It's curious how making a TAS makes you appreciate your own movie more than simply watching someone else's. After painfully completing the game as optimally as possible, reloading savestates again and again, struggling to get difficult parts passed as fast as possible, getting exasperated because it's so damn difficult, once you have finished it's a delight to see the movie from beginning to end, how it seems to play with such an ease and pass all obstacles like they weren't there.
Of course it's completely different from an outsider's point of view. It's just boring.
Top 5 reasons why this movie should be published:
1) It's a game reviewed by the Angry Nintendo Nerd. That has to count for something.
2) I'm such a nice guy.
3) My list of published TASes is way too short I need more.
4) I spent several hours making this movie.
5) Please?
;)
I don't think it's a question of what they want, but more a question of "to get started, look if there's something interesting among these". If the majority of newcomers find a video of a game they want to see in that list, the list is a success.
Edit: Btw, Bisqwit, could you perhaps calculate some statistics about how popular the "recommended movies" link was compared to other links in the website? (If you could somehow distinguish a "newcomer" by his browsing history, identifiable by his ip, it would be cool, but that would probably be a bit laborious...)
Oh shit, I'm really sorry I didn't think to take a look at the Genesis section, it's just because I never played Genesis when I was little, and also didn't wanted to interest me to the TASes on this console before I saw all the ones on SNES, because that's SNES I know the most from when I was little (and somewhat all nintendos too).
I think that's one of the reasons why it's always a good idea to make a post in the appropriate group along the lines of "I have been thinking of making a TAS of the game X for platform Y, what do you think?" before you actually start making the TAS. It could save you a lot of work in some cases.
Maybe just avoid "action". Use everything else, SRPG, RPG, Platformer, etc.
I think the list of "platformer" movies would be longer than the list of NES movies. Not very useful.
DarkKobold wrote:
However, perhaps a 'Runs for Popular games' would stop some of the infighting on the site.
That's not a bad idea, actually. "Runs of the most popular games" would be a lot less controversial than "best runs" or "recommended runs". While what makes a game "popular" is still a bit of a question of definition, it's still much less so than what can be defined as the "best" or "recommended" runs.
Do we really need to tell people to watch a super mario 3 run, or Mario 64? That is the first place a new person is going to go anyway!
And how exactly are they going to find those?
Write "supermario" in the search field and you get 0 results. Fix it to "super mario" (assuming this occurs to the newcomer) and you get a bunch of results which have nothing to do with the super mario movies: The first results are "Super Mario Kart Luck", "Super Mario 64 Tricks", "Super Mario Land Tricks", "Super Mario Bros Tricks", "Super Mario Kart Physics", "Super Mario World Tricks" and "Super Mario Bros 2 Tricks". Judging from this it almost looks like this site isn't about movies at all, but more like a wiki where people write about tricks in old console games.
(I have told Bisqwit more than once that he should implement a priority system to the search: Movies first, then wiki pages, then submissions, but he has never done so. Maybe also implement some kind of dictionary system, so if the user writes, for example, "supermario", the search engine automatically searches for "super mario" as well.)
Ok, maybe the newcomer will click the NES/Famicom link in the front page (we assume that *everyone* knows what those names mean, which might actually not always be the case): He gets a page with something like 200 items, which takes like an hour to load. Not very encouraging, I would say.
I simply can't understand what is wrong with a short, concise list of "best of the show" movies for newcomers to try. It makes it a lot easier to get into the site, so to speak.
Personally, I think its had its day. 3 years ago I can see how it would have been a great idea, but I think largely it sends out the wrong message of "this is what you should like". When the reality is that no one ultimatley wants to be told what they should/shouldn't like.
I disagree with this. It's not "this is what you should like", but "this is what we, the tasing community like, maybe you could start with these if you don't have anything else in mind". I think the list of recommended movies is a good idea. Someone who stumbles accross this site and sees a list of hundreds and hundreds of movies will be quite lost. Showing a concise list of "best of the show" movies may be a good start for a newcomer.
I agree, though, that the list of starred movies could perhaps be re-evaluated and brought "up to date", so to speak. And maybe make the list shorter than it currently was.
Plus a lot of them are of games pretty much anyone would choose to watch anyway, so its kind of just saying 'duh'.
