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And sometimes, we even accept a puzzle game where knowing the answer is all it takes to beat it. Anyone remember this movie?
Excitebike is a starred movie, even though racing games are on the list. We have some good Mario Kart runs too.
And interactive novels: Shadowgate, Uninvited, and Deja Vu are all published movies, the first of which has been improved many times.
Bottom line is: the only definition for entertainment is public vote; if you're looking for a more concrete definition, then you will be disappointed to find that there isn't one. (Artists of all kinds have been struggling with this same question for centuries, by the way.)
Now, if you know what your audience likes and what they are expecting -- that is, if you understand the demographics you appeal to -- then it is easier to tell what will entertain them. Likewise, you can also observe and measure trends of what they do not enjoy. That's really all that the "lists" of bad games and choices are; they are in no way concrete rules, they are a measurement of trends from our audience here at this site.
On this site, we do indeed enjoy surprising things: surprising speed, surprising glitches, surprising puzzle solutions, surprising improvements to existing movies, to name a few. I'm sure even a Chess run could get accepted if, for example, it was a playaround run which used a buffer overflow glitch to transform all pieces into Queens, moved pieces off the board, abused horrible AI in laughable ways, and so on. Nothing is set in stone.
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IronSlayer wrote:
It's fun because any half-way decent speedrun of SMB3 is fun.
That is a strange opinion. The TAS being somewhat entertaining doesn't count because the game is somewhat entertaining? Last I checked, players at this site strive to find games that make entertaining runs.
As for me, I'm voting Meh; minimal presses is a cool puzzle to figure out, and it is quite interesting to watch at times, but it just doesn't seem like it belongs on this site, at least until the site changes its rules to allow for more special challenge runs with "arbitrary rules".
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For me, the most irritating part of TASing is not being able to figure out one or more aspects of why the game acts the way it does.
For instance, not being able to find a specific value in RAM. Perhaps the value is a 2-byte integer or a 4-bit nibble, and doing a simple search doesn't help very much.
Or worse... not being able to find a specific rule in RAM. Such as: why does an enemy turn right sometimes and left other times, even though his data structure doesn't change? Do I have to step through the AI assembly? Where the hell is that? GAAH!
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Dacicus wrote:
Can you back this up with evidence? I have always thought they were implemented to slow you down so that you don't rush through the game "too quickly."
I cannot, in part because I can't find the article which originally made the assertion. But it's more of a philosophy for you to test for yourself the next time you are playing through one of the older RPGs, examine your motives for playing and see if you agree with it.
Using the example of Dragon Quest, I remember that the game progression wasn't based on EXP so much as it was based on gold. My exact frame of mind for playing through the game went something like this:
> So I found a new town. The blacksmith there is selling this awesome new chainmail armor that I totally want, but I don't nearly have enough gold for it. Guess I'll come back later. (Here is the typical strive for greater strength which is characteristic of RPGs)
> Hmm. The monsters around here are not dropping nearly enough gold; it's going to take me years to buy that armor at this rate. I wonder if there are any tougher monsters I can be fighting to make this process go faster? (And thus, I am driven forward to find new parts of the game)
Your mileage may vary, but the philosophy seems to agree with my own personal experiences.
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IronSlayer wrote:
I think the most rewarding approach might be to treat achievements as "suggestions". Some achievements I find interesting, and obtaining them really forces me to push my skills to the limit and get more out of the game. Other achievements are brain-dead and repetitive and thus, I simply ignore them.
This is my opinion as well. Sometimes, you'll look at an achievement list and see something like "Beaten the death gauntlet without using the rocket launcher", and you will realize, "Wow! That actually sounds quite fun, you'd have to be really strategic to pull that off, I think I'll give it a try." If the achievement wasn't there, you would have considered the game complete when you finished the death gauntlet for the first time, and never even considered such a self-imposed challenge.
Now, you might say, "Why don't you just put it into the game proper as a challenge mission? Why does it have to be an achievement?" Because, well, there's no real reason to. Your own goals will always be in your head, whether or not they match what is in the game, on the achievement list, or on some text file you found on the internet outlining fandom-created self-imposed challenges. In the end, they're all the same.
