Posts for moozooh

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I agree with 4N6. Submissions like this have too much love and effort put into thm to be called trolling. In fact, this is by far the most optimized SM run to date: I have compared it to the recent published TASes using the new version of amaurea's ghost script, and Saturn gains seconds on all of them regardless of the item set (I can post my findings later if you want). Which is a lot, considering how much effort was put into those. Judging this submission from that standpoint would come dangerously close to trespassing a very socially important rule of judging the run, not the author.
lxx4xNx6xxl wrote:
Also recently on these forums under Super Metroid. I asked Saturn what he was planning next and he said Any% Runs for both Super Metroid and Super Metroid Redesign. So its not like he is refusing to submit his Super Metroid Redesign. Its still a work in progress.
Elaborate please. You mean he's redoing SMR any%? Did SM any% refer to this run or an improvement over T&K's any%?
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feos wrote:
People born free, they do natural things when they are children, then they study lies and other bad behaviour. Thus they need a law. But simple laziness doesn't allow us to stay as free in mind as we were back then. We invent silly excuses to our weaknesses and create false mental reality around ourselves. We create false laws in our heads, which appear not to be actual laws, but our vision of what's possible, permitted. Superstitions. Stereotypes. And those who still are able to dream, to dive into those spirits they felt when playing video or other games as a childs, are gathered here. They still feel warmth and fill their runs and their discussions with it. That totally distinguishs us among other comunities, forums, sites. Some people say this warmth has grown scanty. But hey, WE introduce warmth here, WE keep it. If we lose it, then surely it would grow scanty. But we simply can't permit that, we create it!
Sorry, I still don't understand how exactly it distinguishes TASVideos from other gaming communities. Except the fact that, uh, we don't really cultivate the culture of playing games here. Instead we remember the olden days when we used to play these games... and then proceed creating sequences for emulators to play these games instead of us, after which we pretend it's a superhuman playing the game as we sit and watch. But surely it is not the kind of distinguishing feature you're trying to get across, is it? I'll reiterate: why do you think it's us here who create the warmth of joyful playing while being free from superstitions, and not any other gaming community? Because we break the games better? Well, that's hardly our achievement, considering the power of tools at our disposal. I can also be free of superstitions and fly a plane to become closer to birds and experience the warm sensation of flight, while some puny BASE jumpers continue their vain attempts to move in a direction other than straight down.
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Yes, and as you've just demonstrated, it can be expressed in a single sentence without wrapping the idea into superfluous debate where arguments are ignored anyway. It can also be done in PM to avoid cluttering the topic, if you really care about it. But let's not forget that people are entitled to their own opinion, and you shouldn't be insulted by their differences or the means of their expression.
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Dudes, stop it. This is so not worth fighting over. :V
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feos wrote:
Oh wait, I put it all here firstly not to make it suitable for a newspaper, but to share my own thoughts, to discuss the inspiration itself! The spirit of TAS.
The main issue with this essay (which I believe to be the correct name for this body of text), as I see it, is that the author himself is so inspired by TASing he gets caught up in it completely, glorifying the phenomenon and praising the people involved to the point of absurd. I'm not sure it's worth it to follow the trope of describing a general TASer as a selfless, hard-working wizard of thought, able to solve impossibly hard problems while making it to be the most awesome-looking thing to grace the screen. Because that's simply not true. More often than not it's a story of entertainment compromises, countless hours of grinding or bot work, engaging in practices best not announced during social encounters (unless they happen to be mainly with nerds and gamers, otherwise you're running the risk of not being taken seriously), and yes, laziness. A TASer isn't always being reasonable, as you may notice by the frequent quarrels, and neither is a programmer (it's some kind of an idealistic image that has little to do with reality). It makes for a moderately inspiring read, but is it correct to sugarcoat it so much that it doesn't resemble the actual thing anymore, so that when you start doing it the first time you realize how brutally steep the learning curve is? I'm not sure. I wouldn't do that myself. The essay covers up another very important aspect of tool-assisted gaming: it is virtually devoid of fun of the actual gameplay process; the entertainment derived from it is a high-level abstraction mainly coming from the fact that you're breaking some kind of limit or law imposed by developers by just being very precise, because in real world that kind of thing is ostracized, punishable, or at all impossible. (The other part is, of course, gaining recognition for your work, but we won't touch that because it's an irrelevant can of worms in this case.) One would argue that unassisted speed- or scorerunning eventually comes to the point where perfecting the gameplay sucks the fun out of it as well, but at the very least it is always engaging as it demands your full attention at any given moment. That is pushing the limits of being human. We push different limits, mainly that of what a game allows a theoretical player to do. It is detached from reality; in a way we are constructing a reality of our own ("how it would look like if things worked differently", in a nutshell), but the difference isn't elaborated. In other words, it appears to me as a piece of propaganda that appeals to readers' emotions by singling out and purposefully hyperbolizing the better traits and completely ignoring the rest. I agree with the idea, I don't agree with the realization.
