Firstly I'll explain my name!
The first game I ever played online sort of seriously was Medal of Honor:Allied Assault.
Now in that community (and to be quite frank what seems to be the case in many FPS communities), the only weapon people thought took any sort of skill was the sniper rifle. The silly thing was that most of the sniper duels consisted of 2 people bunny hopping so close to each other that they could kiss each other... but they would keep missing until one of them got lucky.
When I started playing, I was learning the maps and in that process I was using the SMGs. I noticed that people kept calling me a bass fish. That was quite random I thought....
Until that one glorious day (well... 2 days after it started lol) I decided to call someone a bastard. I finally realised that the chat filter on the server was changing bastard to bass fish.
So in order to save everyone some time, I called myself Balimaar the Bass Fish (or if you prefer, Balimaar the Bastard).
So my TAS Future?
I've watched various TAS runs (mostly the runs shown on the Games Done Quick streams) and am eager to get started on one of my own (that 2 second completion of one of the Mario games was hilarious!)
I come in with absolutely 0 experience in this sort of thing. But solving games like they were puzzles interests me a great deal.
I will be starting with Super Mario Bros. from the NES. I'll be interested to see how it turns out in the end!
So hello again friends! Chat to you all soon!
Joined: 8/14/2009
Posts: 4089
Location: The Netherlands
Hello Balimaar The Bass Fish, and welcome to TASVideos!
Super Mario Bros. is a good game to learn the basics of TASing with (as long as you don't submit your attempts in the submission form, as it is unlikely you'd beat the currently highly optimized publications on the site any time soon).
Try starting out with a TAS of SMB (be sure to read this guide first), and then see how your attempt compares to the currently published movie. You'll probably lose some time somewhere, so then try to investigate why, and as you keep on doing that and keep on getting closer to the published time, you'll get the hang of optimization on a TAS level. You can upload your attempts here.
Once you've got that down, you can then apply that experience to another game, one that has no TAS or has a TAS you might be able to improve upon.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6435
Location: The land down under.
Unless it's a test to see how well you can TAS because it's great for nailing the basics on how to TAS, but it's never recommended to start with Super Mario Bros. in a serious way.
Mario, Zelda, Kirby and Metroid are the most technical games that stand out there on TASVideos.
It's always a challenge to improve on them, but even that's impossible.
A lot of people do actually start with SMB and they always submit what they did, it never ended well.
If you do however get a Mario TAS done.
Don't submit it to the submissions upload it to the WIP area instead: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/my#uploadfile
Anyways welcome to TASVideos, please pick up a different game once you learn the basics.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
Hmmm that is interesting. I have not given a single thought towards what I might do beyond Mario. In that respect I am quite stuck.
Well I have my starting point at least! In the meantime I will stew on the "What Next?" question.
Thank you for the welcomes!
To give you some ideas: For every console, there is a wishlist. Many of the games there don't have a TAS ready at the moment.
(Some shameless self-advertizing following...) I once made a test run on a game called Marchen Maze for PC Engine, I posted a test run there (input+video). The game is japanese, but the text does not matter at all. I somehow lost motivation to optimize it. You might give it a try, you should be able to beat my run by about a minute or two, maybe even more. I think it's a good game to learn TASing, as it is quite obvious how to move fast, but it is hard to actually do it in an optimal fashion.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2821
Location: Northern California
Balimaar The Bass Fish wrote:
In the meantime I will stew on the "What Next?" question.
My suggestion for this, which has worked for me for a long time: Pick up a game you like that doesn't already have a lot of representation on the site. You may like Super Mario Bros, but it's probably the most optimized run we have on the site. It's been studied and TASed to death and the only improvements out there are purely theoretical. Likewise with Super Mario 64, or Super Metroid, or Super Mario World. If you choose a game where the barrier to entry can only be cleared from the next solar system over, your career as a TASer is going to quickly turn into nothing but frustration and eventually quitting.
