I have a lot to say about this video.
Once upon a time this guy Morimoto made an SMB3 video which shocked the world. The speed was good, but the style was even better. He also made two Mega Man videos showing how you can glitch out a game for speed.
A while later this guy named Bisqwit decided to make a site devoted to Morimoto's videos, and added a few on his own.
The idea became to beat the game as fast as possible doing things which you wouldn't do in normal gameplay like hurting yourself to advance further, or throwing away weapons because the game spends time calculating which extra items you have. Bisqwit exemplified these different ideas in his Castlevania video.
Bisqwit really opened the door for thinking beyond normal, which this site has expanded to with video from many players.
However thinking beyond normal has in fact become the norm. Looking up glitches on various websites or playing with the engine in bizarre ways to see what can be exploited is what is expected from anyone submitting a video here. Seeing someone using hurt motion to advance, walking through walls, or playing in a bizarre order is nothing to even blink about anymore.
Barring the MMX+MMX2 we haven't really seen anything here original in a while.
This video now changes all that. FinalFighter has done an excellent job truly breaking apart the Mega Man NES games, some of the most popular games of all time. In the game to launch the second biggest video game franchise of all time, techniques have been discovered to break the game apart like no other.
This video combines many many techniques (which may have been seen in other videos) such as:
- Avoiding animation
- Get into a wall
- Get thrown from a wall
- Exploit boss counters
- Wrap around
- Placement overriding
The last one is especially intriguing. This video not only gets into a wall, but gets into it in places and forced out of it in unanticipated ways to make objects be where they shouldn't such as a ladder on the wrong side of the screen.
A lot went into planning and testing to not only move quickly, but to also do something unexpected to make the movement skip various sections, and to move objects into places they shouldn't be.
If one watches closely, at one spot in the game you can see Mega Man move diagonally for a moment, which further causes graphics in the level to be accessed incorrectly.
However none of this is the real clincher. For this video, in addition to what Bisqwit did for the previous which was making a robot to do random work faster than a human could, he deciphered parts of the game and wrote several tools to work with it.
Unlike any other video on the site an inhuman precision is enacted. Video makers regularly have the issue of not knowing what decision made them lose a frame here or there, since many button presses seem to have no affect on the visible gameplay. However thanks to the tools Bisqwit made to this video, he has gotten a much better understanding to how the game works and had no confusion as to second guessing a particular segment's subtle motions.
Unknown variables are not acceptable in striving for perfection, as the path not traveled may in fact be faster.
In this video the bar forever has been raised as to how close to perfection speedwise a game may be completed in. In order to really be impressive one really has to understand the game like Bisqwit did when making this video. I hope future videos makers will spend more time on deciphering the physics engine. May this serve to all a guide on what steps can be taken on video making.
I thank our leader for once again establishing what this site is really about.
May this video and the MMX+MMX2 video be entered into our hall of fame, and be forever (until obsoletion) placed into video for first time viewers, and a mark of separation between what a TAS movie and a skill movie are about.
Regarding waiting for publishment:
I know some think we've been giving priority to Mega Man games, or seem to favor runs made by older players.
But this video isn't just about Mega Man, or another video from one of our pros, but the essence of what this site is really about.
I for one think it should be published immediately.
This public service announcement has been brought to you by Nach, wearer of a flame resistant suit, lover of ground breaking TAS movies, and recently accused of advertising a little too much videos and/or videos of video games.
