Fighting Game Tool-Assisted Speedruns

[Maj]

Oh, the Ryu nomination was only a joke. I think V-Cody would be much more interesting to watch, along with Rolento if you're willing to make everything look like a narrow escape. The main thing though is Alpha 3 itself, which is such a quirky unique game that you'd never run out of shenanigans to show people, especially fighting game fans who aren't entirely familiar with the real A3. The other promising thing about A3 is all the ways in which you can use VC3 to make it look like you're about to get hit right before your shadow comes to the rescue.

[Maj]

N64 Super Smash Bros. (USA) in 08:19.67 by Leonardo Bechara (aka. Blaze) (starring Yoshi)

Yeah i have no clue what's going on but it's a fighting game so ...

[Maj]

PSX Strider 2 (USA) in 08:51.1 by error1

Not a fighting game but it's basically MvC Strider in a side-scroller so it's close enough. Hella fast movement through stages and even faster boss beatdowns. Since that website approved PS1 emulation, lots of people have been discussing fighting game speedruns for various titles, including SFEX1/2, SFA, and even Puzzle Fighter (which again isn't a fighting game but certainly relevant to our interests).

[Genas5]

http://www.mediafire.com/?gymf1t0zi1t Kof 2002 TAS
Not exactly a tas haha. I made this in 2007 but i didn´t publish it because snk community is always talking shit about tool assisted videos.
Enjoy

[error1]

Very nice, What emulator did you use? Unfortunately tasvideos isn't publishing arcade runs.

here is sfz2a dramatic battle with Rose and Dhalsim
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O037o8HBCKk&fmt=18

[Genas5]

Very nice, What emulator did you use? Unfortunately tasvideos isn't publishing arcade runs.

here is sfz2a dramatic battle with Rose and Dhalsim
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O037o8HBCKk&fmt=18

That was awesome man, i love the dalshim glitch.
About my method i use kawaks 1.46(newer versions suck,lot of desyncs)+ hex editing of rc files. Basically i made an input file for every char and i used save states in specific frames(black color screen) to don´t lose the sequence ,then, when i finished a char i repeated the replay searching for a black screen to create a save state and from there a new input file for the next char.Finally i used frame per frame capturing method, i captured every input file and using virtualdub i created a single file without desyncs.
It´s hard to explain

[error1]

I figured it was something like that, sounds like far to much trouble. You should try FBA RR if you try something like this again.
And you should post your tas on the tasvideo fourm those people will appreciate it.

[Maj]

http://www.mediafire.com/?gymf1t0zi1t Kof 2002 TAS
Not exactly a tas haha. I made this in 2007 but i didn´t publish it because snk community is always talking shit about tool assisted videos.
Enjoy :D

Whoa, you actually made that and had nowhere to post it until now? That sucks. People really love to overreact to that tool-assisted moniker.

It's cool how you planned everything ahead of time and saved the Angel infinte for Rugal so you could get the most hits out of it. I kinda wish you hadn't broken up the combo at the end, but i guess the super looks better out of the corner.

My favorite rounds were probably the Vanessa ones, especially the way you ended the very first round by trading hits without taking damage and then using her ghetto uppercut. Speaking of which, the way you used it against Kim's roll was great. And i loved the feint move against Chang's jabs. Your setups for baiting the computer into crossup situations were fun to watch too.

So yeah, very entertaining the whole way through. Great job sir!

[Genas5]

error1:Dude,i already have FBA RR but i am really lazy to work in a new tas lol. I used to make combos for Mighty Morphins Power Rangers Fighting Edition using rerecords and slow downs, i know how it works but i prefer kawaks, in fact, it took me 3 weeks(1 hour per day) to finish.
Thanks for tasvideos recommendation, i love their work, i will post it on their forum later.

maj: I didn´t post it before because every new combovideo or in this case a tas of kof causes a lot of problems and stupid discussions in snk community,they never will understand what tool assisted means. Basically, they suck.
Talking about the content of the tas, the reason why i stopped the combo was the time counter, i had problems trying to knock rugal with the combo before the time stopped, also because the way angel connects his dm after the char is knocked is cool.

