I'm quite glad this showed up in the vault, after all.
The brief summary in the movie link is misleading, though, as it states: "It was released in the US as part of a popular Mega Man + Street Fighter CD bundle, when Pentium II CPUs were standard."
The game was originally released in 1990, both on a 5.25" and a 3.5" floppy (I still have both ^_^). The game played decently well even on pre-386 machines, as were common when it was released. (Well, it played well despite the crappy game -- you know what I mean.) The Pentium II did not show up until the end of the 90's (1997-1999).
Personally, I liked this game just because it was new Mega Man content that I hadn't seen before -- and I actually owned it, as opposed to just renting the rest of the series from Blockbuster.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
Hooray for you, Tompa and Yuzuhara_3, destroying this game further.
I'm still bitter that I can't play the whole Four Swords Palace or half-game on my cartridge, but seeing this makes me feel better about it.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
Wow. My childhood just whooshed by in 20 seconds.
I loved this game. I spent the time working with my dad to map out every single dungeon level, evaluate different paths to get a perfect score, etc. A definite yes vote for this TAS.
Who's up for Alley Cat? :)
I'll drink to that, too.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
Attention video game designers. Please stop giving your heroes sliding/shuffling/moonwalking/backstepping/whatever moves which are faster than simply running in a straight line.
But it's still a nice TAS.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
I can attest to the importance of in-game time as the traditional method of weighing and judging Super Metroid runs. This game has a rich history of speedrunning and TASing, and I see no reason to reject this video which achieves the best ever in-game time (without game-breaking glitches, of course).
That said, I think a parallel real-time category is worthwhile, as, after all, we are talking about a TAS, here.
Gigabytes of storage are cheap, these days, so I think having our realtime TAS alongside an in-game-time nod to one of the most popular speedrunning games ever is worth considering.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
According to this page, the sequel lists a 386/25 as one of the requirements, so we could use those specs for this game as well.
Problem: At N MHz, the emulated processor is way way faster than 386 at N MHz.
One would need to determine rough correspondence (which is game-dependent because of different instructions different games execute)
Having played this game many times on a variety of machines, I would like to point out that there is an option for in-game throttling, though I forget the hotkeys at the moment.
If I am remembering correctly, only certain speed settings (the top 2?) were truly CPU-dependent, with the lower settings running at a fixed, and sometimes painfully slow, speed. I'm not certain if this feature will be sufficient to completely eliminate the CPU-variation, but I think it is worth an investigation. ... ... Though I understand the entirely counter-intuitive nature of reducing game speed settings to run a TAS. :-/
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
Unfortunately, we can't test this on the real console. Not only don't I have any WL2 catridge to begin with, but the wall clip would be near impossible to do. Your position has to be right (1 out of ~10 pixels is correct), then dashjump towards the wall, jump in the correct moment, face the other direction at the correct frame, and press the other direction only for 1 frame. I don't have a cheat device either and there's probably not even any codes that allow you to enter walls, I think.
So that having been said, klmz considers Gambatte's architecture superior to VBA's. And VBA-24-m's out of bounds sections are the same as Gambatte's. That's why we consider out of bounds glitches legitimate (unless someone comes along and proves them illegitimate. I would be surprised to see it happen).
Cool. Thank you very much. That makes sense.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
An honest question... How do you know which emulator is emulating the OoB areas correctly and which is incorrect? Do you have a gold standard emulation for comparison, or can this be re-created by hand on a Game Boy?
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
If only I had the choice. I'm on a managed network, and the junkheap that is McAfee drops near-hourly memory error messages to my computer. ...the thing has yet to find a real virus, though.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
Whenever I attempt to visit the "Discussion" section of a TAS, my local web filter's Heuristics detection (using McAfee) picks up a "virus" on viewtopic.php and calls it "Virus Name: MGW: Heuristic.BehavesLike.JS.Suspicious.A"
I highly doubt that this is an actual instance of malware, but it does prevent me (and I am sure, others under similar filters) from viewing these sections of the TASVideos.
I am unable to do anything about it, but I would really appreciate it if one of the admins could give McAfee a heads up about this and get this particular function whitelisted.
Example site: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6221 (linked to from http://tasvideos.org/1747S.html)
Thanks,
--NorthBus
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
Having not played Mortal Kombat / Street Fighter II and company growing up, I had a hard time "getting" some of the humor and glitches in the previous MK2 and MK3 runs on this site.
Not so here! This run was hilarious, with laugh-out-loud moments even to those not familiar with the genre. This is the best fighting-genre TAS I have ever seen.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
"Auntie Bellum"? The names of the criminals made for repeated headdesking.
