December 2007 Archives

It’s that flop-sweat time of year: late in the Christmas shopping season—and really late in the Hanukkah shopping season—so you can’t rely on shopping sites to ship your gifts in time. Looks like you’ll have to actually go outside. Luckily, since you live in the shopping capital of the world (you do, right?), it shouldn’t be too hard to find something for your favorite poindexter. With GONY’s last-minute shopping guide, you’ll be back home playing Scrabulous and sipping store-brand egg nog in no time.

Robot Village
252 West 81st St., Manhattan

As noted at the end of Thursday’s post, robots need no introduction, so irrefutable is their stature in the Pantheon of Awesomeness. Of all the post-millennial wonders we imagined back in the 20th century, robots come the closest to delivering on their promise. Everything else falls way short: Cars don’t fly or drive themselves, we eat meals in non-capsule form, and summer holidays on the moon remain impractical.

But at Robot Village, the future manages to be futuristic for once. In a one-room shop below the curb on West 81st Street, robots crawl, grab, explore, talk, interact—everything that robots were supposed to do. That includes “fight with other robots,” a staple robot fantasy that you can live out at a “Battle Zone” that serves as the store’s centerpiece. (However, since the vast majority of the robots haven’t suffered a freak short-circuit that locks them in “kill mode,” most are pretty peaceful.)

Watching a robot go is fun, but building your own robot and then watching it go is more fun. So Robot Village is rife with kits—in fact, do-it-yourself packages outnumber the pre-made robots for sale. Nathan, part of the Robot Village crew, said that younger customers respond to the building experience in a way they might not to more traditional toys. “When I was little, all I cared about was whether He-Man’s shoulder moved up and down,” he said, mimicking a stiff action figure. “But now, kids want to know more about the details of what’s going on inside.”

While children’s tastes are indeed growing more sophisticated, I was pleased to find that Robot Village doesn’t limit itself to the training-wheels set. Nathan and store owner David Greenbaum showed me kits along the skill continuum, from a snap-together gorilla to the programmable, extensible Boe-Bot. If you’re afraid you’ll botch your bot (say, by creating a freak short circuit that locks it in kill mode) there are bot-building stations where the staff will help you along. You can make a reservation or attend one of the scheduled workshops.

At each of the other stores I’ve reviewed this week, there came a time where I was ready to go; I’d seen everything. At Robot Village, despite the fact that it’s the smallest physical space in the X-travaganza, I always felt there was more to explore.

Greenbaum sensed this. At one point I signaled that I needed to wrap up my visit to catch a flight. He nodded and flicked on another robot (the RS Media) for us to play with. When he finished with one robot, he looked around and muttered, “What else, what else…?” until he settled on another Robot Village resident I needed to meet. This went on for another half hour, and how could I say no? I was like a kid in a candy store—or, more accurately, like a 26-year-old nerd in a robot store.

Gift Suggestions

Here are the obligatory suggestions, because people like to look at pictures of shiny gadgets. Your best option is to go to the store (or call) and tell the extremely knowledgeable staff who you’re shopping for. They’ll make a better recommendation than I can.¹

Also, I’ve chosen to highlight some kits you might not find at Toys ’R’ Us. Robot Village also carries ready-made robots, like the i-SOBOT and Pleo. Yes, you can get these at the big-box toy stores (at similar prices), but even if you put aside the whole support-local-independent-business angle, wouldn’t you rather buy a robot from somebody who can tell you how it works?

Revell VEXplorer, $199. Greenbaum was showing me the features of a robotic arm when he yelled to Nathan, “Can it pick up a soda can?”

“No, only an empty one,” Nathan said. Great disappointment.

“The VEXplorer can pick up a full can,” Nathan said. Great joy.

Later that day, I was reading a Robot magazine review of the VEXplorer kit by Grant Imahara of MythBusters fame.² Imahara wrote, “We’re talking about a custom-designed grasper that can pick up a can of soda—a full can of soda.” (Emphasis original.) So apparently, there are two kinds of robots: those that can pick up a full can of soda, and those that cannot. The VEXplorer is one of the former. It has a wireless color spycam to boot.

