Hello. Herewith I want to present you a never before seen TAS that I kept secret for more than a half year:
Super Metroid - 14% speedrun in 0:27!
[noembed][url= Playlist[/b][/url][/noembed]
High Quality AVI (103 MB)
SMV
This run has a pretty long history that would probably interest some of you, so I thought I should share it:
I started to work on it in July 2007 after getting somewhat tired of Redesign. It was intended to actually be a quick testrun using the Ice Beam route, which I always felt like being the faster option than the Speed Booster route moozooh claimed to be faster all the time, so I just wanted to finish it to find out what time I could get with this run. In the very beginning, I didn't bother to micro-optimize Ceres and some of the earlier parts of the run. In fact, I didn't even use some of the tricks from my old any% in it, most noticeably the new OTES climb strategy, Gravity Spike Tech, and Norfair Walljump, because I actually planned to present this run sooner than the fully optimized any% and thus didn't want to spoil the tricks at first. Everyting until the WS lake went very quickly, and I was happy to finally face a new challenge nobody ever passed before in TAS conditions:
[noembed][url= WS-Lake HBJ without collecting the Missile pack![/b][/url][/noembed]
It only took me ~2 days to fully optimize, and guess what, it only required ~7 sec to get to the other side of the lake (for comparison, moozooh thought it requires ~25 sec, and hero even assumed it to be a 2 min delay at first :-P). After that, I started to take the run more and more seriously, [noembed][url= Phantoon in 2 quick rounds while only having one Missile pack[/b][/url][/noembed], and even spoiling a few strategies in WS such as the attic one. At the Red Brinstar shaft followed the probably last obvious mistake of the run by missing the hero-knockback from the Ripper to enter the next room a half sec faster (a trick that wasn't yet public at that time), but from Kraid's Lair on, I consider the run to be more or less flawless (with the exception of the Norfair Walljump I avoided to spoil intentionally).
I did alot of tests and deep calculations ahead to roughly guess what time I would likely end up with all the run conditions count in (at this point I want to thank hero for his any%v1 0:25 run, which was of great help to me, because it basicly used the same route until the end), and after Ridley, on whom I used PBs and even Ice shields to make a pretty entertaining battle overall, it got more and more clear that I would most likely end up with a low 0:28. I started to regret to have neglected some of the micro optimizations from the early parts of the run, which would be badly needed for the quest to break the 0:28 barrier. Despite of all the previous hard work to get excellent luck in LN, I played with the thought to start over completely, but finally decided to take the risk and still try to go for the 0:27 time. The production pace of the run started to slow down massively, as I from now on took much more effort to optimize the run. Nevertheless I enjoyed the new speedboosterless conditions in Maridia, which although made that part a pain in the ass to optimize, allowed me to develop some really nice and still fast strategies there. The highlight was of course the Draygon fight, to which hero once said the following quote when mentioning the "Pros of the Speed route":
Well, how about [noembed][url= out Draygon in a nearly same fast 2-rounder with that horrible ammo nevertheless?[/b][/url][/noembed] :)
With extreme shot precision and luck manipulation it's still possible, you just have to hit Draygon and his gunk for refills with the same projectile all the time.
Anyway, after exiting Maridia, manipulating all refills from the Metroids without delays, escaping the [noembed][url= Metroid as shown here[/b][/url][/noembed], the Mother Brain fight and the speedboosterless Zebes escape, I finished the run in early January 2008 with a completion time of 0:28 that is only 2 seconds away of 0:27, just like I feared. It pissed me off, so I decided to just put that run aside. Then, in late June 2008, when the new 6% NBMB TAS came out, Cpadolf presented a new big Metroid escape that was only possible by abusing Samus' hitbox through morphing in the right moments just before the Metroid grabs her, which was something I couldn't even notice without using the memory watcher in first place. This new escape, although requiring a PB which would slow down the MB battle a bit, should, as I calculated, still be faster in the end, and enough to cut off the last 2 seconds missing for the 0:27 to make my goal come true again. So I picked the run in July 2008 once again after a half year, and redid the Big Metroid escape using Cpadolf's technique, while even managing to improve it by a few more frames. The rest of the run was more or less just copied from the previous work, and just because of the new Metroid escape, I finally got a extremely high 0:27, only a few frames away before switching to 0:28!
Because of this fact, I can now say for sure that 0:27 is definitely the absolute limit for a 14% run, no matter what you do.
To sum the technical details up:
- This run is ~7,6 minutes faster in in-game time than Terimakasih's classic 14% in 0:35, or even ~8,5 minutes faster in realtime. So I not only reached the fastest possible completion time on the game clock, but also a optimal realtime by skipping all Pause Screens/Menus except when it was unavoidable for the Gravity Jump trick, making the run even more entertaining to watch.
