Goals/Aims for Superman 64:

  • Fastest Time with Entertainment
  • Plays on Hardest Difficulty
  • Surviving the creation of this TAS
  • Abusing level design flaws

Describe the Game:

Oh God No!.. Superman is trapped in a virtual world by Lex Luthor. Lex Luthor is clearly the most evil villian in all the universes because the only way for Superman to be freed from the Virtual World.. is to fly through rings.. mostly.
"In short time your fate will be sealed, Superman.. .. Then there's no time to waste (besides flying through almost a thousand rings)!"

Describe Making the Movie:

The general TAS guidelines were incredibly simple for this game.

Ring Stages

You can miss a maximum of four rings in the beginning then later on it is a maximum of three rings. Due to the nature of a TAS, I didn't have to worry about missing any rings so I could use these rings to my advantage to save time by cutting corners and skipping the rings. In about 1-3 ring stages, I forget about missing some rings due to either being super far ahead to make any changes or time saved would have been minimal due to the monstrosity I have been dealing with to make this.

Indoor Missions

These were incredibly simple due to the routing that was already done thanks to *Alec Kermit*! Stay out of bounds to save time, try not to get hit by enemies. Some levels may be hard to see due to Superman flying in the darkness(it would be brighter/clearer but the Emulator Video Plugins are not up to par with the Console).

Other Stages

Help people by killing dark shadows or mine droppers (Very quick stages).

Improvements:

Lots of improvements can be made for those up to the task.
  • Better optimization of ring stages.
  • Minimizing lag frames(game/emulator core are super laggy).
  • Better speed handling with the use of ram watching.

Thanks:

Mothrayas, Spikestuff, CoolKirby, oblivionwalker, jlun2, Patashu Guga for encoding. Alec Kermit for routing and helping while creating this TAS.

feos: Accepting for Vault.
Guga: Processing...


