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I'd have to say the decision to accept this based on only 3 votes was a very rash choice. Especially since this is not the most orgasmic spasmic best TAS of all time. (Yoshi island 100%, I am looking at you.)
That said, I watched through it all, and while it has a lot of flaws, I would give it a yes, with a weak hint of meh.
Highlights:
-Things do go explody.
-Fast pace action.
-Great music.
-Great graphics. I actually let out a "wow" when Izzy appeared.
What I don't like:
-Very little variety. All of the bosses essentially have the exact same fight pattern. SDC is awesome in concept, but it gets boring after a while.
-A very, very, very lack of variety during waiting periods. Maybe it's because I constantly do TASes where I try to make every moment of every waiting period as interesting and fast paced as possible, but I did not find the waiting antics during autoscrollers or waiting for some trigger to be that stimulating. Probably a difference in playing style, but I was bored during those sections.
-The Alia messages. God, the action does NOT have to be broken up that often. Stupid game designers.
-The action to movie length ratio was bad. You said the in-game timer reflected 18 minutes and that's inaccurate, but still, the action was broken up so many times from short levels, the alia messages, cutscenes, picking the next stage, and many other things that very often a high action segment would last maybe 3 seconds and then be interrupted.
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The problem with music is that VBA is the most inferior emulator when it comes to determining which sounds occur on which frame. Believe me, I thought a lot about timing actions to the sounds. When frame advancing, VBA delays the exact frame that a sound will occur by as many as 5 frames before or after it happens. Also, the current sound that is playing on the frame that you hit frame advance will play in addition to the (misplaced) sounds of the frame you rerecorded to. Trust me, if this was SNES9X, I'd have timed many actions to the music and done a lot of dances, since SNES9x makes each sound that plays per frame clear as crystal, whereas VBA muffles and distorts sound.
I still try to do it in a few instances. Like in the Flower boss in Moon 1, and in moving my body position in Moon 3.
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Talk about most overrated improvement ever.
The glitching through the walls is the ONLY interesting thing in the entire movie. Those pauses, while allowing infinite jumps, were annoying because of the frequency of use. The pace is, besides those vertical zips, immensely slow. The music sucks. None of the maneuvers looked impressive. Even the shooting gave me the sense that you were never in danger of getting hit. This is the first time I have watched any run of this game, and I think I do not find this game to be impressive and will henceforth refuse to watch any run that is longer than this one.
I'm going to have to go with Meh. It's a substantial improvement and I can't really vote no because that, and those zips were kinda cool, but I find the run to be so incredibly boring.
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Really? we're throwing ADD insults around now? Thanks for that wonderful reminder of how I dropped out of college 3 years ago and struggle to keep up with some tasks that other people around me perform naturally.
That notwithstanding (especially since you know I'm one of the more attentive watchers for long runs), I kept skipping to different segments and watching 30 second sections to try and get into the movie. I was bored the entire time.
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I'm going to have to say, I enjoy Mukki's N64 runs wayy better than this. The pace never stopped true, but the pace itself was not impressive to me; especially because of the jumps. I couldn't sit through this run for more than 30 seconds. I would have to go with no (I know it's late, but.)
But keep squishing those runs out 'Bossy.
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Well, rather than assuming you can use the input you record with the camhack and splice it into the final movie, use the camhack to create a test route through the entire stage. Then, using the .smv with camhack as a guideline, follow along as best as you can using mem addresses to watch your speed and position and follow along blindly with the non camhack version.
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I full heartedly agree with this, after watching the SDA run and finding out that the run can be played co-op with 2 wiimotes. As soon as Dolphin is ready I'm going to start this run. (And the game runs on my current build of dolphin, woo!)
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Looking at what that glitch can offer, I don't see it being useful for either run. For the any% run, you'd end input on the final throw against K. Rool. For the 102%, you need that Kremkoin to drop so that you can get the % increase and then start the Final Lost World level. The only thing it'd be useful for is a playthrough run that tries to show as many glitches as possible.
The K. Rool fight seems unique in that it doesn't work with the other bosses. Teaming up at the right moment seems to not matter as that Koin falls regardless. You can delay that koin. I did however find that if you press Pause at the right frame, you can freeze the game in pause while Dixie's victory music plays. Fun but again not useful.
I feel it's important to mention that with the various new techniques and improvements NxCy and I found in the 102%, I have started working on improving the any% as well. I just managed to improve the Krow fight even further (not losing any frames I was losing earlier) and am starting world 2, where I previously found more than 1 second of improvements.
