wasted talent?
November 27, 2003 11:50 PM   Subscribe

How to beat Super Mario Brothers 3 in 11 minutes. If it's unedited (which I think it is), this is amazing. (link goes to .wmv file)
posted by Espoo2 (34 comments total)
 
3 and a half minutes? Make sure to get the time right if its a WMV file. Im over 6 minutes and its barely over halfway done.
posted by Keyser Soze at 12:03 AM on November 28, 2003


It says 11 minutes, not 3 and a half.

Also, I feel obligated to link to Quake Done Quick.
posted by oaf at 12:06 AM on November 28, 2003


6 minutes taking you a little over halfway through an 11 minute video would make sense...Think about it. What's more scary than this display of video game proficiency was one of my roomies playing castlevania all the way through in two days... or maybe even worse was when he slept for 35 hours...everything's more extreme with that guy.
posted by StrangerInAStrainedLand at 12:09 AM on November 28, 2003


Wow, none of that Maio Allstars pansy shit, either. Scarily impressive.
posted by Space Coyote at 12:52 AM on November 28, 2003


I think the second/third tank/gunship battles were more impressive than the first, since he did it with the fire flower instead of the raccoon tail. Staying airborne long enough to rack up all those 1-up's without any tail levitating (and while dodging those wrenches in the air!) requires some m4d sk!11z.

QDQ was a team effort, composited together from different demos from different people. If this SMB3 video was a single unedited run, it makes it that much more impressive.

Of course if it were me, I wouldn't have screwed up and hit the mushroom instead of the star at the end of that one level. He's obviously an amateur.
posted by DaShiv at 1:22 AM on November 28, 2003


See also Crazy God Technique (crazygodtechnique.avi, 100 mb, feel free to mirror it or check yr fave p2p)

(and for those who don't have the patience/bandwidth for a 100mb .avi, it's a guy beating Super Mario I and exploiting every possible bug along the way. If you know the game, you'll be gasping in disbelief every ten seconds...)
posted by arto at 1:37 AM on November 28, 2003


Of course if it were me, I wouldn't have screwed up and hit the mushroom instead of the star at the end of that one level. He's obviously an amateur.

I had the same smartass comment when I saw this at work today. But now I realize that the fireworks display for the "5 UP" would have only wasted time.
posted by Gary at 2:10 AM on November 28, 2003


Holy crap. This was just insanely impressive. I spent way too long on this game as a kid and never, ever got as good as this dude.

And I agree -- getting the 1ups were definitely more impressive with the fireflower as opposed to the raccoon tail. Daaaang.
posted by juliebug at 2:14 AM on November 28, 2003


I think some of it is edited -- in World 8 when you cross the bridge you randomly get grabbed by hands and have to play short levels. I don't think someone would play perfectly repeatedly until they got a game where the hands didn't grab them.
posted by donth at 2:30 AM on November 28, 2003


But now I realize that the fireworks display for the "5 UP" would have only wasted time.

Damn. In retrospect, you're right.
posted by DaShiv at 2:54 AM on November 28, 2003


If it's edited together than why are the items/lives consistent throughout the entire video? Savestates?

I never knew about that slide-through wall trick at the end before, though. I have to try that out next time I play it.
posted by Veritron at 3:05 AM on November 28, 2003


He's obviously got some kind of boss controller happening, considering how quickly he can fire two fireballs in succession..
posted by Space Coyote at 3:46 AM on November 28, 2003


Holy. Fucking. Shit.

My jaw was seriously hanging at some of that. The 1UP stuff during the tank/gunship battles were damn impressive but what really got me was that the player knew the levels well enough to go speeding through where not bouncing off a bad guy at a certain point or being a scant few pixels over would have sent Mario down a bottomless pit. Damn.

Of course if it were me, I wouldn't have screwed up and hit the mushroom instead of the star at the end of that one level. He's obviously an amateur.

Heheheh, I thought the same here but damn, Gary's right, the 5UP fireworks would have wasted time.

I think some of it is edited -- in World 8 when you cross the bridge you randomly get grabbed by hands and have to play short levels. I don't think someone would play perfectly repeatedly until they got a game where the hands didn't grab them.

I had the same thought at that point. I mean, there have been times where I've been able to get by not getting grabbed on the first run but that seemed too lucky to me. But...

If it's edited together than why are the items/lives consistent throughout the entire video? Savestates?

The items and lives thing could be kept consistent even with editing. I could imagine he could find a way to ditch some shit item he may have picked up along the way in, like, one of the brief tube levels between map sections and then edit that out. What really makes me think maybe he did manage to get that lucky though is that the number of points the player has remains the same. Fuckin' a.

He's obviously got some kind of boss controller happening, considering how quickly he can fire two fireballs in succession..

I think that might actually be possible normally somehow. I'm not sure, it's been a while since I played, but it didn't strike me as at all odd when I saw it. I dunno.
posted by DyRE at 4:23 AM on November 28, 2003


Another thing that impressed me was how he ran straight at enemies and jumped off of their heads at the last moment, on his way up. I wonder how many lives it took for him to perfect that technique.

Come to think of it, the QDQ guys also used enemy heads as platforms to rocket jump off of. What's with these speed run people using enemies as springboards? From the enemies' perspective, they must howling about the indignity of it all...
posted by DaShiv at 4:49 AM on November 28, 2003


In a similar vein: Contra in 15 minutes. Not nearly as impressive, though.
posted by Ljubljana at 6:02 AM on November 28, 2003


woulda been cool if he didn't use the flutes and did every world... wonder how long that would have taken.
posted by timb at 6:55 AM on November 28, 2003


I think some of it is edited -- in World 8 when you cross the bridge you randomly get grabbed by hands and have to play short levels. I don't think someone would play perfectly repeatedly until they got a game where the hands didn't grab them.

