Back to the Future is a vertical sidescroller where you have to go from start to finish before the timer runs out while trying to avoid things like giant bees, bullies, hula-hoop girls, and guys holding glass windows. After four of these walking stages are over, there is a bonus game. In my run I abused the up+down+left+right combinations to make it so that the character is going all over the screen. I make him jump in the air so that he doesn't get killed when he moves all around the screen. If he lands or is walking on anything other than the road or sidewalk, he gets killed. Doing the control combinations (U+D/L+R) actually gives the impression that he is time travelling at the speed of light, which is awesome. It is a really easy game to TAS, so this run took me three days to complete.
Conclusion
In closing, this run wouldn't have been possible without the support of everyone on this website. I would like to thank you all for this opportunity! :)
mmbossman: Rejecting due to poor audience response.
adelikat
Unrejecting this submission for consideration into the Vault tier
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2161
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Hmm, Supper's run beats the game well over 1 minute faster, and since you main goal in this run is fastest possible time, it would indicate that this run can be improved by quite a bit. Or am I missing something here? If you time is higher because you aimed for higher score in the minigames, you might want to change the priority of your goals, (so your main goal is maximum score on bonus stages, and speed is priority #2).
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
I think it's because he is collecting all the clocks possible in the stages, I don't see any issue with it. If it was rejected for that, it'd be rejecting a Sonic run for delaying the bonus screen because they got an ultra fast time.
Mediafire.DailyMotion.
File size is 18.7mb with an overall bitrate of 100.
Voted meh. it was a pretty decent run. I enjoyed different aspects of the game itself and the glitching kept me pretty entertained. However, it was just a bit too long and I just was hoping there would be more of those random other types of minigames (like the guitaring one), that was pretty funny.
I guess I did enjoy it quite a bit despite the length, maybe I should have voted yes. I'm on the line here really though.
Super Mario Bros. console speedrunner
- Andrew Gardikis
Voted meh. it was a pretty decent run. I enjoyed different aspects of the game itself and the glitching kept me pretty entertained. However, it was just a bit too long and I just was hoping there would be more of those random other types of minigames (like the guitaring one), that was pretty funny.
I guess I did enjoy it quite a bit despite the length, maybe I should have voted yes. I'm on the line here really though.
Same here.
The glitching reminded me a bit of my Tmnt2 movie :)
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
(3570)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Cafe - uber boring
Auto-scrolling - boring but had glitching that made it a bit neat for a few minutes. Killing all enemies including those that would normally be impossible due to being in yards was cool but not all that great.
Very repetitive, mostly auto-scrolling, the rest being repetitive tasks, and oh yeah, I hate this game.
Thanks to flygon for the DM link. Even more thanks for putting the Shadow of the Beast soundtrack on accident so I didn't have to listen to this games music. (diarrhea + ear, etc).
So yeah, I gotta go with no on this one.
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
Okay, fixed the URL links, sorry adelikat but even if Shadow of the Beast has much better music, the beast that is Back to the Future is a blast from the past living in the current time and day that is here to torture us all.
We shall develop a plan to make a tool assisted time machine to force this music into 700AD, hopefully crazy religious sects will burn it up to hell.
The glitching made it cool for the first couple of minutes but that was all the game had to offer. I felt traumatized every time I heard the music for the autoscrolling stages after a mini game was completed. "No" vote.
Okay, fixed the URL links, sorry adelikat but even if Shadow of the Beast has much better music, the beast that is Back to the Future is a blast from the past living in the current time and day that is here to torture us all.
We shall develop a plan to make a tool assisted time machine to force this music into 700AD, hopefully crazy religious sects will burn it up to hell.
The music's that bad, huh? I actually kind of liked the music in this game even if it was just the same track over and over again. :) I guess I'm in the minority in this one (I've been getting that a lot lately).
And about the bonus stages, I even tried moving up and down at random intervals to try to make it more interesting. That's what I did for the v-scroll stages as well. Just the thought of collecting clocks and the way he moves around the screen gave the feeling of actual time travel. I thought that was cool.
I'm with Randil on this one. Although they might have different goals, I prefer Supper's run simply because it ends this horrible game stop earlier. Thus, voting no.
dunna dunna dunna dah dah dunna, dunna dunna dunna dah dah dunna, no vote for that song being stuck in my head the rest of the day.
