If you were an omniscient God, who has created the universe, including all the nature laws in it, and you have the capability of seeing all the extent of time from the beginning to the end at a glance, and you wanted to give the people living in the universe a message, but you wanted the people to write it, how would you do it, considering that the people are an unreliable medium?
That question sounds very much like "if you were able to and wanted things to be as they are now, would you not leave them as they are now". Thus, I will not answer it. :)
I find it funny that a god would be enjoying looking at creatures as primitive as us, though. We can't even interact with physical things in non-physical ways (well, some supposedly can, but not anything close to reliability), or use our brains to >10% of its potential.
We have God's message, the Bible, but like any message that is 600 pages long and created by an intelligence and wisdom infinitely superior to ours, we rarely quite grasp the full meaning of it.
Setting aside my disbelief, the Bible was written by people; in other words, it wasn't created by a superior intelligence because it had to be "dumbed down" to be able to be processed by humans who wrote and read it, with all the required adaptation of thinking categories, terms, and other kinds of knowledge people couldn't have possessed at that point of time, or ever. The existence of a man-made book as a medium for a god's message sounds like a fundamental flaw by itself.
The second quest has 'invisible' doors. You just run into a wall sometimes where a door would be if there was a door, and eventually you can run through it :)
To think Nintendo would be guilty of one of the most outrageous level design offenses… :)
The thing is, your idea is a glorified speed/entertainment tradeoff that may or may not contain additional speed/entertainment tradeoffs per se. A nested controversy, if you insist.
One might just as well make a run with speed/entertainment tradeoffs without applying any additional labels to it, and have it judged just as well.
But I think the big point behind this idea is this:
Derakon wrote:
Frankly, I say that we need to just allow for more runs, period.
Justifying it this way won't work with the current submission judging process, where the process itself is the main limiting factor. The idea itself, however, pertains to the current process. In other words, not a solution, but a very awkward workaround.
Unfortunately, it's much more controversial than you think. The reason for that is "intention" in most cases where the situation might arise, is completely hypothetical.
For one, you list Super Metroid as an example. Programmers included the "attract mode" cutscenes into the intro, that show various gameplay demos. As you play through the game, new demos appear. The last two batches outright show you basic sequence break tricks. In other words, the programmers knew the extent of allowed freedom very well. That brings the main question: in games with open routes, who's to decide the intended ones? Who's to decide programmers' expectations? We can but speculate on that matter, but that spawns more controversy than it solves.
Another point is using potentially gamebreaking tricks (not even glitches) to traverse the environments without breaking their local rules — but faster. In other words, limiting the use of certain techniques. How to decide which of them should and shouldn't be used, and where/how?
Unfortunately, with the degree of freedom allowed by using tools, it has to boil down to rather arbitrary speed/entertainment tradeoffs decided by author and/or the expert community on a per-game basis, dramatically complicating judging and appraisal of technical quality. Sorry, but I don't see it any less controversial than most controversial ideas brought up over the years of the site's existence.
Your previous idea with splitting the site into two distinct sections (anything-goes result-oriented and playaround entertainment-oriented) was way better, and it actually was a good attempt at bringing controversy to logical minimum.
I'd like to mention that Nintendo's Wiimote+Chuck looks like a really good middle ground. What's everyone's opinion on the mostly unfulfilled potential there?
Funny, but games like Bionic Commando 3D and Spiderman 3 haven't been released on the Wii, because its hardware is too weak to support the visuals. Perhaps the most approptiate application of Wii's controller setup was left untapped due to other — completely solvable in any case — pseudoreason. Ironic, huh? This is one of the most facepalm inducing things of the current generation's game distribution.
That aside, my only real gripe with the wiimote is that MotionPlus's added precision was supposed to be there from the beginning. Had it been like that, the few Wii games that actually tried to take advantage of the controller could have been playable (Red Steel for an example).
Wii just needs more good games that aren't remakes, ports, or sequels.
You're intentionally corrupting your SRAM. I don't think I've seen a run yet that attempts to do this.
