I agree this is a great TAS.
In my opinion, unless there are serious sequence breaks that are difficult to do unassisted (beyond save state abuse), then the adventure game is a poor choice to TAS.
This one was clearly not a poor choice.
There is no entertainment value in watching an adventure game being played as fast as possible as intended. But it's certainly entertaining skipping stuff that's not supposed to be skippable. :)
"You were supposed to frame war it"....
It seems the issue is clear.
Gia didn't want to submit it at first, because he wasn't convinced it was optimized, and had no problem with someone else optimizing his strategy. But his original file apparently has the *exact same frame count*, and thus wasn't an improvement, and he doesn't want his video to be beaten on here by one that tied it.
And because gia couldn't beat this TAS either, he can't change his mind and submit it now, because it would be rejected. THAT'S why he's mad. because he failed to submit it earlier, he can't submit his TAS now that turned out to be optimized after all.
In plain english. He wants the TAS removed because it was not the first one to reach that frame count on that game. As soon as someone figures out a way to save a frame, he will be perfectly fine with it being submitted.
This doesn't even meet it's goal of minimal kill counter.
There's a glitch involving the stopwatch and getting hit as it runs out and killing the boss at the same time that lets you not increase the kill count or get exp! People have reached the final save point with a kill count of ONE without tool assistance. Perhaps with that glitch, a kill count of 0 is possible.
Wow. Color me impressed. I didn't think the harder skips were doable realtime.
On the good news, this increases confidence that the game is properly emulated. :)
The thing about an optimized 16 star run is that 16 stars can be performed without tool assistance.
I personally have BLJed up the endless stairs on the real console.
SO that is why this category is not arbitrary.
Here's the deal with this hack.
When you complete air, and play the second loop you can now access a secret passage that is blocked by a goomba normally, which gives you the password to open the zip for this hack, which is meant to be an extra hard, extra short version of AIR.
Like AIR before it, the author realizes that you can turbo-a through blocks, and you can come back from a death off the bottom of the screen without tool assistance, but these techniques are FORBIDDEN, because the author couldn't figure out how to stop them.
This is why AIR 2 was made. to give the TASers something they can't cheat on. :)
I vote for an encode with a pokemon caught counter. :)
Also I think a linked movie would be awesome, with both games maxing their pokemon count and trading to fill in the gaps.
A speed runner would walk up to the arcade, plunk in their quarter, start the camera, and play.
Most speed runners reset until they are lucky. You reset until you have the 1/50 chance that a special item appears or you reset until one of 50 pseudo random boards appear. Where is the difference?
Right, but that's fair on a HOME game. speed running on an arcade machine itself is a whole different matter. An honest console player can just keep resetting til they get it right. An arcade game player has to put in the coins unless they own the machine.
There's a difference between knowing a level and knowing a random sequence.
A speed runner would walk up to the arcade, plunk in their quarter, start the camera, and play.
That's what in my opinion makes this a proto-TAS.
From a speed running perspective, those superplays from the poweron pattern are cheating, removing part of the challenge of the game.
Yup. videotaped episodes and freeeze framed them to work out all the spinner patterns so that he knew the safe times to stop and gain additional spins.
Contains speed/entertainment tradeoffs.
Manipulates luck.
Abuses programming errors. (regardless of sequence picked for the game, there were safe times to try, even without foreknowledge of the arrangement chosen for that episode)
Actually, the competition cart seeds the RNG based on your score in the mario section, and then collects no more entropy.
Sega tetris instead walks through a fixed seed list after every game.
Either way, the seed can be changed through player input.
My point is that a very basic TASing technique (luck abuse) was used long before emulators existed.
And I'm pretty sure nes tetris collects entropy during gameplay. Usually people messed with the cart by playing super mario brothers most of the time and abusing turtle stair.
Sega Tetris, from Japan.
This TAS predates emulators.
You see, the game always generates the same 1000 piece looping sequence from poweron with a clear nvram. (the pieces are supposed to be truly random, you see)
It also gave a 10X bonus for line clears that emptied the field completely.
So what the japanese players did was map out the sequence, and work out how to score bravo after bravo to most efficiently max the score counter in the smallest number of line clears.
The tool in this case was the piece sequence list. No "legitimate" player could possibly max out the score that fast. BUT, armed with the tool of foreknowledge of all upcoming pieces, the hardcore japanese players would max out the counter much faster.
It would be tagged "aims for fastest time, abuses luck".
Because of the way the random generator worked, this is one case where luck could be abused in real time.
I'm on the side of no continues in arcade games.
The reason is because using continues to get more bombs so speed up the game is not superhuman.
