NES games such as solstice and snake rattle&roll use an isometric perspective, which is a bit unusual for a tile-based console, and they use it quite well. Of course since the console is tile-based, it imposes some limitations on the amount of usable colors (because isometric "tiles" do not match up with the real graphical tiles of the GPU, and color usage is limited by the latter).
It just occurred to me that I don't remember ever seeing a SNES game using the same kind of isometric perspective as those NES games. In the SNES more colors could be used so it would probably look better.
Are there any such games for the SNES? Even if there are, why they seem to be so rare?
If we do allow movies to take just a little damage here and there but still label them as takes no damage, I think we would get complaints very quickly.
You are assuming that movies can be categorized just into two: Takes damage to save time or does not take damage. Not true. If a video is uncategorized in this respect then it may or may not take damage, but that fact is not of big relevance.
So, if a video does not have a category related to damage, then it means that it does not use damage (or avoiding damage) for a very important effect. It may or may not take damage, but it's not a big deal. However, if the video is categorized as "takes damage to save time" then it *truely* saves significant amounts of time by taking damage. If it's categorized as "takes no damage" then it means that the game is *very* difficult to complete without taking damage, so doing so is a nice feat.
I know we won't start specifying how much damage you have to take / luck you have to abuse before you deserve the category because that's rather impossible. And if we instead leave it to the judges (or all the editors who also are able to change categories), even if we are given guidelines, I think we will have a big mess in no time because everyone's idea of what is "enough" doesn't match.
You are exaggerating. We will not get "a big mess" if people start evaluating the videos better. The site publishes about one movie per week or per two weeks or so. Judging it is not a big deal at all. On the contrary, the informational value of the categories will raise significantly.
Do you feel the same way about dying only a few times and using a restart sequence only once? How about killing just two or three enemies in a pacifist run? It doesn't make sense to me having categories with loose definitions.
Now you are just using troll tactics. There's a big difference between dying and just taking a bit of damage. You can't compare the two things. Stop being such a hairsplitter and just try to understand what I am saying. I'm sick of having to fight with people over irrelevant artificial nuances.
In my opinion the only realistic cut-off point for inclusion in a category is at zero. Just like with taking damage and using death to save time. Otherwise it will just turn into a constant bickering about how much luck a movie must abuse to be included and if this or that game should or shouldn't count. The only realistically enforceable criteria is luck / no luck.
I disagree. If the the "cut-off point" is zero, then the category becomes useless and uninteresting. Ok, the player takes damage and saves 2 frames because of that? So what? It doesn't make the video more interesting to watch. It certainly isn't something I expect when I search for movies which truely take damage to save time. The same with luck manipulation and abusing bugs.
We don't need to go to a point where we accurately specify, in a techincal way, how much is "enough to deserve the category" (eg. by percentages or whatever). It can simply be a question of judgement. The publisher can use his own judgement and award the category if it really deserves it. Some guidelines can be given for these "judges".
If I watch a video which "abuses luck" or whatever, I expect it to be clear and cool and enjoyable (at least if I know the game and have played it).
If not, then "abuses luck" becomes as uninteresting as "the video is 1028 frames long". It's just a technical detail with no real value.
Any download can get corrupted, by the way. It depends on the amount of transmission noise how likely that is to happen. But that barely ever happens anymore these days.
Uh, are you sure? I thought TCP/IP makes sure that no corruption happens (corrupted packets are resent until it succeeds).
Using a more feature-rich text editor is a good idea. Things like syntax coloring and autoindentation are not simply pretty candy but they really are useful and make coding easier. Naturally other powerful features (such as search&replace supporting regexp) are a plus.
The most advanced text editors will show you in real-time if you have a syntax error. It saves you a lot of trouble, really.
And since we're suggesting here, i'd like to have a unassisted speedruns page, but that could be complicated and not the goal of the site. but it would be just a "fun" page. dunno.
It would be basically repeating what Speed Demos Archive is doing. There's no need.
Requiring licensing in order to publish a game for a certain console can be seen as controversial. There are positive and negative aspects to it.
It is my understanding that Nintendo forcing game companies to get the quality license and limiting the amount of games to 5 per year actually caused many NES games to be of much higher quality than they would have otherwise been. Game companies could not earn profit by flooding the market with dozens and dozens of games each year, getting tiny bits from each one, but instead they had to compete with quality of the few games they were limited to make. In practice they were kind of forced to put time in the developement of their games, by both giving them the time (by limiting the number of games) and by creating healthy competition between game houses.
At those times any experienced NES programmer or a small team of them could have made some poor-quality game each two weeks, thus producing over 25 games per year. Instead, now they were actually forced to a longer developement cycle and a tougher competition on quality with other game houses, which resulted in higher-quality games.
In this light it was not only Nintendo who got benefits but also the end users.
One could, of course, argue that it's unfair to have to pay to Nintendo to just to get the right to publish, IOW Nintendo is getting money even though they are not doing nothing. However, if this forces the game developers to make higher-quality games, is that really a bad thing?
If I'm not completely mistaken, he was the first or at least one of the first to get the idea of making a TAS of a NES game, or at least the first one to get such video popularly known.
Controversy surrounded that video because Morimoto (intentionally or unintentionally, we might never know) did not make it clear that it was tool-assisted and most people thought it was a regular speedrun.
HEY! they made the game in assembly, i think the minimalist route to complete the game is at least interesting for them
I don't understand how making the game in assembly makes the minimalist route interesting.
Besides, I would bet that at least some if not most of those games are made in C (with perhaps some inline asm routines).
To me it makes more sense to base it more on who can figure out the optimal path first.
