Table of contents

About Me

Hello! You've stumbled across my personal page. My name here is Mukki and I have been making TASes for about four years now. I first discovered this site in 2006 by accident when trying to find a video of the 100% Metroid Prime speedrun. I quickly became interested in the various movies here of some of my favorite games and soon wanted to start making my own. In the real world I am a 21-year-old student from the United Kingdom with an interest in movies, music and video games. Enjoy your stay!
I actively rate movies. I should add some information about that here.
I was made a judge on the 4/10/2010. I should add some information about that here.

Finished Projects

I currently have 17 published movies on tasvideos.org, and one obsolete.

Gex 64 - Enter the Gecko.

This was my first real attempt at a TAS. With hindsight this was a good first project; the game was long enough for me to learn the value of motivation, and the gameplay itself was simplistic enough that I could get good results easily. I spent about three months working on this between mid to late 2006 and I enjoyed it. I'd played the game often during it's release so I was always familiar with it, but much of the game itself wasn't in my immeadiate memory so planning and testing became quite nostalgic, a quality I took with me into future projects. Looking back I was actually able to discover quite a few tricks and shortcuts (a couple that were pretty major too) which I thought was pretty decent for a first effort.
This movie, I believe, is very improvable. Although, somewhat surprisingly, I haven't found any new shortcuts or tricks in this game, however I think this could be improved by around a minute or two with better optimisation. I have since often considered starting up a new input file on this game, but have yet to do it and I doubt I ever will. If I were to make a new movie I'd expect it to look far too similar to my first with a few optimisations here and there. I think this game needs the treatment of a new TASer so hopefully someone else can come along and cast an eye over this game and give it a new lease of life.

Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

My longest and most intense project to date. I spent about 10 months working on this; I began shortly after submitting Gex 64 in November 2006 and finished in September 2007. I'd wanted to see a Majora's Mask submission ever since I joined the site and watched Guanobowl's Ocarina of Time TAS. There was a huge amount of interest in seeing a run of this game, but due to certain issues with N64 emulation at the time no one seemed interested in making a serious attempt at TASing it. What finally clinched it for me was when I read Petrie911's route; as a fan of the game I found my jaw hitting the floor at just about every line and knew that the finished run would look seriously awesome. I made a run of the pre-Clock Town segment which beat AKA's attempt by two - three seconds and people seemed to enjoy it so I just ran with it and finished the run. It was a long and difficult run, but it was always interesting and I was fortunate in that I began with the same motivation I finished with and so I was always looking forward despite all the redos.
Originally, I was very interested in making a second version. The first version has a notable learning curve, both for me as a TASer and the community in general as to N64 TASes. This gives the movie an immeadiately sloppy and inconsistent feel which I dislike and so I was dissatisfied with the movie when I came to submit it. On the same route I suspect that this movie would be beaten by about 3 - 4 minutes due to various improvements. In the end Swordless Link started a run and I abandoned mine. I'm glad he did as he found many things I wouldn't have and he also had much more motivation than I did. Since then many new things have been found and so Swordless' eventual movie will beat mines by a hefty 15 - 20 minutes. The final movie will be very different from mine, which I think is great. Unfotunately, it will skip many of the challenges and other cool stuff in the game, but it will also be more optimal and will add cool stuff of its own. This presents a nice obsoletion setting where the two runs are so different that I can enjoy each run independent of the other.

Streets of Rage

My next finished movie was also my first (and so far only) co-authored run. AKA and I did this across January and February 2008. Co-authoring was new experience for me and I thoroughly enjoyed being able to share ideas, strategies and styles with another TASer. I also felt that it really raised my game as I knew that another persons name would go on the final product and therefore I wanted to make the run as best I could so as not to shame them with obvious mistakes. Both of us liked the game and were interested in TASing it, although admittedly AKA knew far more about it than I did and had many cool ideas to save time. This project was great fun as it wasn't all about frame whoring and as a result the movie has genuinely creative stuff in it.
This movie has speed/entertainment trade-offs, so naturally it is improvable, so on that alone this movie could be faster, but it would look much worse. I like this run as being more entertainment geared, which works well with the otherwise linear level progression. I've suspected that perhaps more could be made of the bosses, but this is pure speculation and I haven't tested anything. So far I have no intention to improve this as I like it as it is. If I ever did it would probably be nothing more than a few hex edits, but don't get your hopes up.

