Recorded on Snes9x 1.43-improvement12 (but should work fine on future versions of the Snes9x 1.43 series as well)
Sync Settings
WIP 1 Timing: ON
Left+Right/Up+Down: ON
Volume Envelope Height Reading: OFF
Fake Mute desync workaround: ON
Sync samples with sound CPU: OFF
Attributes of this run
classic any% mode (without game-breaking glitches or codes)
aims for fastest ingame time (due to universal recognition, regardless of emulator)
takes damage to save time
manipulates luck
abuses minor non game-breaking glitches
Genre: Platformer
Total Frames: 141317
About the Game
Super Metroid is a classic platformer with many advanced techniques and a very fine, subpixel-based move engine. The story is about a bounty hunter called Samus who has the goal to explore a foreign planet called Zebes to find and destroy Mother Brain, the evil leader of the galaxy who is breeding a mighty species called Metroids to abuse them for her own benefits. During the journey you will find alot of items such as new ammo, energy tanks, special upgrades that speed you up or allow to pass certain areas you would normally not be able to, and making your character strong enough to be ready for the upcoming showdown against Mother Brain.
Despite being over 17 years old by now, it is considered as one of the best games ever made, and is still played by many people on a regular basis. Due to the many different move techniques, a high variety through the new upgrades, and alot of route possibilities, this game is a very common target for many types of speedruns and playthroughs.
Moviemaking & Comments
This is my 3rd version of the classic any% run for Super Metroid, aiming for fastest ingame time without the use of gamebreaking glitches or cheat codes. With a once again reworked route and improved techs and boss strategies I developed in many places of the run, the completion time is finally down to 0:22:38, breaking the 0:23 mark that was long time considered to be the TAS limit for a gamebreaking-free run.
feos: Added HD encode link (check the new encoding method!)
adelikat: Accepting for publication as a restoration of the in-game any branch. The publisher of the submission will probably not have the ability to edit the obsoletion chain, but I will make sure it claims the in-game obsoletion from the currently published movie.
Voted no. Certainly not different enough than the current published run.
The any% runs will certainly less and less different from each other. You can see that watching from Ceres to Norfair (With the attic room beeing a bit different).The difference between this run and the published one is the goal set by the TASer, in this case "51 seconds in-game time". The rooms of this game will be kinda, the same as perfect levels in sonic runs, if you can't save time, they're gonna be almost the same. The difference in Super Metroid is that the "levels" will be played in a different order/route if you're going for realtime or in-game time.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11478
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
EDIT: sorry guys, reencoding.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
I just don't see why it's acceptable for any one game to have near-identical runs side-by-side while the rest have none.
If my memory serves me right, there were three reasons:
Back when the split was made, they weren't near-identical. Only now, several iterations and discoveries later, have the routes converged to a point where they are.
The ingame-run was interesting to speedrunners back when a TAS was basically a speedrun with higher precision. Not only were TASes a good tool to test different routes and room strategies, they could also serve as goalposts, as in "hey, my run is 2 minutes away from perfection. That's pretty good, right?".
But today TASes are using tricks like the Torizo escape, early WS CWJ, luck manipulation to skip ammo and e-tanks, 1-round phantoon, 4-hit Wave-PB combos and other stuff that's pretty much restricted to TASes. Not only aren't the TASes comparable to speedruns any more, they also aren't really helpful for planning speedruns. This ingame-route will never be seen in a regular speedrun.
While it is still interesting to see how much the ingame timer can be lowered, noting this fact does not require publication, nor does a number at the end of the movie make for an interesting movie by default.
The decision to publish both was also meant to prevent postpone a heated debate about the "correct" timing for this game. It had gotten out of hand and was reignited every time a new run with different timing was submitted.
Now that taco&kriole's run has undone the separation, we'll need to consider whether we'll introduce it again to postpone the discussion another time, or whether we'll simply attempt to have the discussion in a civilized manner.
I think you'll agree that all of these reasons were valid back when the split was made.
Though, as I have stated, IMHO at least two of the reasons don't hold any more. We'll see about the third, and maybe someone can come up with new reasons that need to be considered before making a decision.
I just don't see why it's acceptable for any one game to have near-identical runs side-by-side while the rest have none.
