Super Monkey Ball Jr. is notorious for the bad controls and even worse physics. If you've seen the other monkey ball movies on the site, you may have noticed that moving diagonally is faster than going straight, and getting bounces into the air gives you more speed. Naturally, the exact opposite of both are true for this game. Any airtime will slow you down, and going diagonally does not save time.
Sounds more like better physics to me.
Spikestuff wrote:
Silverbawxer wrote:
I don't see anyone improving on this movie (mainly because nobody will ever bother :P)
I'm not entirely sure about the specifics because my mom thought TV and video games are evil and I wasn't allowed to watch or play them, but I know there was a TV show where viewers could phone in and control Hugo's movement on the TV screen with the tone dial of their phones. It was absurd. And I was never allowed to watch it! :<
derula, the egg will only hatch if I lose to the Armored Harriers. You can't reach Super Boots until you start a cage cutscene, which I skip. Until I do this and hit the switch below, the room is not open. I'll try to add that in to the subtitles when I get a chance, sorry for the confusion.
You're free to make a three-day long PM:TTYD TAS yourself, but then we will judge whether it's entertaining or not. Good luck!
Malleoz wrote:
Chapter 3 - I have to go back to get Yoshi because you cannot reach the Chapter 4 pipe without him.
What I meant is... isn't it possible e.g. to first play chapter 3 until you get Yoshi, and then enter the airvent backwards to trigger the ending? Or in chapter 2, isn't it possible to get the Super Boots and then skip to the ending? I assume that is impossible (otherwise you wouldn't have done it that way), but not knowing that and watching the video made me wonder why it was done in that strange order. I think it would help to put this in the subtitles, just something like "Now the path to Super Boots is open, and I need them for later" / "If I start the tournament right away, I can't get back into the office and do the air vent trick" / "The path to the Pirate's Grotto is unlocked now, because I did this thing in chapter 6."
I think that would avoid some confusion :)
Warning: spoilers throughout this post.Malleoz wrote:
Thanks guys, I appreciate it! Let me know if there is anything I didn't explain enough.
Two things I noticed. They're probably only 'cause I'm not familiar enough with the game; but then you did explain what RNG means so I suppose the subtitles are supposed to be noob-friendly... so here goes:
Why do you backtrack sometimes? It doesn't seem obvious why going back to a place is faster than getting it while you're already there. This happens several times throughout the run, e.g. chapter 2 after triggering the ending for the first time (I suppose this is because a path is open after triggering it that wouldn't be otherwise), going back to get Yoshi (complete with flying back and forth in the blimp), starting chapter 6 and then going back to chapter 5 to get an item, etc. None of these seem to be explicitly explained, and left me wondering if it's really faster going back and forth.
I was expecting something would happen when the second timer runs out. I thought maybe it would lead to an unexpected death warp, or overwrite another timer that's started later (with a negative value!?). But it just disappeared after a while. Maybe you could mention that the "second timer" is actually just the ticking noise, or if it's an actual timer, that it will have no further effect on the gameplay.
Other than that, great run! I always love when someone puts in the extra effort to add subtitles or even a HUD.
I wonder if for runs like this, an edited encode could be made a part of the submission. Like in this case, after five minutes, there would be a cut with a note saying "15 minutes later..." and then it jumps to the final minute-or-so. Because I would yes-vote that edited encode, but not the complete video.
Well, shame there's a faster run, because it could mean this may get cancelled or rejected or something....
This run tells a story. Usually the game's actual story drowns and remains hidden in a TAS, but this one writes a new story never intended by the creators.
For several minutes, we see the titular ninja blast through enemies, and to be honest, he looks kind of bored. And maybe annoyed that he has to perform murders and avoid death all the time.
And in the last stage, we find out why. He was raised to become a stealthy killing machine, when all he really wanted to do was to dance to the music.
Yes vote.
I tried the most possible to simplify sorry if you didn't understand
It's more about the structure. It's a psychological thing really, but individual shorter segments (i.e. sentences) are easier to read. It would also help to have some paragraphs.
I zoned out in like line three, but I'm also very tired now, so I'm not sure how much it is the sentence's fault.
I was hoping to read some explanation of what is going on, since I don't know much about Mortal Kombat or its glitches. No idea about some parts whether they were supposed to happen or were glitches, and I'm sure I've missed some details completely. About others I'm curious about how they work.
But I see that writing all that is boring, and the important part is a fun playaround :) I enjoyed it => yes vote.
Doesn't look very optimized... I think this should be worked on...
