- Manipulates luck
- Teaches English to Japanese salarymen
Like Donkey Kong Jr. Math this is an educational NES game using a Nintendo arcade port as the basis of its gameplay.
RNG is manipulated just by pushing the A button. I make sure to only get 3 letter words. I chose the OTHER category because it has the highest ratio of 3 letter words.
Noxxa: The Vault rules state that educational games are ineligible for the Vault, and that rule is in place exactly for runs like this. Tiers beyond Vault are entirely out of reach as well. Rejecting.
CasualPokePlayer: Unrejecting in light of a recent change to the rules.
CasualPokePlayer: This is a rather complicated judgement, and a precedent setting one at that. I'll break the factors down here:
1. Is this game trivial?
This game involves solving words by guessing the letters. The amount of letters is dependent on RNG, with a minimum of 3 letters. The amount of letters also defines how long it takes until the letters can be guessed, since each letter has a "petal" which needs to fall down before letters can be guessed. There is a predefined list of possible words for the game to choose from, which word out of this list chosen is also just RNG. Even with the same amount of letters, some words are faster than others, especially words which have multiple of the same letter (e.g. "EYE", "ZOO", etc.), or have letters close to each other in the letter chooser. To further complicate things, this game has multiple word categories to choose from, with Animal and Others being the only ones which have enough 3-letter words to use the entire game (with other categories forced to use 4-letter words eventually). To add even more complication, this game has a forfeit mechanic for words (select the "?"), and you can use this up to 2 times and still maintain the best ending.
Considering all these factors, this game is certainly non-trivial.
2. What is this game's completion point?
Remember how I mentioned "best ending"? Well, the game has 3 different ending cutscenes, depending on how many of the 10 words are correctly solved. 0-3 words solved have the worst ending, with Brutus ("bad guy") getting Olive Oyl ("the girl"). 4-7 words have Popeye ("good guy") getting Olive Oyl, but Brutus "ruins the moment". 8-10 words solved has the best ending, with Popeye getting with Olive Oyl with no interruption by Brutus.
The worst ending seems to be effective to a game over, with the "bad guy" getting the reward instead of the "good guy", and is arguably trivial to obtain optimally as all it needs is 10 3-letter words manipulated, with each forfeited right away (which is just hitting the "?" once each time), so it is unacceptable. The middle ending could arguably be acceptable, but it is moot due to the best ending overlapping in gameplay, with the difference just being one forfeits more than the other (which just reduces complexity anyways), so the best ending would obsolete this middle ending in any case. So a proper completion point would be with the best ending, and optimally only 8 words would be completed with 2 forfeited, which brings me to my next point...
3. Does this submission have proper optimization?
This submission does not use the forfeit mechanic. Given the simplicity of the game, this is fairly similar to not taking time saving damage, which seems to be a fairly major blunder. Outside of this, the movie seems fairly optimized. The 3-letter words manipulated have some potential for further strategic optimization, but nothing overtly sloppy here.
While not using the forfeit mechanic seems rejection worthy in itself, there is a silver lining in this. As I said, this is similar to not taking time saving damage. This can reasonably be extended as a general speed/entertainment tradeoff, as solving the words is arguably more entertaining than just hitting the forfeit button. Now, future submissions are highly recommended to NOT do this, but for this submission, this seems fine.
Given this, I would say the movie is properly optimized with a speed/entertainment tradeoff mixed in.
As I've alluded to within my judgement, there is no way for this movie to meet the Moons tier, if not just due to the fact it was already rejected from the Moons tier 6 years ago, but also due to this simply being a boring educational game. Given this...
Accepting to Vault
Zinfidel: Processing...