I haven't been by this site almost this whole year. I hear Bisqwit is gone? Madness.
I watched this in smv form before you submitted it, because I had finished planning for an unassisted run. I didn't learn anything of use for an unassisted run, but this was an entertaining TAS just to watch anyway. Good job, you even threw in a couple things most people wouldn't catch, like gulping to get an extra bounce. I might check out the subtitles, but probably not, this site's focus is to cater to people who don't know the game in question (all the "yes! this game still has the plot intact, great for entertainment!" "this was boring until the plot picked up" "voted no because it was in Japanese, so I wasn't entertained" posts still crack me up to no end).
BTW, it seems that unassisted, mammal is faster than bird. Intuitively, would you agree with this assessment? If you or anyone who knows this game has the time, would you mind taking a look at the vids in this post? Thanks.
FatRatKnight wrote:
On the other hand, I didn't actually test it -- I merely checked the length of time to get through the clouds and back for the dragon. It was something like a minute or so detour.
I've tested it, and as figured, it's not even being close to worth it for an unassisted run, let alone an assisted one (although you can manipulate the cloud). Also the dragon is really slow.
mklip2001 wrote:
Is it weird that as soon as I saw the intro of the game (I usually let a new game run a bit before starting a movie), I could tell the game was made by Enix because of the style they use to draw the blue Earth? It reminded me immediately of Illusion of Gaia :-)
It's complete coincidence, it's a different developer. The feel of this game is somewhat Soul Blazer trilogy though, it's true. Just a couple of the themes.
Also that yeti is a descendant, not the Jr Yeti himself. I'm not trying to nitpick, I'm telling you because I only recently realized this myself.
Zurreco wrote:
Great run. This really puts that sloppy test run I made a while back to shame. I'm glad to see that this game finally has a legit run done. Yes vote.
I don't know who made it (I don't think it was you), but I remember the first TAS WIPs were hilariously awful. It fought the frog boss and literally took minutes upon minutes. Maybe I should dig the whole thing up sometime for the humor. I bet it might be slower than what I've done unassisted.
I dd, in absense of the knowledge that this emulator also emulates Game Genie Gear.
Great, since pcc doesn't seem to be active anymore, and I don't think anyone else cares, I guess we'll never not for a long time see Game Gear TAS's now.
Of course, if this was the Giga ByteGame Boy Dot Matrix Game or Dal Segno Developers' System, this situation wouldn't be happening!
FYI: encoded video for quick watch.
http://dic.nicovideo.jp/v/sm7088500
You don't need an account to watch the video, and you can hide out the comments over the video by clicking the "..." balloon icon.
Thanks for the link!
Thanks for the dic link too, although I have a nicovideo account already. I wonder why everyone doesn't just use zoome though. Probably the same reason English speakers use Youtube, which is that it's most widely used so more people will see your videos.
Edit: Hmm, still seems like you need to sign in to nicovideo to download from Vid-DL though.
This game is nowhere near as awesome as Dragon Egg but I will still check this TAS out when it gets published. Not gonna bother setting up Mednafen just for this though, I'm really sorry. Maybe once PCE is more common here. :)
You can continue to whine about how voting is unfair, but the system won't be different no matter what you change, unless you 100% completely eliminate voting, or user input.
I'm not going to write what I would do here, because I'd rather be able to devote enough space to it. But I actually would 100% completely eliminate voting and user input when it comes to judging (by eliminating judging altogether), and use the voting system for rating instead (what it did originally if I'm not mistaken).
mmbossman wrote:
I understand that several people may not agree with me about the mission of this site (in that we exist to provide entertaining movies, not to provide a database of how fast each and every game ever can be beaten).
Just like alden, I'm going to have to say that if you get the impression that this is my viewpoint, nothing could be further from the truth. I'm pretty sure I'm more "entertainment over technical quality" than anyone on this site. I don't think technical quality should even be considered at all. Also as gia said, "tasvideos does accept pure-speed runs, but only if the game is popular, that sucks."
Also I hate arguing and have absolutely zero need for anyone else to believe what I believe about anything, so I'll have to pass on your PM invitation.
I don't know exactly how people on say #nesvideos feel, so I don't know if this will be controversial or boringly unnecessary.
mz wrote:
Elitist judging system that motivate people to keep TASing the same 5 or so games over and over again (Zelda, Sonic, Mario, Megaman, Metroid, etc.). No one wants to waste months of his life just to see his work rejected only because the judge in turn has never played your game before and he doesn't find it entertaining.
Bolded part of that for Kirkq, who skipped over it. Also I just learned Ferret Warlord did Punky Skunk?! With this and Strider 2, I'm very pleasantly surprised by the PS1 games being done, because I figured it would all be MGS or FF7 or whatever.
mmbossman, if you don't take mz seriously like you say, I'll let you know that other people do agree with this quote. I'm not going to blame the judges though, just the system. You're all doing about as good of a job as can be expected, given the environment of this site, but I just think the job description itself is misguided. Also if you want to replace "judges" above with "voters," that would be more accurate with what I feel.
