As the most of you probably know, Mario can pretty much choice his level of heigh when he jump (until a max. heigh obv.): the most consecutive frames you press the A button, the higher you jump, simple
In the whole game there will be different obstacles where you can jump less o need very high jumps to get past some tall walls or big gaps, right?
Well, here i am trying to avoid giving Mario that extreme power of jump to the stars always that i can
This is a new TAS idea invented by me (i think lol)
The point of the TAS is just beating the game as fast as possible like in any%, but with a restriction:
Every jump has to be the smallest possible
What does this means in gameplay fact is that is not allowed to press the A button for 2 frames or more, is only allowed to make jumps of 1 frame A press
The only exceptions with more than 1 A presses jumps are a 9 frames jump needed to get to the top pipe of 2º room and 2 consecutive 6 frame jumps to get to bowser area, both in 8-4, being that the best I managed to do
you can change both 6 by just another 9, but my priority is that is better making infinite 8 frames jumps than a single 9 frames jump
Tricks & glitches about the proccess of the run:
- walljump: in any whole with at least 2 blocks of height, if you hit the exact pixel betwen 2 blocks, you have 1 frame window where Mario lands on the below block, and you can jump on that frame, what is called walljump; this is basicaly making a double jump in walls, so basicaly is use constantly like everywhere in the run, making the challenge far to be posible getting to 8-4 by a lot lot of walls where using this is needed
- floating Koopa & Beatle: in 8-1 there are 2 big gaps that where would be imposible to get so far with just 1 frame jump without this glitch because of the big space of air, so what i do is stomping the shells just when they start falling off in a gap, so they just stop because of the stomp and the game detects like if they where on the floor, they just wake up and start walking behind the floor, so i can use them to bounce in the midle of the big gap and get that far
- Others: flagpole glitch, wrong warps, pipe clip in 1-2, etc.; tipical glitches used a lot in any TAS of this game that are also posible with just 1 frame jumps; im not going to give more details about those ones here
time of 5:59;009 from the start, just timed from there and not waiting on the menu for optimal time cause time in the menu also counts
the TAS:
It was a funny TAS to make and I like how it resulted to be
played on FCEUX 2.2.3 with a USA/Japan rom
"describe the game briefly" uh? welp mitical game, Super Mario Bros. for the NES, released in 1985 as the 1º ever original Super Mario Bros saga game, a very fun plataformer game where you have to move the hero, Mario, a plumber, to rescue Princess Peach from the main villian of the game, Bowser, passing throught the whole 32 fantastic levels that this game offers (unless you use wrong warps lol, as i did here in 1-2 and 4-2 to play only 8); everybody should prove this game, and it revolutionated the industry of the videogames, to say the least about it :D
feos: It's rare that a newcomer's SMB submission gets this much attention, but it's a good thing this one did!
The audience didn't enjoy this submission, giving it only 24% (5/3/19) vote support. But it doesn't fit into our LegacyPages/Tier for low-entertainment movies because it has an esoteric goal. Vault only accepts fastest completion and full completion.
But there was quite some discussion about this run's goal, and a few points were made both in favor and against it. Most importantly, we only accept entertaining movies to Alternative, and majority of the audience didn't consider this movie entertaining. I'll try to explain why exactly.
Goal choice is not too important in this tier: esoteric and unorthodox goals are acceptable, but only as long as they make for entertaining movies.
The goal choices should be clear, so it's understood what needs to be accomplished in order to obsolete it.
Arbitrary goal choices need to offer new TAS material to be accepted. Choices which have no goal other than to create a new game branch are rejected.
Clarity of "smallest jumps" is questionable. Several people in the thread were confused about what it means and got it wrong. And the main technical problem with it is that the limit we're approaching with jump height is unclear. If we limit jump length, but not jump count, in some situations a longer jump can be replaced with potentially infinite amount of smaller jumps.
Indeed, this movie uses a higher jump count than in the "fewest presses" record, and a much higher jump count than in the "fewest jumps" record, as you can see on this page I put together. The ratio of jump count to total frame count of this submission is the same as in other SMB branches. Also there are 30% more jumps in this run than in the "any%" record, due to having more jumps per second.
The "weight" of each consecutive "A" press is not defined, so there's no clear way to compare this run to a potential improvement that does more of shorter or fewer of longer jumps. Can we replace one 9-frame jump with two 8-frame jumps? Or with 18 2-frame jumps? Can we replace ten 1-frame jumps with one 10-frame jump? This goal doesn't suggest answers that would make it easy to work with as an objective and clear metric.
See this post for more insight on technical problems with this definition.
In terms of entertainment standards, this run is not up to par with existing SMB branches, and doesn't provide enough surprising and novel content that can't be seen in them.