[Maj]

Yeah, i know what that's like. I've gotten in my fair share of arguments on SRK over this subject, but when i started working on my Guile video, tool-assisted combos were the only thing left to do. I'd already done as much as i could by hand and all the remaining interesting stuff was on the other side of the fence. Thanks for the Rugal explanation; that makes sense.

here is sfz2a dramatic battle with Rose and Dhalsim
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O037o8HBCKk&fmt=18

Turned out very nicely sir. I'm impressed that you managed to keep it from getting repetitive considering how many lifebars you had to burn.

I noticed in a few of those matches, you ran into the opponent's frozen uppercut with Rose at the end of the round. Does that serve a purpose or is that just for style? It looks like they fall over as soon as they hit Rose so do they stay frozen if they don't have anyone to hit?

The second round against Sagat was really cool; lots of projectiles. At 1:38, i liked how you jumped up and taunted with Dhalsim in order to keep Bison from landing on the other side. Crazy Alpha Counter glitch in the very next round.

You're not happy with the last round? I thought it was awesome; very entertaining with all those fireball deflections.

[error1]

getting hit at the end of the round was just for style, the same thing happens to the opponent regardless. I almost didn't keep the Sagat uppercut glitch beacause I did the same thing in the first round, but I watched it and loled so I figured it was worth keeping.
Yah I got lucky finding those two glitches in the second bison round, it was mostly by accident.
As for those gouki rounds, I waste abunch of time in the first trying to get him to throw a non-special move so I can alpha counter without taking damage, but I love the judgle I do with rose at the end, uppercut-jumping kick-super throw (don't try this at home).
As for the second Gouki round, I was trying to get him to throw a superfireball so I could reflect it with a lv 3 soul spark, but I couldn't keep a combo going afterwords. I wasn't able to reflect an air super so I just rolled with it and finished it off.

Overall worked out better then I thought, I was worried because nether dhalsim or rose have very good juggling supers so I thought every round might end in a double suber throw.

[Maj]

As for those gouki rounds, I waste abunch of time in the first trying to get him to throw a non-special move so I can alpha counter without taking damage, but I love the judgle I do with rose at the end, uppercut-jumping kick-super throw (don't try this at home).

Hm, it didn't bother me at all. In fact i didn't even notice that you were killing time because it was only a second in the first round and such a cool sequence in the second. But i guess the TAS crowd approaches the clock with a much more critical mindset so i can see why it would concern you. That last combo does look pretty cool now that you mention it.

I've seen a few A2/Z2A videos where they do supers inside a CC, but i don't know too much about it. Do supers get infinite juggle potential if you do them during CC? Either way i thought you did a good job saving your juggles against Sagat and Bison.

[error1]

I didn't think you could do a super during a custom combo in sfa2, unless your Akuma, then you can do his air fireball super.
I think supers have inf juggle potential anyway but once the opponent starts falling they become invincible, so as you hit them higher and higher it becomes harder to keep juggling.
With CC falling works different, the opponent stays in the same vulnerable frame the whole time when falling.
For example in the last round I can knock the opponent up at the end of a custom combo as it ends, if I just do a normal non-airthrow super it won't juggle
but roses kick super works a lot like a custom combo and lets me juggle here, it's why the throw doesn't connect at the end, none of the air throw super hits, just the shadow. Also it wouldn't have been enough to kill him with out sims superfreeze ( Because he dies in superfreeze rose and gouki start moving but sim still pauses ) .
Roses kick super puts the opponent in a normal fall animation so you can't easily do it the other way around.

[Maj]

Nah there's definitely finite juggle potentials assigned to most, if not all, supers. For example if you do Ryu's lvl3 FB super against an airborne opponent, it'll only hit three times. If you do Sagat's FB super it'll only hit twice. If you do Ken's lvl1 Shinryuken, it'll only hit four times against an airborne opponent even though it can hit six times against a grounded opponent (since the third hit causes the actual knockdown). If you do c.HK xx lvl1 Shinryuken, it'll only hit three times.

