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Note that the effect of luck manipulation is limited in Brogue, because each level has its own seed; you can't manipulate a level before it generates like in NetHack. (Apparently throwing monsters/items down pits does have a moderate effect, but this is considered a bug and will probably be fixed soon.)
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I strongly disagree with any option change that would make it hard to see the HP/missile count/danger meter, etc.
I'm OK with any option change that would reduce the amount of border around the screen.
I think people may be confusing the two here…
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Most games don't default to hardest difficulty, and a TAS input file has to be able to recreate everything on a newly bought cartridge with clean saves. That includes going into the menu to change the difficulty. You don't meet the usual category requirements if you don't, so it's not actually wasting any time; there's no way to avoid spending that time, so it's not a waste.
Note that you typically have to go into the options menu anyway to change other settings (text speed is a common one), so the difficulty change tends to hardly cost any frames anyway.
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Derakon wrote:
"No cannons" is a strict subset of 100%, and thus not IMO interesting (assuming of course we get a 100% run). The actual gameplay in the levels needs to be significantly modified for the third run.
This is actually mostly incorrect; no-cannons has no incentive to pick up Star Coins (which exist in every level), 100% does. However, the difference may still not be enough.
Something that would look very different would be a shell-only run that actually uses the shell whenever possible. Sadly, if you have the shell, actually using it is slower than deliberately manipulating it not to trigger…
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It'd be quite similar to tiny-only, but have more variety; there are a few levels that can't be done coinless tiny-only, but can be done with the help of other power-ups (2-3 main exit, for instance, requires either a flower or shell to kill the big piranha plant, as Mini Mario can't jump over it without collecting a coin). (When I was doing coinless on the console, I did it with no cannons, and no alt exits except in world 7 which requires one, because it gave what I thought was the most interesting route; I guess a max% coinless might be still more interesting, though.)
NSMB has the advantage over games like SMW that you can't just fly over every level, so there's quite a lot of ground-based play on any%/100%. So small-only makes a less interesting challenge category than it does in some other games. No-coins isn't ideal (especially because of 8-T1), but it's the best one I know of so far; maybe someone will think up a better one.
Any NSMBDS TASers out there, I'm really interested in whether 6-1 is possible no-coins, btw; it's probably TAS-only if it is.
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No coins is a pretty acrobatic category; it's rather slower than the regular category, and spends a lot of time in Mini Mushroom form (smallest hitbox + most manoeuvrability). It'd look quite different from the existing run as a result.
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A playaround is, specifically, a run meant to be entertaining rather than break a record.
"Superplay" is a good generic word that can be used for speedruns, scoreruns, etc., and even playarounds.
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STBM wrote:
In my opinion, a max goo collection would be a long video with many repetitions (dragging 93 goos at a pipe on a level, and then 23, and then... repeat for all the levels :p).
A TAS could probably throw them, which would be faster than dragging, but I fear it'd still be repetitive.
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Zowayix wrote:
I've attempted a no-coins run, and I can tell you that 1-T is a complete ***** to beat, because it requires the Mini Mushroom and several ridiculously precise jumps in a row before the checkpoint. It's worse if you insist that your coin counter stays at 0 the whole run though, because then you can't use the checkpoint and you have to redo the whole Tower again if you pick up a coin. It makes getting a coin significantly worse than dying.
I could have told you the same thing :) The hardest part is the area with many scattered coins between two crushers; I got it reasonably consistent using the Mini Mushroom and a walljump off the right wall (from below the one-way floor), though. I'm not completely convinced it's impossible without the Mini Mushroom (although it'd probably require TAS precision).
Fwiw, 6-1 is a level that I'm very interested in knowing whether it can be done coinless. I can't personally do it; the issue is the walljump sequence before the checkpoint. There's enough space there that it seems plausible that it's possible to work out a route, though. (It's possible to lure a Bullet Bill to the area and use it as a platform, but it doesn't give enough height to make the jump without a walljump.)
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@STBM: I knew it wasn't OCD (someone in thread seemed to think it was). It also isn't an any%, because you don't skip levels that you could be able to skip. (It'd make the game worse if you did, of course). So it needs "all levels" marked as the category.
The story is independent of the run, so deleting cutscenes would be helpful when watching it. (Cutscenes can easily be found on YouTube for most games.) The cutsceneless encode can't/shouldn't be the primary, but it'd make a great secondary encode.