If my memory serves me right, there were three reasons:
Back when the split was made, they weren't near-identical. Only now, several iterations and discoveries later, have the routes converged to a point where they are.
The ingame-run was interesting to speedrunners back when a TAS was basically a speedrun with higher precision. Not only were TASes a good tool to test different routes and room strategies, they could also serve as goalposts, as in "hey, my run is 2 minutes away from perfection. That's pretty good, right?".
But today TASes are using tricks like the Torizo escape, early WS CWJ, luck manipulation to skip ammo and e-tanks, 1-round phantoon, 4-hit Wave-PB combos and other stuff that's pretty much restricted to TASes. Not only aren't the TASes comparable to speedruns any more, they also aren't really helpful for planning speedruns. This ingame-route will never be seen in a regular speedrun.
While it is still interesting to see how much the ingame timer can be lowered, noting this fact does not require publication, nor does a number at the end of the movie make for an interesting movie by default.
The decision to publish both was also meant to prevent postpone a heated debate about the "correct" timing for this game. It had gotten out of hand and was reignited every time a new run with different timing was submitted.
Now that taco&kriole's run has undone the separation, we'll need to consider whether we'll introduce it again to postpone the discussion another time, or whether we'll simply attempt to have the discussion in a civilized manner.
I think you'll agree that all of these reasons were valid back when the split was made.
If you mean the split with mine and Hero's run, I don't think your second point was any more valid then than now. All the tricks you mentioned existed then. And the route, though less far fetched for a real speedrun than this one, was still pretty much unusable.
The rest I agree with. A publication of the same kind that the 14% runs have might be the best for this, though I wouldn't mind seeing it published and the site being more lenient with multiple categories in general.
I've always been a proponent of following the ingame timer for this game. In fact I still am, because stuff like lengthening the jumps to make the room hatches align looks really bogus from gameplay point of view; having them align by themselves during the transition, while is slower, is just automatically ignored because you have to go through that transition anyway and you aren't going to pay attention to it, just like it doesn't make any kind of noticeable difference if you take 18 items or 20 (it's not like you have some internal pause counter that goes "ok, THAT DOES IT" when you get one more surplus item, rather than an abstract, detached mathematical argument that 18 is in fact less than 20).
I'm pretty sure I've suggested it once, and I feel it's more appropriate than ever to suggest this again: an any% that follows the realtime-optimized route with ingame-optimized gameplay. Why? Because the current any% is already a speed/entertainment trade-off per se: you can complete the game in half the time anyway, so why bother satisfying the front page timer as much as possible? What entertainment goal does that achieve in particular? Why not look for ways to make it more entertaining that don't simply amount to rolling a counter as arbitrary as any other down? At least that way you'll have most of the benefits of in-game approach (a smoother, more varied gameplay where players aren't shy to lag a game for a few frames for a more flashy means of achieving their objectives) with most of the benefits of realtime approach (less redundancy, more gameplay per unit of time on average, as well as lower overall movie time). It's a pretty wild suggestion, but it's worth considering if only because the question of accepting or rejecting runs of inherently entertaining games like Super Metroid has long been more about logistics and politics and whatnot, which should be secondary to entertainment and not the otherwise. I let out a groan each time a solid, obviously entertaining piece of work is rejected because we're more focused on thoughts of how to potentially obsolete it in the future, or how to not clog up a movie list, or similar trifles, instead of appreciating movies for what they are.
For the record, I did vote 'meh' on this run, but only for the reason that functional differences between SM run categories now aren't what they used to be three years ago. The differences are so minute it's like you're watching 40 minutes of essentially the same run to see several seconds of difference on a boss fight or two. And in this case it's not even a compellingly better difference anymore if only because the methods employed by the realtime-optimized run are more complex and fascinating. Realtime-optimized tricks have finally caught up in speed and variety despite being more restrained.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Does Super Metroid get to be the exception where both a real-time and in-game time run can co-exist? If everyone were slobbering over a game like... say, Star Ocean: The Second Story, which also has an in-game timer used to judge console speedruns, would the community accept two separate runs if one has a time-wasting trick to lessen the in-game time?
I seriously doubt it, because SO2 isn't Super Metroid.
For the record, I would totally slobber over any SO2 TAS.
