Sorry for bumping a five-year-old thread but...
Shouldn't this movie have the "uses death to save time" tag? Or is falling off the track not considered "death" in this case?
Wow. Sorry, I didn't mean to insult your or other people's efforts, and I think you can tell from my post count I don't really know what I'm talking about, so please forgive me. I had just assumed that you would be able to manipulate crits and misses everywhere like you can in the main game. How do you optimise battles when the RNG doesn't move? Do you have to go through every possible RNG seed at the beginning of the seven battles to see which one is most favourable?
This would now be a somewhat weird-looking TAS, because frontier stuff (or at least the battle factory, from what i've seen) would, to somebody who didn't understand the RNG differences (like me until about half an hour ago), look really un-optimised compared to the first half of the TAS, in fact I've watched GoddessMaria's TAS and at times it looks like a human playing, and even like an idiot playing (eg no human would ever use Scary Face if they were trying to go as fast as possible, especially when the user would still be slower afterwards).
I found most of the move choices impossible to understand, but I do realise it's because you needed those moves to shift the RNG where you wanted it to go. The result is a very unusual run - really hard to understand the player's choices even if you are familiar with the game, but without using glitches. This looks like a great technical achievement, but honestly I wouldn't be able to tell even if it was really suboptimal. And I think I found it more interesting that you weren't able to just manipulate Horn Drill and Quick Claw to work every time, as then the run would have got really boring.
thatguy: The entertainment from doing all gold symbols in the battle frontier is the extreme difficulty of it. It can take 100s of hours for a casual player to finish the battle frontier, main reason being that if you lose then you have to start progress towards that gold symbol over. Even werster who is really pokemon experienced plugged about 20 hours into that one speedrun and I think only got one gold symbol in that time.
But it's not hard at all under TAS conditions! (And when I say that, I mean completing the Frontier isn't hard. Beating it optimally still is of course.)
Yeah, maybe seeing a real-time speedrun would be legitimately impressive, but that's an entirely different story. Real-time players are best served taking on the tower with strategies that have been cleverly designed to protect against bad luck. In a TAS there is no bad luck, so you're just watching more luck manipulation when you've already sat through an hour and a half of it, and after seeing Stephen soloed by a paralysed Swellow, it would take quite a lot for anything in the tower to top that.
Still, the fact that I personally don't like the idea is not a valid reason for this run to not be made, as long as enough people find it entertaining. If anyone decides to take it on, I wish them good luck.
For me this is a bit of an odd category.
Having googled how many wins are needed for the Gold symbols, it looks like a hell of a lot of battle grinding tacked on at the end of the run in the battle tower. Also, since iirc the Frontier doesn't open until after the E4, the run wouldn't end on the credits, and I feel that wouldn't give it much closure.
This category is clearly inappropriate for the vault (unless you have a strange definition of 100% completion) and may not be entertaining enough to reach moons. I would love to be proven wrong about this.
I think the Pokemon run we all want to see done is a save-corrupted GSC run. But I guess that will have to wait until people understand the mechanism and can manipulate the map distortion patterns consistently.
I guess you have to be american to understand that. The only thing that Europeans care about is violence (especially Germany, where Goldeneye is still banned!). But I find this much more understandable than problems with nudity or bad language.
Yeah, Americans really care way too much about bad language in their media. The King's Speech was rated R in America - nobody under seventeen could see it - because Prince George uses the F-word a few times. And, in context, it's not even a rude word - he uses it because he realises that it reduces his stammer, rather than to insult people.
I know I'm a first-time poster here but I've lurked for about a year. I've watched most of the star movies, and many others (basically movies of games I've played or movies with high ratings), and I've browsed the forums a bit too.
I think that this documentary idea is much more interesting than previous site adverts, which are basically just clip shows. They look cool, and the music is awesome, but I feel like they don't really explain to the viewer what he is watching. Doing something like this probably raises awareness more, even if it is ultimately less entertaining.
The draft at the moment is looking great, and I feel that interviews are a cool idea, particularly the andrewg interview as I think it would help emphasise that RTSes and TASes shouldn't be compared directly (a common misconception which leads many people to consider TASes "cheating"), but that people can do both, and information can be shared between the communities.
If you're looking for a movie that you could use to explain speedrunning/TASing tricks, could I suggest ckstram's Super Mario Kart? I feel this is a good showcase of several basic tricks while not being impossible to follow. In particular:
- It's a familiar game, and it's easy to understand what is going on even if you haven't played it.
- The designers' intended paths are very obvious, and it is very obvious that the TAS doesn't use them.
- It is clear that the movie is exploiting the game's very loose definition of a lap.
- Death abuse is frequent. Moreover, it is TAS-only abuse and it is fairly easy to understand how it saves time, even if you're not familiar with the game.
- Luck manipulation is also present in the form of picking up nothing but mushrooms from the random item boxes, and in avoiding enemy weapons. Anyone who has played any Mario Kart game would know how unlikely this would be unassisted.