Pokemon Yellow (and maybe Green?) TAS also intentionally corrupts SRAM. There might be other examples on 8-bit platforms as well, I just don't know the games well enough.
I thought the goals of this TAS were kinda arbitrary, but seeing that a new any% run will skip virtually everything, it seems like a good option, without having to do 100%. An any% run and this run are enough...
This. Also, it seems like a conventient excuse to obsolete the published OoT run, even though it's in another category (since temporarily having a single category is better than having a tremendously outdated run that doesn't offer any additional content). Win-win solution?
I tried that method some time ago as a part of the testing for a 14% route (there are major energy concerns there at that point as well), but was stalled by the first cwj. Fyi, I tried doing it off the second pillar and at a higher speed (which was the reason for my roadblock). I'm positive it will be faster at least for that route simply because it allows concerving the energy for the rising acid room shinespark a bit later.
Battle Garegga - Stage 5 music, Stage 5 boss music (Black Heart)
Mushihimesama - Final (not the true final) boss
Earthworm Jim (SNES) - New Junk City, Level 5
Earthworm Jim (Genesis) - The Descent (also known as Use Your Head)
Oh fuck yes.
Adding to that, Black Heart is one of the best shmup boss battles ever, seriously.
Symbolic X, if you're advocating direct downloads instead of BitTorrent, that's fine and dandy. But how about you start uploading the existing encodes to archive.org, to help others receive the needed direct links and all? Otherwise the forum rants lose credibility pretty quick, because I don't understand what're you arguing here when you've been already presented with a working solution.
Windows is probably the only OS out there for which each new version is actually slower than previous versions.
But of course, "don't be cheap, buy better hardware"! The universal workaround for software performance problems. :D
Doesn't work that great with laptops, though, does it? However, you may always be suggested to buy a new laptop in this case, either.
I still find it pretty ridiculous, though.
Ladies and gentlemen, bobxp presents you the worst piece of shit ever conceived. Let me tell you a story about my experience with this fabulous service.
Naturally, when following any MU download link, the site tells me the download slots for my country are already full. Like they always are. I have to remind you, I live in a damn huge country. Previously, I managed to "circumvent" this by installing Alexa toolbar for the Internet Explorer and accessing the site using this chimera. I accidentally got rid of Alexa a few weeks later during a system cleanup, and didn't grieve about it, but the story didn't end there. The last time I needed to download something from MegaUpload, I really needed the stuff that was uploaded there, so I had to switch my proxy at least six times, because — yes, that's right — the download slots for my country were fucking full. After that, the speed I got the file with was around 20 KB/s, while it's not even 1/15 of my general download speed. That was the last time I ever dealt with this crap.
I mean, Rapidshare is grossly inconvenient, but this is something not even worth mentioning at all.
I screwed around with one game (ddonpchj.zip) yesterday, and the movie desynced about 30-40 seconds in.
I might have an idea on the reason: I played most of it on 20% speed as opposed to frame advance, but the music always played at its normal rate (huh?). I take it FBA doesn't slow down all emulation at the same time, so there are disrepancies in processing time, resulting in incorrect lagging.
First of all, don't look back at Nintendo. What they're doing is not ideal; it's still improvable, which has been confirmed on numerous occasions. If I were to recommend a decent platformer developer, I'd rather name Konami or Treasure (also Nifflas and Pixel, if talking about indie scene).
1. Anything that can be completed by as much as holding right and pressing jump at irregular intervals is doomed. It's alright only for the first stage or two.
2. Not everything should be simple and intuitive. That being said, things that aren't shouldn't be brick walls, either. It's alright to make the player die once or twice to understand what he's doing wrong. Surprise deaths are bad, though. It's always better to challenge the player by patterns rather than something they can't read beforehand at all.
3. Difficult/tricky parts ("chokepoints") of the levels shouldn't require waiting from an experienced player, since that will just ruin the flow. You have various tools to playtest these. Backtracking is fine as long as you can make it equally fun with each pass.
4. Lack of balance comes from the sudden change in required precision. If the window of opportunity in executing a required action is small in either timing or positioning, it'll most likely be unfair.
These things were available in round form, too!