Then with many levels it becomes a question of timezone. Those who are awake and playing the game will have an advantage over those who are sleeping or simply not playing the game at that moment. So the one who happens by chance to get to play the level with the new kicking first gets the jackpot. It's like a lottery. It shows minimal skills and tons of luck.
Is that really what you want?
As it is now, if you are good at kicking all you have to do to steal a record is beat some level using the worst path in the world then you can look how the record holder does it then you can just copy it exactly but kick slightly better. Then whoever figured out the smart path gets no credit.
The correct solution to this problem would be to keep the movies unpublished, not to build a lottery to see who gets to play the level first.
However, do we want to keep the movies unpublished?
Besides I would consider this a fault in the controls, its not intuitive and why would you ever want to cancel a kick?
I have cancelled kicks on purpose (after starting a wrong kick by mistake) even in record submissions. Others have done that too. It's not like it's a completely useless and irrational feature. (Whether it's the best way to handle it is another question, but it's not a completely useless feature.)
Good games have good controls, you do not see Link canceling his sword swing if you move too soon.
Kicking can be a mistake which forces you to restart the level. Swinging a sword in Zelda probably isn't.
When you kick a box pressing a direction interrupts this, this is really annoying if you are trying to go fast.
As I have already saíd several times, it's a question of whether we want to compete on who has the most skill on playing this game requiring reflexes and good timing and finding the optimal path for a level, or do we want to compete simply on who can find the optimal path first.
Certainly if kicks were uninterruptible then the whole competition in this game would be who is the first to complete a level (with an optimal path). Since uninterruptible kicks would make it more or less trivial to get the optimal time, that would kill all competition (unless someone can find a better path). Only the longest levels would have some competition (because long runs are more prone to errors and to path optimization). Shorter levels would just be immediately sealed by the first one who gets to play them. In the latters it would thus not be a question of skill, but more a question of timezone (ie. who is awake at the time the change to the kick routine is made). Is that really what we want?
The optimal solver program is interesting, I am tempted to try and write my own, but it looks like yours is pretty good already so I might just be wasting my time.
The solver requires quite advanced data containers (in terms of efficiency, both speedwise and especially memorywise) and algorithms. You can try if you want... :P
I saw in a computer game shop "Final Fantasy IX" for the PC. It immediately got my attention as something I could potentially buy.
However, at closer examination I noticed that it had the word "online" below the title. This immediately raised my suspicions.
Curiously, the description texts in the back of the packet didn't help at all. They were really vague and I couldn't figure out if this was really the original FF IX with some extras, or if it was just a FF IX spinoff, some kind of online multiplayer version of the game without the original game. The box included two expansion packs, but even their description didn't make it clear whether they were for the original FF IX or for this "FF IX online" version (which might be something different).
Does anyone know? Does it contain the original FF IX game or not?
Btw, how much of a size reduction we talking about here? Is there some kind of figure you could give me?
Well, supermariobros2-timeattackv2-sleepz.avi is an older video encoded with DivX (or the equivalent format created with mencoder, whatever). It's 10:57 in length and the file size is 41MB.
supermariobros2-tas-full-guanobowl.avi is encoded with the H264 format. It's 24:42 in length, ie. more than twice as long, yet it has about the same file size, 41MB.
If you look at the latter at full screen, you will see that the image quality is better than in the former (the former has visible artifacts especially in the light blue backgrounds).
supermariobros2-tas-philc.avi which is 10:56 in length and contains almost the same video (some frames faster) than the first one above is only 17MB big, and the image quality is better.
If you do the math I beat your record by less than 3 seconds with a 5 seconds better route. I'd say you mastered the mouse movement now. ;)
Once you get fluent with the mouse, mouse movement can in some ways be even easier than keyboard movement. There's much less places to blunder with the mouse.
By the way, I notice that when you need to move a box two steps and then immediately move the same box to another direction, you usually kick the box first (if it's possible) and then go to it and push/kick it to the other direction.
However, if you do the math, you'll see that instead of kicking the box the two first steps and then going to it, it's faster to just push it the first two steps.
Kick + 4*walk (2 steps to get to the box + 2 steps to get to one of its other sides) = 0.5 + 4*0.2 = 1.3 seconds, plus some idle frames after the kick (unless you time it really well).
2*push+2*walk (to get to one of the other sides of the box) = 0.05 + 2*0.4 + 2*0.2 = 1.25 seconds, and there's no delay because of a difficult-to-time-perfectly kick.
Actually it's not really my route in that it was not me who first came up with it. I just shamelessly copied xebra's route and beat his previous record by some tenths of a second thanks to the new mouse orientation feature...
Could someone explain me how do you manage to use the mouse for everything in long levels?
For example, in the 6-2 level you used 521 steps, 155 pushes, 16 kicks and 171 block moves, while I used only 511 steps, 153 pushes, 16 kicks and 169 block moves.
Clearly my path is shorter than yours, yet you still beat my time by almost 5 seconds simply because you used the mouse for everything.
How do you do that? I can perform some initial moves with the mouse, but this is only after practicing and memorizing the clicking places ("first I click here, press right, then here, press right, then here, press left..." and so on). If I try to use the mouse on the fly, without having memorized the clicking places I get almost immediately confused and get pauses while searching the correct place, click on wrong places etc etc.
So, how do you do it? I don't get it.
It's a bit frustrating. No matter how much I optimize my routes and how many times I start over because of a tiny 0.1 seconds mistake in order to get a flawless run, someone will easily beat my time with a worse path by simply using the mouse for everything, something which I can't do myself.
Edit: I just tried 6-2 with mouse only and after about the 100th attempt I succeeded in performing to the end without bigger flaws. OTOH this level is unusually easy because most movement is just pushing one box long distances around...