CIC Hexapod Monster, $26. Most of the kits in the store don’t require soldering skills, but a few do, and this CIC line is quite affordable. If your friend knows how to solder, here’s a cheap gift to hone her skills. If she doesn’t know how to solder, here’s a cheap way to learn. Maybe you see where I’m going with this.

“It is moving by 6 legs with 2 gear motors to control its moving and turning,” says the box copy. So I wouldn’t expect the instructions inside to be Hemingway-esque.

Parallax Boe-Bot Robot Kit, $159. An intermediate kit that includes infrared sensors (so your bot can avoid obstacles), photoresistors (so your bot sleeps when it’s dark), and other goodies. You can replace the wheels with legs to create the crawler bot depicted at the top of this article. Best of all, the robot’s development board connects to a computer by serial or USB, so you can program it with BASIC to do your bidding. Here’s a sample program:

10 DESTROY
20 GOTO 10
END

It’s that flop-sweat time of year: late in the Christmas shopping season—and really late in the Hanukkah shopping season—so you can’t rely on shopping sites to ship your gifts in time. Looks like you’ll have to actually go outside. Luckily, since you live in the shopping capital of the world (you do, right?), it shouldn’t be too hard to find something for your favorite poindexter. With GONY’s last-minute shopping guide, you’ll be back home playing Scrabulous and sipping store-brand egg nog in no time.

“There’s a cult around these toys, isn’t there?” said a woman in ToyTokyo during my visit there this week. She was a video journalist for the New York Post, and she posed the question to an employee who was showing her around. It was a textbook invocation of the familiar lazy-reporter maxim: If something inspires passion in other people that I do not understand, it must be a “cult.”

While the “cult” rap is unfair, it’s not entirely without basis. There is a substantial fanbase in the West that consumes Japanese toys, movies, snacks, etc., without discrimination. To these self-described otaku¹, the content of the thing is secondary. “Made in Japan” is novelty enough. Web shops like J-List cater to this marketing goldmine, pushing the simple equation that “Japanese” = “awesome.”

ToyTokyo and Zakka NYC, the two stores in today’s installment of the X-tra X-pecial X-mas X-travaganza, exist for the quiet majority who are intrigued by Japan but stop short of fetishizing it: the non-cultists.

ToyTokyo
121 2nd Ave. 2F, Manhattan

Look around ToyTokyo, and the name might seem misleading. There’s about a 50-50 split of Japanese and American toys here; for every Astro Boy, there’s a Betty Boop. But the name is accurate in a different way, as ToyTokyo’s mix of modern and kitsch mirrors what I’ve seen in Japan. The experience is much like shopping in one of Tokyo’s specialty toy stores, minus the sexually submissive schoolgirl figurines. Otherwise, very similar.

ToyTokyo was literally built on kitsch. The owner, “Lev,” used to collect Batman toys and memorabilia with great fervor: “I had the biggest collection in the country—probably in the world,” he said. Meanwhile, another collector amassed the definitive collection of Batman comic books: “He had all the paper, and I had everything else.” So Lev sold his stash in one huge lot to Bizarro Lev. One man became the Batman Collector to Rule Them All, and the other opened a toy store.

While retro fare such as Batman, Star Wars, and Lost in Space are well represented in ToyTokyo’s aisles, I’m usually drawn to the back room, which is populated by new designs—mostly vinyl toys—from independent artists. It’s a vibrant display, but as I browsed on this latest visit, it occurred to me that the art-toy scene has been around long enough for parts of it to become stale. The cute-cum-grotesque aesthetic is played, and if I never see another Kubrick/Be@rbrick, I’ll manage. (The bear comes in different colors. I get it.)

Yet Lev is able to ferret out innovation. I asked him to show me some highlights of the designer toys—my eyes having glazed over on my first pass—and he skipped the big-name designers to pull out a “Minigod” by Marka27. It’s a portable speaker system in the guise of a striking, cartoony Aztec deity. (There’s a picture of ToyTokyo’s Minigod in the gift suggestions; I also love this one.) As Lev showed me the Minigod, he was more animated by the fact that he’d discovered it than the prospect of selling it. That sense of discovery drives ToyTokyo. If, like me, you’re not feeling it, try asking the staff, who are happy to share.

