. I would never know this without watching the TAS from Morimoto. Because I have think to do a Parodius TAS for GameBoy later maybe. Now I know its a bad idea when I would just kill all enemies as fast as possible. Its just to boring to watch later.

Something was better, something was worse… I'll vote "meh".

Voting NO: I watched morimoto's run followed by yours. Honestly, I think morimoto's movie is a "meh" at best by todays TAS standards. There are great moments, but it feels like it isn't well planned out. When you watch an excellent quality TAS is feels like the author is superhuman and has everything mapped out and knows exactly what he plans to do. This is not the case with morimoto's run. It feels like he is just "noodling around". Noodling around can be fun and all but certainly a better TAS could be made with better planning. Mainly what irritatined me was the starting & stopping motions common throughout. An author has an opportunity to push the dodgin enemies + fast motion to a point where it becomes some sort of visual art, transcending the video game itself. Morimoto had an opportunities to pursue this but failed to deliver. Also, he should have pushed for speed when he had the opportunity. That would make the run all the more impressive. Honestly, I fell Diman's run is worse than morimoto's run (but not by much). All my reasons are already mentioned by previous authors. But the general summary is that Diman's didn't push the speed & dodging to the extreme.

It's Gone

This run is technically faster than Morimoto's run. However, I do not believe that this run would even be considered were it not for the existing run - since I do not believe that the previous run would be considered acceptable today. I am therefore voting 'no'. Note: I do not believe Gradius would be considered acceptable because the possible margin for improvement between a player who merely does not die but is otherwise unexceptional, and a TAS run is relatively small. Because of the fixed scrolling it isn't possible to make the game any faster, an issue brought up during discussion of The Guardian Legend (with the TGL password) and I believe it is at least a potential issue with all fixed-scroll games such as vertical or horizontal shooters.

Hmm, someone should do a normal run of Guardian Legend...

Someone should do a normal run of Gradius, I'd say. ;D