This movie ends up feeling like an anticlimactic variation of [1715] NES Super Mario Bros. "warps" by HappyLee in 04:57.31, because for each pipe you now need to make a few more jumps, and that doesn't present any technical challenge: longer jump just gets replaced with several shorter ones, and you need to pause on most pipes to perform them.
4444M reminds me of Goldberg machines in how it turns a seemingly simple task into an engineering miracle. "Any%" is then like a human that grabs the ball and skips all the intermediate steps, putting the ball at the finish line. In this movie, it's also a human that skips the machine, but is only allowed to walk on fours for some reason.
Due to these problems, I'm rejecting this submission.
Interesting concept. But I don’t really see a need for another one of these meme category TASes being published. Movies like these should stay in the movie files section and not in submissions meant for TASes intended to be published.
As for the run itself, optimizations looked fine to me (I am not qualified to say much so don’t take my word for it) up until the bowser section in 8-4 where you waited a bit on Bowser to hit the axe, you definitely don’t need to do that.
The run felt simple and didn’t look visually entertaining, it just felt like a RTA run expect it did a bunch of walljumps. This run just visually isn’t very impressive.
No vote.
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I don't think this category works at all. This is, at its best, an any% with an added lackluster walljump showcase that runs out of any novelty value less than halfway through. SMB1 walljumps simply aren't that interesting of a trick to carry the entertainment potential for an entire category.
What would make it more interesting would be extending the definition of a jump to include zero-height jumps, i.e. simply jumping as little as possible. Which is a run that we already have, and it was well-received for what it was.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I like the strategy to reach the high up pipe! Unfortunately, I feel that however you define it, this movie doesn't efficiently meet its stated goal that "Every jump has to be the smallest posible".
Analysis
I see three distinct ways to formalise this goal:
Goal #1: minimise the total number of A presses.
Goal #2: minimise the total number of frames that A is held.
Goal #3: minimise the number of frames in the longest A press.
Goal #1: already been done, and this movie doesn't bear resemblence.
Goal #2: this movie comes somewhat close, but all the unnecessary extra jumps present very obvious improvements.
Goal #3: this movie accompishes this goal, but doesn't do it efficently. The longest press of 9 frames is only used once: an optimal movie pursuing this goal alone would do jumps ranging from 2 to 9 frames all the time. It would probably end up similar to this movie.
Here's my attempt to formalise the actual choices in this movie:
Primary goal: Minimise the number of frames in the longest A press.
Secondary goal: Minimise the number of uses of the longest A press.
(Repeat the above goals for every length of A press below the longest found, thus valuing ten 8 frame jumps as better than one 9 frame jump, and so on.)
Tertiary goal: Minimise the number of A presses, unless they're 1 frame.
This movie is, unfortunately, an arbitrary and confusing combination of goals.
Finding a well-defined goal
Your movie already meets what I named goal #3, minimising the number of frames in the longest A press. As I said before, this goal alone would end up too similar to the published warps run to be interesting. So, my suggestion is to first take that as a primary goal. Then take goal #2, minimising the total number of frames that A is held, as a secondary goal. It's not perfect, but I think "minimum A press length, minimum A press frames" is the least convoluted set of conditions that has a similar spirit to the run you have already.
Other suggestionsUserfiles is the best place to upload TASes of unusual and experimental categories like this one! They won't be judged there, and you can put up whatever you like. Before (or after) making a TAS for a proper submission like this one you can use the Ask a Judge thread or talk with the community to get advice and feedback.
Super Mario Bros. is a very contested game with a lot of time and research put into it, so finding new things is a massive challenge. If it's your favourite game and you really, desperately want to stick with it, go ahead and try and improve the already published branches. Any improvements to those will get accepted, while the chance of another new SMB branch getting accepted is very, very slim, even with the clearer goal I described in the previous section.
However, I'd recommend trying out TASing other games with less history, where you're more likely to find an improvement, or to get an entirely new game onto the site!
While this is a pretty good goal choice, I have to agree that it's arbitrary, and similar in quite a few areas to the regular runs. I'm giving it a no.
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Obviously arbitrary goal choice, I must agree. I'd vote no based on publication.
Even entirely one-frame A presses throughout can't make up for such, afaik. Besides, you can't get past 8-4 without pressing A for two or less frames. You're easily stuck on the second room... and that's it. (marc2427 and I figured that out 2017, so... Oh! And I'm not including a potential possibility of 4-4 while meeting these conditions.)
After watching the encode, I'm not too fond of the entertainment; could be better. All in all, however, I'm not so impressed. Meh vote.
Yaaay, I'm an active player now! :D (as of 11/9/2024) Thanks to TASVideos for the support, they're awesome.