Ok, I'm sorry if this is out of line but I wanted to say something about Bisqwit too. I have more respect for him than anyone else I've ever met online, and he is definitely the nicest person I've ever seen online too. Just a great guy. The problem is: I think that given the environment and nature of this site, he's a terrible fit to lead it because he is actually too laissez-faire to be effective.
This is part of the reason for all the bullying and flaming that seems to be prevalent, and why I feel the site has been taken in directions (by people with strong personalities) that don't seem to match some of the original ideals. He lets people walk all over him, which only inspires more of the same. Sadly, I don't believe his departure would improve conditions any. I will definitely miss him when he leaves though.
I was pretty excited when I saw this and even more so when it said andrewg (I knew he was working on a TAS but I didn't know for what), but I have to admit this one was a total bust for me in terms of entertainment. Didn't watch with Lua script, very possible that would change my mind.
The dancing was really cool though, the best part by far. :)
Derakon: The werewolf shoots out NO! too, you can see it briefly in the vid. My favorite pic from this game is this though:
Works great for me in smplayer and my comp is almost a decade old now.
I have a guess about the problem, most likely it's not the cause but doesn't hurt to try. This video is vorbis in matroska like some of the other recent encodes and ffvorbis chokes on that. Use vorbis (reference libvorbis) instead. If you're using mplayer, "-ac vorbis," (including comma). If you're using ffdshow, try selecting tremor. I don't know if selecting the codec in VLC is even possible, but it uses ffmpeg as well, so it ought to be.
1. I am so glad we can finally TAS PSX. I don't know why it took so long, I guess the emulators weren't good enough until now, but I'm looking forward to more.
Thank the man in the post above yours. ;) Thanks mz! I'm looking forward to the first published arcade TAS.
About to watch this. In my mind, zggzdydp = Castlevania just like Upthorn and nitsuja = Sonic. I'm sure it'll be great.
Edit: There are tons and tons of great PS1 games. I'm only saddened because I know lots of people will invest a lot of time into games I don't care about over games I'd want to see, but it's still a great era now. :)
Please tell me someone wants to do Umihara Kawase Shun though.
Well I talked to mike89 when he submitted so I know for a fact he knew when making his "no rings" TAS that it wouldn't be published and it was just for fun. That means all of them are accounted for besides Warp's, and I can only speculate on his but that's what I got out of it at least.
Heathens! Faxanadu is the best game listed in this thread. Are you not entertained!! Is this not why you are here!!
Although I have to admit Lord Tom did such a wonderful job that I actually hated the latest version for the new optimized movement. Sorry bro, you're still awesome though.
Simply awe-inspiring. Has Tiki ever seen that?
Once again alden makes the best posts, but how many of these were made with the intention of being gruefood? At least 10, 6, 4, 3, and 1 I think. Also how come nobody ever shares such hilarious posts (this is from Dr Jekyll's thread) with me? :(
Mitjitsu wrote:
If the run is good relative to the game then there is no reason for SDA to reject it. Although beat em ups aren't accepted because its accepted that there likely to use repetive strategies which exploit a weakness in AI. The difficulty would come from finding verifiers.
I think anyone who's worried about running out of games to TAS is very misinformed. If you took the set of good games that would make good TAS's for supported systems, the number of those that aren't on the site absolutely crushes the number of those that are. The only system with decent coverage is NES, and the only reason for that is NES was once the only system, plus the fact that the initial community had a much different outlook on depth vs breadth. If the site was started with today's mentality, it would be the same as any other system.
In short, if there is anything to worry about, it would be about tons of great games never getting any attention. This also relates to the topic because it's where the greatest source of new TAS's lies (although I would argue, *not* for newbies unlike what some suggest), and because an improvement on an existing game goes nearly sideways in terms of increasing site content.
I agree with moozooh that the emphasis on frame shaving (depth) is due to the "audience," but I would clarify that to mean audience of the site community (I would say "elite") that actually posts and follows runs and development and would watch new publications of games they've never played. The majority of the total audience out there, the ones that don't post, just find the site and then go look for games they have played and watch the TAS's of those. They don't care about frame shaving on other games, and even for games they care about, they don't care about frame improvements that they won't even appreciate or notice (why the first SMB3, first Mario 64, etc are still the best known).
I do have the opinion that the site would be better off if it focused more on breadth (with better game coverage, more types of runs ie tool-assisted superplays instead of speedruns, etc) rather than depth. TAS'ing is a strict increase in event space over unassisted running, so why clamp down on this space by focusing on speedruns (and even more with optimized speedruns!) over the wider superplay? Some might see the shift away from breadth as due to improvement in tools (although I would say that the community itself changes due to tools, because that affects who becomes interested or loses interest), but I do think there is a fundamental mentality change. When Phil obsoleted Sleepz's SMB2 by a couple frames, the outroar from some people (even if unwarranted) that happened then would never occur today. I have to admit I do miss Josh the FunkDOC, Walker Boh, Bob Whoops, Deviance, Michael Fried, etc.
