Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Well, if you haven't even played the game, of course it doesn't look as impressive. You should get a hold of a Nintendo 64 and a copy of this game. Play it all the way through, getting all 120 stars. Then watch this speedrun.
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
*Last off topic post*
Both Boco and Ramzi are right, we all or at least every person who follows biqwits and radix's site knows that you can complete this game with 16 stars, so that was certainly not a news for us, although Boco is known for her rather provocative writing, bad Boco :)
It's that he does some reasonably difficult manouvres consistently throughout the run. Marsh knew of many other shortcuts, but he didn't want to attempt them because they were low percentage tricks that could kill him easily, and he'd have to start over. I think he only spent a few days on his run, whereas LeCoureur took a few months (or so he says).
The tricks he uses are mostly nothing new. I think probably everyone in the world could learn at least one or two new things from this, but most of the experienced players already knew how he would attempt to get a star as soon as they saw which star he had selected to go for. A lot of the stars have much faster strategies, that are (obviously) much more random/harder to do. So he does a very good job of picking reasonably difficult manouves without going overboard (that's what a TAS is for). He went on the borderline of overboard :) (= lots of risks in Rainbow Ride)
Wow. That was just freaking amazing.
In answer to your question, Warp, you are not supposed to be able to do most of the things this guy does. Many of the jumps are very difficult to do because of the 3d nature of this game. The most dangerous part of this game was never the enemies, but falling to your death.
I bought an N64 as soon as it came out and I spent months becoming an expert at this game. I tried to get every single coin in every level, which requires enormous dedication. It means getting the often tricky red coins, jumping on all of the bad guys the right way, completing every tricky slide, visiting every area, and getting the coins before they fall off of the ledges or disappear. In the case of the "Tiny Giant" area, it means doing everything as both giant and tiny Mario. The point I'm making is that this quest forced me to become an expert in this game, and I've seen and done some pretty amazing things, but I'm not half as good as this guy is. He must have damaged his brain getting this good at Super Mario 64. Give it a try. He only makes this game look easy.
A TAS of this run would be phenomenal. He picked 70 stars that could be collected quickly, even skipping some entire areas. Even so, after cleaning up the places where Mario jumps into a wall or misses the target, speeding up the boss fights and optimizations throughout, and the fact that you could try even gutsier moves, it looks like a 105 star completion wouldn't be much longer than this non-TAS 70 star completion. The 15 stars that you get for getting 100 coins in a level would be the most time consuming, and a lot of thought would have to go into the fastest way to get 100 coins on each level. For the sake of speed, they would pretty much have to be collected in the pursuit of one of the other stars, which would make the quest for that particular star seem far less impressive. I'm thinking that it might be best not to bother with all 120 for that reason.
At any rate, I await the day when N64 TAS runs become feasible. Thanks for sharing this amazing run with us.
TASing or playing back a DOS game? Make sure your files match the archive at RGB Classic Games.
Wow just watched the video... to speedrun a game in 3d like that, with analog controls and semi-complex button patterns, is just insane
He made a few mistakes but they were minor and for the most part my jaw was dropping. Makes me wish they made an n64 emulator with re-records and slowdown/frame advance
That's at the top of my wish list. A competition to get the best times on this game would lead to some absolutely amazing movies. The thing about N64 movies, though, is that most games give you the ability to change the camera angle, and switch between third-person and first-person view. Now you become not only a TAS creator, but a director, choosing camera angles for the best effect. You could hire Spielberg and get advice like, "If you switch to first person while Mario jumps on that boss, that would look much more aggressive," or "Zoom out while you do that so that people can all of the action that's going on around Mario. It's better for the mood you instill in the audience." The movie making aspect of the TAS would really become an art.
TASing or playing back a DOS game? Make sure your files match the archive at RGB Classic Games.
The camera angle usually affects your orientation, so switching angle while your buttons are being replayed could well cause a desych somewhere along the line.
Alex was referring to changing the camera angle after having gone through the level... I believe that's what he meant. If it is, he was correct about the desyncing.
Well yeah, if you change a camera angle, then all of the direction controls that are relative to the camera have to be changed as well. I don't know if I'd really call that a de-sync though - more like a new consideration with 3d games / analog input.
<Swordless> Go hug a tree, you vegetarian (I bet you really are one)
Yeah, sorry.. that's what I meant. I don't think it's possible in any current emulators, as none of them accept new input while replaying something (it shouldn't be very hard to update the emulator to allow this, but it's going to cause lots of movies to desynch).
For some games (like a few PC FPS) when you replay your demo, you can tweak the camera and "be the director", and those movies look pretty darn good.
Well, it's not as if Mario 64 has the best camera control system anyways. The thing's like a giddy fly in terms of staying where you want it and like a bull in terms of finesse.