Salary Man Champ is a Japanese game made by Konami. This fun filled minigame fest is a journey through the life of a salary man, as he strives to be the pinnacle of Japanese society and climbs the corporate staircase.
I don't understand this game, but I've been told that it's really funny for Japanese people. What is funny for the rest of us is that there is an emulator bug where the game stops receiving input for several seconds. See if you can find this bug!
Reasons why this TAS should be accepted
Japanese people may find it very funny.
There is no N64 version of this game.
It's very optimized.
Reasons why it could be unacceptable
There is a very ugly emulation bug.
There might be a more entertaining setting if someone knows Japanese.
That's all. Thanks to FatRatKnight for making some nice "Author's comments" for his submission of The Guardian Legend.
adelikat: We usually prefer a high % of yes votes to be considered a strong viewer response so this was kind of borderline. Having said that, the response was good enough, and a number of people seem to be enthusiastic about this TAS (for whatever reason). I'll accept it.
sgrunt: Encode on the way (thanks to some modifications of alternative capture software which turn out to work well).
Spikestuff: Sync Note: For those figuring out the bios it's SCPH1001.
That is what the Japanese would call an "okama." Western humor has them too. They're called "drag queens," or perhaps, "ugly trannies". The Kaishain are running away presumably because they're straight. Having transpeople aggressively pursue obviously disinterested men is a time honored tradition in homophobic humor worldwide. Have you never on the internet heard people invoke General Akbar's "It's a trap!"? Figuring out what's going on really is, in most cases, simply a matter of common sense.
You're comparing it to western humor like it's exactly the same. I can tell what's going on in this mini-game, what I was questioning is whether or not that "woman" was actually a woman or not. If you look back at my post, I said it was either a man dressed as a woman, or an ugly woman that looks like a man dressed as a woman. From the design, it's not easy to tell. Whereas when you look at drag queens, more often than not, it's obvious.
But that's just one example. There are other games where you can tell what's going on, but not the reason why. For example, in the game with the guy and the 3 buttons, it's obvious that you have the press the right button, but that's all I know about it. Watching that isn't very fun.
I'm abstaining from voting.
I was entertained, but I strongly suspect that it was mostly from the WJT factor of the game's humor rather than the actual gameplay/TASing. This would be even better if there were annotations for what was going on, but I'm still not convinced this is TAS material.
That being said, thanks for the run. It was fun to watch.
Wouldn't you say that's more of a reason to vote no? That type of game isn't fun to watch. The other types can be a mixed bag. They can be fun to watch, but for me personally, sometimes the different humor doesn't make it much fun for me.
... It's not? The only major difference between Japanese and Western humor is that the Japanese actually think puns are funny. Everything else is superficial: Homer Simpson eats donouts and drunks beer, Kaishain eat curry and drink milk.
... Do you see a lot of women with glaring, obvious five o'clock shadows who release deep, glutteral grunts from a jawline wider than their head? You're either very generous about such things or over-thinking the matter completely.
Well when it comes to this game, it doesn't seem like you can just assume that you know what things are or what's going on. If that whole 'drag queen' thing is obvious to me, then please tell me what the heck is that....'thing' looking in on you during the mini-game I mentioned earlier. The one where you work when the boss peaks in and play around when the other..."thing" peaks in. That one.
I believe that was a Daruma head. It's true that it bears specific Japanese cultural significance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daruma_doll) but all you really need to know to get the joke is that it's a big silly head. It may just as well be an Easter Island head or something. What matters is that it's not the boss and that it looks weird. This stuff isn't "The Far Side," most of it is just plain zany. For the most part I think you CAN just assume you know what's going on.
Voted yes because it was an interesting game to see. Also, not every game has to be sonic/mario/franchise.
Also, I could understand the humor and I am not well read at all on Japanese culture.
Why are so many of the "yes" comments a variation of:
"This game was cool/funny/weird so I liked it"?
The point to a TAS isn't to demonstrate the game. That's what longplays are for. A TAS is for doing something new and interesting with the game. Just showing off how cool the game is to begin with doesn't make for a good TAS.
