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It is games like these that make me wonder what the the color averaged out of all the frames in the encode would be.
Yes vote in all its horrible glory.
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One of these days we'll have to find a way to make Nathan jump without slowing down...
I'm inclined to agree with Darak and Atma on this. The movie was well done, and I'm all for more CoTM, but about 90% of this movie played the exact same as the regular TAS. The only difference is that instead of skipping to a late-game item using one unintended method, it does so by using another. Unfortunately, I don't think this is enough for publication, which is quite a bummer.
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Not to be that guy, but this run feels a lot like a Super Mario 64 16 star submission from long after 0 stars has become common. The question is whether this route has enough unique tricks and entertainment to be published alongside the 47 second and the 13 minute runs, or whether maybe it should obsolete the latter.
As it stands, the run was very well made, I especially enjoyed the little playarounds during waiting sections, they were a nice touch. I'm voting yes for entertainment. It's just I'm aching all the more for a deathless TAS playing through the 'full game' now.
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This run goes to show the quality control we do at tasvideos these days. I bet what really happens is you need to find the secret key on stage 4 to access the rest of the game, but no one has figured that out yet.
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Subpixels are important for games where the character moves at variable speeds and/or speeds that aren't whole numbers (e.g. 1.25 px/frame.)
Your goal when TASing is to not only optimize your regular pixels, but also get as good of a subpixel value as possible.
Some games have glitches that are only possible at the right amount of subpixels.
A few games also exhibit something called "Subpixel carryover", where your subpixel value is not claered between levels. Getting as high of a subpixel value as possible before exiting the levels allows you get a small head start for the next one.
Very interesting. I wasn't aware of that glitch yet.
Unfortunately, I don't see that much application for it in a TAS. To elaborate, the runner freezes time using the stopwatch item before exiting the stage, thus freezing all enemies in the remainder of the game. This significantly changes the way you approach the levels, but from what I can see, there's a few significant downsides to it:
1.To activate this glitch, you need to obtain the Stopwatch in Stage 2 and wait several seconds in the boss area before exiting the level.
2.Despite all enemies being frozen, several of them still spawn in inconvenient locations, forcing the runner to whip them away.
3.The TAS utilizes several damage boosts, none of which are possible with the enemies frozen. This especially means a TAS would have to go "the slow way" in Stage 17 (though you could unfreeze time before that to get a damage boost up to the key, which I believe would be the more sensible option).
The only real upside to the current route I can see freezing the game permanently is that you don't need to collect the Stopwatch to fight the Grim Reaper in Stage 13. Unfortunately, I don't think it's enough to outweigh the cons, as the current TAS manages to deal with most enemies and bosses relatively quickly either way.
Still, it is interesting to see there is a glitch like this in a game, it makes me wonder what else still lurks in there.
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ais523 wrote:
I'm inclined to think that gaining total control should always be a category of its own, and should be categorized "total control" (if it turns into a playaround) or "victory via total control" (if it's just used to win the game, with whatever definition you care about at that point). Given that total control, once gained, can be used to do anything this neatly avoids most categorization issues (the only remaining one is what to do when the total control is gained via a cheat code).
I agree with this. For all intents and purposes, when a game hits Total Control, all bets are off. Otherwise, we'd get runs like this one, which technically should've obsoleted the current SMW 11-exits run. (And even then, it's technically not the fastest way you could've done it, which would've lead us to further complications.)
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I became aware of Ikachan through Cave Story, but never got too far in the game. Nice TAS, I liked the movement, there seems to be a lot of finesse in it. Voting Yes.
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jlun2 wrote:
Edit:
scrimpeh wrote:
There is a bit of wiggle room regarding its exact definition, sure, but the meaning I always assigned to it was for a movie which would use one big glitch or combination of glitches to bypass a large chunk of the game's sequence in one fell swoop.
Explain why Super Mario 64 "0 stars" was never considered to be "glitched" please yet Link to the Past runs are. Are you saying skipping the 70 star requirement isn't a "large chunck" of the game?
The difference between those two lies in the evolution of the 0 star. It started as a 16 star, became a 1 star and finally a 0 star. The original 16 star runs was probably considered "too intact" to be a glitched run, and with lower and lower star counts obsoleting the 16 star run, the original definition still is used.
I would also say the SM64 run is not considered "glitched" because it still keeps some of the game's structure, namely doing the Bowser levels and fighting him the regular way, unlike ALttP, which just skips straight to the ending sequence three minutes in.
