Anyway, my opinion. I don't really care much about this TAS because it has very little worth to me (Masterjun did all the work creating it in BizHawk; I was only there to advise him on how to pull off the jump to the credits routine using just name characters). Besides, this TAS only affirms what everyone already knows; the Pokemon Yellow warped branch is absurd to the point of having lost any semblance of meaning in its existence. Chances are that a branch has ended up this way if there are philosophical arguments over what warrants game completion. Glitches have a way of dissolving the integrity of a game/TAS. The issue cannot be simplified to just "memory-corruption glitches" vs. "lesser game-breaking glitches" vs. "casual/benign glitches", since glitches come with a spectrum of effects. So I submitted this partly to show how broken Pokemon Yellow warped can be. Masterjun also wanted it submitted really quickly after I explained the new method, so it was because of him too. Also, I wanted to get the BizHawk "non-improvement" out of the way. Oh, and sorry about the short encodes. Because of what I said three sentences up, we had to rush the encodes, so they may be lacking in a few areas.

That "glitched" branch basically serves as a warning to viewers that they may not find the game to be 'beaten' once it has been 'completed'.

To me, it is the other way around; viewers may not find the game to be "completed" (the TASes warp right to the end so one may feel that something is missing) once it has been "beaten" (the TASes break the game so badly).

om, nom, nom

Harsh judgment here, but I support the judges' (usual) erring on the conservative side of accepting movies. Yeah, you heard me right. Bobo "Carmen Sandiego in 2 hours and Beetle Mania in 45 minutes" the King.

Now do you have anything to say regarding the matter?

Oh well, I guess there is nothing that can be done about this. May the VBA submission forever last on this page. I completely understand that the problem is that this movie doesn't save, so we should at least have the other submission which has the save that shows something. This run is only displaying the THE END with the game going all crazy with the routine. I guess only displaying it is not enough. That however brings up the question about that save in the current movie after the credits. It indeed shows 152 Pokemon and stuff but... well you can't even start it - it freezes. I'm against a Bizhawk run that just doesn't save time over the current run, because it just doesn't show anything new and it does that while losing time. When losing a few frames in this run (for changing the rival name) you can change the output (e.g. it runs the credits with glitched characters except copyright and THE END), but it would never wait for a reset or save the game. I'm out, bye.

I'd like to get my dissenting opinion on this decision on the record. I do see what you're getting at with regard to the end of the game, feos. However, the glitched Super Mario World run does something very similar (corrupts memory to jump straight to the "The End" screen) and the decision was to accept it. What makes this run so different from that one? Is it just that Pokemon Yellow should make an autosave and this run doesn't do that?

It's not the save that determines whether the game was finished or not. It's comparing how the game normally acts when it is finished and how it acts after a glitched run. Otherwise we will literally be able to trick the system by calling some kind of a false ending. SMW normally allows you to do NOTHING after the game is finished. And it does not change after the glitched run. Pokemon (as we already know) allows resetting and makes a save. Masterjun says this save is in fact corrupted in the p4wn3r's run. But the game DOES PROCEED in general the same way it does as if it is actually beaten. Slight glitches during the process do not lock it up. This run brings it to the infamous infinite loop that does not allow to proceed normally. If there were no infinite loop in this TAS, I think I would consider it completely legit. Trying to make a save, but having the glitched data, skipping this action and still moving forward - this is what is acceptable to me. PS: I'm always open for discussion and want to see my decision reconsidered if it was wrong. However, I still think it was right. Will investigate the hell out of MESHUGGAH's posts about game endings. He did some to Battletoads, he must know.

Thanks for explaining. Your points are all very good.