Lion King

I started a run of this very nice game immeadiately after finishing Majora's Mask. I'd hoped to use it for a little respite after that particularly heavy piece of work, but this turned out more difficult than I'd expected. I began this movie in September 2007 and submitted it in April 2008. Aqfaq had posted a few WIPs of this game, but confirmed to me that he was no longer working on it when I contacted him. He kindly agreed to watch WIPs, give advice and share with me the many tricks he'd found. Some of them involved some quite esoteric pixel positioning that I wouldn't have found so the forty seconds of improvement in my movie is greatly indebted to him. It was by this stage that I had become really obsessive over frame shaving, which is why this project took quite a bit of effort. As a result the levels between the Elephant Graveyard (level 3) and Hakuna Matatta (level 6) were in a constant state of redo for months which was quite demotivating. I eventually got it done and am very happy with the finished product.
Since submitting I've found a 36 frame improvement to the Elephant Graveyard, a roughly 20 frame improvement to Be Prepared and I also suspect that a few ledges can be grabbed a frame or two earlier with better pixel and subpixel positioning. At the moment I don't think I could shave the three seconds required to get this under fourteen minutes. However, there are many potential shortcuts in this game that are just impossible. I my time with this game I've seen the rhinos throw Simba in strange ways, enemies used to skip large parts of levels, I've been half inside walls and have even seen evidence of zipping, but none of these has yeildd any improvements. If I could prove a few of the larger ones I'd be interested in giving this another go, but that may be quite a big if. Stylistically, I would like to do more with the Be Prepared boss and, due to all the hex-editing, the dancing in The Stampede is quite badly out of sync, which I would like to fix. Ironically, an improvement to this run may either be very large or non-existent.

Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko

I wanted to see a run of this game ever since I'd TASed Gex 64, however I feared that it'd be less entertaining due to the increased number of collect-em-up levels. After submitting the Lion King I made a test run and decided that a TAS would be passable at least. This project began in April 2008 and I finished it in November 2008. It wasn't really a continuous effort; I did the first two levels in April and then never touched it again until August. This project was quite different from things I'd done before as I wasn't active on the forums during this time. I wasn't feeling particularly motivated to TAS, but I often picked this game up and played some whenever I had the time. It was nice not to have the pressure of posting WIPs, updates or having to think too much on an eventual submission. As a result this was probably the most fun I've had making a TAS and I think it turned out pretty well too.
On a recent review I noticed that I loaded the wrong savestate on my first entrance to Slappy Valley resulting in me losing about thirty frames. I also suspect that rotating the camera in certain ways sometimes allows certain input to be entered a frame or so earlier, but I think this would make the run less entertaining overall and I'm still skeptical as to what the potential gains actually are. In short, I enjoyed this TASing experience, but I think that it was more to do with my state of mind at the time and so I doubt that I would enjoy it as much if I TASed it again.

Toy Story

This was an improvement to my first (cancelled) submission to TASvideos. Gathering motivation for this was difficult as there was so many damage possibilities and I'd made so many attempts at it in the past. I started planning and testing after my first submission was canceled but quickly moved on to other things returning only rarely to test. I eventually had enough to go on by December 2008 and so I decided to finally get this project done. It was a fairly intensive few weeks but the results were good.
I know of a single frame of improvement at the end of level one (!), but I'm sure there's more and I'm not particularly interested in tracking them down at present. This one was good to get done and TASing it became quite cumbersome by the end and so I very much doubt that I'll TAS it again. I still enjoy watching runs of this game and would be very interested in what a new TASer could bring to the table.

Trip World

I stumbled across this game a while back and instantly saw the potential for TASing. I eventually got around to TASing it in late May / early June 2009, but realised after submission that I'd missed something rather obvious and canceled in order to redo. I finished the second version in early July 2009 and submitted it. This was a worthwhile project due to the game's diverse gameplay styles and surprising variety for an early GB title. It was difficult to keep on top of all the possible solutions due to the many transformations and TASing with each power-up was fun.
I'm not aware of any improvements yet, but due to the complexity of certain forms (mainly the ball) I wouldn't rule out that a handsome improvement could be found by a determined TASer. Also, I wish that this game could have abusable glitches as in other Sunsoft publications, and I definitely wouldn't rule out that some cool ones could be found. I improved this.

Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back

Originally, I had hoped to make a 100% run of Crash Bandicoot, but due to the excessive load/save times in achieving such a goal I decided to reduce it to an any%. I had set aside an extra few months in my TASing schedule in order to achieve the 100% completion. What was I to do with that time now? Spend it TASing one of the major projects that have been hanging over me for years? Of course not. I picked up something new and decided to TAS Crash 2. I first started messing around with this in August 2009, but it was late September / early October 2009 before I began putting pen to paper on a regular basis. I submitted on Christmas Day 2009. I was able to find more quirks and tricks in this game than I originally expected and so the run was more entertaining than I thought it would be. The ice glitch seemed to be something of a crowd-pleaser, unfortunately I didn't discover it until the second warp room meaning that I had to redo everything from level 2. I considered dropping it after that, but I persevered and I'm glad that I did.
This run attracted a considerable amount of criticism as to its level of optimisation. While I don't believe that much of this criticism was justified I do think a nice improvement should be possible. Perhaps it may be possible to take the ice glitch all the way to the end of level 2 with better control. I also think that I definitely should have done more testing with sliding v slide/jumping on different slope gradients as I think that there may be many frames there. The I was able to bypass some of the sewer flamethrowers by sliding past them at certain angles, it makes me wonder if all of them can be skipped in this way. As of yet I'm unaware of specific improvements, but I'm sure that there is much potential in a game like this. I became very bored of this game towards the end of the run and so I won't be the one who makes an improvement to this or a 100% run.

Crash Bandicoot

Back in 2008, shortly after my Lion King publication I disappeared from the site for many months. I had completely lost my motivation to TAS or be involved in site activities. I occasionally TASed Gex 3 when I was really bored and occasionally dropped in on the forums to see what was going on. I think I went over three months without logging in at all, which is the longest time since I registered here. Towards the end of this period mz released his first pcsx-rr and being a fan of the console and having always wanted to see TASes of many great PSX games I was quietly curious. I started picking at Crash Bandicoot and decided to start posting once again to gauge interest in the project. Response was good, unfortunately the emulator was not stable. With every release I tested this game, but experienced desyncs and sound issues. It was August 2009 before I started this up properly with no desyncs (but still bad sound). I submitted this on Christmas Day 2009. For the most part I enjoyed this project, and the majority of the many grievances I had were emulator, rather than game, related. Having said that I am immensely grateful to mz for the work that he has done on this emulator allowing these runs to be possible. Some parts of this game are incredibly tedious, such as the boulders levels, spin delay optimisation and box planning. Other parts were very enjoyable such as Native Fortress and Sunset Vista, normally levels I hate, because TASing allowed for some creative platforming solutions.
I am presently unaware of noteworthy individual improvements, however I imagine that there are many optimisations to be found. If someone could figure out what causes spin delay and how to avoid it this would be a major source of saved frames. Towards the end of this project I became rather sick of this game and so I can't imagine myself TASing it again. I would love to see someone try their hand at improving this, I wouldn't be surprised if there were several seconds in there. I also won't do a 100% run, but I would love to see one.

Avenging Spirit

I stumbled across this game while plowing through the extensive GB library. I was sure that there was a huge amount of potential that was yet to be unearthed and I wasn't wrong. This is a nice little game; it is pretty basic as a platformer, but the ability to possess various enemies and use their powers seemed interesting from a TAS perspective. I submitted my Crash Bandicoot runs on Christmas Day 2009, but I still had a few lazy holiday mornings left to work on something else and as I didn't feel like working on Golden Axe I decided to pick this up. I got quite far in those few days, but I then discovered the rapid fire glitch and so I had to start again. I then later discovered that the lag counter wasn't working properly and so I started again. Eventually I had a finished movie to submit by mid-February. Not a ground breaking TAS, but I feel it has its place.
I'm not aware of any improvements at present. The lag can probably be reduced in places to save some time (although, I was able to eliminate most of it and so remoing the rest would probably only save a second or so, if possible). I did some testing with the other characters, however I had already decided that the fastest characters were the best way to go. Perhaps, there are character specific glitches or techs that I am not aware of as I didn't test them all thoroughly. I have no intention of improving this run unless something huge is found.

