TASaturday #1: Brain Training / Age
Welcome to TASaturday!
In this weekly feature, we’re going to showcase one particular TAS every Saturday. For those who don’t know, TAS stands for Tool Assisted Speedrun: it’s basically the same thing as a speedrun, but done via an emulator and using various tools (but no actual cheats). While a traditional speedrun’s aim is to push back the limits of human skills, you could say the aim of a TAS is to push back the limits of the game itself.
The two kinds of speedruns aren’t really competing against each other: quite the contrary, cooperation between speedrunners and TASers is quite frequent, as tricks and techniques are shared.
Most of the time, the aim of a TAS is to go as fast as possible, but not always. Sometimes, a TAS is there just to provide entertainement: this is the case with the video we’re starting with this week, which is about Brain Training / Brain Age. Now you might be thinking “How the hell do you do a speedrun of that game? Wouldn’t that be boring”? Well… it’s quite the opposite, actually!
Today’s TAS shows us the maths exercise from Brain Training, where you have to solve a series of mathematical puzzles as fast as possible. To do that, you have to draw the corresponding numbers on the touch screen, and the game detects whether your input is right or wrong. But just completing that exercise as fast as possible would’ve been really boring, which is why the creator of this TAS decided to spice things up a bit.
The thing is: the writing detection in the game can easily be abused, and this is exactly what this TASers has done by making various drawings… while still getting the answer right. This is actually a very difficult thing to do, as you have to avoid the software detecting your (logically wrong) answer before you’re done drawing. And what should have been a very dry mathematical excercise is now a very entertaining retrospective of Nintendo’s various franchises!
Here is the video:
Click here for more information about this TAS!
See you next week for a very different video, but quite as entertaining!