ANYONE with sufficient funds can do that to save lots of time.
I vote no.
To complete the game you have to get all four characters through all the levels. That's just not entertaining. Super Mario BRos 2 (usa version) is truly the better game.
Well, if all four characters does the same thing, then of course it will be boring.
However, if each character doesn't something different (maybe even slightly different paths), then it can be entertaining.
Imagine, even in SMB2(USA), the plays are different between Princess, Mario, Luigi and Toad.
As long as there are enough differences between each character's run, I think Doki doki panic will be entertaining to watch.
I'm not saying a run of one character cannot be entertaining.
The problem is you have to do all four of them in the same game to get the ending.
It would be like sitting through four suboptimal TASes.
Well, it seems the question of TAS on real hardware has been answered by NESBot. :)
Provided a game doesn't abuse the DMC channel or uninitialized RAM, it's tasable on hardware.
The deal with blades of steel is the DMC controller starts in an unknown state, and thus steals cpu cycles randomly.
AS for the walljump test, it's simply the minus world trick. It proves the possibility of walljump. Also, people have walljumped in a certain super mario brothers 3 level in real time. Nintendo power guide even says it's possible. SUCK IT, haters. :)
As for proof that the console is unmodified, it's simple.
Boot up blades of steel twice before playing back the intended game. :)
I think it would be interesting to show an alternate version of this that draws the number first and then the rest of the lines, to demonstrate how it's seeing the numbers.
Or perhaps an alternate encode that pauses to show the hidden numbers.
I believe the glitch run to be a lot more entertaining than any non glitch run could possibly be.
The issue is that nothing that doesn't involve glitches requires anything close to inhuman precision, as near as i can tell. Other than glitch abuse, there don't appear to be any tricks that aren't humanly possible
If someone can make an entertaining non glitched run I'll be very impressed.
This is cool, but i was very disappointed that missiles were used. :)
When I saw one item run, i thought "how the heck is he gonna complete the game without missiles?"
THen i saw a boss die, and missiles getting used afterwards. "Oh...."
I guess beating the game sans missiles is impossible?
You know, I could have SWORN that the bons on high jump was from fouling the first two attempts, then nailing the third each time.
Was that only the arcade, or is getting a bonust form always suceeding a bug?
I have never known a NES game to deliberately crash if RAM has a pattern in it, but it was a rather common antipiracy trick on the c64, to defeat the freezer carts, that would clear out the ram or write a repeating pattern to it so they knew what ram was occupied by the game and what ram was not when you pressed the RAM copy button. So when they detected a pattern in unused memory they would jump off into never never land (the cpu had a handy "illegal opcode" that crashed the cpu instantly, requiring a poweroff). TO even get them to run at all on emulators, you had to randomize the reset pattern, or pick a pattern the game didn't know how to check for. Or just remove the protection. Particularly devious ones would actually write the state of some unitialized ram to disk, and if it was the same next boot, crash. Oh, and if it couldn't write the state? crash again.
It's true an emulator has to idealise the timing crystals, as it's truly impossible to simulate a real life imperfect oscillator affected by the environment accurately. This is also an issue with the PSX, where they didn't all run at the exact same clock speed, and some games didn't have proper tolerance for this (Gradius Gaiden, we're looking at you).
But an emulator CAN make uninitialized ram random. It can make the initial state of the DMC random. And such an emulation will be more accurate than one that does not (it's behavior will be closer to real hardware). And on such an emulator, the game would become unTASable, without provisions to store the initial state of ALL memory and write only registers when recording starts. (just because they are write only on the real hardware doesn't stop the emulator itself form reading them) But then we have the possibility of people manipulating that initial state by hex editing the file. Is that legit?
I understand what he's trying to say.
even simpler example.
You wish to move on a 2 dimensional plane, and you move at a certain speed, but can move any direction.
In theory, if you plot every possible direction of straight line movement after 100 seconds, you should make a perfect circle with the endpoints.
However, in reality, due to rounding error, you won't end up with one. You will end up with an imperfect circle.
So in some cases, deviating slightly from a straight will put the rounding error on your side instead of against you, and the rounding error may be enough to overcome the additional length.
To test, we take the corner, and we plot two circles this way, each ending at the corner. we may find that on the free space side of the corner, there's an overlap in the plots, when you actually have them intersecting at the corner. If so, diverting from the most direct path will actually be faster.
No, no, no.
The idea is to use a TAS to accomplish what's not supposed to be even possible to accomplish.
To accomplish a goal that is impossible under normal conditions, and very difficult (but still possible) when TASing.
Many Super Mario Hacks are designed to be hard even with savestates and slow mo. These do not count.