These are in no particular order, except for the first which is my very favourite.
[1686] NES Mega Man by Shinryuu & finalfighter in 12:23.34
Absolutely my favourite movie on this site. It has such a sense of drama, because the insanity slowly builds during the movie, starting out with little tricks like pausing to cancel hitstun and reset invulnerability periods (low insanity), progressing through zipping and wraparound glitches (medium insanity), and then culminating in the utterly nonsensical DelayStageClear (complete insanity). You feel like the game is slowly being pummelled into submission - at one point towards the end the music glitches up, almost as though the game is screaming in agony. Even the credits are entertainingly glitched.
[850] N64 Super Mario 64 "all 120 stars" by Rikku in 1:39:02.13
I think this was the first TAS I ever watched. When I saw all that BLJing I didn't know what was happening, and yet I was so hypnotised by it I watched the whole thing. I assumed it was played with a game genie, so imagine my surprise when I discovered that it was all possible with just a controller! I'm still amazed that it took a sixteen-player, five-year effort to overhaul this movie, which shows just how amazing it was for its time.
[1840] SGB Pokémon: Blue Version "Gotta Catch 'Em All!" by p4wn3r & Mukki in 3:20:46.17
OH MY CHILHOOD! Watching the completion of my childhood dreams in record-breaking time was, for me, pretty cathartic, after the hundreds of hours I had spent playing that game without filling the Pokedex (I got to 137 when I accidentally turned off while saving... oops!) The slower pace makes this run a bit of an acquired taste, but what I liked about this movie was that it felt like it was teaching you how to use the glitches, rather than just showing them off, and having played the game so much but being unaware of the glitches, it was fun trying to put the pieces together in my own head to try and work out where the run was going next. This is also the most insane route-planning I've ever seen in a TAS, though Banjo-Kazooie runs it close.
[1895] NES Super Mario Bros. "warpless, walkathon" by Mars608 in 25:30.05
Kind of like the Pokemon Blue 100% run, this run achieves something that isn't even meant to be possible. I guess I'm just attracted to the concept: "yeah, playing Super Mario Bros is too easy when you have frame-perfect reactions, let's make this challenging". The solution to the 4-3 problem is just beautiful, even more when I afterwards discovered it was something that had remained unsolved for about five years. There's something dramatic about the way Mario just waits there while the Koopa Troopa casually wanders off the edge of the platform and just carries on walking on thin air.
[2427] DS Super Scribblenauts "playaround" by Chef Stef, Kiwisauce in 1:01:52.63
The funniest TAS on the site, and when you're up against Family Feud, International Soccer Star, Brain Age and Pokemon Pi,.that's no easy feat. It does a great job of demonstrating just how exploitable the in-game dictionary is, and, unlike, say, Family Feud, there are parts that also demonstrate the benefits of tool assistance. And how can you not love a TAS that includes phrases like "fattening celery", "surgical zombie", "rainbow necronomicon" and "very very very flying yak"?
[2505] GC Super Smash Bros. Melee "Adventure Mode" by numerics in 10:23.48
A perfect semi-playaround. Again, like Pokemon Blue I'd played this game a lot (but I still really suck at it), so the mad combos going on here are just that little bit more special. This was also the first time I saw a truly great run and nobody else had commented, because I just so happened to be wandering past the site as it was posted. In addition, I am generally suspicious of fighting game TASes. So I guess part of the reason I loved this so much was that I really wanted it to be good, but didn't have the highest expectations. Oh how wrong I was.
[2062] N64 Super Mario 64 "70 stars, no Backwards Long Jump" by Jesus, Kyman, MICKEY_Vis11189, MoltovM, Nahoc, snark, sonicpacker, ToT, CeeSammerZ, coin2884, Eru, Goronem, Mokkori, Nekuran, Nothing693 & pasta in 42:58.52
For me, this narrowly beats out the 120-star run. Maybe because it's refreshing to see Super Mario 64 played perfectly but without Mario flinging himself backwards across hyperspace. As a result you get a feel that this is more a perfect human playing, because the game is (mostly) being played as a human would play it, only perfectly. Of course, there are still a boat-load of glitches too, but they are the side orders, not the main course.
[1902] DS Super Mario 64 DS by mkdasher & ALAKTORN in 14:23.34
Okay, I'm a bit of a Super Mario 64 fan, but, you know what, this run deserves more recognition. Again, it's Super Mario 64 but without the BLJs. The move obsoleting it has its moments too, but I think the impact of the original is pretty hard to beat. And it's so nice to see MIPS again.
[2187] GBC Pokémon: Yellow Version "arbitrary code execution" by bortreb in 12:51.87
So this run rewrote the rulebook. On the on hand, it's boring and has a somewhat unsatisfying payload. On the other hand - it has a payload! I wouldn't watch this again (I'd watch, and have watched, FractalFusion's version instead), but this as something that nobody would even have thought as possible at the time - in fact more than that, people would not even have thought it was
impossible, they just wouldn't have thought of it at all. The Super Mario Pong run that shocked AGDQ 2014 wouldn't have been possible without this.
[1902] DS Super Mario 64 DS by mkdasher & ALAKTORN in 14:23.34
Of all the "glitch to the end" movies, this is the most visually striking. In most movies of that kind, in-game data is interpreted as RAM, which is then manipulated to run the ending sequence. This movie turns that on its head: here RAM is interpreted as level data! What this means is that, while normally the interesting bit (fiddling the bytes to warp to the end) happens offscreen, here you actually see Mario merrily wandering around outside the Matrix. You can see him thinking "Right, just press this button here, and that block there, and I win". The fact that the haunted theme plays throughout the credits is singularly appropriate.
And one I just could never get the hype for:
[1285] SNES Chrono Trigger "save glitch" by inichi in 21:23.98
The TAS of 2009: the only time the award has gone to an RPG run, and the only time it's gone to a "glitched" run. I would say I'm not a fan because I've not played the game (as is often said about RPG TASes), but it seemed everyone was gobsmacked by this movie, and they can't all have been Chrono Trigger experts. To me it doesn't even look like that much weirdness is going on, except that a supposedly epic RPG is completed in roughly the time it takes to have lunch. The three minutes of item duplication at the beginning and the long cutscenes slow the pace too. Maybe it's because I wasn't there at the time - when I watched this I had already seen reality destroyed in Pokemon Yellow, Super Mario World, Super Mario Land 2 and Earthbound, so maybe I'd become jaded.