Zakka NYC
155 Plymouth St., Brooklyn

“Otaku culture is almost finished,” Toshiki Okazaki said, and he seemed relieved. It gave him a reason to reduce Zakka NYC’s focus on toys and cute characters—which, he tacitly admitted, ToyTokyo and SoHo’s Kidrobot do better anyway—and rededicate the space to modern design.

Toshiki’s revelation was prompted by his move from Grand Street to the hipper, rough-edged DUMBO, where Zakka NYC reopened in October. “At the Brooklyn location, it’s a different customer base,” he said. He found that visitors were going less for the toys and more for design art books or limited-edition T-shirts. The take-home message was that tastemakers were no longer viewing Japan exclusively through the narrow lens of anime and video games.

Toys haven’t been banished, just put in their place. A row of display cases housing 20th-century Japanese pop-culture artifacts sits across from a library of rare books; together they constitute a museum of design history that Toshiki plans to open soon.

Indeed, while I’ve made gift suggestions below, a visit to Zakka NYC at the right time might be gift enough. (Although if you put “One Coupon Good For Visit to Trendy Brooklyn Design Store” under the tree, don’t hold me responsible when everyone calls you a cheap S.O.B.) In addition to the museum, Toshiki plans to hold events to showcase underground VJs. Not the Kennedy kind, the kind who mix video to live music. Zakka has been holding dry runs, broadcast over dailysession, every Monday night at 6. That might not be a bad way to kick off your New Year’s Eve.²

Gift Suggestions

OK, enough atmosphere. You’re short on time; you need to spend some money but quick. Here’s a fraction of the crowd-pleasers I found for sale.

Typography Today, $59;
Typography in Japan, $55;
Typographic Composition in Japan (not pictured), $80; Zakka NYC. Font nerdery is a frustrating pursuit. Type is ubiquitous, so everyone is familiar with the subject matter, but few can discuss it intelligently. At Zakka, type gets the treatment it deserves. Make a font nerd happy this Christmas.

onezero_select DVDs, $35 each, Zakka NYC. Toshiki, the Zakka NYC owner, is excited about the burgeoning art form of motion graphics, hence his interest in bringing VJs to Zakka to perform. These DVDs, containing selections from recent onedotzero_select digital film festivals, are an affordable way to introduce someone to the state of the art. If the trailer for DVD 5 doesn’t get your blood pumping, then apparently you didn’t enjoy it very much, and I apologize. Loser.

CompatiBalls by Shultzo, $75/2-part set, ToyTokyo. A gag gift of sorts. Wrap each one up separately, and after the second one is opened, your family will think you screwed up and bought two of the same thing. See how long it takes for someone to figure out the gag. Or you could opt for the topless cow girl on the right, if that’s your thing.

Minigod by Marka27, $150, ToyTokyo. For the friend who needs a little god in his life. Ha-ha! Get it? Because it’s a little god! Oh, you got it. OK.

There’s a port in the front where, as Lev noted, “You can connect your iPod.” iPod connectivity is always the big selling point, but it’s just a standard minijack, so you can connect any other music player, too, like an iPod nano or an iPod Touch.

This golden dude is a limited edition for ToyTokyo, so while you may find similar false idols elsewhere, they won't have the same feel of Aztec excess you get with gold.

Remote Control Piston Action Robots, $100 each, ToyTokyo. They’re remote-control piston-action robots. Do I really need to elaborate?

It’s that flop-sweat time of year: late in the Christmas shopping season—and really late in the Hanukkah shopping season—so you can’t rely on shopping sites to ship your gifts in time. Looks like you’ll have to actually go outside. Luckily, since you live in the shopping capital of the world (you do, right?), it shouldn’t be too hard to find something for your favorite poindexter. With GONY’s last-minute shopping guide, you’ll be back home playing Scrabulous and sipping store-brand egg nog in no time.

Video Games New York
202 E. 6th St., Manhattan

If a video-game fanatic moved into a dorm room in 1973 and never moved out, the present-day result would probably look like Video Games New York. Passersby can’t miss the Rock Band and Manhunt 2 promos in the store window, but if they stop and look past the first layer of cruft, they’ll see a Super NES, a Dreamcast, and even a display for the ill-fated Atari 5200. There’s a deep sense of history in this place; it’s just buried behind a bunch of other stuff.

