Posts for Comicalflop


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Wow, nice to know that the community that I've felt a part of for 6+ years labels me as not to be taken seriously. I was under the impression that people are allowed to have their own opinions, and most importantly preferences about what they find entertaining, but I guess that's not the case. Go on and make whatever arguments you want and slander me and take what I've said out of context and try and make me look bad, but I'm not the one who first blew it out of proportion. It's just sad that what drew me to this site is a host of intelligent people trying to make entertaining movies that pushed the boundaries, and after spending years trying to contribute to that effort I'm now being attacked for sharing an opinion about console preference.
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NitroGenesis wrote:
So do your family/friends even care about TASing?
Actually yes they do. Funnyhair, who submitted the Maui Mallard improvement, was my roommate in college. My older brother occassionally checks out some TASes on the site. My youngest brother watches them. I show them to my friends as well. What, thought I was going to make up some bullshit to prove a point? About not liking the Atari, it's true, I really dislike it because I don't think it makes for good TASes. I also dislike most NES TASes, and I'm not the biggest fan of all of the Genesis runs either. I naturally happen to like SNES, GBA, N64, DS, GC/Wii TASes the most because I think the games within those consoles provide the best TAS material. Is the Atari the predecessor for all things video games? Sure. That doesn't mean that the final product TAS is entertaining to watch. Just because you can TAS this console now, doesn't mean you should.
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Warp wrote:
It's much more desired if you evaluate each submission on its own merits and then give your solid arguments why you voted no.
If it ever got published, I'd automatically rate it 0/0. If I showed it too all of my friends/family, I couldn't get them to like it even if I paid them. The run is super boring. Nothing happens. The graphics are atrocious. The gameplay is super dumb and hard to follow. The TAS itself isn't impressive; Adelikat got only 100 frames slower in real time. Music is dumb. Game is dumb. Console is dumb. Any member spending time TASing this system is wasting valuable time that they could be TASing better systems. And this will apply to every Atari run ever submitted here. And yes, I did watch the other two previous Atari submissions, and my feelings were the same. TASing any game on this system is a complete waste of time, produces a final crap movie that nobody will care about or want to see. That about good? Should I use this message as a template to copy into every time a new Atari submission is made?
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11 seconds of my life I'm never getting back. I'll continue to vote no on any and all Atari submissions because they're an absolute waste, and in no way do they demonstrate the raw capabilities of making entertaining movies that TAS tools provide.
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Yech, awful system, boring run. No vote.
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I haven't worked on it at all for 4 years. The last thing I ever did for the game was making a 2nd WIP that didn't even make it past the "this is GOLDWOOD FOREST SAVE THE TRIBALS cutscene. All I've done in glitch hunting since my old WIP was finding the fire-weapon-switch-spam trick, and jumping up into the darkened ceiling of doorways to load the next room faster. Even though I think it'll be a very good finished TAS product, here's my reasons for not working on it: 1. The overall level of optimization for 3D N64 TASing is set high with Super Mario 64. For a 4+ hour long run, I know that there could be improvements in lots of places, simply because for three dimensional movement, there's always some faster way to do a room. I'd be forced to write it off as "contains speed/entertainment tradeoffs" and that wouldn't be not ideal. There are so many ways that a complicated 3D shooter game like this can be optimized to the extreme (my old WIP is piss poor, every single room can be done with a much higher level of optimization, I could probably save minutes if I were to redo it), and I don't want to dedicate years to a project like that. Add that to the extra element of a second character that can help you kill stuff faster, and suddenly the optimal way to kill all enemies the fastest becomes even more complicated. 2. It's a big task (the final movie will be over 4 hours), and I kept looking for a TASing partner to help me with it, but never got one. 3. Now that I'm out of college and on the (painful) hunt for full-time employment while at the time juggling part-time work and an internship, I barely have enough time for my other hobbies, let alone TASing (it's slow, slow goign for my Mischief Makers Gold Gem TAS). That old WIP took me, I think, 4 months to make that 1+ hour progress, and I would go way more slower with the level of optimization I know now as well as way less free time. To compare, it took me over a year to finish Mischief Makers, and that's when I had a lot of free time on my hands. 4. The biggest reason is something I mentioned in the recent N64 Castlevania submission: the optimal fastest way to run in this game isn't a straight line. When you run with the joystick and use the left/right C buttons to strafe, you run faster, and it's possible to run in a straight line, but that straight line is actually a very long curve. You don't go in a 100% straight line like in, say, Goldeneye, rather you take a curved route. This sort of movement makes optimization over long distances insanely impossible, as when I first started TASing this game I'd just move the analog into one direction and tested to see if I'd reach my destination, not suspecting that I wasn't going as the crow flies, which in a finished TAS is extremely sloppy. On a minute, frame-by-frame scale, I'd have to keep adjusting the analog stick. It's too bad, because I really think this would have been a very entertaining movie despite it's long length. If anyone wants to ever take this on, please feel free, I may even help out where I can.