I started my "career" with Terranigma, a game that I had picked up and loved a while ago and decided that it would be an ambitious first TAS for me. There wasn't a whole lot of information on it at the time, and there wasn't (and still isn't) a published run for it, so I started to look into it, and I kept finding out new things, and my work inspired other people to start looking into it as well, and they found even more new things, and overall it helped me get more into the hobby. Even though I didn't even come close to finishing that (admittedly super ambitious) first project, I continued on and kept TASing and got to where I am today.
Of course, there's nothing stopping you or anyone else from looking at SMB or any other popular game, and a new pair of eyes looking at an old game could lead to a huge new discovery, but I honestly think it's a bad idea to go in hoping you'll be the next klmz finding the next flagpole glitch. One of the main things you need is motivation, and a lot of my motivation comes from feeling like I'm actually making meaningful progress. If I'm TASing a game without a published run, something like Treasure Master or Splatterhouse or Majyuuou, then my motivation comes from knowing that I'm creating something unique, and all progress is meaningful. If I'm improving the published run of a game, such as Earnest Evans or Gimmick or Gunstar Heroes, then my motivation comes from the actual process of improvement. Every frame saved over the run I'm improving is meaningful progress, and seeing the results of me pushing down that time and bringing up the number of frames saved is what keeps me going.
Like Mothrayas said, it's a simple game to pick up and use to learn the TASing basics, but it's going to be hell to "break in" that way. Your goal should just be learning the process, how to use the tools effectively, how to get into the mindset of repeating sections over and over to squeeze out every last frame. The "meaningful progress" you should be looking for is just improving yourself.
That's the best advice I can give to a newcomer, so hopefully it helps, even if it's just a little bit.
...Also welcome to the site! I probably should've started with that. That would've been a good idea.
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 BlueskywarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
I have zero published movies, but I've played around with TASing a decent bit. Here's what I've done:
* Tried for wacky challenges in established games (one of my first TAS attempts was a "the ground is lava" run of a few SMB3 levels.)
* Made WIPs for little-known games not yet on the site (I still want to get back to Ninja Senki some day...)
* Entered forum competitions, and learned from collaborating with more experienced TASers/comparing our results to those of better teams.
* Raced a friend with a similar level of experience to see who could TAS further in a game chosen totally at random from the NES library, in two real-time hours.
* Downloaded published movie files and fiddled around with them to see if I could find any improvements, or at least get a better understanding of what goes in to making an optimized run.
TAS tools are really fun to play with, and creating and submitting a complete, publishable run is not the only goal worth having!
A warb degombs the brangy. Your gitch zanks and leils the warb.
Yes I was only going to use Mario as a bit of practice to get some practice into working with TAS tools. It was never going to be a super serious attempt.
I will say however that I have never before spent so much time on the first 10 seconds of a video game before haha! I'm always finding little things to do to improve on what I have already done.
I will be looking into these wishlists.
Although one game that springs to mind (I played the death out of the shareware version YEARS ago) Jazz Jackrabbit (if I am remembering the name correctly that is).
Joined: 3/2/2010
Posts: 2178
Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)
Balimaar The Bass Fish wrote:
Although one game that springs to mind (I played the death out of the shareware version YEARS ago) Jazz Jackrabbit (if I am remembering the name correctly that is).
I'll be sticking for now to games that have a few TASes floating around and as I grow in knowledge and practice I'll start to dig around for games that are 'rare' (if that makes any sense).
I've also sorta completed my first level in Mario as well now - but noticing I am a couple hundred frames behind. I'm having a lot of trouble trying to work the flagpole glitch *hangs head in shame*
EDIT (more like a PS but hey):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vugzCKrnjA
I remember again the version I had was a shareware version that only had this first level in it. Those explosions and those rockin tunes really thrilled young me.
I'm not entirely sure whether this would be a good TAS. That being said... the game could probably teach me a lot about manipulating the game to give me the outcome I want. I think it would be an interesting exercise at least.
EDIT2:
I should also mention the final clincher as to how I chose to come here. Actually reading through the Gruefoods was that reason.
Not because I enjoy dealing with assholes but more that I liked the way the mods and so on handle people who disagree or are just being silly. I feel sorry for Samsara and Moth!