Accumulation trumps presentation at Video Games New York (even the name is no fancier than it needs to be), but that’s not a criticism. In fact, the cluttered ambience is ideal. Browsing the bloated shelves evokes the same excitement as digging through a box of cartridges you uncovered in your closet: Who knows what treasures you’ll find? For my part, I found and purchased the NES version of Lee Trevino’s Fighting Golf, a game famous for combining Lee Trevino-endorsed golf action with a complete lack of fighting.

Of course, old-school Nintendo is in vogue right now, so it’s an easy call to dedicate store space to Duck Hunt et al. What distinguishes VGNY are the obscurities—this stock was assembled with a completist tenacity. It’s probably the only place with an entire shelf dedicated to the Atari Lynx—the Lynx, for Pete’s sake! Not to mention the Virtual Boy, the Bandai WonderSwan Color, the Twin Famicom, etc. You may not have heard of all of those, but they’re all lovingly stacked in one cranny or another with a bright orange “PAYLESS! SALE” price sticker attached.

Despite such overwhelming variety, the staff¹ know their wares. During my visit, one customer rushed in and urgently requested an AC adapter for the Atari 2600, a system that faded from popular consciousness 20 years ago. He had the part in his hand seconds later. (Try that at your local GameStop some time, and let me know how it goes.)

Another desperate soul said that he wanted to give his nephew the Japanese PlayStation 2 import Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix for Christmas, but the kid only had a run-of-the-mill American PS2 console, which won’t play Japanese games. A shrewd businessman might have tried to sell this loving uncle a brand-new Japanese PS2 unit, but instead, the shop owner gave him a crash course on the use of a “swap disc”—a $5 hack that tricks the U.S. box into playing games from the Far East.

After a couple more yuletide shoppers passed through, I asked the cashier what she found to be the most popular Christmas gifts this year. “NES games,” she replied. The NES classics are a reliable fallback, but if you want something that will excite a jaded gamer, consider bestowing one of these more eclectic options:

Nintendo Game & Watch: $50-$250. Before there was Game Boy, there was Game & Watch. These simple LCD pocket games keep you in the safe World of Nintendo, but they offer a bit more cachet due to their relative rarity. Their name stems from the fact that each game also had a built-in clock. We were easily impressed in the ’80s.

Fifty dollars will get you a cheapy game like Popeye, but go ahead and splurge on one of the dual-screen models, ancestors of the modern-day Nintendo DS. Occupying the high end is the $250 Legend of Zelda unit. One of my fifth-grade classmates brought this into school one week, a week during which he was worshipped as our new God.

Mattel Intellivision: $120. Though it was a distant also-ran to the aforementioned Atari 2600, this system is still revered by many gamers who played its NFL Football game, which was incredibly advanced for the time. The bizarre telephone-style controller lent itself well to the complex play-calling of football, and the Intellivision graphics were pretty sharp compared to its contemporaries, as demonstrated in the system’s memorable George Plimpton TV commercials. I found the pictured unit (in near-near-mint condition!) wedged between a plastic tub and some cardboard boxes. If you look closely at the picture, you can just make out a Space Invaders cocktail table underneath, which is another great gift if you can get it working.

Hello Kitty Dreamcast: $280. Of all the “dead” consoles, I have the softest spot for the Sega Dreamcast. Released in 1999, Sega’s last-gasp hardware effort enjoyed a honeymoon of about a year before being crushed by the technically superior (but charmless) Sony PS2. So while VGNY is rife with special-edition consoles, this little blue box caught my eye. Hey, I know Hello Kitty is a capitalist whore who will put her name on anything for a buck, and I know I already own a perfectly good Dreamcast, but…this one’s blue. Damn, that is cool.

So, to sum up, find out which old game system is your loved one’s favorite, and then go to VGNY and ask if they have it in a pretty color. Merry X-mas. Pass the egg nog.