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Just finished all the hexing I needed to do for World 1 and 2 (just to save overall, yes, only 15 frames), so I'm back at Flambee. EighteenSpike's recent WR's on youtube motivated me to get back to working on this.
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Is there a new glitch reason to use the J ROM? It seems like the Japanese text-scrolling is slower in this game, compared to say Ocarina of Time.
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The reason I ask is because of the way the goal is framed. Any% is "beat the game as fast as possible using any means necessary". 100% is "complete 100% requirements and really show off the entirety of the game". This run, similar to the Ocarina of Time All-Temples run, is wishy-washy "beat the game fast but not the fastest, yet show off the game but not entirely as well". I just don't think it's a category that's necessary. I'd much rather see a highly optimal 100% TAS of this game get published than this semi-optimized category.
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That definitely looks like enough new tricks/glitches to justify a new 100% TAS. Very good finds from what is normally a mostly glitchless/well coded game. To answer your question yes Out of Bounds warping is totally ok, just look at the Majora's Mask TAS.
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I'm going to vote meh. I spotted various little improvements here and there, in addition to the ones mentioned by others. While it's true that it overall "looks good", to the trained eye I could see areas for improvement (especially having seen the work of the other NSMB TASers, from the published any% in addition to the 100% WIPs.) I also think that the category is unnecessary... How would this run differ from a 100% run?
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Catastrophe wrote:
That also describes the fastest movement method for both of Rare's FPS games, and both of those were TASed. Speedrunners deal with it too. (I mean, the curved lines looking sloppy and being a pain to 'aim' at the objective.) So you should pick up JFG again! The strafing in the current GoldenEye TAS might not be optimal either, but it was done. And done matters. Anyone who thinks it can be done better is welcome to try.
Not quite what I mean. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark have different control setups, and one of setup allows you to use just the C buttons to move. In that game, when you hold two diagonal directions at once (like left and up), you move 40% faster, but it DOES move you in a 100% straight line (just that Bond is facing a different direction.) In Jet Force Gemini, the analog stick controls movement, but C left and C right control strafing, which makes your character move to the left or the right while still facing forward. When you move the analog stick to run and hold either C left or C right, you'll get that same 40% speed increase as you run and strafe at the same time, however it'll lead to a curved path, unlike Goldeneye.
