Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
One of the rules on SDA:
"Glitches: Many speed runs utilize glitches, unintended side effects of the game's programing, to their advantage. There are some glitches which won't be allowed though: generally any glitch that allows you to leave the normal bounds of the game world, or to magically teleport between distant locations will be forbidden. Anything involving removing a game disc/cartridge or files while the game is running is forbidden. Probably any other glitch will be allowed, but exceptions might be made on an individual basis. Borderline glitches will probably be allowed in separate categories from runs that don't use them."
What do you think? Should they simply ban glitches like that? A glitch that cut time like in megaman walking trhough walls and ladder abuse shouldnt be used, by their rules. I think that is another resource from the player and its very hard to do those moves, as it is hard to jump in timing to dodge the enemies and shoot precisely. All these things are part of the game, they want it or not, they cant say that it was an unwanted feature of the game. Who knows, maybe the testers noticed the bug but thought of it as a cool side-effect (since its hard to make the glitch work, and it gives a crazy effect and we dont have time to fix it, we will let it there). But still, these things can help finishing the game faster (which is the only objective of the runs). I dont agree with their rule, but i know they had to choose a rule, and thats what they chose...
Dissagreeing..
I think that glitches are actually cheating.. As in megaman 1. the select/pause glitch is simply making the game easier..
But as FODA said.. the zipping through walls.. That still doesn't make it seem like they are a well trained Megaman player.. that just shows they have good Optimization. I see no skill in that.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/34/First 6 Masters.fcm
that is the first 6 robot masters done in 15:30 by me. I find that more skillfull(In megaman terms) then Omega's Glitched run.
Also.. My Snes battletoads speedrun done in 21:40 (I think) Game has no glitches, still looks skillful, cause thats what it should be.
Then.. Watching sleepz Megaman 2 speedrun on SDA. How can that not show skill. A glitched run of it, i think would show less skill.
If you define a glitch as an "unintended side effect of the game's programing" then sequence breaking is a glitch. I think it needs a better definition than that...
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
I've got to agree with that one. It seems to me that dying in a place that actually saves time for you takes more skill (in recognizing where you can die to save time) than it does to not die and just do that section by "brute force."
And, similarly, I think that if someone has the skill necessary to activate a certain glitch and then the skill necessary to make full use of what that glitch allows you to use, then there's no reason they shouldn't accept that run. I agree that in some cases they should be given separate categories (like the Sketch glitch in FFVI..) because some people don't consider it as clean as just running through the game at full tilt. But there's no reason to deny people like me who are entertained by seeing glitches that do strange (but not horribly unbalanced) things a source of entertainment.
In favor of SDA's rule, though, it's kind of a stretch to say that being good at abusing a glitch demonstrates mastery of a game, especially when the glitch isn't as hard to do as actually doing what the glitch skips. I mean, if someone found a glitch that gave them the Hadoken in MMX without having to earn it (i.e: a glitch that just flips the "Hadoken" flag in the memory.) and then used it to blaze through the whole game, that's not really a demonstration of skill anymore, since the only difficulty involved in that run at all is in getting that glitch to trigger.
*shrug* I think the real problem with SDA's rules in this area is that they have the "broken threshold" set too low. But that's just me.
I guess where they're coming from is that you're supposed to be watching a complete quest through a game, and committing suicide to warp somewhere else probably wouldn't make too much sense in a real life quest.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Joined: 7/5/2004
Posts: 551
Location: Karlstad, Sweden
I disagree, if u learn to do those things u can do with item-1 in Megaman 2 on a real NES I call it skills. I've tried it myself, and I find it extremely difficult.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Glitches shouldn't be prohibited -- they should be tiered instead. Wouldn't it be better if we had a "normal tier" for Rockman, in which the world record could be at around 26 minutes, and a "high tier", which allows glitches, thus allowing a time like my 23:12 movie to be published?
Alright, this is coming from the point-of-view of a big fan of superplay videos, but I have made absolutely no attempts to do super*slow speed/save state/etc*plays on anything...however, I do speedrun games to show off - had a competition with a friend over clearing Dynasty Warriors 5 maps that lasted about a week until he realized he was getting destroyed ^^
Anyway, I'd be forced to agree with quietkane/others in that if you can pull off the wall-phasing glitch from nes mario or the freeze-enemy sequence breaker from metroid, then you've earned the time you save with it since certain things are just ridiculous to pull off...or even find out in the first place. I mean, someone, at some point, had to come up with the idea for this stuff and if you're clever enough to think of something the game will allow you to do without it being intended, then by all means rock it out.
YtterbiJum, on SMB3:
I've tried 20+ times and it always desyncs there. Unless, of course, Genisto meant to die, use a star on the map screen, go in a pipe, and jump around till time runs out.
Meh, I was mainly just annoyed that SDA penalized Marshmallow for falling off the rainbow level in Bomberman 64 after getting the gold cards. What, did we really need to see him wasting his time struggling to get back to the center island when he might have fallen off in the process anyway? Is anyone really going to consider those penalty minutes as real time? If you don't like deaths because they're convenient, just arrange for a run with no deaths at all.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
A lot of people don't like the "you can't die to teleport" rule, since it's really helpful, works in a lot of games, and isn't very "magical". I'm annoyed with it too.
This cuts both ways... if the glitch is really hard but beneficial, there is pressure on the speed-runner to pull it off, and they're going to fail over and over and break lots of controllers.
Another problem scenario is if someone beats another person's time simply by using an extra glitch somewhere which wasn't discovered yet, and the rest of the run could have been worse than the original player. If you disallow glitches, you don't suffer from this problem.. you can only beat someone else by playing better or thinking better (improve the route/strategy), rather than just do some new glitch.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
why not play better AND use the glitch? if someone finds a new glitch but play worse, then the former record holder can just barge in and get the record again.