Warp wrote:
To be fair, though, I often get hooked to things that most other people deem boring. One prominent example is level grinding in many RPGs. (If it's well done and the awards are just right, it can be really addictive.) I do understand perfectly, though, why most people find it boring, so it's not like I blame them.
Ah, another fascinating topic.
I read a very interesting article about level grinding a long time ago, shame I cannot find it again. But here's the gist of what it said: RPG stats were first used in tabletop games before they appeared in video game format. In tabletop RPGs, all those numbers were not actually gameplay mechanics so much as they were storytelling mechanics. Dice rolls and character sheets gave the interactive story universe a reasonable sense of consistency above and beyond just "let's pretend", and also helped to balance the story to make it more interesting and keep all the character actions in line with their in-universe ability. Case in point, you wouldn't commonly see players "level grinding" at a tabletop RPG, because that wasn't the point. And if they tried, the game director would probably keep them from getting too powerful.
When RPGs became video games, experience points and stats were turned into a game mechanic. However, they had an ulterior motive aside from just "slay more monsters, get stronger". See, oldschool RPGs such as Dragon Quest had a free-roaming open world design -- no stages. You didn't see things like "World 1-2" as in Mario games, because the game progression was open and nonlinear and you could choose wherever you went. Even older games like Rogue had a certain open-world elements like this, as you were allowed to go down stairs to revisit areas you've already seen. However, gameplay still has a very clear progression due to the EXP systen. Ready for your mind to be blown? Higher stats and character levels aren't there so much for the sake of making your character stronger, they're there to make parts of the map more boring, giving you the inkling feeling that it's time to move on from your starting point and press into new areas of the game. It's a subconscious cattle prod to go to the next area. Voila, now you have "Levels", in a game that has no "Levels", and they're ironically called "Levels"!
Unfortunately, this design philosophy didn't make it very far past the oldschool RPGs, as gamers soon found that level grinding was strangely addicting, and game designers began to design their games around it. Missing the entire original point of leveling mechanics, they find themselves faced with this question: "How to make it so that parts of the game don't become boring? We want to encourage leveling, because it's the key component of gameplay. However, we don't want the character to get so strong that parts of the game become boring. We want all parts of the game to be exciting, all the time! So how do we make our players continually strive for strength, yet never truly give it to them?" Thus was born all those cheap tactics such as rubber-banding enemy strength to match the player, or adding stronger monsters to old areas later in the game, or reducing the EXP dropped by lower-level monsters as you gain levels, or capping your strength based on the area you're in... The list goes on and on, because the original truth behind video game RPG mechanics is simply lost to the ages, never to return--the truth that staying in one area and aimlessly grinding was designed to be boring to give you an idea of what parts of the map you're supposed to be at what time.
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Bobo the King wrote:
As for stress, I don't think anyone necessarily has to turn to popular forms of entertainment to relieve their stress. Physics and mathematics can be quite relaxing for me. There are also creative outlets-- such as painting, woodworking, and songwriting-- that can be stress-relievers. It is only through reinforcement that we come to believe that combating stress requires a passive role.
I do a lot of music creation and writing in my spare time, and I consider it stress relief (although it can be highly stressful sometimes for technical reasons). However, in doing so, I am creating a product which is meant to be passively consumed by someone else. Do you believe that art should be created as stress relief, but not passively enjoyed by an audience?
Also, consider the fact that if I did not personally listen to music, read books, or watch movies, I would have no inspiration, no mental material with which to create this stuff. You cannot make something out of nothing. Inspiration is created by combining existing ideas in new ways, not by pulling something out of nothing. So perhaps art is, in and of itself, harmful to society completely? Or perhaps it should only be created for the sake of the artist, and not for the audience?
We are a pretty obsessive and inward-oriented community. Bronies have infected every corner of the internet, often to the detriment of our image. We should be concerned about these things and take them seriously.
I'm pretty sure that I can name about ten other fandoms that are larger and have committed more of these sins than Bronies ever have. In fact, I remember the good old days where adults never wanted to admit that they liked Pokemon. I guess MLP has overtaken the role of "embarrassing but trendy guilty pleasure". Point is, people will be people, and fandoms will always be crazy if they get too large. Don't let that ruin the reputations of the respectable fans.
