To be honest I prefer Tool-assisted speed runs. It can also help you to learn specific enemy behavior or precise pixel initiation for normal speedrun. They actually save you a hell lot of a time trying the same thing over and over from 1st level when you can simply repeat the scenario from 2 seconds before you failed. The only game I've played that had tools implemented already in the game is Max Payne 1, you can press F5 to save state before situation and F6 to reload, you can also slow down time which pretty much covers the tools needed for TASing.
The reason normal speed runs are quicker than TAS runs is most of the TAS runs take a lot of HDD space and recording, so once completed nobody wants to go through hell of redoing a TAS run when somebody finds a new glitch that skips a level or enemy etc. Hence why normal speed runs are still quicker these days. Plus it's more common for a guy to sit down and replay a game from the start compared to TAS recording for simply viewing pleasure on youtube.
I see TAS for punishing stupid games that are hard for no particular reason or for having shitty unresponsive controls.
Watch the football game for best laughs on TAS ever
You say this but I want to break off the illusion to you that normal speed runs are also artificial. When a bunch of guys from around the world gather their top level runs, Half Life, dude 1 level 3 10min, dude 2 level 27 6min, dude 3 level 7, combine that in sony vegas and you got yourself a world record. Even if it's a single guy that does the entire run, he simply takes video 1 from last week, video 2 from yesterday, video 3 from just now and combines it for his top speed run. This is called Segmented speed run, and they don't even have to be 1 person to get credits for it. A single seated speedrun from start to finish is rare, it's done for fun mostly by everyone, it hardly breaks the speed record, but this is the one that is not artificial and it's actually quickest in real life due to not replaying the game for days which is counter active to speed running.
Every video on SpeedDemosArchive Youtube channel is a single seater and it's done mainly for charity. Those are pure and awesome.
The best one from top of my head is DanielK that did ViceCity and gave his tale on how he does it.
Yeah, really like speeddemosarchieve's stuff. I just find it more impressive for someone to do a run in one sitting and not have any sort of special tool assisted when they are speed running. I don't really like segmented runs either.
What means artificial? What means "not the way the game was meant to be played"?
TASers shit on every rule, limit, boundary coders/designers tried to apply. They often know more than guys that made these games.
They put mindblowing amount of effort to save single frames from runs and make them fun to watch.
Also they are the guys who discover amazing glitches so real time speedruners can grind the shit out of them.
Because it's interesting to see how far you can push shit?
Making TAS is challenging as fuck, you need to bring your inner autist to the maximum level.
Edited by pacmanpl at 10:16 CDT, 12 September 2014
and also consider that TAS runs give ideas for speedruns without it and that regular speedrunning is really frustrating, because all games have randomness and 1 frame executions.
Yeah, he just felt like streaming and got a really good run, the weird thing is that his pace is better on an arcade machine but he can't killscreen it
Speaking of donkey kong, just found out there's a 2014 movie from them called "The King of Arcades".
Seems like it is more of a documentary than a mockumentary, the latter as The King of Kong was, and has received very much positive critiques. Available on amazon -no intl' shipping- and on your nearest (or Swedish) torrent tracker.
There's some others that were released shortly after The King of Kong. I remember watching two of them, finding both nowhere near as good and frankly boring.
What made that movie so good was that anyone could enjoy it, no matter if they didn't play videogames at all; whereas all the other gaming-related movies I've watched require to have a particular interest on it. We'll see how the new documentary is and how close to its sibling is (coming from Sweden to home, in just a couple of minutes).
Edited by megaman3 at 11:19 CDT, 12 September 2014
What makes the King of Kong so good is how involved it is. You couldn't write a better, more involved plot if you wanted to. It's a great underdog story that anyone can relate to. I've seen people transform from laughing at nerds to being emotionally attached to the people in the film.
You can see them filming Chasing Ghosts at the Funspot VHS screening of Billy's run.
It's not a 100% exact documentary though. They indeed made a plot, based on real events and with many twisted facts, so the movie looks more like an underdog story and for it to have a villain. But that's why it's really good actually.
I'm aware of the twisted facts and weird pacing. There's examples of Billy Mitchell's character outside of the movie, but it's still pretty close to reality.