I'm not sure how Rose's friends work but maybe they're an exception. I think Gen's airgrab super might be an exception because that thing grabs everything in SFA3, sometimes even when the opponent is supposed to be invincible.

You're right about characters becoming invincible once they pass the apex of their knockdown arc, and that CC knockdown is free of this restriction. But the other half of the story is that CC's also have infinite juggle potential.

There's nobody in A2 who stays vulnerable the entire way like SFA1 Sodom?

[error1]

oh, that's what you meant by hit limit. Yah I don't think there isn't any way around it, still I don't think most supers cause instant knock down after a set number of hits in the air like most projectile supers. Many like shoryu reppa or yoga inferno won't get full hit's in the air just because it knocks the opponent out of the way of some of the hits.
As for gens air throw, I'm pretty sure it gets more hits vs an airborne opponent.
It's not that Sodom's vulnerable the whole way, it's just that if he uses his recovery move he becomes vulnerable. There are a bunch of Sodom recovery glitches in sfa2 but it's not useful for dramatic battle ( you always face the same four opponents ).

[Maj]

Yeah, i just tested A2 Sodom and he's definitely not vulnerable throughout his entire knockdown arc like A1 Sodom is. That's too bad cuz he opens up a lot of juggle opportunities in SFA1. But then again i guess it's easy enough to set up the same effect with A2 Custom Combos, especially in Dramatic Battle mode where you have infinite meter.

You probably know this already, but in case you don't - SFA1 and SFA2 both operate under a juggle counter system where every move is assigned an inherent juggle potential. After a knockdown, these moves can juggle up to that predetermined number of times.

Ryu's super FB has a juggle potential of 2. Sagat's super FB has a juggle potential of 1. Ken's lvl1 Shinryuken has a juggle potential of 3. Rose's lvl1 super FB has a juggle potential of at least 3. Sagat's HP DP has a juggle potential of at least 6. Chun's lvl1 puffball and lvl1 upkick both have juggle potentials of 4. And so on and so forth. Most normal and special moves don't have any juggle potential at all, but most supers do. When you activate a Custom Combo, everything you do is basically imbued with infinite juggle potential, along with a few other properties.

[onReload]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N-wRGZfS-0

Brazilian guy SDR was showing the TASVideos forum his A3 run. I think it works fine, as I explained in my response, without all the insane technical stuff that a lot of gamers aren't going to understand/recognize.

Edit: Call me weird, but I'd love to see someone do an SNES TAS of Hyper Fighting with the 10-star Turbo cheat on. It would be hard to see what's going on, I know, but...I mean, that's speed.

[error1]

yah sdr has done a ton of those, frankly I find them boring. Fighting games in general are hard to make an entertaining tas and I didn't see anything there that I thought couldn't be done by a human.

I'm not familiar with the speed hack but it sounds cool. I think sf2 rainbow would make the most entertaining sf2 tas.

[Maj]

Hate to say it, but that video was really weak. I happen to think that the most entertaining fighting game speedruns either take advantage of a crazy game setting (like Dramatic Battle with infinite meter or an extremely high speed setting like you suggested), or focus on elaborate/stylish AI counters. So in that regard, at least SDR had the right idea. For example, using Ryu's F+MP to go through Gief's c.MP at 5:37, or hitting Juli with c.MK xx LP DP at 6:04 to avoid Juni's lvl3 super in the process, or even hitting Dan's HK Dankukyaku with backward air Hurricane Kick at 7:36.

But when someone clearly can't be bothered to do even the slightest bit of combo research, it becomes too hard to look past all the deficiencies. Did he cancel Ryu's F+MK hopkick even once? Did he crouch cancel even once? Did he get full damage out of Ryu's lvl3 Metsu Shoryuken even once?

There was barely one interesting combo setup in the entire video - when he threw a lvl11 super FB through Cody's rocks at 5:07, which seemed to slow it down a little bit. But even that turned into a wasted opportunity because it wasn't converted into an untechable setup.

