As the most of you probably know, Mario can pretty much choice his level of heigh when he jump (until a max. heigh obv.): the most consecutive frames you press the A button, the higher you jump, simple
In the whole game there will be different obstacles where you can jump less o need very high jumps to get past some tall walls or big gaps, right?
Well, here i am trying to avoid giving Mario that extreme power of jump to the stars always that i can
This is a new TAS idea invented by me (i think lol)
The point of the TAS is just beating the game as fast as possible like in any%, but with a restriction:
Every jump has to be the smallest possible
What does this means in gameplay fact is that is not allowed to press the A button for 2 frames or more, is only allowed to make jumps of 1 frame A press
The only exceptions with more than 1 A presses jumps are a 9 frames jump needed to get to the top pipe of 2º room and 2 consecutive 6 frame jumps to get to bowser area, both in 8-4, being that the best I managed to do
you can change both 6 by just another 9, but my priority is that is better making infinite 8 frames jumps than a single 9 frames jump
Tricks & glitches about the proccess of the run:
- walljump: in any whole with at least 2 blocks of height, if you hit the exact pixel betwen 2 blocks, you have 1 frame window where Mario lands on the below block, and you can jump on that frame, what is called walljump; this is basicaly making a double jump in walls, so basicaly is use constantly like everywhere in the run, making the challenge far to be posible getting to 8-4 by a lot lot of walls where using this is needed
- floating Koopa & Beatle: in 8-1 there are 2 big gaps that where would be imposible to get so far with just 1 frame jump without this glitch because of the big space of air, so what i do is stomping the shells just when they start falling off in a gap, so they just stop because of the stomp and the game detects like if they where on the floor, they just wake up and start walking behind the floor, so i can use them to bounce in the midle of the big gap and get that far
- Others: flagpole glitch, wrong warps, pipe clip in 1-2, etc.; tipical glitches used a lot in any TAS of this game that are also posible with just 1 frame jumps; im not going to give more details about those ones here
time of 5:59;009 from the start, just timed from there and not waiting on the menu for optimal time cause time in the menu also counts
the TAS:
It was a funny TAS to make and I like how it resulted to be
played on FCEUX 2.2.3 with a USA/Japan rom
"describe the game briefly" uh? welp mitical game, Super Mario Bros. for the NES, released in 1985 as the 1º ever original Super Mario Bros saga game, a very fun plataformer game where you have to move the hero, Mario, a plumber, to rescue Princess Peach from the main villian of the game, Bowser, passing throught the whole 32 fantastic levels that this game offers (unless you use wrong warps lol, as i did here in 1-2 and 4-2 to play only 8); everybody should prove this game, and it revolutionated the industry of the videogames, to say the least about it :D
feos: It's rare that a newcomer's SMB submission gets this much attention, but it's a good thing this one did!
The audience didn't enjoy this submission, giving it only 24% (5/3/19) vote support. But it doesn't fit into our LegacyPages/Tier for low-entertainment movies because it has an esoteric goal. Vault only accepts fastest completion and full completion.
But there was quite some discussion about this run's goal, and a few points were made both in favor and against it. Most importantly, we only accept entertaining movies to Alternative, and majority of the audience didn't consider this movie entertaining. I'll try to explain why exactly.
Goal choice is not too important in this tier: esoteric and unorthodox goals are acceptable, but only as long as they make for entertaining movies.
- The goal choices should be clear, so it's understood what needs to be accomplished in order to obsolete it.
- Arbitrary goal choices need to offer new TAS material to be accepted. Choices which have no goal other than to create a new game branch are rejected.
Clarity of "smallest jumps" is questionable. Several people in the thread were confused about what it means and got it wrong. And the main technical problem with it is that the limit we're approaching with jump height is unclear. If we limit jump length, but not jump count, in some situations a longer jump can be replaced with potentially infinite amount of smaller jumps.
- Indeed, this movie uses a higher jump count than in the "fewest presses" record, and a much higher jump count than in the "fewest jumps" record, as you can see on this page I put together. The ratio of jump count to total frame count of this submission is the same as in other SMB branches. Also there are 30% more jumps in this run than in the "any%" record, due to having more jumps per second.
- The "weight" of each consecutive "A" press is not defined, so there's no clear way to compare this run to a potential improvement that does more of shorter or fewer of longer jumps. Can we replace one 9-frame jump with two 8-frame jumps? Or with 18 2-frame jumps? Can we replace ten 1-frame jumps with one 10-frame jump? This goal doesn't suggest answers that would make it easy to work with as an objective and clear metric.
- See this post for more insight on technical problems with this definition.
In terms of entertainment standards, this run is not up to par with existing SMB branches, and doesn't provide enough surprising and novel content that can't be seen in them.
- This movie ends up feeling like an anticlimactic variation of [1715] NES Super Mario Bros. "warps" by HappyLee in 04:57.31, because for each pipe you now need to make a few more jumps, and that doesn't present any technical challenge: longer jump just gets replaced with several shorter ones, and you need to pause on most pipes to perform them.
- In a few places this movie is comparable with [4444] NES Super Mario Bros. "minimum A presses" by HappyLee, Kriller37, DaSmileKat, Kosmic & periwinkle in 10:24.39, because you have to wait for enemies to move across gaps. But it lacks the rewarding aspect of "fewest jumps" that consists of showcasing bizarre setups and mechanics you didn't know this game had!
- 4444M reminds me of Goldberg machines in how it turns a seemingly simple task into an engineering miracle. "Any%" is then like a human that grabs the ball and skips all the intermediate steps, putting the ball at the finish line. In this movie, it's also a human that skips the machine, but is only allowed to walk on fours for some reason.
Due to these problems, I'm rejecting this submission.