Among nerd totems, knowledge of the Japanese language ranks in the upper strata—somewhere above authentic ninja swords and below custom NES mods. Japanese proficiency provides you with access to the origin of all things cool and, more importantly, the ability to lord it over your peers. You don’t need to wait for the translations; you know what Sailor Moon said in the original!

The problem with language-as-status-symbol, though, is that it’s hard to quantify. Sure, you can claim that you know so many hundred kanji, but those numbers are easy to pump up and easier to dissemble. Language has no hertz or gigaFLOPS, just an amorphous concept of “fluency.” So how can competitive geeks objectively declare that “my Japanese is bigger than yours”?

With the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Created in 1984 by an offshoot of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, the JLPT was intended to give bilingual job-seekers a board-certified reference to put on their résumés—i.e., if you pass JLPT Level 2, your superiors at Shirakawa Semiconductor Concern consider you somewhat less likely to humiliate them with your clumsy foreign tongue.

From these utilitarian roots, the JLPT evolved into a benchmark against which aspiring otaku measure each other (and, not coincidentally, into a motivational tool for Japanese teachers). It was in this spirit that I traveled to Columbia University last week to take the Level 3 JLPT.¹

The JLPT is less a standardized test than a battle of wills. Designed by a country notoriously ambivalent about foreigners, the test employs misdirection, condescension, and tedium to discourage you from pursuing your Japanese studies further. The JLPT does not ask, “How well can you speak Japanese?” but rather “How bad do you want it?” Fail to realize this and the battle is surely lost.

On test day, I joined about 60 fellow Level 3 testees—mostly college students, about 60% male—at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, where we were directed to a third-floor classroom. A plaque on the wall declared it the W. T. Chang Family Lecture Room, prompting the thought that perhaps all this time would have been better spent studying Mandarin.

We took our numerically assigned seats and waited. Some sipped their water, for “water in a clear bottle with a secure lid…stored under your seat, not on your desk” was permitted, according to the pre-test pamphlet we’d received. All other food and drink was contraband. Ditto for cell phones, “electronic devices and media,” “a watch that beeps,”² and “handwritten or printed materials.”

An overbearing teaching assistant read the official JLPT instructions while her assistant proctors, a Japanese underclassman and a mousy professor, distributed our test booklets and answer sheets. “Do not open your test booklets before the test begins!” the TA rasped. Thirty seconds later: “Check to make sure that your booklet is clearly printed and has all 11 pages.” How could we do this without opening our booklets? It must be a trick, I thought. So as the other testees wantonly flipped through their booklets—surely they would be disqualified!—I peeled back the very tip of the booklet’s back corner and bent over to look for an “11.”³

It was clear that this test wouldn’t suffer fools lightly, just as it was clear that we were all fools. The TA proceeded: “Correctly write your name and birthdate on the answer sheet in the spaces provided.” Write them correctly, check. But when was I born? Was it today? “Do not put today’s date in the space for your birthdate.” Got it. Thank you, incredibly patronizing JLPT instructions!

I joke now, but the insidious JLPT was breaking us down. If we couldn’t be trusted to remember who we were and when we were born, how could we master a foreign language? Cracks began to show in the testees. Jiggling knees, tapping pencils, teasing hair—this was a rattled bunch.

Then came W. T. Chang’s Revenge. Our stiff, wooden seats were outfitted with arm desks about the size of ping-pong paddles. Once the test began, the room filled with a chorus of fumbling papers and dropped booklets. It was impossible to balance all the test materials on the paddle at once. I can’t overstate how frustrating this was. We were being taunted. “You want it this bad? Really?”

The JLPT is administered in three parts. The second part, listening comprehension, is a deathblow of sorts. In this section, you listen to conversations in Japanese and then answer a question about what was discussed. That would be simple enough if the people on the tape conversed like normal human beings, but they don’t. Instead, they speak in the most circuitous manner possible, tossing in some random nonsense to throw you further off the scent.

Woman: Let’s have an office party a week from the day after Tuesday.

Guy 1: I can’t make it on the day that you just said. I have a dentist appointment, but maybe I can reschedule it, but on second thought, I can’t.

Guy 2: Sandwiches?

Guy 3: Perhaps it would be better to hold the party two days after the day following the 20th of the month.