As for my vote, sadly, I think you gave away a lot of points in entertainment as well. It's not like everyone has to be hyperactive in autoscrolling stages, but just standing around and obviously waiting for the screen to move, while raising a chuckle when it happens for the first time, gets boring pretty fast otherwise. Why get to your destination as fast as possible when you then have to wait for a timer to finish, anyway? You could have easily made that more interesting without losing time.
So to the question should this be published? Needs more polish in my opinion.
To the question was it entertaining? Meh. The gameplay isn't very, but the hack itself is.
Do I want to see more of this game? Sure!
The previous movie had some holes where I thought "wait- this looks like it could be fixed."
This one looks like, unless some game-breaking glitches are discovered, there's no way to improve the score.
It's still entertaining, too, so yes vote.
What I learned about this game: you walk up to doors, open them, and then you are teleported to a completely unrelated place that looks very much like a place you've been to before, while sometimes there are people standing around who look like they could need some coffee.
Edit: This is more commentary on the game rather than your video. I think the game-in-game parts of this game are amazing. I really like the music and the glitch effects, and how the world in the game kind of resembles the one in the... inner... game. Even the DS-y system interface is very well done. However, the 3D world is just so unconvincing. I can live with the poly count, some of the sound effects are fantastic, and the atmosphere is great, but the extremely low-res textures and the unconvincing scene transitions (as described in the first paragraph) just make it seem like a weird mess. Which is a shame seeing how many great things there are.
Anyhoo, I have to give this a No, which sucks because it's not really your fault that it's not very entertaining. And I don't want to be discouraging, because this game is very interesting. Just not entertaining to watch speedruns of.
Edit2: What I actually wanted to edit this post for (but then forgot) is that I like the game's conclusion after the credits so much that I changed my forum signature to them.
feos wrote:
Why are you going forward and back to the door again during the second minute of day 4?
Judging from the submission text, it seems he had to do that to trigger the enemy thing.
This game makes no sense.
I like the parts where you let the old man drown and magically respawn and jumped when you're clearly supposed to duck. Other than that, it wasn't very entertaining to me, so meh vote.
Is it me or does the stereo sound reversed in the encode itself ?
This is the youtube encode I am referring to.
The first one or second one?
Both, actually. Stereo channels are swapped. Sound that's supposed to be on the left side is on the right side and vice versa.
Either that, or I put my headphones on wrong.
What is fairly certain (but also needs to be tested) is that the other runs, should they sync, would no longer be controller-only input and not even just power/reset buttons - there is the cart ejection mechanic and console prep stage as well between every power cycle.
Hmm, which makes me wonder if it would be possible to make a specially crafted cartridge that you plug the real game cartridge into. This cart would take care of initializing memory, and then just re-routing the original game. It could have a separate input from the bot, upon which it would halt the game, initialize memory again, and restart the game. Kind of like one of those cheat modules that used to be all the rage.
Of course, there are multiple concerns about this:
- Is it even possible?
- Would this be recognized by the TAS community as a valid console verification aid?
- Would it make non-TAS scene people make more suspicious of what it does / think we're just cheating?
This is incorrect. It is not theoretically possible for the NES to have the same starting state as FCEUX unless directly outwardly manipulated. Time will not give you this state, ever.
Well... wouldn't individual bits in the RAM randomly switch back to 1, even if it's waaaayyyy less likely than them switching to 0? If so, there would be a theoretical chance that, given enough infinite time, the RAM would eventually be in FCEUX startup state. It'd be incredibly unlikely to happen, but since we'd have infinite time, it would happen eventually. And the superhuman TASer should be able to wait an infinite timespan for their console verification, right?!
[/sarcasm]
Not a great fan of the way you ended input, seems like there would have been tons of time to lose all the extra lives during the game so the game over would have occurred very shortly after end of input, without losing time... voting meh because a) I may be wrong on that and b) the time after end of input did show a few interesting things as you pointed out... just not enough to keep me entertained during that time.
Edit: Other than that, I really liked it!
Assuming constant acceleration and a starting speed of 3m/s, this results in a final speed of 96.48m/s, or 347.33 km/h (215.82 mph). That's 9.241 times the fastest human running speed ever recorded.
Voted yes. Looked optimized.
I thought about voting "meh", because there were some moments of standing around where I thought you could add more entertainment. But these were rare and short, and overall I was pretty entertained. Didn't mind the bonus stage.
"I wonder why most of the times that 1 frame has its solution to be saved. Is it pure coincidence or because persistence makes miracles? I guess the world is full of surprises, even in Mario's world."
"SMB runs are more than just speed records, but also something beautiful and incredible making you believe that wonders may come true."
Nothing to add. Yes vote.
Can't watch the encode because of GEMA. Obvious no vote.* I'll have to wait for a different encode or until after it's published, or get my hands on ROM/emulator/movie file.
* Just kidding, obviously.