feos wrote:
And I see TASing as a form of ascetic work both on the subject one chooses and on himself.
What do you mean by an ascetic work on oneself? I can't make heads or tails of that sentence. :x
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FODA wrote:
I've yet to see an anime that fares better at storytelling than its manga counterpart.
I have to agree with you there. The only exceptions I know of are manga that was created after the anime.
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I somewhat enjoyed Death Note, but there were two major problems that irritated me a lot about it, both of which are also shared with Code Geass which is pretty similar in the way it presents the story. First is constantly spelling out every little thought, intention, motivation... well, everything really. It dumbs the storytelling down immensely. I know not everybody has the patience or intelligence to follow a good detective story, but you don't have to kill the intrigue outright by constantly explaining everything without giving viewer a slightest chance to come up an explanation on their own. Arthur Conan Doyle knew how to work with this problem; he solved it brilliantly by introducing Watson, a character with intelligence considerably lower than Holmes's but pretty close to the more observant half of the presumed reader/watcher audience. So when Holmes would deduce something really tricky he would usually ask Watson for his own analysis first so that we, the audience, would first be able to compare our thoughts on the matter with those of our equal, instead of being constantly spoon-fed with logical chains so delightfully obscure they feel completely detached from reality... like it happens in both DN and CG all the damn time. My second gripe with DN is writers taking so much drugs coming up with dramatic problems and even more dramatic, almost deus ex machina-ish solutions, it breaks suspension of disbelief in half around episode 17. You think you got me now, huh? But I have foreseen you having foreseen me having foreseen how you thought I thought you thought I would act, so I'll do something different and possibly completely unrelated! *groan* Do the characters read the script in advance, like the Joker in The Dark Knight? Why do they always rely on something completely unrealistic, so that it always feels like they just know it's going to work despite the odds, just because the authors want that? Or introduce new characters at an arbitrary point in the story just to hold everything together? Meh. That being said, if you're up for watching it, I would at least recommend grabbing fansubs by Subbers in the Rye. By far the best release you can find. So what are the cleverer, more coherent story-driven anime shows/movies, anyway? I mean those that have strongly written, engaging story above all, and not just cool characters or unusual storytelling. Given it's mostly a commercial industry that caters mostly to the inane side of the spectrum—that's where the money is—who are easy to please with the cheapest tricks (not necessarily a bad thing if done tastefully, mind you), one has to dig pretty deeply to find gems unconventional not only in style, but also in essence. People often mention Monster and Legend of the Galactic Heroes as some of the best examples, but sadly I haven't gotten around to either of them yet; hopefully I will soon. Off the top of my head I would name Satoshi Kon, and Katsuhiro Otomo as the major brains behind anime screenplays (well, this guy to a large extent, too, but he's virtually unknown). I can't say everything they have made is genius, but it's still ranging from well above average to exceptionally good.
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Why even bring up conceit into this? Are athletes conceited? How about engineers? They can do this and that, too, and aren't ashamed to show it! And it's a good thing they aren't. It's pointless and misguided to even attempt to take sides on this matter. I've written that post in defense of TASing, yes, but ultimately I've ended up creating many more finished unassisted speed-/scorerunning products than anything I've done for this site and its audience. Why? Maybe because the realization of being in the "right" crowd didn't keep me busy! But I digress. Keep in mind that if you want to fit this article in a magazine format, it will need a lot of editing, and I don't just mean grammar. There are logical and semantical inaccuracies all over, as well as sub-par stylistics. Take this example:
"Nah, game, I know you can do more, extremely more than you do now. Let's explore your real abilities a bit... Okay, your own creators never expected you'd ever act like this, ha-ha. And all I'm really doing to you is just providing button presses, which are surely absolutely legal."