The key for SM is that given that the tricks to optimize in-game versus real-time actually changed the route significantly, it was worth publication.
My personal opinions on that matter:
* This debate varies by discussion, like the "where the last input should be" from the recent TMNT. If you hate this category, I should remind you that most, if not all, Sonic games use in game time.
* In this case, Is is not an case of obsoleted category, just a question of a single movie winning 2 different goals at the same time. On the "ingame" time, that movie is now obsolete. If someone break 2 different records on swimming competitions and other person breaks one of them, he won't have to worry about breaking the other one to be recognized.
* It is a valid category, using that specified way of timing.
* I found the "minimal number of runs" quite silly. If a movie is different enough, it should get as many runs as possible, given a good enough quality, goals and other factors. Numbers of runs already published in the site should not be a reasonable enough argument for a rejection
...but that's just my 2 cents. Not really voting, btw. It's amazingly good, though I don't remember the first run enough to check if is it really different from this one.
My first language is not English, so please excuse myself if I write something wrong. I'll do my best do write as cleary as I can, so cope with me here =)
(ﾉಥ益ಥ）ﾉ
I always enjoy SM runs, but I won't vote on this one. I feel this discussion relates to historical facts I'm not qualified to have an enlightened opinion on.
What's the real problem behind all of this anyway? Why limit the actual number of published runs if they aim for different goals? Fear that it might confuse the viewers? That it might add too many runs of the same game to the movie pages?
What are the possible solutions? Keep some branches of SM while rejecting alternate goal TAS of less popular games (sounds arbitrary to me)? Keep a "main" speed run on the movie pages, and add a link to a game-specific page with alternative goal movies? Redesign the movie pages to "expand" or "collapse" games with alternate goals?
I know I might sound like the kind of newbie that want to change everything, but you're free to ignore me.
Well, you're actually thinking in the right direction. Designs that efficiently incorporate many categories in game title-based clusters have been proposed as early as 2006. In fact, even at that point most people who had discussed that agreed it was an interesting idea worth implementing, but unfortunately it required reworking a significant amount of ways the site did things, and the snag that prevented its realization back then is the same these days: lack of time (and probably motivation) to do a proper job. Now that the site has new administration, it's up for them to allocate site coding resources and negotiate with resident coders with regards to access to the site and adding new features, and this doesn't seem high on the priority list for either.
The idea never lost its relevance, though, because severely limiting the amount of categories is a persistent problem that hurts the site in many ways. The "we don't need many categories" mentality lost its charm back when standards of TASing rose to a point that makes subsequent improvement tiring and completely unwelcome for beginners. I.e. back in 2007.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I voted yes after watching, but before I realized its not actually "real time" faster than the current published run.
My 2 cents is that if there was only going to be one published run, it should be the real time run. I think that's clearly the main goal. But there are already plenty of games with multiple publications of different interesting conditions (newgame+, 100% runs, etc.). Given that fact, the question then becomes whether for Super Metroid a "lowest in-game time" publication is interesting. That's obviously subjective, but I think it is.
Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 2227
Location: Georgia, USA
First of all, the simple facts for me: I liked this run. I really appreciated seeing Mother Brain killed quickly with the Plasma Beam instead of using Power Bomb Shields. I like seeing some slight extra stunts, like getting enemies to shoot more shots for further damage boosts at the expense of lag (one noticeable one was in the room by the area where you could get Spazer). I do think that the menu switches feel a little questionable (I'm not sure why Speed Booster is deactivated that one time, for instance), but I can go with it.
So basically, I like this run enough to want it to be recognized on the site. Saturn has done excellent work. I don't think that this run should obsolete the real-time run, but I can't really make up my mind about whether a separate category is a good idea. The changes between this and the real-time run are noticeable but still not huge.
Anyway, I don't think I'll vote. I did want to say though: Congratulations, Saturn, on your continued work at really pushing games further.
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically.
Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.)
Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html)
Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature!
Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Watched the whole thing. Enjoyed the whole thing. Therefore, easy Yes vote.
