The first TAS of SPM in about 4 years. Took a significant amount of time to work on and was fun to work on too! Shoutouts to JohnP55 for introducing me and teaching me how to TAS SPM, it really means a lot to me.
Frames: 787154
TAS Time: 3:38:39.23
Rerecords: 11513
Samsara: Several people, including prominent members of the Super Paper Mario speedrunning community, have pointed out numerous issues with the level of optimization shown in this movie. This run improves Karaage's TAS from 2017 by about 5 minutes, after accounting for the unnecessary blank input at the end of this submission. For the sake of comparison, the Scanner Skip discovered last year saves nearly 5 minutes on its own, and that wasn't anywhere near the only new trick discovered since Karaage's TAS. It's hard to even compare the two runs because of the sheer number of new timesaves found over the past 4 years. I watched both runs side-by-side up through Chapter 2, and nearly every stage I watched between the two runs has a new route, a new skip, a new method of performing a skip, tons of little things that should be adding up to a lot more time save than this, but are ultimately moot because of the suboptimal movement all throughout the run. Some of the movement and strategies in this TAS are behind even current RTA standards: The Fracktail fight was pointed out as being full seconds behind the RTA record.
Just beating the previous full game time using new strategies is not enough. Every individual section, every room, every text box, every little bit of movement should at least match the best known run. A TAS like this, one of a complicated and technical game of considerate length, should not be rushed. Study each run you can find (both other TASes and RTAs, even non-WRs) and make sure you're not losing any time to them, redo each little section over and over until you can't possibly improve it any more, ensure that every single thing you do is as fast as the game will allow. It takes a while, but it's definitely doable.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2823
Location: Northern California
Wasn't there another TAS of this in progress by JohnP55, or am I severely misremembering the SPM WR progression video?
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family.
Now infrequently posting on Bluesky
Just for the record, the movie file should cut at the last frame required to reach the credits, so the 5 or so minutes should be cut from the movie file.
Yeah, I'm wondering about that as well. You applied that strategy for the first loop around, but not the second one.
EDIT: Comparing both fights, the TAS is 5 seconds slower than the RTA any% record.
Other moments in TAS are quite different from RTA WR and seem slower like the fight against Fracktail or Francis. Others like climbing the ladder in level 5-2 seems slower than the TAS of 4:43:42.01 found on youtube. Are there any explanations or comments to add to your submission ? Anyway it's a good job but I fear that it is poorly optimized in some portions. I will still give my yes vote because I always wanted this game to be part of the big family of this site but it is important to note these improvements:
- fight against Fracktail, Francis
- climb the ladders too slowly
I probably missed other places ...
Hi, I am a current speedrunner of this game, and I need to explain why this is a very unoptimized TAS.
In the last 4 years since the previous TAS, there has been over 20 minutes of time save found by the SPM community and then some.
This TAS has only been able to utilize maybe at most 10 minutes out of the 20 minutes due to the amount of poor movement in this video.
Like people have already pointed out, many things like the Fracktail fight, and other movement options are slower than RTA speedrunning, and alone should be a big give away that this is not a good TAS.
The only reason why this TAS is faster than the previous is because of the amount of time saves that have been found, which has been given no credit to JohnP55, or anyone else in the speedrun community.
The projected TAS time is a 3:25, which is almost 20 minutes off the mark, which in my opinion this should not be accepted into tasvideos.
I'm not going to nit pick every single thing wrong with the TAS, but I, as long as many other people in the SPM community, do not what an unoptimized TAS to represent what we have become in the last 4 years.
Verifiers if you have any questions, all of us are here at the SPM Speedrunning Discord to discus this. 2r66vqUNQP
(Although I haven't posted it on TAS videos) I am the very person who once created SPM Any% TAS.
As others have pointed out, after the creation of my TAS, it was obvious to everyone that it was possible to update that with the new technology found in the last few years. He has certainly done that, but the gameplay is far from optimal and is very crude. It would obviously be completely useless if it wasn't optimized to at least the same degree as the existing TAS.
Aww, I was excited for an updated SPM TAS, as I love them. Too bad it's unoptimised. Better luck next time PTL :)
As a TASer that keeps getting better after YEARS of TASing the SAME game, don't give up. You'll get better. Get in touch with the SPM community, it will help a lot ;)
There is. This is a TAS by a member who has left the community and has spoken to no one in months. They have not said anything about this project, and I and the community only know about this TAS because someone DMed me about it.
The projected time save, using all the new time saves found over the last 4 years is 20 minutes. This TAS barely saves 5 minutes. The only reason why this beats @Karaage's TAS is because it uses many new glitches, including Scanner Skip which saves 4m30s, and Midair Chest Jumps which save 1 minute total. And even with 5m30s of free time save, PTL still manages to save less than that. This alone should make obvious the level of optimization that this TAS manages to avoid. Another is the number of rerecords. PTL made the entire TAS in 11513 rerecords. For the record, at the time of writing this, my WIP TAS is in Chapter 2, and has 44488 rerecords, almost 4 times as much.
I don't have much else to add, as others have already pointed out the many segments which are unoptimal and, in some cases, slower than RTA. As @llSacredGhostll said, we in the SPM Speedrunning Discord Server will be more than happy to answer any questions verifiers or lurkers may have about this situation or TAS at https://discord.gg/dbd733H.
This is probably the easiest "No" vote I will ever cast. Even within the first chapter there are noticeable unoptimized movements, and even some mistakes. This only makes sense based on the rerecord count which shows that you did not spend that much time on this.
The fact that you created this while other members of the community were working on the "real" TAS, and you had the audacity to submit it even though it's horribly unoptimized is just... I don't even know what to say. Looks like you want the credit for something you put less effort into. No submission text to explain / credit the tricks and skips to their finders. You opted to make your own movie rather than help the community work on the in-progress one.
If the amazing TAS from Karaage never got published here, then this movie 10,000x does not deserve to be published here either, sorry.
Joined: 8/30/2020
Posts: 43
Location: United Kingdom
I think that’s just a misinterpretation of the messages already sent here, since it has already been mentioned by Karaage himself in this forum that he didn’t submit it.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2823
Location: Northern California
I'd like to ask everyone that if they have further comments on this run, please refrain from bringing up personal issues or issues related solely to the SPM community, and remain respectful to the author. These kinds of judgements can and should be used as helpful learning experiences in order for authors to improve their skills, not to demotivate them with comments that can be perceived as attacks on their character.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family.
Now infrequently posting on Bluesky