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Kuwaga wrote:
So everybody who refuses to be happy for no good reason has split personalities and is clinically depressed? I see, that convinces me I should be taking more drugs, watching more TV shows and playing more video games indeed. Let's all enjoy this glory and happiness that Western civilization has brought upon us!
Keep in mind that you're posting this in a thread about My Little Pony, on a site dedicated to video games. Why???
But anyway, your philosophy mostly makes sense... except that it seems as though you have not yet learned about the concept of "stress".
"Stress" is a very real thing, it is not just a figure of speech. It is a cycle of chemical reactions which happen in the body that prepare it for imminent danger: the fight-or-flight response. It can happen instantaneously ("OMG, that car is going to hit me! DIVE OUT OF THE WAY!"), but it can also have a prolonged effect ("Ugh, I think my boss is going to fire me but I don't know when" / "Ugh, my term paper is due in a week and I haven't started on it yet").
While the short-term stress can be a useful survival instinct, the long-term sort is almost completely obsolete in our day and age, and can be very harmful to your health, since it takes energy away from things like your immune system to power your sense of focus, reflex, and all the facilities your body has that are programmed to save your life at a moment's notice. Prolonged stress can cause innumerable health problems such as ulcers, insomnia, depression, and heart attacks. Prolonged periods of high-level stress are also proven to chop years off the end of your life.
If you cannot identify the stress reaction in your own life, you have not done enough meta-cognition. Keep up your journey and you will make new discoveries.
Anyway, the human body requires catharsis for its stress levels on a regular basis, just as much as it requires food, sleep, and comfort from pain. This means that pleasure for its own sake is, in fact, biologically justified! Fancy that! This is why we have things like ponies and video games to make us smile every once in a while, release the stress and forget about all those everyday things which "threaten" us physically and emotionally. And it helps when the entertainment is wholesome like ponies, rather than degenerate, like, say, most pop music out right now.
Can you get addicted to catharsis? Certainly. But remember, as one of my favorite quotes goes, "Most human beings are addicted to food", which is completely true. An addiction in and of itself is not a bad thing, letting it get out of hand is what's bad. Overeating may be bad, but starvation is also bad. You've no choice but to accept the addiction and learn to control it.
Likewise, there's no reason to completely remove happiness from your life. In fact, if you do, you are doing your body and mind an immense disservice, and you aren't impressing anybody. Show some skill and learn how to balance work and pleasure, rather than just condemning everyone who likes to laugh at an innocent, colorful cartoon.
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VirtualAlex wrote:
Do you know what the best feeling a video game can give you is? Letting you feel like you outsmarted the game when, actually, you are simply playing as intended. It is a different matter entirely when you outsmart the game and the developers did not intend it.
Okay... long explanation for this one. But since you wrote a wall of text, you can handle reading one, too, can't you?
There are many differences between a child gamer and an adult gamer, but the three most significant are as follows. In general:
1. The older you get, the harder it becomes to pick up new skills. This is due to the brain becoming less malleable around the age of 20. This is a very well-known effect in the education system, and it also applies to video games. It becomes much harder to quickly master new games after your teenage years are over, unless they resemble older games you have already mastered.
2. The older you get, the more money and freedom you have. Children will play a single game for months or even years because their parents will only buy them a new one for Christmas or their Birthday. These are the games which children play inside and out, master, and value. But once they grow up, get a job, suddenly they find they have enough money to buy whatever games they want. A small, dedicated game library of a few dozen games usually balloons into a library in the hundreds, because a grown person will still feel value for gaming and want more of those feelings they had as a child.
3. Here's the big one: The older you get, the less time you have, and the more you value said time. When you become an adult, you have to provide for yourself, and a load of other things as well: work, college, a relationship, a family... all these things combine to destroy most all of your "free time", leaving little room for gaming. But there's also a little voice in your head constantly reminding you that you're mortal and that your time upon this earth will one day end, and that you'd be ashamed of yourself if you wasted so many hours of that limited life accumulating fictional accomplishments rather than real ones. While your mortality may dawn on you as a child, you're usually not as worried because you're still so obviously young and know you don't have to worry about dying of old age anytime soon. But as the years tick by, this worry starts to surface, as you start to realize that a quarter, or a half, or more, of your life is already gone. Your time becomes immeasurably precious and valuable.