I'm Asumeh, semi-expert SMB1 TASer. :)
Check out some of the TASes I don't submit/upload to TASVideos on my YouTube channel, if you'd like.
In progress:
- Extra Mario Bros. (redo) (with HappyLee and w7n) - I'm currently assisting with finding improvements before the boss. On hold; we're currently struggling to confirm that we have the fastest route. Some debugging may also help with finding glitch exits, but neither of us are experts in that field.
- Record my older TASes (excluding any obsolete TASes) and upload to YouTube.
- Pretty busy at the moment...
Check out my other links here. (Mostly WIP hehe)
I voted Meh. It's far more entertaining than the other A button-related category as it's not 5 minutes of waiting inside walls, but on the other hand, it just ends up being the warps run with about 15 more seconds on it?
Hard to call this arbitrary if "63 A button presses" (the current theorized minimum without ACE) is allowed.
"63 A button presses" (the current theorized minimum without ACE)
I know it's easy to mix up games, but I'm not aware of anything in SMB1 that can be termed "ACE" in any way, even if we tried to stretch the definition of ACE beyond all reason.
"63 A button presses" (the current theorized minimum without ACE)
I know it's easy to mix up games, but I'm not aware of anything in SMB1 that can be termed "ACE" in any way, even if we tried to stretch the definition of ACE beyond all reason.
Super Mario Bros., like many NES games, likely has an ACE vulnerability in the form of a DPCM attack, like its sequel's sequel, Super Mario Bros. 3.
SMB2 also features DPCM ACE per this GitHub I found in the submission for the above SMB3 run. It seems illogical to think it only appeared in SMB2 and SMB3, with SMB1 being free from it.
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Acumenium wrote:
Super Mario Bros., like many NES games, likely has an ACE vulnerability in the form of a DPCM attack
Does it even have DPCM samples?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
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Why is it a valid branch and why should it obsolete?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
"63 A button presses" (the current theorized minimum without ACE)
I know it's easy to mix up games, but I'm not aware of anything in SMB1 that can be termed "ACE" in any way, even if we tried to stretch the definition of ACE beyond all reason.
Super Mario Bros., like many NES games, likely has an ACE vulnerability in the form of a DPCM attack, like its sequel's sequel, Super Mario Bros. 3.
Well that could be the case if the game actually used that DPCM thing and actually coded in some workaround for the issue it has (the game polls input once per frame, so no it didn't, so it's immune to this sort of attack).
Except that's not what this submission does.
Submission Text wrote:
The point of the TAS is just beating the game as fast as posible like in any%, but with a restriction:
Every jump has to be the smallest posible
What does this means in gameplay fact is that is not allowed to press the A button for 2 frames or more, is only allowed to make jumps of 1 frame A press
The only exceptions with more than 1 A presses jumps are a 9 frames jump needed to get to the top pipe of 2º room and 2 consecutive 6 frame jumps to get to bowser area, both in 8-4, being that the best I managed to do
This submission's goal is to never press A for 2 consecutive frames or more, with two/three exceptions. Nothing about minimizing A presses by framecount.
Hm, that's a good point. In that case my opinion is to reject this as an arbitrary goal. "Never press button <x> for more than <y> frames" sounds pretty random to me.
feos wrote:
Why is it a valid branch and why should it obsolete?
Because I thought it was the same goal as the other branch, but by a slightly different metric. But as Fractal points out, this is actually not the case.
There was recently (once again) a discussion about "arbitrary goals" (and "arbitrary restrictions"), and when is a goal too arbitrary.
IMHO this categorizes as such.
I also don't think this category makes a lot of sense. A natural comparison can be made with the recently published minimum A presses run, as both runs restrict the use of the same button. For the most part this run looks like a normal any% run, but Mario has to keep doing wall jumps to climb up pipes and walls. For me this doesn't add anything interesting. The game ins't traversed in a new, innovative way; it's just that an extra step has been added to otherwise regular movement. I felt like the minimum A presses run required more of a rethink of how to get around different obstacles and pushed the game more to its limits with the strategies involved. I don't think this category is better than minimum A presses, and I don't see that it is different enough from other runs to warrant publication as a new category. Therefore I voted no.
I don't see how "smallest jumps" could be objectively measured in a simple enough way. To me, overall it's just a warps run with some walljumps. In addition, the entertainment is not up to the standards of the other SMB1 TASes.
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Quit coming up with new, pointless branches for this stupid game!!
There are plenty of other games out there! Find them, they are worth your time and effort!
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
The Vault is the tier for runs that don't meet the entertainment and/or user feedback standards but are still recognized as the best in their respective well-defined and common categories for the purpose of record-keeping (currently: any% and 100%, though we're looking to expand it with other common categories). I'm afraid it's completely orthogonal to the situation at hand.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
