There can be no powerup runs and pacifist runs for Contra, then I don't see why we shouldn't be able to have a similar movie for Castlevania as well. :) TASes don't always have to be about destroying games by abusing every trick to its fullest advantage and in what seems to be the main complaint here, being hit every single solitary time it'd save time, after all. Dodging stuff in amusing or fancy ways is also entertaining, after all, and suboptimal character stuff is also permitted (SMB2, Castlevania 3). Yeah, watching the same old cross or holy water rip things apart is entertaining, but seeing how much can be done with the oft-ignored main weapon is good enough to get a "yes" out of me. With that being said, I bet that if the damage boosts were included and it was just no subweapons, just about everyone would be singing praises for this run. ;)

Considering how hard the game is without these restrictions (for me, at least), I enjoyed this TAS a lot, especially the Mummy and Death battles. Like Mukki pointed out, however, you didn't always jump to get the orbs after each boss, so I wonder if there may be other possible optimizations that you overlooked. Meh vote.

I bet if this run was just "no subweapons" people would be decrying it for being too similar to the published run, actually. Some days you just can't win.

It's not amazing! Bad work. A no vote from me. Sorry!

This is quality material for gruefood delight, but I consider these goals unpublishable for this paticular game.

There can be no powerup runs and pacifist runs for Contra, then I don't see why we shouldn't be able to have a similar movie for Castlevania as well. :)

The difference is that Contra wasn't designed to be allow a pacifist run. It completely changes the gameplay and adds to the TAS as the author takes interesting measures to avoid killing foes. Taking no damage in Castlevania takes out all the fun damage boosts and boss murdering glitches. That detracts from the TAS and makes it rather dull. The only interesting bits were manipulating potions and rosaries.

The difference is that Contra wasn't designed to be allow a pacifist run. It completely changes the gameplay and adds to the TAS as the author takes interesting measures to avoid killing foes.

Can we please not get into the speculative arguments of what was intended or designed without ever having a way to substantiate that? By the same logic Castlevania wasn't designed for not using subweapons (because they're there) and not taking damage (because there's a health bar), and you can't argue that it doesn't change the gameplay, either.

You could maybe save a second off this run if you tried harder. It wasn't particularly enjoyable but it was pretty optimized for a first submission. I guess a Meh vote is my choice.

om, nom, nom... blech, bitter!

Compared to current published runs this is missing lots of tricks and glitches. Not surprising for a 14 year old submission. If it was re-judged it would be found un-optimized.

I'd like to take a shot on it sometime in the future, because the scroll glitch can be abused even more.

Oh hey, this old submission. This was one of my first "real" TASes, and it very much shows in the level of optimization and planning. When submitting this, I frankly anticipated the run would be rejected, and I understood the reasons when it was. It would definitely need another round of optimization to be up to snuff these days. More significantly, the run nowadays has to justify its existence against the "pacifist, minimalist" category of this game in my eyes. While that category came later, this run and the pacifist run have a lot of overlap, but there are also differences where they sort of slot into each other's gaps:

• This run is allowed to attack (non-essential) enemies, the pacifist run isn't.
• This run is allowed to pick up power-ups like the cross and rosary, while the pacifist run isn't.
• The pacifist run is allowed to take damage from enemies, so long as the enemy doesn't die from contact. By extension, this means:
  • The pacifist run is allowed to use damage boosts.
  • The pacifist run is allowed to use critical hits against enemies.

Overall, I believe the pacifist run has much more to offer and is overall a better representation of a "limited" category choice for this game. It has less downtime, and the lack of screen-clearing and invulnerability powerups means the pacifist run has to spend much more time tightly dodging and weaving between enemies, which is where I think this run here actually gets interesting. In retrospect, I am wondering if I should have banned crosses and rosaries for this reason, but that would've made the runs even more similar in the end. I am also wondering if this run should have scroll glitches. They'd obviously present a massive improvement to the walking-and-stair-climbing simulator that is this run, but I don't think there would be any unique scroll glitches that wouldn't also be seen in pacifist. Since the idea behind this movie originally was to make a "perfect" run of this game under a set of extra-challenging conditions, skipping portions of the game through scroll glitches would sort of undermine this goal. With pacifist around, not having scroll glitches would set this run apart and make it more unique, at a serious cost to entertainment (which is already lacking) and completion time. I don't think that's a worthwhile trade overall, but I still wanted to bring it up for consideration. I am still quite fond of this category. If Challenger (or anyone else) wants to have a look at it, I'd gladly encourage you to do so. This was a very simple TAS to make (in no small part because it cuts out all the difficult stuff, as people back then noted :P), so it might serve well as a simple break project between more complicated TAS projects. I'd seriously be interested to see how this TAS would look when pushed to its maximum potential, with scroll glitches or without. So yeah, that's my 2 cents on it. Or a couple more of them maybe considering how stupidly long this post on a 14 year old rejected submission turned out.