I say who gives a shit? As long as the run is fun and entertains, who CARES what it's labelled as? Some people will always be anal about certain things and this is one of them. I watch stuff here, I enjoy it. I watch stuff at the SDA, I enjoy it. It'd be nice if more people could do the same and all the whining and bitching about the whole subject could just go away.
Being that THAT is never going to happen:
Speed Run: Played on a real console without aids.
Time Attack: Played on an emulator with slow-down and rerecords.
That isn't hard to show people, is it? Hell, make links out of the 'Speed Run' and 'Time Attack' portions, linking to the SDA/Bis' site.
In the end, it's one big slap fight, with each side always having at least one guy trying to attack the other for how it functions.
who gives a shit? You know that already small number of the gamers that make competitive speedruns? Well take the even smaller portion of that group who have never done anything in speedrunning worth mentioning, and there's your answer. They can't reason, so they bang the table!
Welcome to angry speedrunner world, where you'll find logical fallacies such as:
Slippery Slope: Don't make time attacks. If you do, soon all speedrunning will become unpopular. Then, we'll be spending all our time submitting cheated runs as records!
Attacking the Person: "Disregard Bisqwit and his Nazi Goons"
Begging the question: Time Attackers cheat. Since WE are not cheating, it follows that we are playing fair.
Hasty Generalization: Someone submitted a cheated run to Radix. This proves that all Time Attackers are cheaters!
Appeal to Popularity: of course everyone knows that games have built-in rules that time attacks violate.
And Much More!
Joined: 3/29/2005
Posts: 229
Location: The boonies.
Don't we have people here who have done both? (Authored a Time Attack and a Speed Run, that is.)
If not, I could see about submitting a Speed Run for Megaman X6. :p
To be honest, I don't see why it matters to them. They're video games. What kind of person needs to defend their ability to play a video game? (With the possible exception of multiplayer ones, but still....)
The standard term in the speedrunning community for what we are doing is tool-assisted speedrun. This is a common term. Just see for example http://www.doomworld.com/tas/main.shtml
Tool-assisted speedruns of games like Doom are quite common, as we can see from that site. It gives an example of how TASs are a normal variety of speedrunning. Do you see anyone shouting "fake!" there?
Could we finally please stop using the term "timeattack"? I don't know where this term comes from (did Morimoto use it for the first time in this context?) but it's just not accurate enough. I know that "tool-assisted speedrun" is longer, but it is more accurate and, most importantly, a standard term.
Joined: 5/20/2004
Posts: 118
Location: Over there!
Quark is even easier to say, and just as accurate.
'Time Attack' is a stupid misused term
It's primarily used as a synonym for 'Time Trial.'
The earliest example I can think of is Sonic CD (1993), but it was probably being used long before that was released.
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1978
Location: Making an escape
Hows about "emuruns"? Short, self descriptive, and allows for the opportunity to have a flightless bird as a mascot.
Or "taps", aka "tool assisted playthroughs"?
And where else is the term "power play" used, really?
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
Joined: 5/17/2004
Posts: 106
Location: Göteborg, Sweden
Tool-Assisted Speedrun may be a mouthful, but it 's what the speedrunning community has used before and it does describe what the difference is between this and a normal run. Replacing 'tool' with emu or emulator might help to make the term more specific, but no need to go beyond that in catchyness IMO.
Also, is the thread long enough to start quoting the relevant bits of Joyce & Shakespeare yet?
the semantic argument over the word "time attack" goes back all the way to the time when this forum was in its diapers. You could probably find the first thread on this topic too if you search the threads. Real competition among time attack makers was almost nonexistent a year back with the exception of a few games, but now it is a driving force. I first heard these runs termed "time attack" on Arc's site. The tool-assisted speedrun term came into wide acceptance here shortly after, and I believe it should stay.