So, to recap: adults have more games, which are harder to get into, less time to play them, and a nagging conscience telling them that games are worthless and it's time to move on.
What's a grown-up gamer to do?
Easy: they compromise. They hold their chosen games to certain standards, and look for value in them. Not just entertainment value, but long-lasting, significant, lifetime value, the same value one looks for in work or hobbies -- value which can mentally justify the time spent on video games, value which can be put on their proverbial résumé. Any games in which they cannot find this sense of value, they discard and ignore as pointless and boring.
So, what values are these which adult gamers look for? Again, there are many, but two which are most important by a landslide:
1) Contribution value
When you examine a game for contribution value, you ask yourself these questions: "Am I naturally talented at this game? Can I pick it up more quickly than other people? Can I impress other people with my knowledge and skills? Can I hold my own in competitions? Or can I play the game more creatively than other people? Can I contribute something to this game's community or the culture surrounding it?"
You'll garner much more enjoyment from a game if you feel that you are naturally talented at the game, that the game is easy to you but hard to other people. Some game developers have picked up on this particular trend, and are crafting their games to make the players feel that they are talented, when they really are just normal players. This is the effect you're talking about in the original post, as well as the most important factor in determining a game's popularity over the long-term.
See, it's not that you're outsmarting the game, it's that you're outsmarting all of the people whom you envision to be playing the game "normally". These could be real people, or just projections in your head, but these are the people you work to impress with your skill and dedication to the game, and this is where the true source of the fun comes from. As someone from Activision was recently quoted as saying, games are like relationships. If you feel that you're skilled at a game, that you can play impressively or uniquely or with mastery, that you can achieve and outlast where others would falter... you feel that the game is "yours" in some way, and that you are contributing something new to the game and its existence. You are effectively in a rewarding relationship with the game.
If, however, you feel that you have no place among the game's community of players, that you cannot do anything new and that you can never measure up to the masters, you will soon realize there is simply no more point to trying and the game will cease to be fun. The value in it will be lost, and thus your interest.
The TAS community is a good example of this. We as TASers strive to bend and break games in ways that have never been done before, contributing our parts to the games we play. There is no point in TASing a game unless you can beat the record, right? Nobody creates suboptimal TASs for fun, right? (Well, unless it's a playaround run, I suppose, but those are groundbreaking in their own right). The point is, we are all here to be contributors and to make groundbreaking entertainment for our audience, and so our hobby of TASing is sustained, as we feel competent enough to do justice to the games we play and make entertaining, technically incredible movies nobody else would make.
2. Experience value
Failing the above case, the adult gamer has a second way to justify their hobby: they tell themselves that their games are important life-experiences, significant accomplishments, and cherished memories. That they are somehow becoming more intelligent, more skilled, and all-around better people because of the games they play. This is fine and all, except for one small problem: experiences, accomplishments, memories... these are all things that are typically most valuable when they are in the past. Thus, for a gamer who is playing a game to feel proud or accomplished, the reward is truly in the destination rather than in the journey. These gamers may not have anything against the games they play, but they want to put the games behind them as fast as possible, so that they can move onto all those other games in their library, or to other real-life important things their conscience tells them they should be doing.
These are the gamers that care about achievements and hundred percent completion. In fact, if one achievement or objective is perceived as too hard (or worse, glitched), it invalidates the entire gaming experience for them, and they will refuse to even start. It's because the entire fun in the game is the feel of accomplishment -- without the end, the journey becomes pointless, and the conscience quickly resents all the precious time "wasted" on the task.
Other times, you might choose to refine your goals, such as "100% completion is too hard! I'll just beat the game and forget about 100% completion". But really, we all start out playing new games with a mentality that we will stick through until the very end... we really don't know when boredom will kick in and we will start seeing the experience as pointless. And even after boredom does kick in enough to take a break from the game... if you were a completionist as a child, as most child gamers were, it's hard to mentally forget a game you haven't totally finished yet! As long as you keep that game on your shelf, it'll continually scream "Finish meee! Finish meee!" until you either break down and finish it, or get rid of it.