I don't care much about all the controversy about what should be published and what shouldn't be. In-game and real-time optimizations are fine to exist side-by-side. Embrace diversity! This is a fantastic run, that a lot of effort's been put into.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
The idea never lost its relevance, though, because severely limiting the amount of categories is a persistent problem that hurts the site in many ways. The "we don't need many categories" mentality lost its charm back when standards of TASing rose to a point that makes subsequent improvement tiring and completely unwelcome for beginners. I.e. back in 2007.
I suppose the idea with limiting the number of parallel publication categories for one game is to avoid having tons of completely arbitrary categories which add little to the existing runs (or even if they are different enough, they are not all that interesting).
This might be possible to alleviate if a grouping of runs of the same game were ever to be implemented. They could be organized into subgroups based on the "relevance" of the run. We could have the "main" runs (eg. the "main any%" and the "main 100%") and then "secondary" categories (which might get their own subgroups depending on what they do).
Here is a comparison video between this run and its predecessors:
Link to video
And here is a lossless RGB version of the same:
http://folk.uio.no/sigurdkn/saturn_any_ingame_rgb.mkv
This is a great new run, and there are sizable improvements in almost every room (though I have not yet investigated whether the improvements that are not due to new techniques are due to movement optimization or different timing (i.e. lag management by Taco&Kriole)). However, there are some cases where time is lost, too:
When exiting Phantoon's room, 6 frames are lost, but 5 are then regained during the next room due to higher speed exiting the room, for a total of 1 frame lost. Was this in order to gather more drops from Phantoon?
When crossing the lava seahorse room at 8:14, you do not roll through the lava like Kriole&Taco do. This seems to cost about 29 frames. Did the Hi-Jump boots make the lower route too slow?
In the first room in lower norfair you lose 5 frames by having lower speed than Taco&Kriole, who start by going left to build up speed. Was this also due to Hi-Jump boots?
Anyway, this run was good (as most here seem to agree), and faster than its predecessors, so I vote yes.
Many posters here seem to be in a moral dilemma here: They think the run is good and want it to be published, but they think that would be bad for the site because we would get too many categories per game. I don't think this is anything to be torn about. We should have many more categories per game than we have - there are many interesting ways left to run every game. Of course, the problem here isn't that we will run out of categories (though you might get that impression from the way some are arguing) but that people are afraid that the most interesting runs will be swamped by more specialist/niche runs, thus lowering the signal-to-noise ratio of the site.
My answer to this is that firstly, that is what we have the star and moon system for. We use these to pick out the most noteworthy runs. I have previously suggested that we change the role of the moon symbol (or introduce a new symbol) for the most noteworthy (or possibly runs) for each game. The games list would then list this run prominently in that game's entry, with less prominent links to the pages of the other runs for that game. That way the games list would not be swamped by extra categories, but they would still be available for those who are interested in that game.
In many ways, I think the "popular categories will be swamped by niche categories" is exactly the same problem as "popular games will be swamped by niche games", and the solution to both is the same: Stars for games, and moons for categories within games.
By rejecting good runs like these and suggesting that they "should be 'published' on youtube" because they would give us too many categories, we are doing ourselves a disservice. Not only are we turning runs we ourselves admit are good away from the site, we are also reducing the incentive to submit here and in general promoting direct-to-youtube publishing as an alternative to TASVideos. It would be a tragedy if this were to become the norm, as putting the run up on youtube does not automatically ensure that the input file becomes and stays available. Consider, for example, the tragic loss of Saturn's Super Metroid Redesign any% TAS input file, and all the excellent Japanese TASes which are available only as video encodes on NicoNico douga.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11478
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
The RGB version looks broken in my VLC. It has strange green color.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
This might be possible to alleviate if a grouping of runs of the same game were ever to be implemented. They could be organized into subgroups based on the "relevance" of the run. We could have the "main" runs (eg. the "main any%" and the "main 100%") and then "secondary" categories (which might get their own subgroups depending on what they do).
