Haha. Nitsuja was awesome!
I approve the new tricks, but the time spent waiting for the bird monster looks horrible. Even wobbling would have looked better. :(
I really liked the bosses (specially the last), and the use of weapons. The crazy maneuvers were also great, but I think they're abused too much in some parts. I would have appreciated some moments of rest to the eye, because 25 minutes of bouncing is tiresome.
I wouldn't call this a 100% kills run because I felt you spared some turrets on the labyrinth (because it was impossible to reach them), maybe "most kills" might be a more appropiate title, treating the death toll as score.
As for my vote, I found this one less entertaining than the first Gradius due to the lenght and the above mentioned bounciness, but it's still very good. So I'll give it a yes.
A lot of people would like to see an optimized glitchless run with Sonic solo, but no-one's working on it, and there are only about ~2 players on this site who are able to do one up to current standards.
Watched it again. The first youtube video is still boring, but the other three are much better. As from the submission it seems that the first part was redone, I'm voting yes.
I'm a fan of Garfield and I've played many of his games.
This movie seems well played, but I was bored pass the third minute of the first youtube video. I'll try to give it a try this sunday (maybe with a fresh night of sleep things could change), so I abstrain from voting from now.
While we are discussing classes, I think "Takes damage to save time" has been problematic lately. I have published several movies where damage was taken but not necessarily to save time (like SOR, or playarounds like RCR).
That's not problematic at all. If you don't take damage, then is a "Takes no damage" tag. If you take damage, but it's not to save time, then you don't get a cute tag.
Agree in theory that the more accurate emulation should be used. But I don't know which one it is, and I don't know who would know. Eitherway it is beyond the scope of this list.
Also, the only thing affected is how long the "Loading..." screen appears.
Any person with a working cartridge can tell. 150 frames is a difference of 2.5s. Can be measured in real time.
Also, I removed solomon's key, which I should have done years ago. The point of this list was to improve movies and that movie was improved. It just happened to be improved by another famtasia movie. But that movie doesn't fit the "old and substandard" category.
I thought the point was that famtasia was obsolete and that by improving all famtasia movies, the site could stop accepting them, and people wouldn't have to download famtasia to view the movies.
Obviously, it isn't a must to obsolete every famtasia movie. It's just a self-imposed goal. But being so close now to achieve it, it's a bit sad that we started relaxing the criteria if we can avoid it without too much hussle. :)
So I did some tests with Eggerland. It turns out that (at least for this game) famtasia emulates the disk loading much faster than FCEU. This is not a small margin either. The opening load takes about 150 frames more in FCEU and about that much on each subsequent load.
I tried hexing Bag's .fmv input into a .fcm file but it would desync anytime the load screen appears. With as many loads as this run has, this would mean a FCEU run would be much slower even if big improvements were found.
As a result I think there is good justification for using famtasia for such a run (it is also a very simple game more advanced tools may not be required to optimize it completely).
Therefore, I am removing it from the list.
Which emulator is being unaccurate, then? If the culcript is FCEU, then I understand using Famtasia until FCEU fixes this "emulation bug" (which can be never). If it's famtasia the one that fastens the load time, then I think that run shouldn't be allowed/its times should be corrected.
going back a frame should be faster then going foreward one right? instead of calculating new values for some amount of memory, you simply recall them, and in both cases, you would re-render the frame?
There must be something Im missing.
What you're missing is that, when going forward, the CPU just applies some changes to the current state (so it only has to remember the current state, the changes are made "on the fly"). When going backward, the CPU has to store ALL previous states, as it's impossible to retrieve previous states from the current state when you are overwritting it every frame.
This wastes a lot of space, and you have to store it somewhere, temp files allow backtracking more frames, but also require access to the hard disc, which is thousand of times slower than RAM memory.
1. When to create a savestate
2. When to overwrite a savestate
3. When to load a savestate
4. If you choose to load a savestate which savestate to load
Btw, those things would mostly go away if someone finally created a rewinding feature to the emulators (ie. like frame advance, but instead of going forward one frame, it goes back one frame).
As all variables on the machine state have to be preserved on each frame, it'll affect the speed while playing, and also have a buffer that limits the ammount of "undo" that you can do. You can use tricks like storing differentials ("on frame X value Y changed from A to B") instead of simply dumping all the same values every frame, but the space available still imposes a limit to the feature.
Suggestions include allowing the user to specify the max number of undo actions (like MS Word does).
You should have submitted today... 11:11 movie on 11:11 :P
Anyway, the run is absolutely awesome, I love this game (also, you should keep making cool TASes, even if there are no more NES Ninja Gaiden games left).
Awesome news! It'll be hard to have another 2 free hours to watch this, but It's on my watch list.
@Kaitoukid: The trick is that you watch it in a small window, so you can do other things during the "boring parts" (mostly the mountain/forests parts that only allow 2 steps per turn).
EDIT: Movie watched. Voting yes. It's a surprise how many people die on this movie, specially Earnest, who just does his thing and dies! Looking at how you manipulate/ignore the enemies is very fun, and the secret weapon scene is hilarious. I wonder if some time could be gained by switching the mobility ring between members on the forests/mountain part, but it's so obvious I guess you'd have already thought of it. I'll still watch the queue for more details about this run. Congrats!
I rolled over the floor laughing while watching this run, which is pretty rare actually.
I didn't mind too much the graphic glitch at the end, that I viewed as a "glitched rain" that added dramatism to the last scene (I view too much on that, heh). I think the run can be polished further on certain places, but as of now it's quite enjoyable, and has all the good things I loved from the starred run.
Yes vote on the run.
As a side note, the input watch didn't work on Full Screen mode, only in a window.
I found that the input work was a bit interesting some times, but not by much, and some times got even a bit annoying (when it moved ultrafast in all directions).