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Looks interesting but the angles of movement can use a lot of work. It seems that this game forces curved paths from the analog stick movement, but I can tell that along long distances you allow the analog to stay in one direction, and that it eventually gets you there on a curved path. For instance, when climbing a circular flight of stairs, you stay in the middle of the stairs and curve around in the same shape as the circular stairs (on the N64 analog, keeping it held in the same direction while the camera naturally follows you). That's not optimal, since in a 3D game you should try to move as the crow flies in a direct straight path. On that staircase for example you could have done better to hug the absolute inside of the stairs, thus having to traverse just a little bit less. Or when rounding corners, I noticed that your movements are very curvy and not a straight beeline from one obstacle to the next. If you watch some Mario 64 TASes, you'll see what I mean about making straight lines from one point to the next. I think you may need to find the MHS address in the same way that the SM64 TASers use that shows what direction Mario is facing; this'll allow you to make straighter paths when the camera's moving and she's not going in the exact straight path. This image shows what I mean: The left curvy line shows how your character is moving. The straight lines demonstrate what i mean about making tight lines between points of movement. This is one of the reasons why I stopped working on Jet Force Gemini, because the fastest form of movement (running with analog stick while strafing) caused a long curving running pattern, rather than an exact straight line like normal running. It was really frustrating for me to handle that type of running knowing that I'm never running in a 100% straight line, and it looked very sloppy. What you have so far is good and the final product will be interesting to watch, but with that level of unoptimized movement I wouldn't rate the final movie very highly in the technical category. it's up to you, but I recommend redoing and trying to use MHS to track your character's facing direction to better optimize your movement.
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Kyman, when you had the Super Mushroom, you could have gotten more mileage out of it by skidding and using the left/right trick. It's possible to skid for very long amounts of time (you can control how fast you shift from yellow to orange to orange-red) and then before you skid out of control you can do a short hop and start from the beginning. I know it was on a mostly straightaway (you can get around this by snaking) but that section you could have made a bit faster.
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Those are some very nice discoveries. Would he be interested in making a TAS for this game? he seems to know the mechanics of it very well.
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Why not the screenshot at 2:21 where she's kicking the boss in the crotch for the last hit right as she levels up? Anyways, I liked the fast pace of the run. I think there was one underwater part with the spiky things where you could have done it faster (rather than go left around a certain wall of spike-balls underneath you, and hit the one once you hit the floor) you could have maybe hit the one at the top so that as you have the invincibility frames you could have passed through them from the top. Otherwise, yes vote.
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Out of curiosity which difficulty mode did you choose? I know one of the TASvideos guidelines is to choose the hardest difficulty possible from a clean SRAM, but with this game the hardest difficulty doesn't work very well with the "beef the main character as much as possible and blindly attack anything and everything" strategy.
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That's why I haven't TASed for months. Dressing up like a ninja may not have helped much either.
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I think your best time to write messages to the audience is at the end of each level, when the pipe thingie fills up with goo. You have like what, 5-10 seconds of waiting? Use it wisely. And yes I can attest to how difficult writing messages can be, but trust me it's worth it.
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I like this so far. My only criticism is that you have the opportunity to use the black cursor to spell out letters in the same way that Adelikat does in the NES Gradius run, since it looks like the cursor leaves enough of a black trail to spell out letters when moving it very fast. Whenever you have these kind of opportunities to write messages to the audience, it can only enhance the entertainment value.
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The playing speed only is bad when you want to rewatch your progress in realtime. I think the even bigger problem with GC/Wii TASing is getting a hold of the ISO's and Wii game files, since those aren't readily available on the internet as much as ROMs for other game systems.
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I'm gonna throw in another recommendation for score instead of just time. Back when Dolphin was first in the works I had thought long and hard, and actually watched a lot of the speedruns of time WRs versus score WRs. I decided that score runs would be 1) more entertaining and 2) create a more difficult category to compete with and calculate routes for.
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I think this might be it? I was looking through my old PM messages with Nitsuja. savestate comparison: http://www.filexoom.com/showfile-8419/snes9xyi.zip
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Nitsuja had made a LUA script for this game, where it showed a colored trail behind Yoshi that tracked his speed (i.e. the color would change if the speed dipped down below what you want it), as well as made ghost Yoshi's in different savestates to compare.
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The shortcut one to get to the crops for the first honeycomb? I've done it in real time, it's not really that difficult to do. Also, I was under the impression that the camera in this game worked out so that without hitting any C buttons, holding one direction made you move in that direction without the camera moving and without you straying from the path. Is that incorrect?
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