I haven't yet seen this part of the video (connection failed!) but I do know from experience (as best as I can recall) that you can manage to evade the hands if you cross over quickly enough.

So far I'm totally amazed that he made it through the important parts of World 1 in about three minutes. That's already cool enough for me right there. SMB3 is my favorite video game ever, and I thought I knew it all!
posted by lnicole at 7:09 AM on November 28, 2003


The Pile says it was done with prerecorded movements played back.
posted by jmccorm at 7:19 AM on November 28, 2003


My 12 y/o child couldn't believe it...she kept muttering, "This guy...is a...genius!"
posted by davidmsc at 8:21 AM on November 28, 2003


"(link goes to .wmv file)"

No it doesn't, it goes to a 403 error.
posted by majick at 8:31 AM on November 28, 2003


This one works.
posted by password at 8:57 AM on November 28, 2003


I've mirrored a copy of the torrent. (Don't know what BitTorrent is? Try torrentstorm)

I suspect this was done in an emulator with savestates. Makes it easy to go back and redo a mistake, also makes it easy to record the video. Which doesn't say any less about the achievement, just makes it human rather than superhuman.

PS - where did you find this, Espoo2? I first saw it float by on BitTorrent, was surprised to see it here in the blue.
posted by Nelson at 8:57 AM on November 28, 2003


He's obviously got some kind of boss controller happening, considering how quickly he can fire two fireballs in succession..

The video is a screen capture of an emulator "movie," and the game was played in an emulator (go to the first website listed at the end to download the emulator movie, the emulator itself, and a really excellent emulator movie of somebody beating Rockman 2 in short order.

This explains why he's able to get off the rapid-fire fireballs and skip the hands- he's turned turbo on on the controller, or something like that. Also, he does a tailspin thing on some of the ships which is apparently only possible under emulation. And some of the action appears a little fast than it would've originally due to the capture-playback of the emulator... if you watch the Rockman 2 video you can see the guy pull up the weapon-selection screen, pick a new power, then go back to the game in like half a second, which I think is more a function of the way the game was recorded than the way it actually happened.


On edit: I didn't notice the Contra page had the Megaman video. Good stuff. Though the movies do seem to have been taken down. Definitely check out the website at the end of the Mario 3 movie; the Famtasy emulator videos are very small and probably won't be taken down.
posted by rxrfrx at 10:12 AM on November 28, 2003


timb: Me and some friends sat down to beat Super Mario 3 all the way through last semester. We didn't use any flutes and also played every single level, even the ones that you don't have to play. Not everyone was at the same videogame proficiency level so it took us an entire day. Probably about 7-9 hours off the top of my head.

Also, the first time we tried to do it one of my friends walks into the room like a moron and tripped over the nintendo cord and sends the nintendo into it's flashing random colors mode. We were already on world 6 or 7. He barely escaped with his life.

Super Mario Bros. 3 is the best videogame ever made.
posted by untuckedshirts at 10:33 AM on November 28, 2003


PS - where did you find this, Espoo2? I first saw it float by on BitTorrent, was surprised to see it here in the blue.

I originally saw this in a random thread over at em411.com.
posted by Espoo2 at 11:05 AM on November 28, 2003


*sigh* wish good porn would be torrented. ;)
posted by mrplab at 12:11 PM on November 28, 2003


Access to the requested URL /~scy8y/moSMB3.wmv is restricted on www.people.virginia.edu (Error 403 - FORBIDDEN).

This may be intentional to protect specific documents or it may be an oversight on the part of the maintainer.

Please double-check your URL or contact the maintainer of the referring page, http://www.metafilter.com/, so they may update their link.


Dang it. Any non-torrent mirrors?
posted by rhapsodie at 12:32 PM on November 28, 2003


There is also a bank of files that shows someone beating EVERY LEVEL in SMB3, in order, in a little over 1 hour. Gets the star at the end of every level, as well as many other amazing things. Uses some of the known game glitches to get through a couple of levels (Wall double jump, missing sprites, etc..), but doesn't use turbo at all. It's probably the most impressive thing I've seen since the Ikaruga on hard with no hits movie. The movie is split across 8 files, with the names "super_mario_borthers_3.world_x.super_play.avi", with x being 1-8, denoting the world it shows. All in all, around 500 megs for all the files (which is why I'm not just gonna trhow it up on my web host for everyone to download), so fire up your favorite peer to peer and start looking. :)
posted by qDot at 12:52 PM on November 28, 2003


mrplab: emPORNium
posted by Iax at 3:56 PM on November 28, 2003


Great post.
posted by BlueTrain at 4:42 PM on November 28, 2003


arto: whats the login/pass for that site?
posted by Iax at 7:18 PM on November 28, 2003


Personally, I welcome our Super Mario 3 beating overlords.

...wow. Didn't they make a movie about this guy?
posted by fatbobsmith at 7:46 PM on November 28, 2003


Urgh. Having trouble tracking down Crazygodtechnique. Any links?
posted by effugas at 9:16 PM on November 28, 2003


played in slo-mo, played back at normal rate.
posted by Hackworth at 11:55 PM on November 29, 2003


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