How about the playaround movie, which has the freedom to show various tricks that are not seen in the speed-movies? What extra would it offer?
There are numerous tricks and glitches in this game that aren't useful in speedruns, but are very interesting, funny, or otherwise noteworthy. The problem with them is that it's quite literally impossible to pack them into a continuous run (because they require restarting a bossfight, or, for instance, grind the game to a halt or crash it completely). There's lots of material for such blooper reel, but no-one has ever put any serious effort in stuff like that. But it's certain it won't work as a single continuous movie at all.
Aqfaq wrote:
Has anyone attempted a pacifist run? What is the lowest theoretical kill count? It might not be interesting, because the enemies are already quite weak against the TAS player, so avoiding them is probably easy. Anyway, for me it is initially a more intriguing concept than the 14% run, but I don't know the game well enough to imagine what the pacifistic movie would look like. Maybe lots of time would be wasted, because of the reduced amount of item drops from enemies. What would be the tricky parts, if killing enemies was disallowed?
The tricky parts would be using powerbombs, and getting refills. Basically, one would have to get more items than it is necessary, just to not run out of them. Nothing too interesting, from what I can tell.
Aqfaq wrote:
Also, a no-damage run would be quite different from the current categories, because all of them use damage boost strategies very extensively. Right?
Right. But I don't expect it to be very entertaining, just because Super Metroid has one of the best damage boosting system in existence (closely followed by Metroid 2 in that regard). Throwing it out is like throwing half the fun out of a speedrun.
Aqfaq wrote:
A missile-only run / no beam weapons run? Is it possible? If not, what is the least amount of beam shots needed?
Possible only with at least ~35-40 items collected, due to the first and second phases of Mother Brain fight combined (which takes LOTS of super missiles, and then some powerbombs to finish the job). Won't be true no-beam due to the plot, though. Refilling will be tough.
Aqfaq wrote:
100% kills run: kill every enemy in the game at least once while completing the game as fast as possible? This would require a very different item planning than seen in any of the other movies, right? And it would be a very action-packed run, I assume?
Quite the opposite: the game has tons of respawning enemies within the rooms, and the normal enemies respawn when you re-enter the room as well. Some are only killable with obscure stuff like screw attack. Just won't work.
This run shouldn't be compared to SMW small-only. In fact, a proper run for comparison's sake would include a suitless high% collectathon, kind of what the unassisted runners did with NBMB before the way to bypass Mother Brain and the statue was discovered. The highest percent at the time was 73%. Not sure what it is now. So if we take that run, include killing all the bosses, and collect all the items available sans Varia/Gravity suit, that would be as close to SMW small-only as possible. In fact, this is pretty close to what RBO is, if you think about it (except RBO doesn't focus on collecting every possible item).
*hasn't watched ANY of the Super Metroid runs, so who the crap is he to say anything?*
Well, this is exactly the kind of situation I would like anyone to avoid at all costs. There's zero use in arguing without having watched everything that pertains to the subject of the argument. I thought you'd know that.
The complete lack of any item is obviously visible up to the point of acquiring that item. :) There would be no way to ever differentiate Super Metroid runs if we judged them by the first five minutes of gameplay.
Heh, Fabian might be right in many respects, but it's not yet certain the situation is really that bad. In other words, it's indeed not the time to jump to conclusions. But seriously, even if a man has a girlfriend/fiancee/wife, does that stop him from having conversations with any other females he has known, or making new female acquaintainces? Seriously, does that? No, it doesn't, and never did. So should we expect girls to be different?
Reportedly, confidence and trust are among the main traits women are looking for, and it also means you should consider solving your problems if/when they arise instead of letting the situation gradually degrade together with your mental health. Girls expect their boyfriends to be the men they could rely on, not martyrs, so don't act like one.
But tell me, if you have a backup plan of sorts, in whatever area of life, does having that plan actually mean that you're considering actualizing the plan? No, it just means that you're _prepared_ for it, _if_ it ever becomes necessary to actualize it.
Bringing it up another notch I see. I think it is nice that you are still able to actually surprise me with your behavior, I honestly didn't think that it could be done anymore.
Oh, how could you. Saturn is trying his best to open your eyes, but unfortunately, you still aren't able to see the full extent of his arrogance.
Huh? You just point the installation CD to the same drive your system is on. It will ask: "There is a Windows installation on this drive, blah blah, continue anyway?" Do so. That's it.
I thought obvious recommendations are also to be included. When I first came, I wouldn't have looked for Mario 64 had it not been starred. And then I saw the 1-star run which astounded me - I'd never thought such things were possible, let alone the more recent efforts!
Though game X may be a popular game and you think people will look for it, I think it should still be starred, depending on run quality. Seems better to include an absolute gem that most will have already seen than to have a minority miss out on a highlight.
And from what Bisqwit says, these are meant to both be recommendations for newcomers and also a checklist of 'have you seen this?' for older folk.
That makes sense, but only for games where tool-assistance is prominent. If we take games like SMB or SMB 3, where most tricks are the same as in the up-to-date unassisted runs of the same games, the factor of tool-assistance is considerably less prominent. If you take an uninitiated person and show them the current SDA efforts, they'll be surprised just the same, because they likely wouldn't immediately see the difference anyway. SMW, on the other hand, is different at least because the preferred methods of traveling there are visually different (hopping, 1/1 swimming, and so on), and spotting this aspect with a naked eye takes little to no effort. SM64 takes it so much further that the runs are not even close to each other. It's, as you said, surprising because the TAS does things not thought to be possible in this case.
Thus, I generally think it's a good idea to give the most prominent examples of TASing priority over the most prominent games that have been TASed. All while adhering to the guidelines mentioned by Bisqwit, obviously.
But of all things, the recommendation should not work as a double for the top entries of this list, or the whole idea won't make sense at all.
Btw, do we all agree that the stars should signify not-completely-obvious movie recommendations aimed at newcomers, and not anything different? Just to be sure we are all on the same page.
I highly doubt that the fragmentation introduced is anything significantly worse than standard fragmentation.
Well, let's put it like that. Fragmentation occurs becase the data is written in separate chunks to efficiently fill the available space. Every time you or some external process delete or resize a file, a gap occurs. The drive performance decreases almost exponentially when the free space diminishes because every file is cut into hundreds and thousands of small chunks that fill the gaps in every remote part of the platter, increasing the amount of physical operations with each read or write operation (and thus, wearing out the drive's mechanics). With partitioning you artificially cut the space in half, making the drive suffer twice as much if both partitions are low on remaining space. It is, of course, not a problem if each of your partitions has 15-20% of free space, and you defragment them regularly, but that might be hard to maintain, especially in case with a laptop. It's harder to maintain and defragment multiple partitions like that, for sure.
Partitioning helps mainly against file system faults, and also when you need to format the OS partition without having to touch the rest of the files.
On the other hand, more partitions = more fragmentation. And fragmentation usually shortens the life span of a drive dramatically, which is something to consider.
I actually like your idea a lot, because it will make those who care participate without knowing for sure whether their choices will affect anything, making the whole process more honest. But knowing Bisqwit as much as I do at this point, I expect him either to consider/cater to every opinion presented (casting it into the abyss of statistics), or allowing his own opinions to interfere with choices. :P
