Tool-Assisted Speedruns

 

I've made a couple of Tool-Assisted Speedruns, which are kind of crazy to explain but I'll try. Now, a normal speedrun aims to get through a game as fast as possible, but to make this competition fair, certain rules and restrictions are required. Don't use mods, no auto-fire controllers blah blah etc. A Tool-Assisted Speedrun (TAS), though harder to explain, is ironically easier to define: Do not alter the game in any way, anything you can alter outside of the game is fair game. So playing through a program to give infinite saves or slowing down the game is alright, even expected, as long as an input-file will run in the unaltered game.

 

For further reading, check out: http://tasvideos.org/WelcomeToTASVideos.html.

 

It's a pretty strange concept to grasp, I understand that, and if you decide to ingore this part of my site it's okay, this is just extra stuff for those interested.

 

Now I've made four runs, one of them was beaten by myself later and one was beaten by another leaves 2 still published. These are actually world records and all four were records at the time they were made, I seem to forget that myself sometimes.

 

My runs can be seen here: http://tasvideos.org/Movies-225up-Obs.html.

 

Personally I believe the skillset for making these runs and programming overlap quite nicely. They both require a great deal of structure, precision, and an eye for finding possible exploits. It's just as critical for a runner to find out why a boss sometimes might not spawn correctly so it can be abused as it is for a gameplay programmer so it can be fixed.

And they can both create results far beyond what most can imagine.