Noxxa
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I just watched the whole thing in one sitting (having seen most of the WIPs already). During the ring stages, it was interesting to look at virtual Metropolis. It's interesting how such a large and relatively detailed environment is mostly wasted on just a ton of ring flying and the occasional limited intermissions. Anyway, yes vote. If you can get past watching the ring stages, it's just fun how quick each indoor stage is glitched to completion.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa <dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects. <Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits <adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Patashu
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solarplex wrote:
Next TAS I wanna see if people like the idea of it: "Hey hey hey! it's time to make some crazy money! Are you ready? Here! We! Go!" Crazy Taxi! on hardest mode with shortest amount of time. try to see if it's possible to get the Crazy license and maybe even 1st Rank (to get Crazy license, you need to rake in 20,000$ in taxi fares). Shortest amount of time you can start with is a mere 35 seconds.
OMG, a Crazy Taxi TAS would the bomb.
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Solarplex did a good job on the TAS, honestly I'm dumbfounded that someone had to patience to TAS the ring stages. He's amazing just for that. Some of the indoor stages could have been better from a technical standpoint but really what's the point in sweating over every frame in a game that has only been given speed testing attention from a couple people? The programming is so bizarre and amateur that I'm sure we'll see level skips and wrong warping down the road. Most interactive objects in the game don't even have independent programming, they just do what they do because of the last trigger Superman set off.
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solarplex wrote:
jlun2 wrote:
After some thinking, I wonder if the run would work on console? It lags like hell at times, but otherwise it's quite straight forward.
There is a lot less lag on console. Maybe it would be better running with pure interpreter n64 core but I was already 200k frames done when bizhawk switched.
On console all of the ring stages lag on and off heavily, on emulator they don't lag at all. Overall console has way more lag. Emulator seems to chug more in some indoor and enemy stages though. Here are a couple thumbnails that are pretty funny:
Neo
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Link to video </thread>
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Terrible game choice. Yes vote ! :p And yes vote for crazy taxi too !
TAG
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i have given this some thought and i don't like it at all, it is bad, the game gave me a headache and the green made me unable to see. This TAS on the other hand i give a YES YES YES. Nice job solar and i am sorry for putting you through this mess
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Joe
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God, those rings really drag this down. This TAS does its best to make them more entertaining, but they still take up over half of the viewing time. They are easily the worst thing about this game or at least near the top. My favorite part: The portion where Superman picks up Darkseid like a hunk of wood over his head, flies around for a munite before throwing him, Darkseid then taunts Superman as if nothing happen, he goes down after some punches, gets Ko'd, then Superman "dies" while the screen flashes "Superman Wins!" As an aside, is it possible for the beta rom to be a contender for a future TAS? It's a much more brief game and there's quite a bit of differences between the finished game and the prototype. Most significant is that there are no rings, which strongly suggest they were tacked on at the last minute to pad out the game length and possibly to forgo programming any map/mission markers in the final product.
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Joe wrote:
God, those rings really drag this down. This TAS does its best to make them more entertaining, but they still take up over half of the viewing time. They are easily the worst thing about this game or at least near the top. My favorite part: The portion where Superman picks up Darkseid like a hunk of wood over his head, flies around for a munite before throwing him, Darkseid then taunts Superman as if nothing happen, he goes down after some punches, gets Ko'd, then Superman "dies" while the screen flashes "Superman Wins!" As an aside, is it possible for the beta rom to be a contender for a future TAS? It's a much more brief game and there's quite a bit of differences between the finished game and the prototype. Most significant is that there are no rings, which strongly suggest they were tacked on at the last minute to pad out the game length and possibly to forgo programming any map/mission markers in the final product.
Never seen the beta of superman. Seems like that would be entertaining without all these rings haha.
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This game is incredibly long and repetitive. The creators really lacked any kind of inspiration or motivation.
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What is with the sound design in this game, why do the red rings sound like a mech walking or something?
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Shit game. Amazing TAS. Easy yes vote!
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So happy this is finished ;-; Yes vote
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Warp wrote:
This game is incredibly long and repetitive. The creators really lacked any kind of inspiration or motivation.
I might actually disagree with this one. If you look closely, you can tell there was some degree of ambition on the part of the developers. There's the entire cityscape of Metropolis sitting in the cartridge, for crying out loud! It's almost as if the developers were trying to go for a more open, free roaming game, but either got in over their heads or had to keep beating the WB executives back, and as such their dream wasn't fully realized until the "sandbox" genre of videogames became more popular in later generations. So I would argue it's not lack of motivation or inspiration that killed the game, but a troubled development cycle.
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sack_bot
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Ferret Warlord wrote:
Warp wrote:
This game is incredibly long and repetitive. The creators really lacked any kind of inspiration or motivation.
I might actually disagree with this one. If you look closely, you can tell there was some degree of ambition on the part of the developers. There's the entire cityscape of Metropolis sitting in the cartridge, for crying out loud! It's almost as if the developers were trying to go for a more open, free roaming game, but either got in over their heads or had to keep beating the WB executives back, and as such their dream wasn't fully realized until the "sandbox" genre of videogames became more popular in later generations. So I would argue it's not lack of motivation or inspiration that killed the game, but a troubled development cycle.
What I've heard from interviews is that WB made them throw out huge parts of the game, which their contract still prevents them from releasing.
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sack_bot wrote:
Ferret Warlord wrote:
Warp wrote:
This game is incredibly long and repetitive. The creators really lacked any kind of inspiration or motivation.
I might actually disagree with this one. If you look closely, you can tell there was some degree of ambition on the part of the developers. There's the entire cityscape of Metropolis sitting in the cartridge, for crying out loud! It's almost as if the developers were trying to go for a more open, free roaming game, but either got in over their heads or had to keep beating the WB executives back, and as such their dream wasn't fully realized until the "sandbox" genre of videogames became more popular in later generations. So I would argue it's not lack of motivation or inspiration that killed the game, but a troubled development cycle.
What I've heard from interviews is that WB made them throw out huge parts of the game, which their contract still prevents them from releasing.
This is true. In fact you'll notice that many aspects of the beta are more polished than the final product.
negative_seven
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Voting no because of noticeable improvement. Making the in-game resolution 20% reduces lag. justkiddingtakemyyes
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Oh yeah here comes the big turd of the N64. I'm giving this crap a yes because of how horrible the game is to humanly control and this TAS makes it look not half bad as it really is. Couldn't go through the whole video tho, this game is just that bad!
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credits are so fast in this game cuz people dont want to be held responsible for the game
TAS i'm interested: Megaman series, specially the RPGs! Where is the mmbn1 all chips TAS we deserve? Where is the Command Mission TAS? i'm slowly moving away from TASing fighting games for speed, maybe it's time to start finding some entertainment value in TASing.
Guga
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Here are the screenshots that were suggested a while ago:
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First one.
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superman creeping up on poor little Jimmy..
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I also like the first one.
xRavenXP
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You deserve an award of honor for scoring endure the torture that is this horrible game!
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Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [2616] N64 Superman by solarplex in 1:19:31.67