I hate to be so harsh but the bottom line is that there was way too much boring dead space in this video, which is inexcusable in a game as crazy as A3. Even with the handicap of picking A-Ryu, i didn't feel like he strived to reach the project's full potential.

[Maj]

Arcade Street Fighter Zero 2 Alpha (JPN) in 03:19.0 by Isaac Wehmanen (aka error1) (starring Rose/Dhalsim)

Nice, congrats sir.

[error1]

Thanks, they just started accepting arcade submissions so mine was the first arcade game submitted.

So sdr has had 3 of his street fighter submissions rejected recently but he just submitted a xsf that looks likely to be accepted http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLP1GGy69EQ
I have a few problems with it but overall it's a big improvement

[onReload]

Thanks, they just started accepting arcade submissions so mine was the first arcade game submitted.

So sdr has had 3 of his street fighter submissions rejected recently but he just submitted a xsf that looks likely to be accepted http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLP1GGy69EQ
I have a few problems with it but overall it's a big improvement

Yeah after looking at other fighting game runs, his don't look as good...but I do love the part where he has Dhalsim throw a fireball, then die on a traded hit, so it looks like his own fireball killed him.

[Maj]

Two more not-fighting games both involving a high degree of brawling. Capcom needs to get the ball rolling on a Strider vs Shinobi game already.

Genesis Shinobi III - Return of the Ninja Master (USA) in 22:18.42 by JK (aka Dammit)

My favorite parts of this run are the horseback (1:53), elevator platforum (3:23/18:37), surfboard (7:46), and freefall (13:53) interludes. Maybe it's a little weird, but sometimes the autoscrolling segments that can't be rushed are the most interesting parts of a tool-assisted speedrun. Since the players have no choice but to take it slow, yet still have to appease their ADD audience, they're forced to create elaborate stylistic routines wherein enemies are toyed with for as long as possible before they're killed.

For example, at 14:13 and 14:35 he blocks shurikens backwards for no reason other than having time to kill. What are the chances of seeing that shown in an unrestricted stage? Don't get me wrong, speed is awesome ... but sometimes it can get a little dry.

He also relies on a clever trick of hitting enemies at the very end of his divekick. In addition to looking cool, it avoids the bounceback animation that Joe usually does. Dope zigzag divekick at 13:04 and some crazy fast wallhopping shortly thereafter.

Genesis Wolverine - Adamantium Rage (USA) in 10:47.68 by Nick Mong (aka mmbossman)

I'll be honest despite my obvious soft spot for oldschool Marvel console games - this Wolverine game is ghetto. But in the player's defense (and mine by extension), he did figure out how to wavedash and managed to put together a wicked combo incorporating lots of wavedashing at 6:38 against Cyber. Ignore how ugly wavedashing actually looks in this game. Also the bit where Wolverine kicks some random henchman in the head at 7:48 is the must-see event of the Summer. Dope little two-hit combo at 9:47 too.

[Maj]

This one gets a little bit weird ...

SNES Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (USA) in 16:46.58 by DavidPaz (aka SDR)

Basically any SNES game that was also released on PlayStation is glitchy as all hell. That's probably why the SNES version was used in this run even though PSX/N64 speedrunning tools are already available. What makes this even weirder is that 2P randomly joins in at several points to fight versus battles. Admittedly these are nicely choreographed, but that removes even the illusion of speedrunning from this playthrough.

There's a Shang Tsung mirror match at 10:15 which gets crazy in the second round. Very entertaining overall. There's also a "Randper Kombat" cheat code match at 8:05 which is fun to watch, but would have been a lot cooler if one of the characters turned into another character in the middle of performing a combo. Maybe the game makes that difficult though.

Anyway pretty cool run but a little too hard to follow. I don't see much of a benefit in cramming this much unrelated content into one run. It might have been better to split this up into multiple playthroughs.

[onReload]

I totally agree. While the glitches/combos are innovative, the 2P joining in really slows down the flow, and he doesn't exploit the ability to manipulate both kombatants enough.