(As for the speed thing; many levels work OK at full speed for someone like me who knows the game well, but I had to use frame advance to figure out wtf you did in "You Have to Explode the Head". And I have a general idea of what you were doing in "Burning Man", but it's too fast to be seen even with (YouTube's 30fps) frame advance.)
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STBM: Do you want me to write submission notes that explain what's going on in much more detail? I think something like that is needed for this game, and it would help the enjoyment of viewers who don't know the game.
Oh, and I think the category is incorrectly marked. This is not an OCD/100% run. What I suspect it is (but haven't watched the whole thing yet to verify) is an "all levels" run. (A few of them are skippable.)
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I request an encode with cutscenes cut out and the gameplay in slow motion. Would be easier to watch that way.
I think this TAS deserves publication for the first level alone. The strategy is the obvious one that any beginner will come up with, but it goes so fast the only sensible reaction is "wait, what?" followed by rewinding.
Slow motion with commentary may help in several of the other levels. You need to know the game quite well to understand quite how absurd some of the strategies are, sadly.
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Having done both small-only and tiny-only in realtime (any%) for fun, I'd say the two categories are pretty similar (tiny-only feels slower, though).
I'd also like to suggest minimum-coins as a category (sadly, there are some obviously unavoidable coins in 8-T1, but apart from that, you can even do it warpless without collecting coins in any other level). Playing like that makes NSMB DS feel like a kaizohack rather than a regular Mario game…
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This is a valid category: unlike 100%, it doesn't require hunting for star coins. So it's seeing a reasonable number of the levels completed as fast as possible, something that doesn't exist in other categories. (It's thus a little more different from 100% than, say, SMB3 no-whistles, which is a very similar category.)
I have a feeling that this run is unoptimised, though. My instant reaction simply upon seeing the time was "that feels too slow for TAS warpless", and other people's comments are making me feel that's right. (Waiting on an encode before I come to a real judgement on that.)
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The problem there is that pretty much every jump in the game does that.
I think I suggested a category that bans exiting solid objects from a side other than the side you entered them from; I don't yet know of any issues with that definition, although perhaps they exist.
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<ais523> anyway, I really like the visible sequence breaking in the KMW1 TAS; it's way more visible than in pretty much any other game
<Nach> ais523: then write it in the thread
<nitrog_phone> I'd rather not skim through 5 pages of comment that AREN'T on the run
<ais523> Nach: I did
<ais523> shall I write it again?
Edit to avoid double-post: If Masterjun's right about this being suboptimal, though, that would be a good reason to reject in its own right.
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What I really liked about this run is the amount of unintended routes that are being taken. It's not like Item Abuse or something where huge amounts of glitching are required to make progress; rather, it's pretty clear to even someone who doesn't know the hack that Mario is going via completely the wrong routes here, and that's what pushes it over to a Yes for me.
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It's worth checking to see what happens if you reset during the intro cutscene. Many games let you skip their intro cutscene that way. (Probably it won't work, but it'll save a lot of trouble if it does!)
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Cooljay wrote:
Not going to lie but I almost thought it desynced at the cake boss. Still a yes vote though as it did beat the game.
Just confusing why someone would run into the boss numerous times and damage themselves. Never seen that before in any TAS.
It's actually quite common in TASes of certain games (it's frequently done in Sonic games, for instance). The usual reason is to get inside the boss's hitbox so that you can damage it more quickly; I'm not sure whether or not that's the case here.
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It's worth submitting even if it doesn't get accepted; it'll get more people watching it, and it'll probably get a great encode because there are encoders that are watching the queue.
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Using different glitches can constitute a different category, even within the same game (see, e.g., Super Mario 64 70-star); however, a newer version of the game gives a natural point to draw the line.
Generally speaking, "past most-glitched" (e.g. Super Mario 64 16-star) isn't an interesting place to draw the line, or at least hasn't been found to be one here at TASvideos. For low-glitch categories, you're either going to want a lot of different glitches (as in SM64) to make the runs sufficiently different from each other, or else you're going to want no glitches at all to show a true glitchless playthrough.
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I'd say with different glitches, it's pretty much different categories. (Using the most recent version of a game, if it contains no known glitches, might lead to an interesting way to do "glitchless" TASes; those are less popular than ones that use glitches, but there's still a large contingent of people who like watching them.)
If the game falls to the same glitches used in the same way, it probably isn't interesting.