Hello, everyone! I figured it's about time I registered and made this post. I've been working on TASing these two games (as well as SMB Deluxe) for the past year or so. I'm bringing this thread back to let you all in on some goodies from Byrz and myself. This post will be a bit of an info dump, so please bear with me.
First of all, I'm happy to let you all know that we're working on two completely new TASes! Super Monkey Ball's "Expert through Master" TAS is being completely redone, and we are also working on a TAS for "Expert through Master Extra" on the PAL version of Super Monkey Ball 2. Progress has been much slower than it was for the original TASes due to a much higher standard of optimization, but we've been making good progress recently. I won't spoil anything about them yet, but rest assured that there are new strats and new optimizations which continue the series's standard of jaw-dropping movement.
Why PAL for SMB2?
SMB2 runs on a non-deterministic physics engine (i.e. physics is rendered once every frame instead of constantly), so in order to compensate for PAL running at 50Hz, the physics engine was altered to give more speed and height from clips and boosts, to make up for the fact that physics was rendered at 5/6th the speed; this results in the engine being more or less equivalent to NTSC 60Hz. However, this means that when you play the PAL version at 60Hz, the physics gives you more speed and lift than was originally intended, allowing faster and cooler strats.
EDIT: The game supports 60Hz on PAL on the official release; all you have to do is hold B during startup and the game gives you a menu asking if you want to play at 60Hz. Granted, this loses some time in TASVideos timing, but that time has already been made up in the TAS itself.
So why wasn't PAL used for the original SMB2 TAS?
Mostly because the vast majority of the RTA community does not have access to the PAL version of the game, and the TAS was largely made for them. We're now using the PAL version to see how far the game can really be pushed.
That's not all, though. A lot of SMB TASing has been done that wasn't posted here. Byrz made full TASes for Beginner and Advanced of both games, and we've both also been working on IL TASes. I've compiled a small playlist of the coolest of these, which you can view
here. Note that these are all time TASes: I figured those were the most relevant here, but there are also score TASes and stunts that you can find on our channels or in our TAS compilations.
Less relevant to this particular thread is my TAS work on ILs of SMB Deluxe, because it's not technically applicable to the thread for the Gamecube games. Unfortunately, TASing Deluxe ILs is very painful due to not having frameadvance, and until we have a functional Xbox emulator with TAS tools, there won't be a full game TAS of Deluxe, due to PS2 having much longer loading times and worse graphical quality.
I can't really give an estimate on when the new TASes will be finished, but we can keep anyone who's interested updated on our progress. In the meantime, I'll probably still be working on ILs in addition to the new TASes, and if anyone has any ideas or TASes they'd like to see (I'm still debating category score attack TASes), feel free to bring them up. Until then, enjoy what we have for you here!