Also, Randper Kombat or any situation where a character changes (Shang Tsung reverting) cannot happen in the middle of an autocombo (like Unmasked Sub-Zero doing HP, HP, LP, LK, HK, B+HK is an "autocombo", or "dial-a-combo") - but it should be possible in the middle of a link/juggle kind of thing - e.g. Reptile's slow force ball (B, B, LP+HP), revert to Shang Tsung, morph to Sub-Zero, then freeze (D, F, LP). However, I've never tried it, I just know that it's theoretically possible. Hell, maybe you can't remorph while projectiles are onscreen so you can't create unblockables or just weird setups...

[Maj]

Seems like TASing is getting more popular outside of the established TASVideos community. There are quite a few things like this popping up:

Super Street Fighter 2 X - Ryu TAS by leandroff5sfz3
Super Street Fighter 2 X - Gouki TAS by leandroff5sfz3

If you're only gonna watch one, pick the Akuma version. He's got a lot more juggle setups so the combo counts rise higher, plus it's fun seeing him tack on extra hits whenever he counters one of the CPU's attacks with a Hurricane Kick. Plus he always gets creative with air Hurricane Kick juggles, making them land a different way every time.

For me the most interesting part of watching these is figuring out what these guys don't know. Cuz they always come out of nowhere, never having seen a TZW video, playing ST like it's a Streets of Rage game. I'm not hating; it really is cool to witness.

For example, i never saw a light attack get jump-canceled or renda kara canceled in either run. For that matter i never even saw Ryu cancel a normal attack into super fireball. But at 5:29, Akuma does set up a glitchy pseudo-blocked air FB / c.HK simultaneous hit. And at 7:51, Akuma lands a 10-hit combo against Sagat starting with four air fireballs. That's dope. (Even though he probably could've done a fifth if he knew about jump-canceling jabs.)

P.S. Youtube sucks. I tried to post a comment to kick down some leet oldschool info and u2b rejected both of these attempts:
"Try this: c.LK -> c.LK -> UF+LK, j.HP"
"Try this: c.LK, c.LK, UF+LK, j.HP"
Finally had to settle on this bootleg version: "Try this: D+LK, D+LK, UF+LK, air HP"
No symbols, no arrows, no dots? Awesome!

[error1]

It's funny, a lot more research has been done for street fighter games then most games TASed but it's much harder to find. The first thing any good speedrunner or TASer should do before he starts a project is find everything that's already out there on it. I know for my alpha 2 tas this probably took longer to do then the TAS itself and that's with access to these boards and people who know about it.

SDA recently started a Strategy Wiki as a way to document various tricks and routes
http://speeddemosarchive.com/kb/index.p ... ategy_Wiki

u2b's comments fail at a lot of things, I find a pm works better for things like that

personally I find the reaction counters boring in a tas. There's no reason every attack shouldn't combo

[Maj]

Really? Reaction counters are usually my favorite part of the TAS format. It is kinda lame when i notice something that could have been followed up by a combo, but other than that i love seeing counters. Unless you're using a Shang Tsung type character, i don't think anyone has enough combo variety to sustain an entire playthrough. The reaction stuff gives you something completely different to aim for whenever you're facing combo-unfriendly characters like Chun Li, Dee Jay, Balrog, Vega, and so on.

Of course if you use Dragon Punches then it's completely boring. You have to use counter attacks that we rarely see, but those aren't too hard to test with tools. For example i thought he did a pretty good job with Akuma against Dhalsim. But yeah, it's not much fun to watch Ryu do obvious uppercuts.

[error1]

I guess what I'm saying is he doesn't do enough enemy manipulation. Rather then just react to whatever attack the enemy is going to do he could make the opponent do whatever he wants.

[ShinjiGohan]

One problem with fighting game speed runs is that they aren't really a speed run. Yanno? Since its possible that I couild defeat the enemy faster than they can. Though a lot of that has to do with luck in regards to exactly how the computer decides fight (aka the computer opens up with a move that would create an opening for me to land a redizzy combo or something).

well basically I just don't believe that the term "speedrun" really applies to these videos i the first place.