/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.585139]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN3V-dlF36o

What do you think, /vr/, is this a tool assisted speedrun? Why or why not?

I know that it's an old video at this point, but I watched this the other day and I've been wondering. The guy has a whole series of well-played vidya videos on his channel and he claims that none of them are tool assisted. He has tens of thousands of views over the years and apparently nobody has been able to prove him wrong. So either he's really good player, or a really good troll.

Personally, I'm inclined to believe he's more likely the latter. There's just too many things in this and other videos he made that come down to chance, or luck. And somehow they all work out to his favor, which logically seems like something that would become increasingly unlikely with each and every time it happens consecutively.

Many times the things he does rely not just on hitting the right button inputs but would also require insanely fast reflexes. The average human brain physically can't react quickly enough to accommodate certain things he appears to be capable of in this and other videos.

Plus, if you just look at it, it really does resemble a TAS. Every movement is very precise and perfectly executed, sometimes to the point of being frame-perfect. The overall playing style has that clean, sort of highly efficient quality of a TAS. Even world record holders in this game, whose videos are also available online, aren't able to replicate this effect so well.

[Anonymous No.585952]

If it's a tool assisted run, it's a really bad one. He loses momentum and gets stuck on a few obstacles for like half a second at some points. But maybe it really is tool assisted and the fact that he's bad at it just helps convince people that it's not

[Anonymous No.585976]

Have you watched Tetris or Quake 3 championships? Human reflexes can be ungodly if trained.

[Anonymous No.586005]

>>585139
Nah, if it's tool assisted, there's no point in not optimizing every single jump, which he would have probably done. It seems to me that he's just really good. I find real gameplay to be more entertaining than tool-assisted runs anyway. Thanks for the channel, op.

[Anonymous No.586021]

>>586005
>Nah, if it's tool assisted, there's no point in not optimizing every single jump, which he would have probably done

There is, actually. It takes much more time to do that and it wouldn't look legit if you tried to pass it off as non-tool assisted

[Anonymous No.586046]

>>585139
Doesn't look anything like a TAS to me. Remember a TAS is advanced frame-by-frame so there is no need to do the small corrections he does in this video. Also most TAS runs of Sonic games can utilize the frame-perfect and/or pixel perfect zips that most likely can be done in this zone.

[Anonymous No.586736]

>>586046
Flying Battery does have a zip exploit, I think, but it's hard to pull off. More importantly, I don't believe it was known to exist at the time when these videos were made almost 6 years ago.

The small corrections can easily be explained by a few different possibilities. He may have been new or inexperienced at TASing. He may have been lazy. He may have deliberately done a subpar job to help legitimize his claim that it was non-assisted.

>>586021
>>585952
These anons get it.

>>585976
No but I imagine with Tetris the reflex comes from seeing a piece and immediately knowing the ideal place to put it. That's something that can be trained through experience because the ideal placement will always be the same under a given configuration of other factors (such as falling speed and how much room they have remaining). They can basically memorize various scenarios.

But that's different than what you see here. Explain how he so easily navigated past the platforms at 3:30 and 4:00? I'm pretty sure that the way the game is coded, those objects activate and deactivate on a timer that begins in Act 1. It's like he knew what they were going to be doing ahead of time. He didn't even react to their position, he predicted it.

Are we to believe he somehow kept track of that timing from the very beginning? And somehow had the presence of mind to think critically about what position they would be in at the precise moment he was due to reach them, and pre-emptively modify his actions to avoid them as shown? All while maintaining the same fast paced, high level of play throughout the rest of the level at the same time?

That he would clear both of them purely by chance seems equally unlikely.

[Anonymous No.586812]

You mean other players aren't as good as the one in the video? Huh.

[Anonymous No.586820]

>>586736
Do you know how much time speedrunners throw at games?

[Anonymous No.586882]

>>586736

there's universal timers in sonic; all of these timers for a zone start at the beginning of act 1 of the zone

also, if you play as much of a game as a speedrunner does, you get consistent enough that anything that isn't RNG become muscle memory, just like tetris

OP's vid isn't even that impressive. if you want to see a good run, look up werster's runs or watch garrison play super metroid or watch siglemic play super mario 64 or cosmo play windwaker or.....

I guarantee this isn't a TAS

[Anonymous No.586898]

>>586736

>Are we to believe he somehow kept track of that timing from the very beginning?

You'd be surprised as all fuck how feasible this is.

[Anonymous No.586952]

>>585139
Damnit OP (or whoever made that picture), Marcus Brigstocke said that, not some "Nintendo CEO".