The Shrine

Tool Assisted Console Game Movies

Some good examples:

River City Ransom (Moral of the story? Beware people carrying trashcans.)
Zelda: Link to the Past in under 4 MINUTES!
Metroid in 9 MINUTES!
SMB1 in 5 minutes flat!
Dragon Warrior 1 in 19:31!!! (this one is amazing; gets a couple of metal slimes in a row to level to 8 and then kills the last boss with Sleep and Hurt)
Bubble Bobble in under 30 minutes (one of the fastest possible times due to the 10s wait per level; with one person controlling two players!)
Monopoly in 37 SECONDS! (very funny; the computer loses in 3 turns)

I thought these were all hacked, or faked, or whatever with emulators.

Eric wrote:I thought these were all hacked, or faked, or whatever with emulators.

There are rules. These aren't hacked in any way. They use save states and glitches, but it's the original ROM without any hacks or Game Genie type devices. (The worse they do is certain tricks involving hitting up and down at the same time for a glitch.) Despite the use of emulator tricks, they are still very cool and nice to look at. Even with the save states, most of these are very hard to pull off. (Do you want to load a save state 500 millions times to get a very rare Metal Slime on the first step?)

I saw a Morrowind speed run in just over 14 minutes. I was impressed until I realized he was exploiting a bug in order to do it.

That's still impressive. Like I said, those sort of things are still hard to do. Besides, it's more about how cool it looks than anything else.

There are some videos of newer games floating around as well, Metal Gear Solid and Metroid Prime. The ones I really want to see are the Zelda videos that have been posted on various record sites.

There is someone doin' Prime 1 in 1:20 or so and the sequel in 1:40 or so. Both at 100%. That's pretty insane.

I'd rather try to achieve the records for these games on consoles. You can do different things using the keyboards and as you said, they exploit some bugs or something using the ROMs. As I mentioned to Kupek earlier, I don't think SMB1 is possible in 5 minutes on the consoles, regardless of how good you are. I used to tear through the levels constantly running and using all the warps with hardly slowing down to fight anything and it would take about 10 minutes or so. I'm sure they're exploiting the emulators. Metroid in 9 minutes? No chance. A friend of mind can beat the original Zelda in about 45 minutes, which is ridiculous.

What I'm trying to say is, these are insane records and are impressive, but they don't mean much at the end of the day. Records should be for how the games were originally meant to be played. That Quake run in 19 minutes on Nightmare was awesome, Prime 1 in under 1:30 at 100% is insane. Start emulating, using a different controller, a different method of running the game, and they dont mean much IMO

All right, I'll bite. Where can I get a BitTorrent client, and an electronic version of a condom strong enough to protect me from the malware that I imagine may come along with it?

I really see absolutely nothing impressive about doing something flawlessly when you can just load after every failure and save after every successful action. Save states preserves the seeding of any random elements that may exists which makes doing miracle dodges actually really trivial when you already know which attack and where it's going to land. I assume in the rare metal slime case that there was some way to disrupt the seeding which brings the complexity down to n*frequency of a slime where n is the number of slimes as opposed to frequency^n.

Mental wrote:All right, I'll bite. Where can I get a BitTorrent client, and an electronic version of a condom strong enough to protect me from the malware that I imagine may come along with it?

http://www.bittorrent.com/

No condom needed. It's a legitamite distribution mechanism, although it is being used to distribute lots of copyrighted material.

I really enjoy watching speed runs, like the 45 minute real ones. I can't get into these, especially ones like the Zelda one, where they clearly just explot their way into winning. No fun, IMO.

I don't see much of a difference between exploiting some bug for a speed run as opposed to exploiting the save state feature.

Don Wang wrote:I really see absolutely nothing impressive about doing something flawlessly when you can just load after every failure and save after every successful action. Save states preserves the seeding of any random elements that may exists which makes doing miracle dodges actually really trivial when you already know which attack and where it's going to land. I assume in the rare metal slime case that there was some way to disrupt the seeding which brings the complexity down to n*frequency of a slime where n is the number of slimes as opposed to frequency^n.

Just as a question, Don, do you see anything impressive about anything these days?

Also, what's the codec needed for these?

There are things that are impressive but what amounts to loading on every mistake which is how 99.9% of the people approach any turn-based strategy game (including me) until you get a flawless setup is nothing to be impressed about. I had a friend who beat Brood Wars without ever losing a unit and I don't think anyone will think that is very impressive (kill some stuff, ensure everyone is alive, save, continue) and that's exactly what's being done here. If someone didn't tell you about the loads and just put it in one continous video you'd think he's some kind of micro god, even though he's just a normal BGH player.

I can show you one of my Fire Emblem 4 plays where I beat it in the minimum time possible (all castles are taken on the first turn Selis can physically reach them) and leveled everyone to max, even the dancers, had 0 deaths, and killed the 'unkillable' Yurius in Chapter 10. I'll bet I even loaded less often than most of these impossibly fast speed runs too. I was messing with MMZ4 and once you get the pattern seeded you can go some downright impossible stuff like dodging an EX attack that covers 95% of the screen and still hitting the boss while dodging it because you already know the outcome.