Guy Who Sounds Kind of Similar to Guy 1 But You’re Not Sure: I think that would work, because the evening before that particular day is the morning of our big presentation.

OK, This Guy is Definitely Guy 1: No, that’s Thursday afternoon, at 9 a.m.

Woman: Then it’s settled.

Guy 3: Yes, agreed.

Guy 2: Sandwiches.

It seems they know you’re eavesdropping, they know your Japanese isn’t too sharp, and they’d prefer you didn’t discern their secret office-party plan. Burn about 20 of these to a CD and you have the JLPT listening section. This parade of cryptic misanthropes tramples any sense of welcome you might have felt from the Japanese people. An effective tactic.

Morale was low after the listening section, and conversation dwindled to a whisper. Partly because we felt beaten; partly because talking in the hall during breaks was “prohibited, and testees who violate this rule may have their results invalidated.” We picked up our shattered spirits, along with the booklets that had fallen off our goddamn desks again, and stumbled through grammar & reading.

When the test concluded, our proctor warned us that anyone who “distributed test content via the Internet or any other communication network will have their results invalidated.” Right. Whatever. They could have invalidated the bejesus out of us for all we cared. We just wanted to go home. Finally, mercifully, we did.

Despite the use of optical-scan answer sheets (those fill-in-the-bubble deals that get fed into a computer), the results take a ludicrous three months to tabulate—one final test of endurance. Perhaps, the thinking goes, if our wills were not broken by the actual test, a long silence will compel our interests to drift elsewhere. “Portuguese looks like fun, or maybe I’ll take up basket-weaving…”

Indeed, I’m sure by the time our results are grudgingly mailed in March, many of us won’t care anymore. We’ll be too busy studying for JLPT Level 2. For some reason, we want it that bad.

In late 2003, a video called “11-Minute Mario” hit eBaum’s World—the Stuff Magazine of video sites—and stunned the world with an act of unprecedented video-game dominance. In it, an unseen master plays Super Mario Bros. 3 with baffling precision, completing the quest in a little over 11 minutes.

“Eleven-Minute Mario” worked NES diehards into a froth not seen since Jenny Lewis accused Will Seltzer of touching her breasts. There was enough of a frenzy that the Internet’s global squad of Pubescent Moron Reactionaries was called in to evaluate the footage, and as with all past and future cases, they declared the video ONE HUNDRED PERCENT FAKE. Thus the PMRs again rescued audiences from potential enjoyment.

But wait—it turns out that in this one single instance, message-board trolls made a mistake! “Eleven-Minute Mario” was no fraud. It was the coming-out party for a new art form: the tool-assisted speedrun.

As the author, “Morimoto,” explained on his website, “11-Minute Mario” was created by playing SMB3 at a very slow rate—frame by frame—in an emulator. Morimoto recorded his input, and whenever he made a less-than-optimal decision, he backed the recording up and tried again. This painstaking method yielded a sequence of timed button presses that, when played back through the emulator at full speed, turned Mario into a demigod.

Building a tool-assisted speedrun is like crafting a player-piano roll, except somewhat less honky-tonk. Also, the performance generated by a TAS could never be achieved by mortal hands. This superhuman quality is the source of controversy. Either tool-assisted speedruns are the work of cheating cheaters who ruin everything for everyone, or they are engrossing flights of fancy that explore the limits of familiar worlds. Allow me to make the case for flights of fancy.

Super Mario Bros. 3 in 10:34.55
by Jean-François Durocher a.k.a. “Genisto“

Intentionally or not, the TAS community has kept a pretty low profile since the “11-Minute Mario” backlash. Beyond TASvideos.org, a de-facto headquarters of the movement, tool-assisted speedruns receive only scattered mentions. So you might not be aware that Morimoto’s seminal work has been “obsoleted” —i.e., beaten by a faster speedrun—three times in the years since.

This SMB3 run is about 30 seconds faster than "11-Minute Mario." But in the TAS world, it’s one thing to be fast; it’s something more to convey your genius. Genisto is an able showoff, demonstrating every bug exploit and sleight-of-hand in his repertoire. Mario is crammed into tight spaces, penetrated by countless projectiles, and forced through brick walls. I know he’s the selfless hero and all, but by World 8-2, he’s got to be thinking, “No princess is worth this shit.”