Golden Axe

One of my favorite games of all time. One of my favorite TASes of all time. I watched trazz's run almost immediately after joining the site and was blown away by it. I've always had an interest in breaking my favorite runs down to frame level and studying them in depth and so naturally I had always been interested in TASing this. For a long while I lacked the experience and skill to match trazz but I eventually decided to give it a go. This is a short game, but TASing it is challenging. Each screen serves as something if a puzzle that must be solved and there are so many ways of clearing each screen. There is also some difficult luck manipulation in the bonus levels to consider. TASing this is interesting as much of it doesn't involve TASing at all. I found it effective to observe the problem and then spend a few days mulling it over in my head as I went about my business and then testing and balancing various solutions. This worked better than TASing it head-on as many of the best solutions are not immediately obvious. I started working on this in November 2008 and worked consistently until March 2010 with an improvement of over 6 seconds which is more than I thought possible. This is the movie of mine that I am most proud of.
I am not aware of any improvements to this run. I think this run will be quite difficult to improve. The first four levels have bonus rounds after them and the luck manipulation is frame based which creates a series of frame rules. Therefore each of those levels must be improved by several frames to gain any bankable improvement at all. If there are any frames left they will probably be in levels 6 and 7 since these have no such rules and so are capable of pure improvement. In total I don't believe that this run can be beaten by more than a few frames if it all. I need a break from this game, but in a year or two I'd like to come back to this and try and find the last few frames if they exist.

Zany Golf

A nice little game that I stumbled across while having a random wikipedia/gamefaqs session. I played it for fun quite a bit before I even considered TASing it as I didn't immediately see the TAS potential. Eventually, as I do with most games, once I had become infatuated with the game's style and atmosphere I decided to record a run. After the submission of the first iteration in early April 2010 TwistedEye discovered an improvement to the second hole. I tried to hex in this improvement, but my efforts constantly desynchronised. I soon discovered that this was because the new strat on Hamburger Hill caused the tee-off to be in a slightly different position on the next hole. I canceled my submission to investigate is I could use this small quirk to my advantage in other holes. I was right and was able to save six seconds. I submitted a new run two weeks after my first which was published. The second run almost didn't happen because the tee-off randomness put me in a position that would have cost me all the time gained in Hamburger Hill. Thankfully, just before I gave up hope, I was able to find just the right angle to pull off a strat that was ultimately faster than what I had before.
This can probably be improved further. If you try to obsolete this run you should look into the tee-off randomness in more depth. Sometimes I lost frames over my previous submission due to it. I am unaware of how it can be controlled so if you can figure that out you may be on to a nice improvement. Also, you should try and hole-in-one Frantic Fans. I take two shots because my hole in one method (using the last fan as a boost) was ultimately slower. I was able to have the ball maintain high velocity all the way up to the hole without using the out-of-the-way fan, but it just missed. Shame. I have no intention to make a third version of this game.

Umihara Kawase Shun

I first started recording runs of this game in early 2009 while still experimenting with the new emulator. I wanted to make a full run but didn't get far because the first level suffers from a, thankfully rare, phenomenon in which it is the hardest to perfect. Eventually I decided to let my inhibitions slide and go with what I had as I was unable to improve it further. Optimising this game is incredibly difficult, but the project itself was comparatively incident free. Things became difficult when the routes diverged, but I was able to quickly figure out which was the fastest.
At the moment I am unaware of any specific improvements, however I do believe that this run can be improved by several seconds, such is the nature of the game. I do not have any intention of making another any%, but at some point I would like to record a 'sightseeing' run.

DoReMi Fantasy

This is a game I stumbled upon while looking for good SNES games that I may not have played. I instantly fell in love with it and knew that I would eventualy want to TAS it. I had never used SNES9x before, but I got used to it quickly. This project turned out to be longer than I had anticipated as my memory had screened out the two long autoscrollers in World 6 and the extra levels in World 7. If my predictions had been more accurate and I knew that this would be over an hour I'm not sure that I would have picked it up. Despite it being longer than I thought I finished the run faster than I would have expected as I was able to keep my motivation relatively high throughout. Perhaps it is the wonderful graphics or backgrounds, but this was a very relaxing TAS experience.
I know of one improvement and that is in the World 7 'ghost house'. After I press the first switch I drop down the hole and then accross to the right. I could instead continue to the right immediately and drop down a later hole that had a torch I could use to break my fall and avoid the falling animation. This would save ~2 seconds. Other than that I am unaware of any other improvements. I have no intention of TASing this game again.

