I'm not sure if this justifies the mage for the rest of the game, but it can skip a section of the first level by shooting the bell without even opening the tower.
This might not be practical for a 1P run, but someday when some ambitious person starts the 4P co-operative run one character should definitely be the mage for this reason!
I honestly thought the fighter would be the best choice, mainly just because of the best running, jumping and speedy flechette use. He's also much better at killing centaurs who can really get in your way in the Guardian Of Steel and Caves Of Circe maps.
I'm a little bit torn about this. I watched without fastforwarding and parts of it were fun, and there was clearly a lot of strategy in making the run... but I found the game ugly and a lot of it was boring.
I have a feeling that if I knew the game better my vote would be different, so I'll abstain.
This game is a moderately fun watch... far from the worst I've seen. I enjoyed watching the platform levels actually, because Luke is such a quick little guy.
I'd probably lean towards yes even if it weren't an improvement.
I care. I watched the Mu WIP and it was very impressive that you're faster with the red jewels.
Since it must be pretty radically improvable, do you intend to revisit any% sometime?
Inzult's already said it: I'll vote for the faster movie unless there's a substantial difference in entertainment value. In this case there isn't, and this movie is faster.
The graphical differences shouldn't even be a factor. I wouldn't prefer any other game with all the sprites hacked to be Hitler, nor would I prefer a hack of any game with additional pointless engrish.
Hm, not bad. The run wasn't as interesting as I thought it might be because it uses so few of the items, but it still has a lot of routes and was fun to watch. I especially liked the glitch on ladders.
In the end level, you get the arrow that does 4 damage and penetrates. It seems like the basic arrow could be faster against the two forms of the final boss because you can fire it so quickly, rather than waiting for the penetrating arrows to fly the whole length of the screen. I don't know that for sure though.
I wondered during the first wait period for a platform why you'd wait and not kill monsters to qualify for more time-saving health... then I realized that (a) your score takes time to count at the end of the stage and (b) when you get your health, the guy talks for a very long time.
Besides possibly the arrow in the last stage, I don't see anything major. It would be nice if it were possible to manipulate the bosses more effectively.
...and very enjoyable. And would lend itself nicely to a TAS because of the variety of routes and items in some stages.
I'll watch it and get back to you with input sometime soon (probably not today).
I think a fun run would be a minimum-experience run. It could be fully glitched but beat the game with mostly level 6 characters. It wouldn't cost that much time at all compared to the existing run. It may not deviate enough from the normal run to merit publication, though.
Well, I dunno, I haven't had a lot of success with TASes and that's why I've never submitted anything.
Perhaps, if nothing else, I should try to beat Lashiec from Frenom's progress.
In an N64 thread, I saw Hoe say he'd like to see bounties for TAS games and he'd throw in $5 on Blast Corps.
If I were to spend money on any TAS video, it'd be this one. I'm not sure if that's an actual offer or not. Maybe somebody could convince me? :P
I didn't find this run boring, but I found it very plain. At least the bubble was there to provide a bit of variety in playing technique.
I don't think the Tom fights were boring because except for the last one they were over in 5 seconds or less. It takes me about 15 seconds to get bored... which means that even if pirate_sephiroth's HoD run was completely terrible I'd watch most of it.
In level 1-2, you grab a large cheese that restores two hearts while you still have two hearts remaining. It looks to me like you could have taken another hit (maybe at the snail immediately in front of it?) and perhaps saved a small amount of time in doing so.
In level 4-1... near the very end of the level, you jump off a table and instead of holding right immediately you sway left first and land on some black can or something. It looks like a small waste of time.
Not voting yet.
I noticed that Circus Charlie has a 5.2. It could just be that everyone is giving it low entertainment ratings.
After a few watches at 100%, I'd have to say it appears very unlikely to be improvable by much. I don't think it took a huge amount of work and certainly not advanced tools (it's still Famtasia). But it's a simple and short game, and if it's approaching being a frame-perfect movie I'd give it a 9 or 10 technical rating.
Should technical ratings not be proportional to the simplicity of the game?
TheAxeMan once said the key to a good RPG run is iteration. Each of these minor timesavers you find will improve the run next time, if you can bring yourself to do a next time. For now, don't stress about it.
I like the run so far. FYI, I played PSX translation and don't read Japanese... watching it wasn't bad at all but I watched the story scenes with higher speed.
The first category name was made intentionally ambiguous to gently poke fun.
The second one was serious. If people are upset that speed-enhancing techniques are used to achieve the fastest time, that's the middle ground; defining what techniques you will or won't use. Technically it's already done with existing movies in the case of "takes no damage". It doesn't have an ambiguity problem.
I see no value in it either by the way, but it seems like others may.
I'm going to take a post here to justify Hexen a bit more thoroughly:
Initially there isn't anything that looks deeper than Doom, but the game has very large and complex levels and a couple of different features. In particular this game was the first to allow the player to hold items and use them later. There are also different character classes... if using the fighter (fastest and usually the strongest), you have only short range weapons for half of the game, which makes the combat quite a bit less trivial than Doom (etc).
Another innovation new to FPSes in this game was co-op play. Imagine someone doing a TAS of this game with a party of four? It would be absolutely incredible to see the various characters (including different classes!) moseying around hitting all switches and collecting items in an efficient manner, then teaming up to beat the bosses. That would be an absolutely AMAZING run.
I don't know how Mupen would feel about that right now, though.
Regarding the items that can be held, there is one that allows you to fly freely (but is only gained near the end of each group of stages, therefore probably not very useful), one that doubles your walking speed (finding the optimal place to use this would be interesting, as well as finding when it's worthwhile to go out of your way to acquire), one that offers several seconds of invulnerability, and one that teleports you to the level's entrance. There are a lot of optimizations that would make the run less trivial/predictable and exciting.
Keen use of the Disc of Repulsion would also be pretty cool to see.
In regular play, this game takes a few hours to get through and explore. As a TAS I'd expect it to be about 45 minutes at a quick estimate. With multiple players acting optimally and independently I have no idea how fast it could be.
I'm not at all opposed to the idea of a "takes no damage" version of any movie. If someone really wants to submit such a movie, then by all means. I won't protest that. I'm just not sure if it will get enough yes votes to be published. Perhaps it will.
That's sort of what my post was getting at: if people are feeling dissatisfied with broken runs, maybe they can play a "takes no sloppy damage" and "no zipping" run. The goals are listed with each published movie because they vary between movies, which I consider a good thing. People should feel free to try different sorts of runs and state the goals, and we can see if the support exists for them.
Although I'm generally just here for the speed, I've found the recent MKII and KI runs pretty refreshing and enjoyable.
4:45 AM, apologies in advance for typos and redundancy.
