What's the deal with TASvideos.org?

The Game Room
1

Okay, just got back from my latest trip to this site. Just for the record, “TAS” stands for “tool assisted speedrun” (or tool assisted superplay, used mainly for fighting games). Basic idea, get through the game as speedily as possible using whatever tools and tricks you like. It’s a disgusting, dishonorable, disrespectful, cheating, whoring, vile perversion of everything those games stand for. Needless to say, I love it. :slight_smile:

So then I see a new addition, Outrun for the Genesis, and looking through the notes, I see that it was originally rejected. Too slow? Bad picture quality? No, the site owners didn’t like the game. (“Questionable game selection” or something.) After 500 frames, you’ve seen everything there is to see or whatever.

A bit later, I dug a little further (they’d recently added those “comment on this video” links). The comments I ran into were…pretty disturbing. The respondents were judging. And that’s all they were doing, no “that was awesome” or "so that’s how you get past that part or even “I can do that”, judging. And not judging whether the run was legitimate or the time could be beaten, judging whether or not the video had any right to be on the site.

Pilotwings, in particular, left me cold. This was a monumentally screwy game that I find insanely difficult even with cheat codes AND save states. When I saw someone pick it apart level by level, I was thrilled. When I saw what the author went through, chronicling every task step-by-step, I was amazed out of my mind. So what do I see? Criticism, that it was a “wrong game choice” and “wasn’t entertaining”. Some suggested that he sacrifice speed to make it more entertaining! :eek:

I saw hints of these attitudes on YouTube (someone said he didn’t like the Final Fight 3 TAS because it was the same patterns over and over; another asked “why TAS would be useful in a beat-'em-up”), but I never dreamed it had gotten this bad.

<Sigh>…my points:

  • Worthless, shiftless bums ripping apart the works of people who are actually doing things is bad enough, but demanding that they do it a certain way? You know, “How much are you going to pay me?” doesn’t get used nearly enough. And if some bozo told me I made a bad game choice, my response would be simple: “You choose your games and I’ll choose mine.”

  • How is anyone supposed to balance speed, the actual objective, with a completely subjective concept like “entertainment”? How the hell does that even work? Good lord, you hear them talk about things like frames and lag constantly, you’d think that the technical aspect should have precedence. And to reject a video because it isn’t “entertaining” enough strikes me as astoundingly snobbish at best, completely brain-dead at worst.

  • Of course TASes for certain types of games aren’t going to look at stunning as others. Say, anything with a slow fixed speed (Rush 'n Attack), or that can be cleared in a very short time (Dark Castle), or are extremely heavily glitched (Rygar), or have a very limited number of techniques (Rad Racer). That’s beside the point. This is a showcase for the author of the video, showing the end result of a great deal of effort, patience, and skillful work. The game is the medium, not the message.

  • Okay, not to burst anyone’s brain cells here, but tool assistance is…what’s that word…oh right, cheating. Constantly, shamelessly, by design. The TAS community are the last damn people in the world who have any right to be snobs. The rest of the video game world thinks you’re wholesale scumbags, so why not embrace your outlaw status and have some fun?

I’ve seen, by chance, two fantastic videos of Puzzle Bobble and The Hyperstone Heist on YouTube. I’ve never seen either on TASvideos, probably because they’re too “boring”. There are dozens of great videos on that site; I find it mindboggling that it could be so steeped in arrogance.

Am I missing something? Should I just stick to YouTube searches from now on?

2

This is one reason I go with Speed Demos Archive. They’re sensible and have a regular charity drive. They do have pretty specific rules for certain categories - but they don’t deny any run that meets their requirements. The absolute worst you can say is that their requirements are pretty stiff. They validate every run, don’t accept tool-assists, and if their validaters see obvious improvements, they’ll tell you to step up to the challenge. But they accept super-fast runs, ugly runs that work, runs that abuse the engine or bugs, and runs that are the most elegantly beautiful things ever created.

The things about TAS is that, well, it attracts a lot of immature people. It’s like a lot of very dark, deep holes on the internet - the people who show up rule the day, and they can be pretty nasty to look at by the light of day.

3

The video game speedrun community uses tool-assistance to see what the optimum time for various levels or stages is. Then people try to match the time as best as possible without tool-assistance for legitimate speedruns.

And as smiling bandit almost said, the video game community attracts a lot of immature children.

4

I haven’t spent a lot of time on Speed Demos Archive. I’ve had trouble getting the videos to run, and statements like “playing through games quickly, skillfully, and legitimately” set off my this-is-gonna-suck-o-meter. I’ll give it another try. It does seem to have more of the obscure games, especially the ones that drove me nuts as a kid. In those cases, I just want to see them stomped into the mud; I don’t care how cool it looks.

