TAS: Metroid Prime - Any% in 00:37

https://twitter.com/fusionvaria
This is a tool-assisted speedrun of Metroid Prime completed with an in-game time of 0:37:37.000. (The in-game timer does count milliseconds, I just so happened to end with .000).

Created using Dolphin 4.0-4222 and the original North American (0-00) release of Metroid Prime.

Rerecord count is supposedly 128,969. Dolphin's rerecord counter is a little weird though, using read-only in certain ways seems to sometimes undo rerecords from your movie.

The in-game timer counts upwards any time you have control of Samus. Cutscenes, item collection text, and elevators between areas are some examples of things that do not contribute to in-game time. An argument can be made that a TAS should have the goal of the lowest possible real-time, but the vast majority of people from the Metroid Prime community will agree that real-time strats make for a less interesting watch, as well as a considerably slower in-game time on the mission final screen.

I started this TAS back in March of 2015. Up until around that point, loading times were a huge issue for this game on emulator. Certain tricks just plain don't work if the game loads too fast, things that are consistently console viable weren't an option on older builds of Dolphin. Once I'd done some testing and confirming that this revision did in fact have console-like load time, I dedicated my Spring Break to TASing Frigate. It was about a 60 hour “work week”, streaming almost 10 hours a day for 7 days. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvTG7...)

Shortly after Frigate, RNG started to become an issue and I had dropped the TAS for quite a while. Upon playback, enemies occasionally acted different, sometimes getting in the way or causing a dash angle to be inconsistent, which lead to desyncs. I don't fully understand the what causes the RNG variation, but I found out it could be avoided by making savestates mid-movie and playing back from them, as opposed to playing the movie back from power-on. This recording method is the reason this video isn't in some crazy 1440p 60fps quality like most other major TASes I've done. Being unable to record everything all at once made it much more of a chore to dump in 1440p with all the enhancements on. It's also the reason for some sections being 30FPS and the audio levels being weird. I'm sorry about that.

Anywho, progress up until recently was quite slow and spaced out. I spent a lot of time thinking about route improvements and looking for new glitches instead of actually working on this. In the end, most of my theory routes had issues, some seem potentially solvable, but currently have yet to be. I personally don't believe this route will be optimal in a few years, assuming this game keeps evolving as rapidly as it has been lately. Maybe by then we'll have a Dolphin build with perfect-to-console emulation and no RNG or syncing issues and a more optimized TAS can be made. For now, this is more than good enough for me.

I'd like to thank:

Claris, for helping find addresses and making a user friendly address viewing script. The optimization level on some bosses and even general movement would never have been possible without her help.

Edzan, for sharing his 100% TAS timings and input on various bosses to give me something to compare to and try and improve on.

Venick, for willing to sit on Discord with me for hours on end while I complain and rant as I grind rooms and timed things.

The Onion Bros as a whole, for also letting me hang out with them while I worked on this project.

Kirbymastah, for giving Edzan a shoutout at SGDQ2016 for something that I did.

Aruki, for his amazing Prime World Editor which allowed me to view load triggers and collision and opened a whole new world of optimization and understanding of the inner workings of this game.

The Metroid Prime community as a whole for being there to bounce ideas of off and always be willing to help look for new strats and optimizations.

And df for being df.