Slashdot Mirror

Gah. Reddit's markdown is making me soft.

Speed Demos Archive
TAS Videos

Here's a list of tool assisted speed runs that are actually run on real hardware with a real copy of software : http://tasvideos.org/Movies-Ve...

Getting things to sync to real hardware is amazing that so much effort FROM FANS has gone into preserving these games in emulators that it works outside of those emulators.

It is possible to die on turn 0, before you have even had a chance to act.

OK, so since it seems no one else knows who RAPstar or Mano Paul is either, let's go with this dumb question: what's your favorite Pokemon?

Actually, I think I can turn this into something vaguely on topic since someone managed to do a TAS of Pokemon Yellow that manages to run arbitrary code, ultimately calculating pi to several digits.

So have you ever found an exploit in a game or something and used it to your advantage? Or what's the coolest, unintentional behavior you've done with a computer program?

Lemmings

Clickfest levels prevent progression. There was one called "I've got a cunning plan" about midway through a level set, that required you to rapidly click on lemmings so that they build a bridge to nowhere, and make sure your leading lemming bashes open the path to the exit. It gave no room for error.

I think that game was ported to consoles. Hardly playable on a controller, especially on reflex-based levels.

Humans

Glitchy. A game breaking bug had humans stack and climb other humans, without assistance from other humans. It's glitches are shown on TASVideos.

Myth and Riven

Myth was a bit clunky for an RTS in my opinion.

But if you meant Myst, then that has a massive sequence break on par with Alpine Encounter - and not going through said sequence break meant you were expected to go through a long cutscene-based maze twice. . Riven, however, was a 32-bit era game.

I would instead recommend any of the Lucas Arts adventure games. Practically anything past Maniac Mansion or Zak McKracken puts a major reduction on becoming impossible without your knowledge (or if so, you had to go out of your way to do so).

King's Quest Series

Deathfest simply by moving a bit too close to the ledge, and the main character is more than happy to not stop.

I'm sure there's plenty of quality games in the 16-bit era. However, a chunk of those listed have major issues that strips away being a quality product.

My understanding, admittedly layman's, is that a lot(all of?) the early console systems were hardware constrained as hell and certainly didn't have the luxury of a hardware RNG or even many peripheral interfaces with the unpredictable outside world, so their games tended to not only lack randomness; but rely on techniques for faking randomness sufficiently rudimentary that "luck manipulation" becomes viable...

It's my understanding as a game developer, that if you need any sort of networked multi-player or demo record and (instant) playback then your engine needs to be fully deterministic. That is: if anything is random it's pseudo-random. Eg: Doom used a pre-computed look-up table for its "random" number generator.

Furthermore since: UpdatePhysics( elapsedMillisec ); UpdatePhysics( elapsedMillisec );
Is not guaranteed to produce the same results as UpdatePhysics( elapsedMillisec * 2 );
many of today's games run their physics and game logic at a fixed interval. A discarded interpolation between two intervals can provide a fractional time step for a rendering frame, or to implement client-side prediction (latency compensation).

There are other techniques, but they must be deterministic or else desynchronisation occurs. Ergo: If determinism is your basis for likelihood of NP-hard determinations, the candidates are still widely produced today despite our advances in hardware randomness generation.

Don't forget that there is a human element in a game: It's not possible to determine the precise timing of actions or reactions a human will supply... Depending on the game logic this may cause cascading effects or feedback logic loops -- the basis of cybernetics, which is typically a non trivial field (even less trivial when a human mind is part of the loop).

My understanding, admittedly layman's, is that a lot(all of?) the early console systems were hardware constrained as hell and certainly didn't have the luxury of a hardware RNG or even many peripheral interfaces with the unpredictable outside world, so their games tended to not only lack randomness; but rely on techniques for faking randomness sufficiently rudimentary that "luck manipulation" becomes viable...

For those interested, the provided patch works by loading a fixed value of 1 into register A during the wall ejection routine instead of loading the value in address 0x45. 0x45 keeps track of the way Mario is facing.

So basically, the wall ejection routine kicks in, thinks Mario is facing right (1), and ejects him left (back out of this wall).

(Information collaborated with Ilari of TASvideos and the SMB RAM Map on Data Crystal.)

go there for more details :
http://tasvideos.org/GameResources/NES/SuperMarioBros.html#WalljumpSmb1Smb2j

And does anyone know why he's usually jumping facing backward? Does Mario go farther that way?

It helps with the collision detection with enemies, walking through walls, and to jump off the side of bricks, among other things.

Here is a list of pretty much all the exploits used, with animated GIFs and explanations, from the same site containing the recorded key press files:
http://tasvideos.org/GameResources/NES/SuperMarioBros.html

Welcome Slashdotters.

An introduction might be in order. Please note we have many other movies for other consoles. We also have a list of recommended movies for first-time viewers.

Please don't beat up our poor server too badly.

Welcome Slashdotters.

An introduction might be in order. Please note we have many other movies for other consoles. We also have a list of recommended movies for first-time viewers.

Please don't beat up our poor server too badly.

Welcome Slashdotters.

An introduction might be in order. Please note we have many other movies for other consoles. We also have a list of recommended movies for first-time viewers.

Please don't beat up our poor server too badly.

Actually, the generic randomizer could do that as well, and in some cases can be abused.

Luck manipulation works in tool-assisted speedruns of Tetris for NES because the game mixes keypresses into the PRNG's entropy pool. Some other games seed the PRNG only once; the entire piece sequence is predetermined from READY GO.

It also prevents complaints about games having a rigged random number generator if the pieces aren't distributed evenly.