Seriously, the problem isn’t immaturity. YouTube has tons of immaturity. I can deal with it so long as it doesn’t get personal or dip into truly offensive territory. It’s the arrogance, the self-importance, the…for lack of a better term…anal-retentiveness, that chokes the life out of everything. It honest-to-god sounds like these people aren’t having any fun at all. Which I find truly bizarre, because if ANYONE should be having fun, if ANYONE should throw honor and propriety out the window, it’s the TAS community. For crying out loud, it’s slicing up a game frame-by-frame to find the quickest route through it; don’t pretend that this is important. I saw the once-great Improfanfic suffocate to death in its pretense and intolerance. It wasn’t pretty.

I dunno, I just think it’s horribly ironic (emphasis on “horribly”) that a TAS site has degenerated into a morass of ego and entitlement while a hardcore site like Speed Demos Archive looks a lot more open-minded.

Any other sites might be worth a look?

5

I don’t really get this mentality. Tool assistance isn’t memory editing, it’s effectively a way to show off how to break games within their own rules. It’s not “dishonorable”, nobody in their right mind is claiming that their TAS run is “better” than a non-assisted speedrun because it’s faster. Tool assisted speedruns, at least for the first use of any given bug, are basically programmer porn – showing off the limitations of various systems and glitches inherent in many games (especially old games) that are only noticeable with frame perfect timing. If you were using this to brag about how much faster you were than the quickest “legit” speedrun, then sure, dishonorable, I agree, but take TAS for what they are, very creative ways to show off cool bugs.

Like this one where he programs a MIDI player and image loader, encodes a chiptune and image and displays them using nothing but frame-perfect timing and inventory bugs in Pokemon Yellow.

This is why Speed Demo Archives isn’t the same. They’re not tool-assisted and don’t try to be, they’re cool speedruns, to be sure, but they’re not the same type of thing as tool-assisted runs. I love a good fair speedrun (Dark Souls in under one hour) as much as anyone, but they’re not the same flavor as a tool-assisted one. I like them for completely different reasons. One appeals to the programmer and puzzle solver in me, the other is more of a “martial arts” sort of appeal, where you revel in watching insane skill.

Unfortunately pretty much everybody that’s not actually part of the site agrees that the TAS community are a bunch of anal-retentive idiots, but as far as I know there aren’t any other big tool-assisted communities.

6

Speedrunslive.com I think is the more popular speedrunning sites these days. No tool-assitance, just legitimate speedruns and races.

7

Jragon…seriously…use the smiley. The smiley is your friend. And just for the record, I really hate it when “honor” is seen as an inherently good thing, where my prevailing opinion is that it’s not a thing at all re. video games. For crying out loud, I bought five cheat devices for the PS2. And I still have three of them!

I’m not to make any kind of judgment on whether TAS or honest speed attacks are “better”. They’re two different things. However, I do know beyond any shadow of doubt that having fun with it, being open-minded about the games and methods, and treating it like the harmless yet spectacular exercise it is is vastly better than retreating into a hidebound mentality and attacking everyone and everything that disagrees even a tiny bit.

Guys, if I’m comparing you unfavorably to effin’ YouTube commenters, something went seriously wrong. :slight_smile:

CIB - That site’s a bit limited from what I can see. Seems to be focused mainly on games that players are interested in showing off on right now (which I guess makes sense). I’ll give it a whirl sometime.

8

Cheating would be passing off a TAS as a real time run.

I agree that if you purport to be a speed run site then entertainment shouldn’t enter into the equation. But since the real point is to get people to watch entertaining videos, it’s a perfectly acceptable alternative. And the run you were talking about is on the site.

TASes are widely popular, so I’m not sure where you get this. It’s certainly useful for normal speed runs to learn what is possible. I know it’s helped several of my SDA runs.

9

I never liked TASvideos.org and I watch them on YouTube.
Family Feud Glitchfest

(ironically the comments on this video are okay)

10

Yes, you seem to be missing a lot. First off, you’re complaining about judging in the very forums specifically desigend to judge whether or not a video gets on the site. That’s like watching American Idol and complaining that not everyone was like Paula Abdul, giving fake platitudes. It’s not a discussion forum, so your expectations of discussion are misplaced. Didn’t you notice the poll on the top of the page that specifically asks you whether or not you think the video is good enough for the site?