If you think that's bad, I transcribed that song for the piano after I made my run. Since then, I've hardly touched a keyboard without playing it.
Anyway, as I've said, this game doesn't make the most interesting TAS. I don't think going for the highest score is good for it either, since that just means playing the boring minigames longer. I think it would have been more interesting to simply aim for destroying all enemies possible (which you did a nice job of, although I wish you would toy with them a bit more instead of just killing them immediately).
This is really nitpicky, but you could have manipulated the first bully to start on the same row as you in the café minigame. I'm not sure if that would have saved time, since the bullies seem to come on a set schedule. Same goes for the ones you let come up to the counter before using the Super Shake.
This is just my personal taste, but I would have preferred some sort of structured movement during the minigames, like synching Marty's guitar playing to the music.
I'm also a little disappointed you didn't make use of "oil warping" -- if you hold up/down/right and slide over an oil slick, you'll either wipe out or teleport to a random on-screen location.
So "fond" as I am of this game, I'm voting meh. It's fun to watch, but the game is just too long and repetitive.
Yes vote. When I first learned what exactly a TAS was and what tools to were used to make them I immediately started thinking about doing runs from the most difficult NES games from my youth. With Battletoads already published I set out to work on this game. I gave up rather quickly.
This game is hard to endure in a perfectly executed 18 minute TAS. Imagine the time involved in worrying about the details of every frame. Glitch Man has definitely put in the work here and deserves to be published.
The only other TAS we've had of this game was essentially just a playthrough with no style. This run abuses glitches, kills every enemy, and collects every possible point and power up which is hard to do even with frame advance tools.
Yes yes yes!
Please don't reject this run because if you do, I'm sure noone would ever attempt to TAS this game ever again....
Oh, that and because this run was somewhat entertaining.
Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 2227
Location: Georgia, USA
After watching this movie for a bit, I was reminded of Super Spy Hunter (since it is also essentially a fixed-time autoscroller when played as a TAS). I rewatched some of Super Spy Hunter, and I was much more entertained than when watching this movie. The issues have basically been brought up by other people, especially the music, which is good but too repetitive for a game of this length. The game has quite little variety, even if it is challenging, which causes the glitches to get old. The lack of boss fights doesn't help either, and the minigames make a poor replacement. (The only particularly interesting minigame was the guitar one.)
I respect the work you put into this, GlitchMan, but the game doesn't seem to be cut out for a good TAS. I see that you put effort into playing around, but it seems that the game is 4 times longer than it should be.
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically.
Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.)
Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html)
Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature!
Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Please don't reject this run because if you do, I'm sure noone would ever attempt to TAS this game ever again....
Oh, that and because this run was somewhat entertaining.
<klmz> it reminds me of that people used to keep quoting adelikat's IRC statements in the old good days
<adelikat> no doubt
<adelikat> klmz, they still do
Please don't reject this run because if you do, I'm sure noone would ever attempt to TAS this game ever again....
Oh, that and because this run was somewhat entertaining.
It's all right. This game is just not meant for a TAS. It is just too bland playing the same stages 16 times in a row even with the teleportation glitches. At least I gave it a try! :D
I don't think everyone should be so quick to judge whether or not Glitch Man made a worthwhile TAS based on factors that are beyond his control.
Every point made in this thread has to do with the game being awful and failing to see beyond that.
Yes, the music, graphics, and programming are awful. I can think of several games that have all of the same problems as this game that were published because of skill in movie making and not some other extraneous factor.
Deadly Towers, Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest, Kung Fu, etc.
Quit sperg'n out already and vote yes. Not every game can be Mario or Sonic.
And what I'm pointing out is that shouldn't be a factor in rejecting a run because it's opinion base and not skill based.
I don't like Mario and I bet I could find other people here who didn't like any Super Mario Bros. games.
Should those be rejected?
I understand that's a blunt way to make a point. What I'm saying is certainly there are games that are more entertaining than others and there is no reason to not feature those runs on the site because they bring in new visitors, programmers, and TASer's. But to limit runs to say, the top 100 most popular, well programmed games for a system is ludicrous and makes the site unsustainable in the long run.