The Amazing Spider-Man - Lethal Foes

Another great SNES game I stumbled accross and couldn't help but TAS it. This was an enjoyable project. Short and sweet. This game has a great wealth of moves and manoevres and so every screen was very interesting to test and there was always a wealth of options to test on every screen. I had a great deal of fun with this one actually.
I'm unaware of any improvements at this time and so have no intention of TASing it again. If decent improvements were found I would consider a version 2.

Trip World Version 2

In mid-July 2010 I was approached by SDA's cyghfer (known here as Orange Claw Hammer) for advice on making a realtime run of Trip World. I was more than happy to oblige, being a huge fan of the game. However, he quickly found numerous improvements to my run, some of them quite major and interesting. I decided to look into making a v3 of this and soon started to find various aditional improvements myself. This new run is 2900 frames (48.33s) faster than my first run.
I am unaware of any further improvements at this time. I am not interested in making another version as I am pretty burned out on TASing this (three versions is more than I would normally devote to one game).

Bionic Commando

I started screwing around with this game as I originally got to know FBA. I made a test run, but was not particularly impressed because the controls did not allow for the sexy gameplay that BC has a reputation for, and also because most of the game's challanges can be skipped by death. During summer 2010 I was without internet for a short time and as this was the only project I had that I could TAS offline at the time I decided to do a no death run. I was quite pleased with the finished product so I decided to submit.
I know of no specific improvements at this time.

Sonic Advance

For a while I'd been messing around with Sonic games as they are a lot of fun to optimise, but in late August 2010 I decided to make a run of Sonic Advance that did not use the ultra-spindash glitch. However, as I got to know the game's physics I began to find many improvements to the published run and so I decided to improve it. In total the in-game improvement was over 33 seconds, which I was pleased with.
There is a small improvement on the wire in Secret Base 1. I intend to make a run without the ultra-spindash glitch and it is conceivable that I will find more improvements, in which case I will hex them in.

Current Projects

Main Projects

This could be very interesting because technically this shouldn't even be possible. Primo began a WIP of this idea years ago but, to my knowledge, never progressed very far. I've always wanted to see the finished product so I decided to start route planning with a view to TASing it. The route is nearing completion and I've done some TASing. This should be fun as I've never TASed an RPG before and so it will test a variety of different skills. The new VBA also supports lua scripting which will ease much of the stress of this manipulation heavy run. A max-crit luabot would be awesome and I would also like to use it to include on-screen notes and comments. Unfortunately, my current progress desyncs on the new emulator so it's back to Oak's lab for me!
Update (03/07/09): The route is coming along nicely. Once Golden Axe is finished I'll be fully committed to this. I'll first hope to finish the route and then write a lua script to help with the manipulation. It would essentially just be a bot that just needs to press the A button and find the max crits in the shortest time. This is very time consuming in real life, but if I could get my hands on such a script I may even get this project done this year.
Update (10/02/10): There have been certain developments here. I would now consider this project to be fully active. There is, however, a massive but. I will be releasing a pretty substantial WIP (about 30 - 40% completion) late this year.
Update (26/02/10): The route is very close to completion I swear! I found a name combination that allows me to start with Charmander without losing any time. Once the route is done I will post it for peer review and then get cracking on this.
Update (31/7/10): Certain developments mean that this is well and truly priority number one. Finally.
I'm TASing this in a very odd way in order to get a feel for how it will look...however, I hope to release WIPs at some point over the next couple of months. I think that this may well be more entertaining than my currently published run.

Potential Projects

Contacting Me

You can PM me on the forums or talk to me on IRC. I love to discuss Tool-Assisted Speedruns and will gladly help out anyone with a question about my work or any other TAS related problem. If you would like to co-author a run under the 'Potential Projects' heading, please drop me a PM (Note: It will be well into 2011 before I have time to TAS anything there).
HomePages/Mukki last edited by Zeupar on 2/4/2011 5:43 PM
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