Haha, I've just realized that the main menu selection cursor is a steaming pile of shit, literally!
That being said, voting yes if only for the amazing amount of enemies you've run through.
— Mommy! Daddy! How does Moses's mom run with him through the river?
— It's... uh... it's totally fine, sweetheart! She's holding him above the water surface!
I haven't taken a look at it yet, but it seems that ejection speed (which mainly qualifies the bounce as bugged) depends on the combination of wheel pressure angle and force exerted upon the surface. The reason why they're so rare is that the combination(s) probably needs to be very precise, probably a round (thus, exact) value. My hypothesis is that while a "normal" bounce is a result of the suspension being highly contracted and exerting its potential energy as kinetic in a short time frame, a bugged bounce is a result of a wheel getting a little inside a polygon surface and being forced out with a fixed (?) speed.
Ah, arguing with you is truly a pleasure.
sgrunt wrote:
Let me turn the initial point that prompted that line of discussion upon you, then: What do you consider to be a fast-paced run? I presented a definition earlier which hasn't seriously been challenged, and if there are flaws in it I encourage you to point them out.
There are no flaws per se, because being fast-paced means different things to different people. It may be dependent on anything including but not limited to: rate of actions carried out per second, speed of screen scrolling, character movement speed, enemies AI or rate of attack, required rate of decision-making, and so on. Moreover, in tool-assisted and unassisted conditions these things tend to change, as is often the case with games like Bomberman. What I consider fast-paced is in this sense irrelevant, and I won't even try to come up with an universal definition because I know it won't even work for myself. Instead I rely on a feeling of speed, and that's, while largely indescribable, works well for me.
In regard to this run in particular, I wasn't bored by it, so it's good enough. (I won't rate it highly either, nor be depressed if it's ultimately rejected.) If it were considerably longer, I could see myself being bored, but it's not the case here, so we shouldn't even consider that.
sgrunt wrote:
If you look back at my past track record on submissions of this nature (where I've bothered to comment, at least), I've generally been opposed to their publication for exactly the reasons I'm citing here - that there's little room for technical innovation or entertainment. Games such as Mega Man are a different story, in that there are additional factors at work such as route planning (for the initial stages), weapon selection, and (in may cases) substantial abuse of glitches (a look at the most recently published Mega Man 1 submission being a wonderful illustration of the latter).
But since Mega Man games are at the upper spectrum of entertainment for a relatively simple platformer (mainly due to glitches involved), a valid question would be: should we still publish runs of games that don't allow as much as Mega Man does? Historically the answer to this has been "yes", but what is your opinion and where do you draw the line?
sgrunt wrote:
I'm not referring to anyone else's argument here, and I'm not sure where that notion came from.
From here:
sgrunt wrote:
but as beautifully pointed out above, that's far from the be-all and end-all of technical quality of a given run.
So... whom it was pointed out by, if not Wak or yourself referred to in third person? I should note that OmegaWatcher's request to quote your references would be indeed warranted here.
sgrunt wrote:
If it is a bad criterion, perhaps the page in question needs to be updated. I'm merely citing a suggestion that has been presented there, which, by its presence, nobody has challenged there up until now.
The criterion on the page in question reads "amount of work", not "amount of time", and I hope you agree that the relation there is not quite direct. I also don't see it even suggested anywhere on the page to speculate on the amount of work in the absence of hard data by the submitter. As you know, speculations make for lousy arguments.
sgrunt wrote:
To turn this on its head: if you don't expect that a game is complex enough to warrant more than a modicum of effort to produce a tightly optimised run, how can it provide for a slightly technically interesting run?
Why necessarily a modicum? The amount of work here is relative to the game length, which I hope is understandable. If the game was longer, say 10 minutes, I would expect it to take more than a few days to TAS (but, again, historically it didn't always require so even with more complex games, so I wouldn't use it as a criterion for anything).
sgrunt wrote:
To carry on with your keyboard analogy, suppose I give you two passages of text to type - one requires two fingers to type, and another that (using normal keyboard positioning) uses all ten. Between these two, which requires more technical skill to carry out?
I'm using the entirety of a keyboard, even if not optimally, but the result is the same. If I have no hard time limits that would make typing either using two fingers physically impossible, you would never even tell how many fingers did I use. To follow up the point that brought out this analogy, what really matters is the result. The method is of use for a reference or academic interest, but is largely irrelevant otherwise.
I've [post 275290]already debunked the possibility of this run being fast-paced[/post].
So you've debunked a subjective notion? :) Or did you debunk this run being fast-paced as per the criteria made up by a single forum member who isn't used to arguing or, indeed, using English? Too early to claim a victory here, try somebody of your own league.
sgrunt wrote:
Gameplay here consists of, well, running to the right and jumping occasionally, which explicitly fails the "be varied" criterion, and as [post 275232]I've previously noted[/post], the one glitch here does not alter gameplay substantially from normal. Thus, I don't really see how the run fits any of our commonly-defined criteria for entertainment.
More weasel words and appealing to subjective notions. 8-bit platformers in general require little more than holding right and jumping occasionally, simply by their nature. Even the revered Mega Man games consist of exactly that to at least 80% of their length (that isn't consumed by get weapon cutscenes, boss appearances and so on), which is why not everyone likes them despite the glitching. Yet we publish runs of 8-bit platformers at least once a month without failure, and somehow the argument doesn't crop up too often. Why is that? Did they suddenly become complex? Before you pull the "past mistakes don't justify the present" card, are you going to use it the next time somebody TASes another exceedingly simple platformer for MSX, SMS, GB, or NES?
sgrunt wrote:
I will grant that the run is probably well-optimised, but as beautifully pointed out above, that's far from the be-all and end-all of technical quality of a given run. This run was thrown together in less than two days in response to [submission 3171]an earlier submission[/submission], so I can't really see that any special tool work would have been done for this run, or that a significant amount of effort was put into its creation.
No, that's a bad, bad argument. Referring to Wak's statement here is grasping for a straw that wouldn't even matter had this submission not been controversial. While his words supposedly come from a personal (and likely supported by hard data) insight, they are very very general and hold little weight, so using it to back up your own argument is naive. "Look, that guy says this run is very improvable, so it must be true!" See? That's how your argument looks. Until Wak has presented his improvement, it effectively doesn't exist, and this submission should be judged on its own merits. And saying that a run is improvable is like saying nothing, because any run is improvable and it's not a secret to anybody.
As for the time required to make a run, it's a very bad criterion as well because you have no way to appraise that, and, moreover, shouldn't. People like AngerFist, Nitsuja, JXQ, and other TASers have been known for working extremely quick while maintaining solid quality, and so far you haven't proved it to be otherwise. And keep in mind that it's a 2-minute long platformer. How complex can that possibly be to take more than a couple days of decent work?
sgrunt wrote:
Further, technique here basically consists of "determine which frame to press jump on", unless I am very much mistaken about how this game is supposed to work. In addition, as warned against at the very end, this is a game which is exceedingly straightforward, requires no route planning, and showcases a grand total of one glitch which does not influence gameplay significantly.
You have not only described most of the simple platformers, but also the process of TASing in general. Indeed, it basically consists of determining which frame to press a button on, which in case with platformers is mostly jump and occasionally attack, which, mind you, is used here as well (to pick up baby Moses, for one). That's like saying that your words aren't significant because you type them up with two fingers and not ten.
sgrunt wrote:
In other words, what we have here is a game that fails almost every possible criterion set out by the site for being entertaining or technically interesting. How this can translate into being called "high quality" is beyond me.
Ok, here's some more challenge for you. Do you bring up this argument in submissions that are improvements of already published runs that fail the same criteria as well? Do you also say they aren't high quality and vote No on them, or is this only specific to submissions of new games?
People seems to forget about general optimization over the obsoleted submission. There have been more improvement than just the glitch, and there will be more improvement as well. This game HAS more to offer than just running right and jumping.
I'm willing to place a bet on these words. History has known submissions that were due to be rejected for bad game choice, but subsequent improvements made them quite competitive and not at all embarrassing (btw, I agree with Warp that the old OoT TAS was pretty much the only one I could consider embarrassing to have published on the site).
While I admire sgrunt's arguing skills, there's a hole in this argument here.
sgrunt wrote:
It's not the TAS itself that would be considered shameful. As [wiki WelcomeToTASVideos]noted elsewhere[/wiki] (emphasis mine),
Site mission statement wrote:
TASvideos.org is committed to providing the best in tool-assisted speedruns and superhuman play. Our runs are held to high standards, and only high quality runs will be published on the site.
The run itself is high quality: it's indeed tightly optimized. The play is superhuman: there is absolute precision even though the controls are awful, there's complete disregard for danger, glitch abuse, and all that. It's the game that's bad, but the snippet you've quoted says nothing about that.
Thus, there is nothing in this submission that openly contradicts the mission statement, you're just filling in the blanks using your interpretation of it.
Let's start with abusing all bugs there are and going from there. If it indeed gives too much power we can open up another category with stricter rules.
Oughta be renamed "Moozooh and Cardboard Can't Drop Things.".
Yeah, well, apparently I'm a moderator. It's my duty here to come out and say "dudes, you're being off-topic here, get back on topic please".
Cardboard should have known better than paying your posts further attention, as all it ultimately resulted in was a few more vapid responses which we have an abundance of by this point. One more post not about Duke Nukem Whatever (the game, not the circumstances of its purchase, refunding, and whatnot), and all of the 3DS purchase slice-of-life debate will be split into a separate thread and promptly locked, and I sincerely hope it will not come down to this.
Do we have a deal?
First of all they don't pay you back in cash (but rather allow you to "relocate" it to a different purchase), so your money remains in the shop in any case. I'm sure there are other limits imposed as well. From a consumer's standpoint it's a great business model, though.
May I ask for your posts to have somewhat more essence than expressing a perfectly mundane intention (which by itself is fine, of course) across three separate messages in a row? I know you like talking and all, but repeating yourself over and over is not the proper way to conduct communication. We understood you the first time just fine.
Back when I used to play Mario Party 4, I could get ~152 presses in 10 seconds using that guy's "vibrating" method. Almost every semiserious gamer I know can vibrate like that, so it's comical he would claim to be the fastest with such poor execution of such a common method.
His vibration amplitude is so high he fully hits and releases the button (you can both see it and hear it click), which is something I don't expect from you or any other semiserious gamers™. And keep in mind that 130 hits video was from 2007 or so. 160 he did before you were even born.
Please tell us more about the $153 you're going to spend on a 3DS. If I understood the last three of your posts in this thread right, you took your copy of DNF back to Gamestop and asked for your $90 back, which you then received. Is this correct?
Yes, that's Takahashi Meijin, and he's a legend for his button mashing skills.
Using test sites, or indeed any kind of non-standardized controllers, for this kind of challenges is pointless, as it makes for uneven ground and untraceable abuse.
I think the ratio (good games:bad games) is the more telling thing about a consoles overall game success.
See, this is way too dependent on the manufacturers' policies and content delivery systems. For instance, WiiWare and Xbox Indie Games are the kind of thing that attracts shovelware that would never get a retail release otherwise, and PS2 had no digital downloads of the sort. But, on the other hand, XBLA/XBIG is way more lenient towards [certain aspects of] its games quality compared to Sony's "your game should look worthy of the mighty PS3" attitude, and WiiWare is, IIRC, even more so. Which doesn't say much about the gameplay of the games in question, but rather the initial selection strictness. Consider also the development kit costs that, the higher they are, the more effectively they prevent some of the shovelware titles from appearing online just because the devs can't afford it.
So these ratios are a tricky business, it's quite easier and more effective to just count the good games. If only because, you know, it's those that we play and purchase the system for anyway.
If you count digital releases, then yes, Wii must be the absolute champion indeed. I wonder why is this even brought up? I thought the point was that Wii had too few good games, not too many bad games.
I'm not particularly pro- or anti- any company in particular, but I indeed had high expectations of Wii, and Nintendo made a good job of ruining it with:
— horrendously poor game selection and release schedule;
— not making the controller proper until after three years (and selling it separately as a special fuck-you to those who expected the functionality from the start);
— not using the full potential of the control scheme aside from singular titles, as well as not being able to handle games that could do that (like Bionic Commando).
That's not to say others did particularly better, but hey, at least X360 has a number of decent shmups, so if not for that I wouldn't even consider purchasing it, let alone importing it all the way from Japan. If we were to go by retail exclusives only, all three current-gen consoles even combined can barely compare with, say, PS2's game library.
After all that I'm not holding any breath for the new controller's "potential"; potential is ephemeral while the controller's characteristics — like size and the fact that a six inch screen has to draw power from something — are already quite real. In short, I prefer controls that are simple, precise, and immediately responsive. I prefer not ever thinking about the controller — not feeling its weight, not feeling pain or fatigue from it, not having to change its batteries — let alone looking at it. All the three major console manufacturers, however, seem to be going the opposite direction these days, so there's little I can do.
Although it wasn't particularly interesting, two minutes of this hot running-to-the-right action are many times more bearable for me than, say, 1.5 hours of cape flying in SMW or something similar. Yes.
Aqfaq, never give in! \o/