Second, you seem to have a fundamental difference of opinion on what a TAS should be. This would be fine, if you realized that it was just a different opinion, and not that yours was the morally right choice. You seem to think that everyone should think of TASes the way you do, and deserve to be insulted (shiftless bums, anal-retnetive, and the like) if they don’t. They do think of the videos themselves being the “message,” as you put it. They don’t have a problem with the subjectivity inherent in making an entertaining video. (That’s why they vote.) The site was build because the founder saw a tool-assisted run and thought it was FUN to watch. So that’s what the site has always been about, even though, as time went on, some people have the opinion you did.

Which leads me to the third thing you’ve missed. They just completely overhauled the site to try to cover both sets of opinions. Those videos you are complaining about? The reason they are now being published is because they’ve now created a section for people who just want to see speed records broken, called the Vault. So rather than becoming more “anal-retentive” as you put it, they’ve become more permissive. They’re trying to make more people happy.

A fourth thing you don’t seem to notice is that you are reading reviews of videos that were not considered good. So of course there aren’t going to be joking or even pleasant comments. Did you even try to go the comments on Star videos, the videos deemed to be the best work of the site? There are a lot of comments of the kind that you seem to want. And there probably won’t be any of those comments on the Vault videos, because there’s no point in discussing them, since they automatically are published if they beat the old record.

And the fifth and final thing I’ll cover that you don’t seem to get is as follows: taking things seriously doesn’t have to be antithetical with fun, The fact that people are criticizing doesn’t mean they aren’t having fun. This is a problem I’m surprised to see on this board of all places. where a lot of us have fun by being “anal-retentive.” We nitpick spelling errors, we get into debates, we insult people like they are hte most vile people in the world. We’re both the same type of people–the people that Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory was designed to parody. These guys spend years painstakingly going through videos frame-by-frame, often doing do-overs, and you expect them not to take their hobby seriously? And you think they keep on doing them because they don’t think they are fun?

Honestly, the only complaint I’ve ever had about the site is that they don’t enforce their version of the “Don’t be a jerk” policy, and never really punish people. Only trolls get banned. I could see how that could piss you off. But complaing that people judge things you like as not being good? That’s what I don’t get.

11

BigT - Okay…I don’t normally give extensive responses to guests, but I got a nice vacation coming up, so I’m going to be nice and respond to your points one at a time:

Yes, I understand that the point of the threads are to cast sneering, pretentious judgment. When it’s thrown at someone who worked pretty hard on something, it’s downright insulting. I certainly wouldn’t put up with it, no matter how many well-meaning excuses the moderators offered. This was completely accepted practice at Improfanfic, and I didn’t buy it for a second there either. On top of that, if you’re really interested in constructive criticism, how does blather like “lousy game choice” or “boring” help? Suggestions about the video quality, or the sound quality, or the size of the video, that could help.

Yes, it’s nice when a speedrun can throw in lots of flash (Super Mario Bros. 3 and Battletoads are good examples), but sometimes it’s not in the cards, and given that videos are measured in hundredths of seconds and some improvements are a matter of frames, I have a pretty good idea of what the bottom line is. So: ragging a video because it’s not showy enough, missing the point. Demanding that the speedrunner slow down for the sake of flash (like in the Pilotwings forum), majorly not cool.

Yes, I’ve seen the new categories. Leaving aside how utterly ridiculous a concept this is (you need a friggin’ icon to tell you how much you’re supposed to be entertained by the video?), I can’t help but think that this was the result of a massive backlash. You can see it in the description of the Vault, the contempt practically dripping off the page, as if they were doing an enormous favor to us unworthy peasants by allowing these base, inferior videos. But hey, whatever it takes, I guess. I’m definitely glad that we’re seeing things like Atari 2600 and Colecovision. It’s far too early to start celebrating this as a great revolution, though.

I don’t even know what you’re getting at with your fourth point. Again, “There seems to be a lot of image breakup; here’s how you can fix that”, good. “You missed a shortcut here,” good. “Oh, this game is so boring, you made a totally wrong choice, shame on you”, BAD. Inverse absolute true as well. If someone told me that I “made a proper choice and upheld the fine standards of this website”, one thing I would not be was flattered.

Are they enjoying it? Really? Because I’ve looked around quite a bit, and it’s downright creepy. “It will be enjoyable to see a skillfully done TAS of this.” “Good luck on your endeavor.” “Nice game. I think it deserves publication.” Who the hell talks like this? It looks like work more than anything.

Oh, right…

marshmallow - Don’t pretend it’s important. Don’t care so much. Don’t judge so much. Don’t scare away rookies who might be interested. Show appreciation for all the hard work. If criticism is warranted, give it plainly and leave it at that. Act like a normal human being would act when seeing something incredible and remarkable. That kind of outlaw.