- All Boss strategies except of Kraid are new and unique, developed for this run exclusively, yet they are performed as optimal as possible with only a minimal margin of error (a few frames at most) due to unavoidable luck manipulation.
- Health and ammo management is excellent over the entire run, especially in Lower Norfair and at the Metroids, where it took me alot of work to optimize.
And to clear up the last questions about the Ice VS Speed time and route differences:
No matter whether you take Speed Booster or not, going for early WS with my HBJ technique is a must in any case. Getting Speed Booster early then returning back to WS, like moozooh planned in his run, is much slower due to the long route detours combined with the additional, slow elevator rides. Although having Speed Booster would save a couple of seconds in WS, it would still be far away of reaching the time losses to get it early.
Because of this simple fact, both routes would be equal until entering Norfair, with also almost same detours to get Ice or Speed. So basicly, the true Ice VS Speed comparison only starts at Lower Norfair. Thanks to hero's any%v1 in 0:25 TAS, I could compare the time gains of Speed Booster in every room pretty exactly, until the very end. In total, with all the possible improvements count in, and with the delays of PBing the Metroids, the Speed Booster only saved 70 seconds at most, and this without even counting the recharge station / ship refills you would probably have to use at least once, wasting 10 or more seconds additionally, and therefore resulting in a final gain of just ~1 minute in the end.
The Ice Beam however, already saves ~100 seconds at Mother Brain alone, and another ~35 seconds at Ridley.
So in the end, the Ice route is (135sec - 60sec) around 75 seconds faster than the Speed route, as unbelievable as it looks, and therefore the absolute limit you could theoretically reach with the Speed route would be a mid till high 0:28 at best or even a low 0:29 at worst, which, to my surprise, moozooh once again failed to realize.
Anyway, I hope I could clear everything up regarding the 14% run now, and I want to apologize to keep it secret for so long. I was just curious to see what some of you would be able to achieve by themself, and I didn't want to kill your attempts with my run too soon. Seeing that nobody works on a 14% run anymore, I thought it's the right time to release it now.
So yeah, enjoy the run!
Super Metroid - 14% speedrun in 0:27!
[noembed][url= Playlist[/b][/url][/noembed]
High Quality AVI (103 MB)
SMV
This run has a pretty long history that would probably interest some of you, so I thought I should share it:
I started to work on it in July 2007 after getting somewhat tired of Redesign. It was intended to actually be a quick testrun using the Ice Beam route, which I always felt like being the faster option than the Speed Booster route moozooh claimed to be faster all the time, so I just wanted to finish it to find out what time I could get with this run. In the very beginning, I didn't bother to micro-optimize Ceres and some of the earlier parts of the run. In fact, I didn't even use some of the tricks from my old any% in it, most noticeably the new OTES climb strategy, Gravity Spike Tech, and Norfair Walljump, because I actually planned to present this run sooner than the fully optimized any% and thus didn't want to spoil the tricks at first. Everyting until the WS lake went very quickly, and I was happy to finally face a new challenge nobody ever passed before in TAS conditions:
[noembed][url= WS-Lake HBJ without collecting the Missile pack![/b][/url][/noembed]
It only took me ~2 days to fully optimize, and guess what, it only required ~7 sec to get to the other side of the lake (for comparison, moozooh thought it requires ~25 sec, and hero even assumed it to be a 2 min delay at first :-P). After that, I started to take the run more and more seriously, [noembed][url= Phantoon in 2 quick rounds while only having one Missile pack[/b][/url][/noembed], and even spoiling a few strategies in WS such as the attic one. At the Red Brinstar shaft followed the probably last obvious mistake of the run by missing the hero-knockback from the Ripper to enter the next room a half sec faster (a trick that wasn't yet public at that time), but from Kraid's Lair on, I consider the run to be more or less flawless (with the exception of the Norfair Walljump I avoided to spoil intentionally).
