This is great! We haven't seen a SM TAS showcasing new tech for a while, and the icing on the cake is that it pushes low% down to 13%, obsoleting two other TASes.
My one and only critique is that the wall jumping in Maridia does get a little boring after seeing it once or twice, but only accounts for what... a minute or so out of a 46 minute video. I wouldn't say it diminishes the quality of the TAS in any way.
Overall, I personally found this run quite entertaining to watch. I didn't find the Ridley or MB fights boring. The addition of moonwalking makes these fights new and different from the other 14% TASes.
There’s a lot of feedback here, and since I’m listed as one of the contributors I thought I would give my two cents:
This is the first known calaboration between a TASer and community.
This might be a bold statement, but you can’t hold nymx or anyone else to possibly know of every TAS for every game and how they were collaborated on. This specific TAS was worked on and authored _in the open_ and broadcasted on Twitch for everyone to watch and help collaborate on (hence the long list of collaborators). I can’t recall of a single occurrence of this for Super Metroid - especially for a “legit” category - “legit” being defined as being listed on deertier.com.
If community “calaboration” is so important, why wasn’t this community involved in any way? I find it incredibly sketchy that nothing about this run was mentioned here until this submission… I’m all for collaboration, believe me, but is it really even collaboration if you’re not reaching out to a community that knows what they’re doing?
I can’t speak for nymx here. I, personally didn’t know that posting userfiles on tasvideos.org was an option. If I had I would have suggested nymx do this. I do think it’s unfair to discredit nymx or this video on this premise though. nymx was clearly seeking collaboration, and looked to an active community of Super Metroid runners (on Twitch) and those with an incredible level of knowledge about the game.
I think the goal choice is arbitrary. These kinds of runs have been rejected before. Barring that fact, we already have about 4500 published runs for Super Metroid, what does this one bring to the table? Does it add anything significant…?
I do not think the goal choice is not arbitrary, and as I already mentioned - it is a “legit” category and is listed on deertier.com which is the standard for all Super Metroid rankings. The run you listed as being banned is taken from one of the earlier Castlevania games. No disrespect but comparing the movement of your character in Super Metroid and Castlevania is like comparing Apples to Oranges.
This TAS shows a vast array of strats and technique that we have not previously seen in other Super Metroid TASes - especially by those authored by cpadolf and saturn. Because this category requires every tile to be explored this requires that the majority of the game be played in a way that we haven’t witnessed in other Super Metroid TASes. It requires a lot of creative maneuvering of Samus to complete the primary category objective while maintaining speed, avoid unnecessary item collection, avoiding unnecessary multiple passes through rooms and tiles, and provide entertainment value. I’m not going to list out every room here, but a selected few strats that are vastly different than other TASes are Red Tower Shinespark, The Moat Shinespark, and Mother Brain fight.
The routing in this TAS is very different from the current WR, and to compare these two room by room, and strat by strat could be a book in itself and it’s simply easier and more time conserving just to watch the videos.
If there are 90 seconds of known improvements and an updated submission is being made, why even submit this one? I completely understand if someone spends a long time working on a TAS, gets burnt out, and ends up finding improvements later on but doesn’t have the motivation to incorporate them into a new run, but that clearly isn’t the case. 90 seconds is pretty significant, even for a longer run like this, not to mention there will likely be further optimizations found on a second pass. Unless it’s going to take the better part of a year, it would’ve probably been better off to have waited for the improved version.
Again, it’s not really my place to speak for nymx here, but I know he spent at least 6 months of actively authoring this TAS, and spent at least a year prior doing research and planning. One cannot simply go back and optimize a section of the game without scrapping the rest of it. He could’ve literally spent years and years working on this TAS! I think it’s unfair to say this TAS should be totally optimized considering it’s the first of its kind. capadolf submitted multiple runs of a category as they discovered new optimizations - even if by only 20 seconds (http://tasvideos.org/1686S.html compared to http://tasvideos.org/1863S.html)! I think this TAS sets a great base line for future TASes of this kind to be improved upon.
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I think this is a great TAS. Super Metroid has had a lot of TASes authored (some of which are pretty epic in my book). I think this one does a great job using tech that we’ve all seen before used in new ways we haven’t seen to make this an entertaining and _fast as heck_ run. I look forward to future improvements, but I think this is a solid baseline for a TAS of this category.
To all the users out there “rejecting” this run. It would be much more helpful to the author of the TAS and to the community if you could provide valid feedback (some of you have) about your reasons for rejection.