It was solved pretty elegantly already back then. In any case this is a perfectly solvable logistical problem that has little to do with entertainment or viewers. We are not scaring anybody away by having more categories; if anything it's the opposite. Then there are just guys like Saturn and arukAdo who just like to work on a single game for whatever reason, and this allows them to go wild on it (like these two already do anyway, by the way), no holds barred.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
By rejecting good runs like these and suggesting that they "should be 'published' on youtube" because they would give us too many categories, we are doing ourselves a disservice. Not only are we turning runs we ourselves admit are good away from the site, we are also reducing the incentive to submit here and in general promoting direct-to-youtube publishing as an alternative to TASVideos. It would be a tragedy if this were to become the norm, as putting the run up on youtube does not automatically ensure that the input file becomes and stays available. Consider, for example, the tragic loss of Saturn's Super Metroid Redesign any% TAS input file, and all the excellent Japanese TASes which are available only as video encodes on NicoNico douga.
Great post, and I couldn't agree more; what exactly is the fear in publishing an additional category for Super Metroid, especially one that we had for Cpadolf's run from March of 2008 until the middle of 2009?!
I've always been a proponent of following the ingame timer for this game [...]
I agree fully with this whole post. In retrospect I regret optimizing everything in the 100% run for realtime (and not just because I was 4 seconds of from 00:35). I hope that whoever decides to obsolete it follows the suggestion of optimizing the realtime route for ingame time (though the route is probably the same anyway). It's more entertaining, equally technically impressive and the sacrifices in time are too small to notice, and in places where you don't look anyway.
moozooh wrote:
The dread of going through the argumentation challenge to convince judges to get this on the site as a yet another category. :)
Hopefully people can see that it's too awesome to not publish :P
Joined: 11/14/2005
Posts: 1058
Location: United States
This run shows off some pretty nifty new tricks. Tourian in particular was incredible. All the rooms leading up to the baby metroid had substantial improvements. The WS exit was very clever. Energy and weapon management was absolutely perfect.
My main concern with this run is that it might not be using the best in-game route. I don't know if Saturn looked into this or not, but I am pretty sure it would have been much faster to skip the plasma beam, and instead get the 2nd PB pack in red brinstar. This would give Samus a full 15 pbs for the PB wave combos on mother brain.
Another thing that bothered me was why the lower route was taken when exiting the highjump boots area. I thought going towards the missile pack is faster.
I am not sure how to vote on this. On a technical level, it is better than the current any% run. Though I am a little weary about the plasma beam stuff I mentioned above. I also don't like how pause screens were used to save less than 1 second of in-game time. De-equiping the speed booster is a good example. However, optimizing the doors for in-game time looks MUCH better. So for now, I will abstain from voting.
I've always been a proponent of following the ingame timer for this game [...]
I agree fully with this whole post. In retrospect I regret optimizing everything in the 100% run for realtime (and not just because I was 4 seconds of from 00:35). I hope that whoever decides to obsolete it follows the suggestion of optimizing the realtime route for ingame time (though the route is probably the same anyway). It's more entertaining, equally technically impressive and the sacrifices in time are too small to notice, and in places where you don't look anyway.
I am not sure, but...
If the route would be the same and the sacrifices would be too small to notice, what else could that provide to the watcher besides a smaller number on the timer? Could it be more entertaining if the pause menu would be invoked more often when the fastest in-game time is aimed for?
<klmz> it reminds me of that people used to keep quoting adelikat's IRC statements in the old good days
<adelikat> no doubt
<adelikat> klmz, they still do
I've always been a proponent of following the ingame timer for this game [...]
I agree fully with this whole post. In retrospect I regret optimizing everything in the 100% run for realtime (and not just because I was 4 seconds of from 00:35). I hope that whoever decides to obsolete it follows the suggestion of optimizing the realtime route for ingame time (though the route is probably the same anyway). It's more entertaining, equally technically impressive and the sacrifices in time are too small to notice, and in places where you don't look anyway.
I am not sure, but...
If the route would be the same and the sacrifices would be too small to notice, what else could that provide to the watcher besides a smaller number on the timer? Could it be more entertaining if the pause menu would be invoked more often when the fastest in-game time is aimed for?
The pause menu would not be invoked anyway, so that's not a problem. What you gain by optimizing for ingame time on room to room basis is a cleaner and better flow of gameplay. This is because it removes some ugly quirks in movement that is required to optimize for realtime at some points, and making almost all luck manipulation taking place between rooms instead of slowing down in the rooms themselves. The only downside is that there will be a few more frames of fadeout lag during some door transitions, but it's such a small fraction of the door transitions sequence that it won't ever be noticed.
