Posted: 3/13/2010 10:42 AM
(Edited: 3/13/2010 10:57 AM)
Post subject: Rules about game settings
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henke37
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Joined: 3/10/2010
Posts: 899
Location: Sweden
The rules says that games should be played at the hardest difficulty, but that is it. However, games has a lot more settings than this. For example, there is the question about how many sound channels should be used. Plenty of soon to be ok games supports surround sound. Then there is the matter of PAL games and their refresh rate, some gives you a choice about 50 Hz or 60 Hz. Clearly 60 Hz gives shorter movies in realtime, but only if the game does not scale the gameplay to match. These additional frames can also cause less or more lag. Continuing on the PAL games, they often offer multiple language choices. While we already have rules about Japanese vs English, what about things like German? Text may be shorter and/or longer in different languages. And then we have backwards compatibility (as in playing the game on a console newer than it was designed for), different game version numbers and cross platform releases. It is supposedly the same game, yet it can have different glitches and so on. Should we use the latest version of the game? Any version? For example, there are different glitches in Metroid Prime depending on the version. As for more vague things, there is things like particle intensity and the shadow intensity. These can also affect lag in some cases. In the end, these things may not look like they will affect normal gameplay, but we can hardly call ourselves normal can we? I believe that we need clear rules about these options as well.
Posted: 3/13/2010 10:54 AM
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Flygon
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
What the problem is in my eyes is that, quite simply, the rules are too strict for trying to mold everything into one single, for the lack of better term, category. I'm actually semi-surprised that the concept of allowing multiple languages for TAS's hasn't actually been allowed provided that they be published in separate sections according to language. I'm pretty sure this could also help solve some fan translation debates. Some of us want Mother 3 in English and some of us want Mother 3 in Japanese.
Posted: 3/13/2010 10:54 AM
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Warp
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Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
I think there's a rule of thumb which helps deciding on most of those issues: Maximization of entertainment. Given that we are slowly reaching the point where we can TAS games which have different graphical quality settings, I think that the most obvious rule of thumb is to maximize visual quality, unless there's a very good reason not to. (Most modern games don't become slower with this, they only update at a lower framerate.)
Posted: 3/13/2010 5:26 PM
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>The rules says that games should be played at the hardest difficulty, but that is it. However, games has a lot more settings than this. We also have a lot more rules than that one. There is already a rule for PAL/NTSC framerate. Games should be recorded at the correct setting. That is, PAL games as 50Hz. Ach ja. We also specify English if possible. This is what the majority of the audience will understand. For game versions, the latest. Both of these can be overridden if the German/0.9 version has an interesting bug. For the other stuff, I'm not sure.
Posted: 3/13/2010 5:33 PM
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henke37
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Joined: 3/10/2010
Posts: 899
Location: Sweden
Yes, games should not be forced into settings they are not designed for. But PAL 60 is a very valid option in several games. If the game allows you to set it in a menu without using any form of secret code (the manual saying "Hold B at boot for PAL60" not being secret), it is a valid setting.