dwangoAC asked if someone could quickly make a reasonably fast and entertaining TAS of SMW SMB with lsnes. He also needed it done by today (2015-01-02), and gave me only a few hours notice, as he's under deadline for AGDQ2015. So I appended a quick & dirty play of SMB onto Masterjun's SMW that I created from scratch in a little over an hour of TASing with lsnes in order to meet his sync requirements.
I'm not HappyLee, nor did I even put much effort into this to perform all kinds of crazy glitches and get perfect play everywhere. However, the play it still pretty solid, and is within 20 seconds of what HappyLee's latest version would get on this version of SMB.
I did put some effort into entertainment with interesting enemy kills and near misses. So you might find this more entertaining than several other SMB TASs, even though this isn't a polished TAS. Of course a proper TAS would put even more effort into entertainment, although many established TASers in the past have failed to do so for this game.
Note: This is the first time I tried rerecording on lsnes, so rerecord count is way higher than it should be as I was playing with hot-keys and such, and the movie finishes way later than actual game-play too. The rerecord count also includes Masterjun's SMW rerecord count. Read: Not much effort was put into the SMB side of things.
In-game level ending times, HappyLee (~5:02) vs this (~5:18) vs first SMB TAS (~5:20):
- 1-1: 370 - 368 - 368
- 1-2: 347 - 345 - 346
- 4-1: 340 - 339 - 340
- 4-2: 356 - 344 - 354 (time units very misleading versus real-time due to beanstalk)
- 8-1: 200 - 197 - 199
- 8-2: 338 - 337 - 340
- 8-3: 244 - 242 - 242 (intentionally slows down to avoid fireworks)
- 8-4: 317 - 309 - 306
All in all, not bad for about an hour of TASing, not aiming for perfection. Although as a judge, I'd reject this for sloppiness. There's even a point where I didn't realize I wasn't running in 8-1 where I should have, not to mention other issues that could be fixed with an extra 5-10 minutes of work.
What's wrong with this TAS:
- 1-1: Crashes into pipe in underground.
- 1-2: Goes over the ceiling instead of through the wall.
- 4-1: Misses many coins, slows down near the end.
- 4-2: Goes between the bricks instead of through the wall, which further requires beanstalk manipulation instead of being able to enter pipe directly.
- 8-1: Slows down in the middle for no good reason, misses enemies.
- 8-2: Slow start. Then big jump followed by Piranha collision glitch could be done faster. In fact I did do it faster and had a better looking glitch, however, right afterwords I stupidly pressed load instead of save, and didn't redo the effort into getting that part to be optimal in entertainment and time.
- 8-3: Didn't kill enough Hammer Brothers.
- 8-4: Didn't wall jump into pipe, swimming suboptimal.
Lastly, issues aside, this run is still faster in real-time than the first few SMB TASs we published when re-synced for this version.