I already have SMB and Jamestown as well; as far as I'm concerned they're the only two games worth paying for on the list (YMMV).
Cave Story+ is a child of a concept that generally pisses me off to a considerable extent, so I won't buy that one on principle.
I'm sure it can be done with any sufficiently fast projectile (most of them accelerate indefinitely) if conditions are right, but I can't remember offhand if there's a single door behind such an obstacle that opens slow enough the player actually has to wait for it.
Well, thankfully, we're not going to deal with I/O bottlenecks at the rates we're using. On the other hand, I'm honestly surprised it's --keyint, and not --b-pyramid or --bframes 16, or anything else like that, slowing down playback on Flygon's machine. </drunkposting>
in fact, fewer key frames would, in principle, speed up playback
What would be behind that principle? Keyframes should require less processing power—in principle!—because they are complete images that don't require information from other frames. An all-keyframe stream is compatible with any device, while most of them pose limitations on the amount of consecutive b-frames, as those are the most computationally intensive.
If you native language is not english, and you are giving it your best shot, I do not care. If you butcher the english language, and its your native tongue, I do care.
What upsets me is when people keep making the same mistake that renders the meaning of their words ambiguous, and when you try to point their attention to it, they take a defensive stance, "yeah yeah, nobody is perfect, sue me". And then they continue making that mistake.
agwawaf, I believe you're taking the idea of rating very seriously—more seriously than it deserves and more seriously than it makes sense.
Everybody has a different idea how and why to rate movies, how to appraise technical quality, and so on. For instance, I use it as a personal catalog of movies I have watched, to be able to tell at a brief glance which movies are my favorite, which ones I believe to be improvable, and which ones I find boring. And yes, I also change ratings over time (retroactively) to a lower value when an improvement comes around, if I believe it made the older movie look worse in some way—this is often the case with optimization-heavy games like Super Metroid.
I don't think anybody has got a personal grudge against you so as to purposefully downvote your movies. Again, don't take this too seriously. And, what's most important, always be above petty vengeance.
In order to create a good "low-glitch" category for the game, I'd suggest banning zips, but also sprite ejections that eject Sonic out a different side of the sprite from which he entered (unless the sprite is destroyed in the process).
Yes! This is exactly what I had in mind with my proposal of respecting solidity.
The point isn't that the particular glitch is bad or anything, it's that the rest of the run sets a certain flow that is, in my and other people's opinion, badly interrupted by such usage. The run is coherent with the goal choice but incoherent stylistically; had such major ejection glitches happened more often and spread evenly in the run, it would be more coherent (but wouldn't be low-glitch anymore, imo).
Unfortunately it doesn't work as intended here: speed changing controls don't change anything. I'm on Opera 10.60 beta, got the same result on Chrome at work. I'm wondering what exactly is wrong.
Can we please not degrade the discussion into sophistry? Arguing what was or wasn't intended is pointless. We should be arguing what is or isn't a suitable goal or a suitable way to conform to that goal.
Hmm, the last two levels were head scratchers alright. They looked... out of place, even though goals were not violated. I am unsure what to vote, because the run was definitely cool, and it set up a very good branch as well, but these glitches are significant enough to break two stages, and they still leave the category open for more abuse in the future if more applications are found, thereby defeating the purpose somewhat.
Maybe we should discuss this is greater detail.
So far I see two more or less feasible solutions:
1) respect this goal choice and base the branch around it;
2) reformulate the goal choice so that glitching similar to SBZ2/3 is forbidden, but the rest of the gameplay stays.
For #2, I propose a goal formulated as "respecting solidity": if a terrain or an object are solid, don't go through. As far as I remember, although spikes deal damage, they aren't solid—is that correct?
I wholeheartedly support the goal choice; will watch the run tomorrow, but I'm sure there's nothing in it that'll prevent me from liking it. Please consider do the same for other Sonic titles (any of them will do).
I'll try rephrasing the footnote.
Btw, as pointless and overly complex as it is in the normal game, 100% map coverage may actually become an interesting goal if one were to start the game with all items. It would avoid item acquisition fanfares and would showcase rooms one doesn't normally visit in a speedrun (or at all).
Remember, first TASes of Contra were 11:30+, and they were considered entertaining.
When I was a little kid, I considered playing TMNT and Felix the Cat entertaining; I don't anymore.
What I want to say is, I'm not against your ideas per se, but I do think the solutions you've proposed either overcomplicate things (#1 and #2 are disconnected from the general viewing experience, as they require the viewer to monitor RAM to verify adherence) or have fuzzy goals (#3, "clear connection" is hard to define, as there is always some kind of critique that emerges in any case).
#4, albeit defined a posteriori, is "don't actively kill, but don't prevent collateral damage either", and it is the only goal that is both unambiguous and easy to monitor. It has no internal conflict, but it does have an external conflict with your desired definition of pacifism and your desired increase in the amount of playarounds as opposed to pure speedruns. I'm not critiquing the notion; in fact I support it, but I'm just not sure it makes much sense with a game as simplistic and straightforward as Contra. Many of the more complex games actually do have playarounds and non-trivial goal TASes published; maybe you should rather open up a thread asking people for interesting playaround goals/ideas for games with(out) published speedruns? Or, well, maybe do some yourself—you're a proficient TASer after all.