I feel a little sad because my post was used to reject the submission, but well, it happens. A judge has to give a clear verdict: accept or reject. Although I abstained from voting, I think I would side with feos if pressed against the wall. I don't think the SMW run is a good comparison because there the input ends with the game in its final state and it shows it is there with the end screen. Here this doesn't happen, the game is not in the final state, as can be seen clearly from the infinite loop. I remember from previous tests that depending on where I called the credits routine the game would let me even examine the TV if I pressed A. So, the SMW run is not a counter-example to feos' criterion. People could say that while it may not be a well defined ending, it looks like one. My problem with this is that deciding if it looks like an ending is actually more difficult and more subjective than deciding if it is an ending. IIRC this is the first Yellow submission where people have doubted the game's completion. And in this line of reasoning, SMW is actually a precedent against this run, since it was accepted because the ending routine was accurate without concern for the ones that thought it didn't look like an ending. I disagree that this decision leaves a VBA run published forever. You could say that the category is useless and have a code injection playaround obsolete it. Surely, since console verification became possible, the site has been turning towards more accurate emulators (even if such emulators might have performance-reducing architectural choices that make SNES games run at 50% speed on my 2009 laptop). However, we all know that even crappy emulators are very accurate at well-known games, so the difference for RBY, if it exists, is minimal. Don't get me wrong, I'm 99% sure that the published run has no chance of synching on GB hardware, but I'm also not sure if any current emulator can do that, because this game's entropy depends heavily on timing. I have no issue with obsoleting runs on inaccurate emulators, if you can justify it well. If it was proven that a Bizhawk run would sync on hardware, it's perfectly fine and there would be few complaints, it would still be a demand of accuracy AFAIK unprecedented, but I'd be totally fine with it, I would just ask why this requirement wasn't made before for SMW, where the accurate emulator existed at the time of submission. If you can't prove the verification works, then we should obsolete runs every time inaccuracies are fixed. This has very obvious drawbacks that I won't bother discussing here.

By the way, some people on the higher ranks have in the past entertained the idea a couple of times that perhaps gamegenie/whatever cheats could perhaps be allowed. This whole debacle shows why that would be a really, really bad idea. Pokemon Yellow happens to be a very special game in that after a bit of meddling around, corrupting saves and whatnot, you basically gain the ability to use any kind of cheats without having to use any cheating device (emulated or not.) Thus this demonstrates really well why legitimately allowing cheat devices on all games would be a really bad idea: The entire idea of speedrunning would be completely destroyed. If the goal is to finish the game as fast as possible, and a cheat device would allow you to make the program do anything you want, the only possible use for it would be to make the game immediately jump to the extreme end of the game, because that's the goal. Thus there would be nothing to watch, really, except possibly a "the end" screen. This idea can be reversed: If we don't allow cheating devices, one of the reasons being that it makes the whole concept of "speedrunning" completely moot, then why should we allow glitch abuse that effectively amounts to the same thing? Just because it's doing it by abusing bugs in the game doesn't render the end result much different. There's still no "speedrun" to speak of, just a jump to the very end. What's there to watch? Technical prowess, sure. Entertainment? Not so much, I'd say.

That's what a Demo tier would be for.

This idea can be reversed: If we don't allow cheating devices, one of the reasons being that it makes the whole concept of "speedrunning" completely moot, then why should we allow glitch abuse that effectively amounts to the same thing? Just because it's doing it by abusing bugs in the game doesn't render the end result much different. There's still no "speedrun" to speak of, just a jump to the very end. What's there to watch?

You raise an interesting point, but you put it too simple. People in the past didn't suggest using cheat codes to complete the game in the title screen, they proposed them as a tool to complete otherwise impossible goals, but they still wanted to maintain the gameplay. Not allowing them is a question of arbitrariness. If you're going to use a code, which one? How do you decide which one is the best to use? If 50 people submitted 50 movies completing a game in the fastest way possible using 50 different codes, how do you decide which to accept and which to reject? If you're missing too much entertainment by disallowing cheats, then make a hack, change some stuff so that it doesn't look like the original and submit a movie, the run will be judged on its merits as a run of a hack. There's still no reason to use cheat codes. Game breaking glitches in official games are different, by playing a good dump on an accurate emulator we can assure with reasonable certainty that everyone who has a copy of the game could theoretically perform them without looking for obscure hacks or using third-party devices. If the glitch is dumb to the point of destroying all value in the movie, some people might still be entertained just by knowing that it's possible to skip the whole game, in this situation we can always publish it separately. If it doesn't entertain, reject it and tell the author to ignore the glitch in the future. Anyway, simply let it come forward and be judged, like all the others. There are really two messages here: one is that the specific Pokemon Yellow run that uses save corruption is uninteresting and doesn't deserve publication, which is sound criticism, and the other is that some speedrunning "spirit" makes this run and any other that abuses game skipping glitches equivalent to cheat codes, which is problematic.

and the other is that some speedrunning "spirit" makes this run and any other that abuses game skipping glitches equivalent to cheat codes, which is problematic.

Not so much a "speedrunning spirit", but simple viewer entertainment. The most usual reason for someone to watch a speedrun (tool-assisted or not) is to see the game played through at incredible speed. Skipping to the end just isn't. It's a simple question of pragmatism.