The underlying problem I think is the emphasis on publication. People should be creating TAS's for themselves, for fun and creativity, but instead their goal many times is just to get published or get "respect." And it's much easier to get a TAS published and people to say "great job" if you cut time off an existing one than start out on a new game. Also someone said it before, but sadly the current competitive aspect of the forums goes hand in hand with the competitive aspect of "beating" people's TAS's, and they just fuel each other.
I would say more (I have a lot of site improvement ideas instead of just gripes like this post, lol) but I've already rambled too much. I should ask for a user page so I can dump them there and not clog threads with this poorly written crap.
Yes it is, thanks a bunch. Worth noting though, that there was another version after this one, that fixed one of the later levels that was impossible otherwise. Also, I need to find my copy of the game anyway, because it has all the known released user levels, as well as all the levels I personally created of course.
Assuming you already know about stuff like Haali's media splitter or MPlayer or VLC, something you might not know is these vorbis in matroska encodes choke on the default vorbis codec, ffvorbis. Select vorbis (the reference codec) instead. For MPlayer, use "-ac vorbis," (comma intentional)
Edit: I don't know how this is possible, but I am unbelievably bothered by the fact that Turkish Rondo loops instead of going on to the next section. :( This is truly the musical equivalent of blue balls.
Downloading the mkv, thanks ShinyDoofy. Unlike others going in, I already expect this to be awesome. Unless I'm wrong as to what this will look like, this is one of the "purest" entertaining TAS's since all of the tricks here, you can do in real-time. Edit: Ok, now that I started watching, I do wish there was a lot more playing with the cursor (to the music, to write stuff, etc) and playing with the skill selection (to make patterns, play primitive cellphone-like songs, etc) but other people would probably detest those so you can't please everyone of course.
Lord Tom, *thank you so much*, since the very first day I came upon this site years and years ago, I've probably most wanted to see a Lemmings 1 or 2 TAS. The best part about only following the RSS feed is submissions like these come as a complete surprise for me. :)
You also have superb taste in the games you work on since you have Faxanadu and Legacy of the Wizard as well. Not asking you to, but if you did Lemmings 2, it would almost certainly be my favorite TAS on the site -- due to the in-game fast forward button (!) and the fan and some of the skills like superlems. All that plus dancing with the cursor (although I think zsnes but not snes9x supports mouse recording), I don't know if I could take it. :D
Kirkq wrote:
EDIT: Another fun fact: The creator of lemmings also created Grand Theft Auto.
I love historical things like this. I forget all of the best ones but that is one of them. Blizzard also made Lost Vikings and World of Warcraft, that's another good one.
Edit: +1 for Sunsoft levels, I was such a Lemmings freak I played any levels I could, including the Prima levels and the Christmas levels and so forth. I'd watch any of those (they're PC though of course), as well as Fun, Tricky, and Taxing too.
Maybe in the late 90s someone made a Lemmings clone where you could make your own levels and I just loved that. It got taken down for copyright reasons but I think I still have it somewhere (I had a HD crash last year but I think it survived it). I tried to find it online once and I couldn't do it.
I know there are a ton of great unassisted players on this site, especially for older systems. Accessibility is a concern to many of them, which is why they might prefer competition on emulators, such as Gavin Ward for MARP. That's why I'm linking this speedrunning tourney here.
After previously running an arcade score tourney, we're trying something new. I don't know if anyone else has run a multi-week speedrunning tourney like this before. Details are in the linked thread. I'm sorry to ask something like this, but if you have any questions, please post in the linked thread so I will be more likely to see it.
This tourney will be fun and not so serious, so don't be afraid to join! There is no commitment. You can play as many or as few weeks as you want. The games to be played will be voted on each prior week. Right now, people are voting for the NES game for week 1.
Bisqwit, I just wanted to wish you the best of luck in whatever you do in the future. I truly think you are this community's greatest asset.
This really belongs in the "new site layout" thread, but I'll just ask it here since it was briefly mentioned in the first post. For future reference, where is the donate page now? I can't find it anymore, but that's probably just my fault.
I think this article is rather poor, but there hasn't been a good speedrunning article yet, and this one isn't much worse than any of the others. I think at this point every new article that comes out just copies the previous ones. This one is particularly lazy and poorly written. I just realized the author never tried to contact us, which is a bad sign.
Well, I could pick this article to death but it's not very productive. Some of the SDA people had more complaints, but nothing really bothers me except one line: Some “pure” runners claim the use of tools as cheating. To me, that seems to be trying to create some rivalry or issue that isn't there. It's been a long time since sdkess vs Arc and m2k2's renaming idea, which were unfortunate but also in the distant past. I can't name a single person at SDA who considers TAS's to be cheating.