A definite yes vote, though. The video is boring as all get-out, yet this bot is bare-bones TAS-ing at its finest.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
I want to know how the programmers could "forget" to set this is_picked_up flag for the glasses, and only the glasses. It seems like they would have had to have gone out of the way to change the way to change the way the glasses are handled, assuming they used some sort of subroutine. I wonder if they were trying to fix another, more sinister bug...
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
I particularly love how stage 1 has a ~30 second section of nothing more than "Jump back and forth between these identical green platforms". I think this game was really just an experiment in animating the ape. The rest is just an afterthought.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
Let's see. 300 mph is 134 m/s. If we assume constant acceleration (a big assumption), then that is 44.7 m/s^2 acceleration, or 4.6 g's, which is darn close to the human consciousness tolerance. Assuming a constant 2rd derivative of velocity, then we have an initial peak of 9 g's.
Clearly, the driver is an android.
Anyways...
This is a nice run. It is good to see the boring-ness (where I sit and watch the 32 identical background cities scroll by) reduced to a single race, followed quickly by glitches and epic-ness.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
Man, I remember (and had a love-hate relationship with) this game. It has some of the flimsiest controls and worst graphics for a "major" title on the NES, but there was just something unique and imaginative about the level design which kept me coming back.
That said, I thought I remember Bugs being able to stand on at least some of the enemies, smack it with the hammer, and ride it as it goes flying forwards. That is actually slower than walking, though?
Given the huge amount of health that Bugs has, and how a "takes damage to save time" run ends up looking more like The Cheetamen, I wonder if a "no damage" run would be more appropriate ... probably more entertaining, at least.
Excellent job on Tweety, by the way.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
So the question that remained on my mind... What *else* did you mess with the assorted POKEs into game memory on your way to 0xA2D5?
And yes vote, again, of course.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
Awesome.
We need more movies where the characters physically interact with the contents of game memory, in my opinion.
Also amusing and unexpected was the credits BGM failing to load. ... still can't decide whether this is a plus (for the weirdness) or a minus (for the lack of good music) to the run, though.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
I'm with Henke37 on this one.
There is definitely room for a nostalgia-inducing "clean" run for those of us who remember this game and love watching a good TAS of a good platformer.
On the other hand, this run is flat-out amazing, and I am hearing Pomp and Circumstance in my head (where the sound is less glitchy, of course), celebrating the unbelievable accomplishment that Shinryuu and FinalFighter pulled off with incredible effort, here.
Glitch out, TASers.
Edit: I have to say, though, I am in awe that the music track stays in one piece, the game doesn't lock up, and the ending doesn't completely crash, despite the graphical corruption that occurs. That's really a testament to the programming skill of Akira Kitamura and team on an at-the-time young console.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
Perhaps making the low-score goal a little less stringent might make thins into an interesting playaround. Obviously, the technical skill is amazing, but it is, at the moment, neither in the spirit of a playaround or a true TAS.
i.e., still show off the tricks, bounce between the goombas, juggle the mushroom, make the impossible jumps, and then end the level and get some flag points before it gets too boring. This can even be themed a Mario "pacifist" run or the like, to give it a nice title. But I think this certainly belongs in the "playaround" category, and should have the entertainment/sticking-to-goals balance adjusted accordingly.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
Yes vote, didn't think the xmas special had that many levels. The difficulty adds to the entertainment too.
You probably, like me, got the Skyroads XMAS Edition "shareware/trial" version though one of those Christmas Games Packs. You know, the ones which were full of various common Windows 3.1 games, but now covered in snow and with red bows everywhere? There was even a Jazz Jackrabbit XMAS Edition, which came with just a few Christmas-themed levels and an advertisement for the full game -- Skyroads.
By the way... is anyone else having trouble getting the embedded Archive.org videos on the main submission page to work? I can view the smaller video in the Author's Comments just fine, but the video in the submission page just jumps right to the last frame while the audio plays normally.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down
So, when I first read the summary and watched this TAS, I was more-or-less amused, but not quite impressed. It was not until I sat down and viewed the game with the summary alongside as a play-by-play did I really understand and appreciate everything that was going on.
So a suggestion, then, especially for playaround runs such as this, but more generally for any TAS that relies on confusing and/or subtle glitches: Include a (non-audio) commentary on the video.
I think all of the Mortal Combat TASes could benefit greatly from having simple comments such as those already here in the summary included in the video in some method (YouTube commentary, etc.).
--Just my $0.02
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down