A longplay of a game like this wouldn't make any sense though: it doesn't really have a story, or secrets, or even intricate non-linear level design to show off. Using the power of emulator tools to max out score though is far more interesting. (And frankly, a welcome change from the usual frame wars. I'm much more in favor of "Tool Assisted Superplays" than "Tool Assisted Speedruns."
Admittedly, there doesn't appear to be a lot of gameplay depth here (the submitter can correct me if I'm wrong) so I would understand if this submission fails. Still, even in that respect I'd like to defend it in comparison to the Myst DS run. First of all, this run looks like good-old-fashioned, real gameplay. Second, there's a great deal of variety, some of which I imagine is open to much more complex and interesting methods of optimization (Perhaps the game where the goal is to collect as much Yen as possible while competing with the enemy AI). Third, this run actually IS entertaining; that a run is entertaining to watch should indeed be considered a contributing factor to whether or not it's a good choice of game.
(Come to think of it though, if there was a significantly similar run on SDA, I'd agree that this should not be published.)
So am I, which is why I don't like runs like this that are speed-oriented to the point of them being boring. It's just "Hah, I beat it before all of you guys. Now to wait and do nothing for 40 seconds" rather than making something interesting of it.
I don't know, this kind of sounds like you solidifying my point. I don't think a run should be published purely as a demonstration of a game. A TAS has to be impressive as a TAS, not just "Hey, you guys probably haven't heard of this game, so here it is." And it sounds like you're saying that if another site had a demonstration of this game that would fit the same purpose even without tools.
Actually, I somewhat like it that way... I mean in this movie there a Salary Man that can do everything perfectly wathever how ridiculous is his job/situation in order to allow max-productivity for an unknow(?) enterprise. This cycle restart again and again, but it's just how redundant the life can be (once your set up with some random job).
Also, I'm unsure if mz is aiming only for full speed, just as you say. Example: When running from girl, I think that he could just let his player dying along with the computer, but he decide to waste few frame for winning the race.
I think the culture point of this movie is more about "you have to be PERFECT if you want to reach your goal" - the non-understandable are part of this.
Just for this kind of particuliar perfectness humor, I feel like there something enough different from the other mini-game TAS and then, make it quite enjoyable. Yes vote.
The thing I want to know is, what are all the labels on the staircase they climb/get knocked down after each minigame? I imagine they get pretty grotesque for the CPUs after awhile...
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Well, I do think what you're saying is a valid critique, but the fact of the matter is that we don't have a good basis of comparison like we did with the DS Myst run. I've neither played this game nor seen an original hardware run of it. I have no idea whether significantly the same results could reasonably be accomplished by a human being. If they could, there's no doubt that I'd switch my vote to "no." I kind of doubt that's the case though, least of all because of the multiple choice questions that get answered before being asked and the extreme twitch based reflexes some of the games seem to demand.
A significant number of the games are based on score rather than speed though, and in general I think that the optimization of performance is a criteria well suited to this game. I will agree with you that the turbo-button games are trivial though, despite showing the difference between TAS and AI performance. The playaround potential for this game is pretty much handled by watching the AI fail...
Personally, I don't think that mini-game based titles necessarily make for bad game choices. Certainly not more than the story/adventure games. I think these are genres in which entertainment should be a decisive factor.
Joined: 4/30/2008
Posts: 89
Location: Northeast Kansas USA, GMT -06:00
Why do I get this allusion in one segment that it's me standing on one end of the bar (the guy in the blue suit) and the guy at the opposite end of the bar is some random troll I used to know on the IRC chat?
[URL=http://img200.imageshack.us/i/salaryman.png/][/URL]
They're ranks that could be interpreted as the Salaryman hierarchy. There are too many for me to go through right now, but here's how it ends (my translations might be slightly off, there are definitely people on this board much more proficient in Japanese than myself):
Player 1 (mz) - Multi-millionaire (not necessarily literal, can mean "extremely rich")
Player 2 (CPU, just above last place) - King of pocket change
Player 3 (CPU, last place) - Office Lady's enemy