A game doesn't do or act on its own, it reacts; that is, responds to the actions of the player. Consequently it can't have abilities to explore; the word you're looking for is possibility. Different words, different meaning. "Surely absolutely legal" is worded in a way that makes a reader instantly doubt your words, because that "surely" indicates uncertainty that can't be offset by "absolutely". Are you offering some forbidden pleasures to the game (or the reader, for that matter)? Not to mention that the whole quote looks like it's written by an abusive sadist, not a romanticist or a child alluded to later in the text. A child would never say anything like that. Writing is in fact very similar to TASing: it takes a lot of effort to get into as you're bound to make every single mistake there is, and the end product is always a result of many small optimizations, countless rewrites, and thinking beyond the obvious. So voting meh, go back and redo from stage 1.
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Ok, having replayed the original Deus Ex, I indeed need to re-evaluate what I've said about Human Revolution. To put it simply: it tries to repeat or otherwise imitate ideas, concepts, and problems presented in the original game, but does so less subtly and certainly less clever. Which, considering the more limited scope of the story in DXHR and the experience from the original game, indicates wasted potential. Everything story-wise is simpler and more loosely tied together, which is a shame because the gameplay itself definitely isn't worse than that of DX. I'll change my mark to 8/10 for now.
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Voting for a better improvement later on, please pwn this game further. :)
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Ahaha, that thread has the longest post I've ever written. :D Granted I wasn't exactly sober when writing it, but still, wow. I guess I cared a lot!
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Yeah, that is definitely the case of faster != better.
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"I'm coming as fast as I can!" is so inviting itself for a "that's what she said" joke. Anyway, yes vote for one of the longest-awaited improvements. It did not disappoint.
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Tub wrote:
One last thing: have you considered delaying each room until the *last* sprite exits the room? This might make it easier to follow, and easier to spot the amount of improvements going on.
Wouldn't that interfere heavily with the music? It would have to resync heavily, while using the current method it's just fastforwarded (not the most aesthetically pleasing solution, but probably the simpliest). Can Lua make music play continuously?
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With regards to the Star Wars prequels, I very much recommend watching these reviews by Harry Plinkett that explain in very great detail what is wrong with them as movies per se, as well as Star Wars movies. Actually regardless of what you think of them or if you have even watched them, this is one of the most hysterically funny video reviews I've ever seen. The character is so well-done, the editing is excellent, and how he rags on the most inane things is very clever even if the language he uses is deliberately low-brow.
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And nothing bad about that, trust me. :)
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I have no idea what's going on there. :D Care to write it out in detail?
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Unbelievable, it's beaten again. :D The King is dead, long live the King!
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You mean a playaround? Well, if it's more entertaining than 100% kills, why not... But I'd actually strongly suggest considering the arcade Gradius III. It's not only harder, it also looks better, sounds better, and has less lag.
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Do you mean downloadable encodes, or streaming (YouTube and others)? Downloadable videos are captured at original resolution, so there is nothing to filter (filters are only applicable when you scale).
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Maybe not everybody possesses a fluent grasp of English, eh? The rules aren't written in his native language either.
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From the rules: "Under special consideration we might allow movies that play a single level only or a part of the game only." How are you going to have any special consideration cases when a submission is speedy rejected as you're requesting? This should be a subject to normal judgment procedure (and rejection if necessary).
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The dread of going through the argumentation challenge to convince judges to get this on the site as a yet another category. :)
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Warp wrote:
This might be possible to alleviate if a grouping of runs of the same game were ever to be implemented. They could be organized into subgroups based on the "relevance" of the run. We could have the "main" runs (eg. the "main any%" and the "main 100%") and then "secondary" categories (which might get their own subgroups depending on what they do).
It was solved pretty elegantly already back then. In any case this is a perfectly solvable logistical problem that has little to do with entertainment or viewers. We are not scaring anybody away by having more categories; if anything it's the opposite. Then there are just guys like Saturn and arukAdo who just like to work on a single game for whatever reason, and this allows them to go wild on it (like these two already do anyway, by the way), no holds barred.