True, luck based cop-outs are harder on bag than on the original randomizer. But apparently, BPS chose bag over the history based randomizer used by TGM designed to choose one of the least recently used pieces. The advantage of LRU over the bag randomizer is that an LRU randomizer 1. won't generate the sort of SZSZ clumps at the "seams" between bags, and 2. doesn't have the "Playing forever" pattern. That's part of why I chose an LRU randomizer for my own Tetris clone for NES. LRU doesn't guarantee strictly even distribution, but it is still far more even than the original memoryless algorithm. I can think of a few other compromise algorithms, such as keeping a bag of 14 pieces, drawing seven out, and adding all seven pieces once seven are left in the bag.

I'm talking about things like Tetris DS and Tetris Party with their infinite spin mechanic

Shocking.

a bag randomizer that allows for a play pattern that can provably continue forever.

Actually, the generic randomizer could do that as well, and in some cases can be abused. It also prevents complaints about games having a rigged random number generator if the pieces aren't distributed evenly.

Besides, I haven't seen an attempt at a malicious RNG under the bag system.

So would that make Tool Assisted Speedruns art, even if the games themselves (allegedly) weren't?

That sounds about right. One rarely calls a violin/game a work of art. But, the music/game play that the artist/player creates can be called art. Look no further than Tool-Assisted Speed runs for an example.

Of course, as I hinted out earlier, while one rarely calls a violin a work of art, that doesn't mean they could never be considered works of art. Most games don't qualify because they're designed to facilitate art production. Others (Animal Crossing, Farm Ville) are meant to facilitate communication and community. But, clearly some games are meant as works of art and would qualify.

The interesting thing, then, is that while virtually all games include art, very few are art. In other words, a video game is less than the some of its parts in that regard. In fact, most things in reality would qualify under that point.

http://tasvideos.org/

TAS = Tool Assisted Speed Runs. Basically you program controller inputs (at very slow speeds) and then play them back at 1:1 speeds and you watch a pre-programmed controller run through an entire game as quickly as possible. There are runs for basically most of the more popular NES and SNES games as well as other games. Pretty interesting stuff and usually a daunting task is creating a TAS of a game.

Too bad. Otherwise, you could send them one of the files from the TAS of SMB (available somewhere on here) which is very probably frame-perfect at this point.

People have been using similar things for years to find the most optimal routes for speed runs. These scripts are known as "TASbots" and are used on all sorts of games, mostly 2D platformers.

If you're interested you can check out a bunch of videos made with the help of these tools here.

As is every game when you're making a tool-assissted speedrun of it. The Mips and backwards long jump glitches are disgustingly difficult to pull off in real-time (but possible).

"It's was like thumbing through an old family album of childhood photos."

There's a speed run/time attack of Castlevania that really takes me back too. Perhaps turning such speed runs into blipverts could cram all that nostalgia into a delicious dense nugget.

I've been using it for downloading videos speed runs at TAS Videos, and it works very well.

www.speeddemosarchive.com recently posted a run of Deus Ex: Invisible War. It makes the game look semi-entertaining to watch as it short-circuts portions of the map, dodges through large number of enemies, and throws objects at AI players that simply stand around doing nothing.

Tasvideos.org recently posted a batch of videos.

Granted, these are single player games, but that doesn't prevent anybody from not enjoying them.

not to turn this into a PC vs. Console debate, but even IF you put all that together, you will have a grand total of zero games designed to take advantage of the strength of your system.

The battleship levels (and other kind of auto-scrolling levels) are actually more annoying than interesting. They may have been good when they came out, but now it's more used as a crutch than anything.

If the character can already keep up with the camera (e.g. as in the Tool Assisted Demos), those levels are more tedious than anything since there's almost nothing to.

Some auto-scroll levels are badly designed as well, since you have to do a series of jumps within the first 1.5 seconds of the level.

A community I am involved with uses a forum and an IRC channel. The hook in between is a bot created by the main administrator. Whenever there is a post on the forum, the bot announces it on the IRC channel, with a very convenient link. Not sure if it's what original poster had in mind but I think it's a neat system.

I've had Metroid Prime crash on me once, sounded like the drive was given conflicting orders as it kept moving the head around and clacked all the time before the BSOD came up. Granted, that was only once but have a look at the bugs in console games.

I've had Metroid Prime crash on me once, sounded like the drive was given conflicting orders as it kept moving the head around and clacked all the time before the BSOD came up. Granted, that was only once but have a look at the bugs in console games.

I've had Metroid Prime crash on me once, sounded like the drive was given conflicting orders as it kept moving the head around and clacked all the time before the BSOD came up. Granted, that was only once but have a look at the bugs in console games.

I've had Metroid Prime crash on me once, sounded like the drive was given conflicting orders as it kept moving the head around and clacked all the time before the BSOD came up. Granted, that was only once but have a look at the bugs in console games.

Its amazing that nintendo was cool enough to release a commericial as a film and kids would flock to see it?

I find watching certain people play video games quite entertaining, although your tastes may vary. Still, give it a try with something like the Gradius III 100% kill rate video or something. Some of them are quite incredible...

Don't knock it until you watch a few from their reccomended videos page.

At least all of the ones that I've seen are honest about it. There's a huge community centered around a few sites, and they make it quite clear that they're not trying to trick people into thinking that they beat the game that quickly for real, but rather to demonstrate what perfect play of a game could look like.

I can respect that. Some of those videos are still jaw-dropping, just knowing that it is physically possible to do that in a particular game.

The only time I've seen them without some kind of mention of the use of emulation tools is when they show up on third-party sites (like ebaums).