Not really. Not everyone has played the games. Many people might like some tas-videos even without having ever played the game in question (I haven't played but just very few of the games from which tases have been made I like a lot). If you have never played the games, you then don't necessarily have a good idea of what you would like to watch. A "the tasing community recommends" list could be a helpful start.
If you really want to attract newer people then you would need to showboat newer games
This site isn't really about newest games, but about classic games. Its target audience are mainly the people who played those classic console games. The age of the game doesn't really matter.
Also starred movies don't represent site opinion in general, only that of the administrator.
"Recommended for first time viewers" and "highest voting scores" might not always coincide in the same list. A long-time taser or watcher of tases may appreciate rather different things than a first-time viewer.
Well I checked and figured you could enter the pre ridley room with ~50 frames left on the timer, in the beginning of the room there is a unavoidable fall (you start without ground under your feet) and no large platforms where you could gain great speed. Thus you can nor make it that far enough into the room, I don't even think you would come very close.
Thinking about it, couldn't you fire your weapon immediately after entering the pre-Ridley room, wait for a while (the minimum amount of frames needed for this to work) and then jump forward and launch the shinespark just at the right moment? If I'm not mistaken, doors can be opened by shooting even if the door is outside the screen (at least that's done after defeating Kraid).
(Of course this is already being quite slow, but maybe, just maybe, being able to shinespark through two long rooms may make up for it, if it indeed works. If you can make it work, could you post how many frames the current way of doing it and this way require?)
It's not about the charge timer (you have more than enough time to carry it into the next room), it's about the length of the pre-Ridley room. Basicly the rule I figured out is: All rooms that are longer than 2 screen blocks won't allow you to make a distance shot to open the door on the other side fast enough to shinespark through it without hitting (the only exception to this are blinking grey doors, because they open 6 frames faster). As Cpadolf said, the speed of the spark just gets too high after more than 2 screen blocks.
Then run in the pre-Ridley room until it becomes possible? The shot doesn't have to be fired immediately when entering that room. You could try running towards the other door and fire+launch the shinespark in the exact frame where it works.
I'm not saying this will be faster than doing it like it's done in the runs now, but has anyone actually tried it to see which is faster?
(Btw, some time could be saved in the Ridley room by charging the shinespark in that room instead of the adjacent room (where the energy tank is). That way time doesn't have to be wasted in that adjacent room.)
At approximately 25 minutes into the movie, when exiting Ridley's room, you charge the shinespark, climb the left wall to get to the ceiling, shoot at the door to open it, and launch the shinespark to get accross the next room fast.
Why not climb the right wall, open the door, go to the next room, fire and then launch the shinespark? Wouldn't that allow you flying through two rooms instead of one?
I know: Let's publish both runs as one single avi. First encode one of the runs to an avi, and then append the other to the same avi. Double publication. Two runs for the price of one.
Though I think that, at this point, its best to drop it until the next time Saturn says something totally out of line.
It seems that it took only slightly over 1 hour from your post for him to do exactly that:
Saturn wrote:
As much unbelievable as it may sound to you, please don't forget there are actually people around who don't have mental problems like you seem to have with me.
And I prefer to think about this site as about one that aims to serve speedy TASes, not lower numbers.
OTOH "feels faster" is a hard thing to measure. "Uses less frames" (or in some cases maybe even "uses less seconds by the game's own clock") is a much easier thing to measure.
At least to me it wouldn't sound very good to write "yes, the previous published run was 1 minute faster than this one, but this one feels faster".
I can see why everyone is debating about the realtime/ingame time issue, but if you look at the key factors of what makes Super Metroid entertaining (powerups, action, speed) then its obvious which run is more entertaining.
Cpadolf's run collects more powerups, has more style, and is just more tight altogether.
Fair points, but I believe that entertainment-by-amount-of-items-collected should be reserved for the 100% run, not the fastest run. I don't think it's really a question of which run collects more.
Yes, the audio and video get slowly desynced as the video progresses. This very rarely happens with any other movies published here. I'm using mplayer in linux.
The Bubble Bobble run was the very first one which I did not watch in its entirety (before it I had watched every single AVI publishes in this site thoroughly). No offense to the author of the run, but the game choice was extremely poor. It's just way too long and way too repetitive and with too long waits.
IMO while *usually* warp-runs should not obsolete non-warp-runs as a generic principle, this game specifically should be an exception.