Mega Man [Rockman] in 15:38.07
by Joel Yliluoma a.k.a. “Bisqwit“ & “FinalFighter“

“Abuses programming errors in the game,” notes the description page for this video. “Abuses”? Bisqwit outright dismantles Mega Man on the way to creating a speedrun that plays like an avant-garde film: it’s shocking, it’s cutting edge, and half the time you have no idea what’s going on.

The so-called abuse is inflicted by exploiting glitches in the game’s programming. With a thorough knowledge of the game’s under-the-hood mechanics, a speedrunner can often uncover bugs that allow him to sidestep inconveniences like the laws of physics. (Such bugs are so myriad in the Mega Man series that they’ve gotten their own page on TASvideos.) In this Mega Man run, oddities abound as the game is stressed to the verge of collapse by a glitch-pounding stream of controller input. My favorite visual non-sequitur comes when a couple of hapless Picket Men are rendered as alphabet soup.

I used to imagine how embarrassing it would be for the original Mega Man programmers to see their mistakes laid bare by amateurs who seem to know the game better even than they did. On further reflection, though, I think that the game’s ability to cope with this mess is actually a testament to the resilience of the code.¹

Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! in 17:50.0
by Andrés Delikat

This is one of those videos that makes you want to dust off the old cartridge because damn, it looks easy now. But then you get out the game and start playing, and it’s even harder than you remembered, and FOR CHRIST’S SAKE THE SUPER MACHO MAN ATTACK IS JUST COMPLETELY UNFAIR, COME ON!! and so controller meets floor.

With optimal strategy, it takes longer to defeat The Sandman (2:18 in game-clock time) than Mike Tyson (1:58). This makes sense, as The Sandman had the tightest fundamentals of anyone in the game, whereas many of the other boxers resorted to cheap tricks. Coughcoughsupermachoman.

In addition to his TAS exploits, Delikat has recorded a sweet cover of the Punch-Out!! fight music. More details at his site.

U.N. Squadron in 18:33.27
by Ryan E a.k.a. “georgexi“

This entry is only here because my list of “best” TASes is shaped by the games I played a lot back in the day. Yours will be, too. Still, this is a polished run, and a good example of speedruns in the side-scroller genre.² The pilot can’t make the scenery crawl by any more quickly, so in the meantime, he taunts the enemies, letting their bullets, missiles and whatnot come this close to his ride before darting away to blow their sorry, artificially intelligent asses off the screen.

In its original Japanese release, U.N. Squadron was called Area 88, based on a manga/anime series of the same name.³ For the U.S. version, Capcom’s marketing gurus tapped into the United Nations craze that was sweeping America’s youth in the late 1980s. United Nations: the public-domain fighting force!

Watching the Videos

The links above direct you to TASvideos.org. Unfortunately, viewing a video can be a haphazard process, as the site uses a maddening array of emulators (out of necessity) and video codecs. There are generally three ways to acquire a video; they’re listed below in the order that I usually try them.

• Use BitTorrent. Each video’s description page includes a torrent link. This works well for the most popular videos, but, because of the nature of BitTorrent, less so for more obscure entries. Patience usually pays off; I rarely have to wait longer than an hour or two to locate seeders. Once the torrent is finished, use MPlayer or VLC to play the video, which is usually an AVI encoded in DivX, XVid or H.264. (Annoying outliers like MKV and OGM pop up from time to time, though.)

• Play back the key-input movie. It’s the purist method: Load the button-sequence file into the emulator and watch it play the game. The trouble is that you need the same ROM used by the speedrunner, and TASvideos doesn’t supply these for (il)legal reasons. Even if you’re willing to wade through skeezy ROM sites to find the one you need, it may be a slightly different version from the one that the speedrunner had, in which case the speedrun won’t play back. Burn. There’s a bit more info on the TASvideos Downloads FAQ.

• Look elsewhere. Google the video name or, even better, the game name + video author. Sometimes this works and you turn up a YouTube page or the like, but often it comes up empty. Be careful, too, because even if you get results, they may point to an obsoleted movie.