Additionally, the terms 0 star, 1 star, 16 star, and so on are well established in the SM64 speedrunning community, with all of them having a very specific route associated to them. This doesn't really apply to ALttP.
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I've ranted on about this issue in IRC several times before. I don't mean to present a full argument here, but rather to sum up my thoughts and have them on record somewhere. I'll try to keep it short because I know I would not read my own rambling if I wasn't me.
I don't know where and when we got the idea that "glitched" was not a valid category name. There is a bit of wiggle room regarding its exact definition, sure, but the meaning I always assigned to it was for a movie which would use one big glitch or combination of glitches to bypass a large chunk of the game's sequence in one fell swoop. A run that instead just contains glitches generally still keeps the game's sequence mostly intact and recognizable to someone who knows the game in question.
The differentiation was made for viewer benefit, because with many of these games, a TAS playing through the game normally was just as interesting as the glitched route, because of more gameplay, strategy and so on in the run. A good example of this are the GBA and DS Castlevania games: Why have a 3 to 5 minute run that warps straight to the end when you can have a 25 minute run that shows off the entire castle? Additionally, a run being "glitched" generally implies the run being the fastest category and faster than any other branch by a considerable marigin, barring things like "NG+" modes.
So with that in mind, while we don't necessarily have a concise and entirely consistent definition of what "glitched" means, I think that most of us have a very precise expectation in our head about it. I've heard the point raised by adelikat that this does not apply to newcomers, but I think that they can learn by simply watching 'glitched' runs and learning for themselves what that term means.
But what about multiple "glitched" runs of the same game, such as with Super Metroid?
The main point of a branch name is to define a movie to give a quickly recognizable outline to the audience. The word "glitched" allows us to get a very clear understanding of what the run is about, but it's not the only one. The same way, you can name specifically the glitch the makes the run what it is. In the case of Super Metroid, one run uses the X-Ray scope to tunnel into the final area early. It could hence simply be the "X-Ray glitch", people familiar with the game's TASing side would understand what it's about - those who aren't would find out.
This brings us to the other side of the table:
Ever since we had a Super Metroid "less glitched 14%" run, I knew we had a problem on our hands. The main problem, as far as I'm concerned, is that most of the movie branches for the more branch-heavy games read horrifyingly awkward now. They also don't really fit established conventions for the most part: The "11 exits run" for Super Mario World has only been the "11 exits run" since we discovered it could be completed faster using Total Control. But why is it the 11 exits run? We could just as well glitch the game into skipping the final level, making it a 10 exits run. The reason we have an "11 exits" run is that before TC, it was the established "any%" branch of SMW.
It's not defined by the fact it's 11 exits. It could as well be 12 exits if the game was programmed that way or it somehow turned out to be faster to complete an extra level. It's defined by the fact it's the fastest run you can get without glitching the game. What does that make the current "" run?
In the same vein, many of the "no X glitch" branches we have were named retroactively as a reaction to glitches that have popped up after those runs were made. It was not the point of the authors to make a run without such a glitch.
I also agree with Meshuggah's statement:
MESHUGGAH wrote:
TASes should be branched individually using the game's (speedrunning) terms and tagged with general things.
This especially applies to games with a strong speedrunning community like, you guessed it, Super Metroid. This allows us to use established terms many people are familiar with already. I think that generally, individual games' speedrunning terminology should take precedence over our naming scheme, regardless of what we end up chosing in the long run.
In the end, you have to consider that there will always be some grey area and uncertainty, as newer and crazier runs, such as the "Super Mario World TC 11-exits" run of this year's April Fools shows us. We will not be able to get an entirely consistent naming scheme out for every movie. Games are just too different from eachother for that. However, our audience aren't robots. What do we need a rigid and perfectly consistent naming scheme for if it just ends up throwing people off who are familiar with the "old way" while being stupidly awkward in some cases. What I think most people have forgotten is that we can happily allow for some inconsistency because ultimately, the runs matter, not their names.
I hope my thoughts were somewhat coherent and followable. I may end up editing this post to add and remove sections and add emphasis later on. Cheerio.
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Warp wrote:
feos wrote:
Tool Assistant maybe?
Urban dictionary defines "tool" as: "One who lacks the mental capacity to know he is being used. A fool. A cretin. Characterized by low intelligence and/or self-steem."
Perfect! Grade A KnowYourMeme material now.