Mental wrote:All right, I'll bite. Where can I get a BitTorrent client, and an electronic version of a condom strong enough to protect me from the malware that I imagine may come along with it?

www.download.com, get BitComet

Mental wrote:

Don Wang wrote:I really see absolutely nothing impressive about doing something flawlessly when you can just load after every failure and save after every successful action. Save states preserves the seeding of any random elements that may exists which makes doing miracle dodges actually really trivial when you already know which attack and where it's going to land. I assume in the rare metal slime case that there was some way to disrupt the seeding which brings the complexity down to n*frequency of a slime where n is the number of slimes as opposed to frequency^n.

Just as a question, Don, do you see anything impressive about anything these days?

Also, what's the codec needed for these?

There's a codec pack called K-Lite. Get it, it has everything

☆GBA Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (USA) in 23:43 by Mike Lastovica (aka. OgreSlayeR).

Wow, I would really like to see how this is possible. Must download.

The Seeker wrote:☆GBA Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (USA) in 23:43 by Mike Lastovica (aka. OgreSlayeR).

Wow, I would really like to see how this is possible. Must download.

Taking advantage of a bug in CotM where you can activate a DSS combo, then immediately switch to cards you don't have, and it'll do the DSS combo that you don't have. Also, bosses are killed with the bony skeleton's huge bone. (Only gets thrown once in a blue moon, but does huge damage.)

My latest save I thought was fairly quick, it is over 5 hours, and I barely got through Dracula. I even used a gamefaqs map to find the cards I needed right away. I got all the cards on my first run through the game, but on this run through I only got the ones for the best combos.

The river city ransom one didn't even dare to block a single hurricane kick from the dragon twins and they call this gaming perfection/art? If I want to see someone hitting 2 guys with a trashcan and then magically jump back before every time the twins do a hurricane kick, I can play the game myself and just get a fast weapon swing thing and do the same thing with a whip instead.

The continous jump kick off the trash can is kind of cute though.

Don Wang wrote:There are things that are impressive but what amounts to loading on every mistake which is how 99.9% of the people approach any turn-based strategy game (including me) until you get a flawless setup is nothing to be impressed about. I had a friend who beat Brood Wars without ever losing a unit and I don't think anyone will think that is very impressive (kill some stuff, ensure everyone is alive, save, continue) and that's exactly what's being done here. If someone didn't tell you about the loads and just put it in one continous video you'd think he's some kind of micro god, even though he's just a normal BGH player.

I can show you one of my Fire Emblem 4 plays where I beat it in the minimum time possible (all castles are taken on the first turn Selis can physically reach them) and leveled everyone to max, even the dancers, had 0 deaths, and killed the 'unkillable' Yurius in Chapter 10. I'll bet I even loaded less often than most of these impossibly fast speed runs too. I was messing with MMZ4 and once you get the pattern seeded you can go some downright impossible stuff like dodging an EX attack that covers 95% of the screen and still hitting the boss while dodging it because you already know the outcome.

That is impressive. I actually got pretty far in the Terran & Protoss campaigns without using any uinits, that WC3 Micro training really pays off.

Don Wang wrote:The river city ransom one didn't even dare to block a single hurricane kick from the dragon twins and they call this gaming perfection/art? If I want to see someone hitting 2 guys with a trashcan and then magically jump back before every time the twins do a hurricane kick, I can play the game myself and just get a fast weapon swing thing and do the same thing with a whip instead.

You're always invited to try to beat the record. Depending on the game, if there's only one person submitting a video for a game, it may not be "perfect" because the competition isn't there.

Don Wang wrote:The continous jump kick off the trash can is kind of cute though.

Yeah, there were some neat looking kick and can combos there.

Hmmmm, I can't seem to get the Castlevania one to download anyways.

I grabbed a bunch (Castlevania I, II, III, IV, A Boy and His Blob, Mickey's Magical Quest, Star Wars, maybe a few others). They're fun to watch. I don't care about issues of perfection or skill, I just get a kick out of watching videogames I grew up with being played well.

I'm picking up Deja Vu, Castlevania III, and the 1 hour 20 minute Link to the past, Faxanadu in 30 minutes (I would say there are only a handful of people who can complete this one faster than I can without tool assistance), and final fantasy in an hour and a half.

Well, The Zelda one is done to absolute perfection, with lots of quitting and resets and mirror warping and stuff. It is absolutely flawless. The guy even takes damage just so he can take the most direct and quick path.

Link to the Past completed in 1 hour and 20 minutes.

The SMB1 version (no warp) and Ninja Gaiden movies are insane. SMB is shooting perfect fireballs, and I'm saying all the time "WTF?! That fire column passed through him!"