In the end, there really is no such thing as "just for fun", to put it flatly. "Fun" is merely the feeling of fulfilling an emotional need. Everyone has their reasons for playing games, whether it's to cure a spell of boredom, or to explore a new world with new physics, or to dominate other players in competition. Anyone who says they play a game "just because it's fun" is either ignorant of or covering up the reason they play, the need which the game fulfills in their life.
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You know what this reminds me of? This movie: http://tasvideos.org/1365M.html
That movie had a bunch of weird incomprehensible stuff happen, and then returned to the title screen, with no ending sequence. But just because the world number was greater than 7, beating the castle counted as "winning" and thus the game was counted as beaten just because an invisible flag was set unbeknownst to the player.
I love both this movie and that one for the sheer WTF value, but you have to admit this one has a clearer ending, because it at least has a "THE END" screen.
Just an observation.
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That was crazy! How about we make a new movie tag, something like "Prematurely triggers credits/endgame", since a lot of these movies seem to exist now?
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Interesting list so far!
I wonder if I will see anything from Dragon Spirit: The New Legend on this list. That's probably the first game my mind jumps to when I think of "NES Games with moving melodies". Legacy of the Wizard also comes to mind as anticipated.
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I don't think this would make a good TAS, but as a playable hack, I rather like it.
I'm effing sick and tired of the fact that all Mario hacks nowadays are the "Kaizo" type. Can't we have one or two that emulate the feel of the original game? Well, here's one. It's a breath of fresh air to me.
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Dr. Mario had a level select screen where you could select any level from 0-20, similar to the one in Tetris.
My thought about passwords is this: if, by soft-resetting a game, your current password is already entered for you on the password screen, then it should be allowed. This sidesteps the whole meta-content issue and essentially constitutes the same thing as normal old save abuse.
Aqfaq wrote:
State D - Game begins again, but the game state is not identical with State A. The player can now load the savegame, which was not present in State A.
This would still hold true.
So my thought is that using passwords is okay, entering or altering passwords, if they are not part of the fundamental premise of the movie, should constitute cheating.
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I just had a laughing aneurysm watching those videos. This is one of the most beautiful glitches I have ever seen.
I think I will attempt to play around with them myself.
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Nice idea, though I'd imagine it will only work for certain types of games. It would be funny to see Mario coasting through an entire level, but not so entertaining to watch a shmup that consists of just moving one pixel left or right when you're gonna get hit.
Also, when I saw the thread title, the idea that came to mind was a TAS that made the player seem like he just didn't give a damn about anything, takes clumsy risks rather than skillful ones, yet still beats the game. As funny as that seems.
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Oh, man.
I am a huge fan of this game, but I almost feel the need to vote No before even watching it.
I mean, really? A "proper" TAS of this game would have NO GAMEPLAY because you could theoretically start off each floor standing on the staircase, right? Yet somehow it's two hours long...
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My life is now complete; I have seen every room and every item in Solstice!
Yes vote, a weak one, but still yes. The any% run was much more mindblowing, this one had some repetition and dead space, like walking into rooms only to leave them immediately... but I was still able to appreciate it.
Good job, Randil!
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I think the answer to that question is extremely circumstantial. If you were doing a "Swordless" run which required the sword to be used 6 times throughout the movie, I can see how that would be considered pointless. But since in this movie, you only need the sword to end the game, then you could make the case easily that watching the first 26:40 as a novelty run is entertaining, even though the last :03 breaks the rule.
Then again, in either case, simply re-tag the movie from "swordless" to "uses the sword as little as possible" and it might clarify the movie's position. It also might serve as a subversion of expectation to new viewers who watch the movie expecting the sword to be used only ten or so times, and then are surprised to see it used only once at the movie's end.
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#5: Run a Lua script that puts the sword in the inventory when entering Ganon's room.
Since the "Swordless" run is technically over at that point, you can say that the "Swordless" run was successfully completed without picking up the sword, and killing Ganon and ending the game is technically an extra provided for entertainment purposes. Pause the encoded movie and place a disclaimer on the screen when this happens, kill Ganon, finish the game.
But honestly, arguing over these semantics is downright silly. Not using the sword is not using the sword, and killing Ganon after the movie's established goal is already completed is fine by me. Without having seen the movie yet, I completely agree with the goal and method taken, and I will most likely vote yes after having seen it.