I did alot of tests and deep calculations ahead to roughly guess what time I would likely end up with all the run conditions count in (at this point I want to thank hero for his any%v1 0:25 run, which was of great help to me, because it basicly used the same route until the end), and after Ridley, on whom I used PBs and even Ice shields to make a pretty entertaining battle overall, it got more and more clear that I would most likely end up with a low 0:28. I started to regret to have neglected some of the micro optimizations from the early parts of the run, which would be badly needed for the quest to break the 0:28 barrier. Despite of all the previous hard work to get excellent luck in LN, I played with the thought to start over completely, but finally decided to take the risk and still try to go for the 0:27 time. The production pace of the run started to slow down massively, as I from now on took much more effort to optimize the run. Nevertheless I enjoyed the new speedboosterless conditions in Maridia, which although made that part a pain in the ass to optimize, allowed me to develop some really nice and still fast strategies there. The highlight was of course the Draygon fight, to which hero once said the following quote when mentioning the "Pros of the Speed route":
Quote from "[url=http://forum.metroid2002.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=9dc1053c27fc35bacfe6e2901dd6ee7e&topic=6563.msg184405#msg184405:
hero of the day[/url]"]MUCH MUCH MUCH faster draygon fight. Since your ammo is horrible in a low% run, shinesparks can take out draygon in a very fast 2 rounds.
Well, how about [noembed][url= out Draygon in a nearly same fast 2-rounder with that horrible ammo nevertheless?[/b][/url][/noembed] :)
With extreme shot precision and luck manipulation it's still possible, you just have to hit Draygon and his gunk for refills with the same projectile all the time.
Anyway, after exiting Maridia, manipulating all refills from the Metroids without delays, escaping the [noembed][url= Metroid as shown here[/b][/url][/noembed], the Mother Brain fight and the speedboosterless Zebes escape, I finished the run in early January 2008 with a completion time of 0:28 that is only 2 seconds away of 0:27, just like I feared. It pissed me off, so I decided to just put that run aside. Then, in late June 2008, when the new 6% NBMB TAS came out, Cpadolf presented a new big Metroid escape that was only possible by abusing Samus' hitbox through morphing in the right moments just before the Metroid grabs her, which was something I couldn't even notice without using the memory watcher in first place. This new escape, although requiring a PB which would slow down the MB battle a bit, should, as I calculated, still be faster in the end, and enough to cut off the last 2 seconds missing for the 0:27 to make my goal come true again. So I picked the run in July 2008 once again after a half year, and redid the Big Metroid escape using Cpadolf's technique, while even managing to improve it by a few more frames. The rest of the run was more or less just copied from the previous work, and just because of the new Metroid escape, I finally got a extremely high 0:27, only a few frames away before switching to 0:28!
Because of this fact, I can now say for sure that 0:27 is definitely the absolute limit for a 14% run, no matter what you do.
To sum the technical details up:
- This run is ~7,6 minutes faster in in-game time than Terimakasih's classic 14% in 0:35, or even ~8,5 minutes faster in realtime. So I not only reached the fastest possible completion time on the game clock, but also a optimal realtime by skipping all Pause Screens/Menus except when it was unavoidable for the Gravity Jump trick, making the run even more entertaining to watch.
- All Boss strategies except of Kraid are new and unique, developed for this run exclusively, yet they are performed as optimal as possible with only a minimal margin of error (a few frames at most) due to unavoidable luck manipulation.
- Health and ammo management is excellent over the entire run, especially in Lower Norfair and at the Metroids, where it took me alot of work to optimize.
And to clear up the last questions about the Ice VS Speed time and route differences:
No matter whether you take Speed Booster or not, going for early WS with my HBJ technique is a must in any case. Getting Speed Booster early then returning back to WS, like moozooh planned in his run, is much slower due to the long route detours combined with the additional, slow elevator rides. Although having Speed Booster would save a couple of seconds in WS, it would still be far away of reaching the time losses to get it early.
Because of this simple fact, both routes would be equal until entering Norfair, with also almost same detours to get Ice or Speed. So basicly, the true Ice VS Speed comparison only starts at Lower Norfair. Thanks to hero's any%v1 in 0:25 TAS, I could compare the time gains of Speed Booster in every room pretty exactly, until the very end. In total, with all the possible improvements count in, and with the delays of PBing the Metroids, the Speed Booster only saved 70 seconds at most, and this without even counting the recharge station / ship refills you would probably have to use at least once, wasting 10 or more seconds additionally, and therefore resulting in a final gain of just ~1 minute in the end.
The Ice Beam however, already saves ~100 seconds at Mother Brain alone, and another ~35 seconds at Ridley.
So in the end, the Ice route is (135sec - 60sec) around 75 seconds faster than the Speed route, as unbelievable as it looks, and therefore the absolute limit you could theoretically reach with the Speed route would be a mid till high 0:28 at best or even a low 0:29 at worst, which, to my surprise, moozooh once again failed to realize.
Anyway, I hope I could clear everything up regarding the 14% run now, and I want to apologize to keep it secret for so long. I was just curious to see what some of you would be able to achieve by themself, and I didn't want to kill your attempts with my run too soon. Seeing that nobody works on a 14% run anymore, I thought it's the right time to release it now.
So yeah, enjoy the run!
Thread title:
attachment:
