Focusing on entertainment has nothing to do with it.
So far no-one seems to have said anything about the find. I can understand HappyLee: he's Chinese, and he doesn't visit the site often, but I don't understand why a question on delaying the publishing hasn't even been considered.
First of all, I don't understand why has it been accepted without the improvement mentioned here. This is the fifth generation of a sidestroller, it hasn't been a terribly complex run in the first place, so every improvement should matter, right? Has the discussion been read?
Is it a demand to TAS from ISO or can it be done with a CD-ROM?
ISO with a corresponding md5 might be preferable in case the disc is scratched or otherwise isn't bit-identical. Otherwise it can become hard to understand what's going on if a movie desyncs.
Sometimes, it will ricochet. The other, an enemy you've just killed with it crushes you (a game bug). Also, you can't ignore the good old recoil kicking you onto the spikes.
Shotgun is far from being the best item in the game just because it needs to be held (also because you can get it very easily (also because you can kill yourself with it (third set of parentheses (a shoutout to JXQ)))).
The jetpack is easily the best item in the game, since it makes ropes completely obsolete. Finding it in the first few levels basically guarantees a lot of money later on. Closely following are the climbing gloves, and the cape.
This is part of the reason I choose Torment as the example. It has very little grinding (unless you want to), very little fetchquesting (unless you want to) and in general, very little outside of the main story you're forced to do. It got loads of stuff to do, but very little it actually forces you to do to further the plot.
That aspect of it I indeed liked, as well as the writing (which drags the game out of a huge "shit, we missed the deadline" pit quite magnificently), but pretty much all the rest was either unfinished, unbalanced, or plain bad.
Neophos wrote:
So the arcade as a platform is generally superior to consoles because the games HAVE to be designed with replayability in mind?
Indeed, this is very often the case. But it rather goes the other way around: the problem with consoles is that quality control is way more lenient, and their users are considerably more lazy. It's a topic for a different discussion, but I'll point out that arcade games had to adhere to a lot of rules that would spell their doom lest a single one is ignored:
1) make the game look interesting, or the customer goes away;
2) make the difficulty balanced, or the customer will become too frustrated;
3) make the game play interesting, or the customer will play something else;
4) make the game challenging, or the player will beat it too soon;
5) remove all the padding from a game, or the player will spend more time on each credit.
It's all pretty hard when a game forces you to pay for each playing session, and every session has to be as short as possible for maximum revenue. Suddenly you have to make every minute of the gameplay worth the investment, something that console developers are not forced to do. In this respect the arcades are infinitely superior to every console, ever. And they're basically killed by laziness nowadays, because the current generation of gamers are afraid of games that take 100+ retries before they are beaten (even though most of us grew on such games).
Neophos wrote:
Personally, monetary concerns were also part of the reason. When you couldn't afford more then one game every second month or so, that one game damn better well be played until every single option has been exhausted.
It might have had something to do with lower standards as well, or the love for challenge (I know I was among the few who opted to beat pretty much every game they received, but nearly none of my friends could say the same). Then again, monetary reasons don't stand the test of time: I certainly didn't play the hell out of some of the last decade's games because I couldn't afford more.
Neophos wrote:
So games doesn't get bonus points for novelty? Many games have had interesting gimmicks or features that made it entertaining, but other games afterwards copied, and the gimmick became standard and not something special in subsequent games.
Well, Treasure's Silhouette Mirage (a PS1 game, iirc) had the novelty of changing the player character's "polarity", but it was barely heard of. Ikaruga (where Treasure applied the same mechanic to a shmup), on the other hand, is known by most of the active gamers. Which of them give bonus points to? To the one that plays better, I guess. Poorly implemented novelty isn't worth much.
Planescape: Torment is extremely story- and character-heavy, it's not a game you can replay over and over. You have to let quite some time pass between each playthrough to really enjoy it. Does that make it a bad game?
No, it rather makes it more disposable; a game that you would play through, probably have fun in process, but then inevitably leave and won't touch until you get chewed up by nostalgia or something. (Don't get me started on the particular qualities of Torment, as it's a game I have very mixed feelings about.)
Being or not being RPG has nothing to do with it in general, the fun of the process still is the thing that truly matters. RPGs just dont usually happen to be pick-up-and-play type of games, which basically means you have less fun restarting, less fun having to do repetitive tasks, and so on. I don't give two shits about plot twists if the game forces me to grind or do a zillion of fetch quest to reach them. I don't mind challenge, but I don't particularly like subjecting myself to tedium to experience short moments which may or may not actually be fun. Which is also why I don't play many RPGs. Torment was actually the most recent one that I bothered to finish (in early 2004 or so). For jRPGs it was Last Scenario, and it was actually fun throughout. Between them there were Icewind Dale 2 and Baldur's Gate, and I stopped halfway through in either, because it started to get tedious. They were supposedly good, but I don't think I'll ever get around to finishing them. Too bad.
Neophos wrote:
Fighting games HAVE to be replayed instantly and over and over to get any real satisfaction out of them. Does that mean every fighting game is a top 10 candidate?
Actually, arcade games are very much built around the idea of per-process fun. There are no clear goals announced, there is little to no "extra content" or other such incentives to replay the game. These games that are meant to be replayed, and that's why they are fun in the first place.
I'm pretty sure it also is the real reason behind the longevity of SMB/SMW/SM64 series, Metroid games, Sonic games and so on: they put the focus on the gameplay process. Historical reasons were a far lesser factor of their longevity.
Neophos wrote:
Games like Professor Layton and Phoenix Wright are essentially room-by-room puzzle games, with nearly no satisfaction from the gameplay after the initial playthrough. The only reason to replay any of them would be the humor (Perhaps not Layton so much...). Does that mean that these are terrible games?
In my book, yes. Obviously you can think otherwise, but I wouldn't think of buying a game I could only enjoy once.
Neophos wrote:
To add to the other currently discussed subject: Ocarina of Time ranks quite a bit up on the ladder if we're taking "historical significance" into the equation, but if compared to current-day adventures (even ignoring the graphical aspect), it's not a masterpiece in any area, really. The controls aren't very good (aided by the fact that you play it with the N64 controller), there's a lot of filler and fetch-questing and there's very little challenge. Majora's Mask, on the other hand... Now that's quality.
Basically, that. You can compare any games as soon as you strip them off their technological form (and respective advances/breakthroughs), because content doesn't age. If a game isn't fun to play ten years after release, it means its true value wasn't high in the first place, and no amount of vocal fan support would change that.
Besides, dig out 100 people who never ever played a video game, let them play Tetris, OoT, Resident Evil 4, Super Mario World and Halo and see which game they rank highest.
It's not as much "which game they rank" as it is "let them beat every game once and see which one they play the most after that". Because that basically consustutes the fun factor of any game, ever: as soon as the plot twists, secret endings, and unlockable characters are behind, the only thing left that matters is, that's right, the gameplay process. And it's not as easily influenced as verbal representation of the said rank, because people pathologically like to convince themselves of things that should be, but aren't there.
I give my vote to Lord Tom. While he did not make as many movies as the other ones on the list his where the ones I enjoyed the most (well, 3 of them at least).
New route in HoD and a broken Aria of Sorrow outweigh the polishment of CotM and running past things in Naruto. The GB games are pretty meh, both of them. Klmz it is!
Sorry, Cardie. :(
Well, if 484 frames of a 491-frame improvement to an already tight movie were found by Zugzwang, I think it would only be fair to list him as a co-author, not?
It's not that there aren't new games. There are lots of them, actually, and even more are going to appear as PS1 and probably even NDS games will pour in somewhere this year. I think it lies elsewhere.
1. Most games that are supposedly good for TASing have been TASed, and they are usually TASed in the first place. Take a look at the current GBA lineup with an average rating of 7.0 and higher. Any familiar titles there? Do they amount to at least a half of GBA TAS library? Most newcomers like games that are popular, and naturally, they'd like to try TASing them in the first place. Then they inevitably find them already TASed and resign their ambitions as soon as they witness the level of optimization involved. Exceptions are rare.
Solution: none. This will happen anyway.
2. Obscure games are obscure. Many of them aren't even accepted on the ground of extreme obscurity that may not appeal to everyone, etc.. Doesn't happen every time, but it does happen. Most people that TAS those are newcomers, btw. The others are named Aqfaq.
Solution: broaden the range of material allowed on the site.
3. The audience is greedy, and is more cruel than the entire judge circle at TASvideos. In a sense that it's the audience that raises the standards too high, not the admins. If a judge can forgive lack of optimization for a first-generation TAS of any new game, the watchers will be annoyed at lack of memory watching, infuriated by lack of frame-advance, but they would praise the insane esoteric frame shaving bullshit to no end, successfully making a point that good TASes should be like this. Of course they should. But in a newcomer's perception, TASes like this are good, and what they can do with their non-existing experience is, well, bad. That opens the gate to every self-depreciating claim out there, like "I won't ever become good at this", and effectively, stop them from TASing due to the insane expertise slope they think they have to climb to make their product appreciated.
Solution: for the audience to be more moderate with their judgements, as well as their expressions.
4. The creative freedom is hindered by the site's current standards for multiple categories. An old, known problem that's been debated to no end.
Solution: adopt one of the gazillion of paradigm shifts in regards to the site's content. Never too late to.
There are probably more of such reasons, and I've listed them once when talking to adelikat and others in out secret tree club for boys™, but I don't remember everything I've said back then.
Top 4 ways of killing a shopkeeper.
1. If it's a weapon shop with a shotgun, pick it up, press shoot+jump when facing a shopkeeper. You only have a few frames before he shoots back, so the distance should be safe.
2. If it's a weapon shop with a web cannon, pick it up, press shoot+jump when facing a shopkeeper, and land repeatedly on his head until he's dead.
3. Shoot a sticky bomb at the shopkeeper (exactly at him) and escape.
4. If a long range weapon or a bomb is present, scroll the screen so that the shopkeeper is about 1-1.5 blocks offscreen, shoot at his supposed location.
Other ways (jumping on the head, directing a boulder at the shop's location, crushing with a block, luring away, shooting bombs semi-randomly) are much riskier, or include some specific level topography.
I almost always try to kill them, though, because it saves me money and gives great stuff to loot every time. I'd even go as far as saying it's easier to make do with the angry shopkeepers compared to playing through the entire game without certain inventory items.
Oh, Dolphin emulates Wii now? That's cool, didn't know about that. I suppose leejunfan777 doesn't have to wait as much as 3-4 years, I'd say it's down to 1.5-2 years now.