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Also keep in mind ISG prevents Link from grabbing the ledge to catch himself, so that it's not a question of a TAS being the same distance, but that ISG lets you stand over the lip slightly farther than without it. I think, that the middle of your body hitbox can be standing right on the farthest edge, whereas if the outside of your hitbox reaches that edge, it goes into "grab to save my life" mode.
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I once zipped up a ladder Goldeneye style in Ocarina of Time, inside the Deku Tree. I've yet to replicate it.
I think the most fun I had with discovering glitches in TASes that I've made was going through the floors in Mischief Makers (saving 14 seconds in one stage alone) and discovering in Donkey Kong Country 2 Rattly's glitchy triple jumps, exceeding his normal charged jump both in height and speed.
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Wait, what the hell?
Most TASers do share stuff. Hence, why many topics contain WIPs. Very, very few members vocally announce that they've found something, than keep it to themselves. And among those, even less keep it hidden from everyone INCLUDING other TASers that work on the same game. (I'm looking at you Saturn.)
And why should a run using tricks that he found and kept to himself not be published?
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If there are improvements as HappyLee says, and if a 2 player run would be better... why publish this?
Aside from that, I did not find the run to be that entertaining. I watched like 7-8 minutes and stopped. I guess it's just that I never played metal slug, nor do I enjoy watching Contra-style TASes. No vote from me. But Angerfist you're still cool for having the most pulsating fist ever.
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Sure, maybe an additional .mkv can be encoded that does this, and tacked on with the publication like the Sonic Advance 1 page... but the main published movie should still be the original in its entirety, because as we all know, if the main movie is different in any way from how the game really behaves, you're going to run into trouble with people claiming it's cheating.
On the subject of watching it... I dunno. I think the only parts that I seriously enjoyed was Hyper Sonic (even with the flashing). Up until then, I felt like it was better in some regards to the Knuckles run (due to new strategies) yet inferior to the any% because of the lack of Tails. And it took a very long time to get to the interesting Hyper Sonic. And the goals are immensely arbitrary. So... I give it a meh, I suppose.
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3. Can you even long jump under water as metal mario? I thought you could only slow-jump.
Also, are you trying to turn everyone into a Saturn? We don't need penis fights over who discovered what, since it's not like you get mailed a fleshlight sex toy every time you discover a trick. Listing all the authors is usually just fine.
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These 2 runs were rejected for a reason. Nothing but the best will obsolete Guano's run, a standard which is being set by Bloobiebla, AKA, and SwordlessLink. Who are the ones working on the run. A run which will only be doable once record-reset and the pause fix are present in an acceptable emulator. Which as soon as it comes, the trio will finish it.
The problem also with the all temples run is twofold. 1) MrGrunz also has plans on obsoleting Bloobiebla's after he finishes Majora's Mask. and 2) the boss door can be skipped in every single temple. Which, in my opinion, completely ruins all the fun, and more importantly, the POINT, of doing an all temples run.
Edit: any% is the title Guano's currently holds. A new any% would use the RBA glitch to beat it faster.
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Long overdue update. FINALLY finished Moon 3, and saved 3 seconds compared to my old run in the process (woot!).
I may, for entertainment purposes, separately TAS every single room in Moon 4, just to see what they're like.
Edit: Ok, so now the new movie is 1,363 frames (22 seconds) faster than Pirate's old attempt (an additional 2+ seconds is possible, but I use the 2 seconds to save 6 seconds in the Black Fight.) So, I would have saved 24.) This is compared to the 18 seconds faster that my old movie was.
Edit: almost done with Moon 5!
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The problem with TASing Steam games (which I know, I tried with Portal) is that all of the tools for TASing are present, but they cannot be used in tandem.
Let's assume that there's 2 main important tools in TASing: slowdown (or frame advance) and rerecords. Steam games have both of these (and even very advanced forms of memory watching and genie codes, but I won't get into that.) The problem lies in the code itself. When you activate time scale (slowdown) or single step (frame advance) the way the game reacts after loading a save (rerecord) is very bad. The game itself literally freezes. When you load a save, the game spends a random number of frames where the game itself is frozen; even trying to create a load save script to wait a number of frames before unpausing will cause the game to crash; and even then you won't have consistent frame advancing to certain frame numbers that you made a save at.
To summarize, you can EITHER use rerecords, or frame advance; but not both. The movies on this site are made using both; movies made with only one are usually rejected.
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1) I can't seem to get the game running in any Desmume build.
2) Are you going to try and go for fastest time or most entertaining solutions? I can imagine both being distressing with either "I don't know if any multitude of different combination of words will be faster" or "Could this be solved in a funnier fashion?"
3) No harm in making a test run.