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maTO wrote:
You are crazy! :)
Thanks! :)
maTO wrote:
I never thought a game with a boasting name could be any good.
Yeah, I guess the name refers to the gods in the ancient Greek mythology. I bet the game would have succeeded a bit better with a more "pop" name, like Hercules or something. Everyone would remember the Hercules for Sega Genesis. Other good names for this game would have been The Ancient Hero, Troy, Achilles, The Gladiator, Iron Mask, Turkish Superman, The Immortal, Clumsy Adventures, Greek Mario from Hades, Asterix Deluxe, Assassin's Greek, Muscles & Mythologies, Ancient Laser Monsters, Doom, The Monster Killer Guy Whose Quest is Not to Save a Girl, The Minotaur Invasion of Lesbos Island... Any of these would have been better than... Gods. :(
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Yeah, it may be a good idea to remove the tag from the Maniac Mansion movie.
Warp wrote:
Aqfaq wrote:
The Lost Vikings:
- 3 characters
- 3 controller inputs
I thought the three characters are controlled sequentially (ie. never at the same time) with one single controller? It's a one-player game, if I'm not mistaken.
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I remember testing it shortly a long time ago. It had some very strange screen scrolling behavior, if you autofired forward. There might indeed be potential for a stupid, funny and fast-paced TAS here.
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Comicalflop wrote:
Also, what happens for games when one controller CAN control more than one character, like Ranger X for Genesis?
That is a good question. (For those not familiar with the game, the 2nd character is controlled [simultaneously] with the X, Y and Z buttons in a 6-button controller.)
Allright, I'll try answering it just for fun.
One solution would be to separate the tag into two different tags: One tag would tell the number of used characters while the other tag would tell the number of controller inputs used.
Ranger X would then have these tags:
- 2 characters
- 1 controller input
Maniac Mansion would have:
- 3 characters
- 1 controller input
The Lost Vikings:
- 3 characters
- 3 controller inputs
Streets of Rage:
- 2 characters
- 2 controller inputs
Metroid (using restart sequence):
- 1 character
- 2 controller inputs
"1" would be the default value for both of these tags, so those could be left out.
But with this solution, the "# characters" tag would need to be used with movies where it might have little meaning, like some Megaman game where you might control Zero for a short sequence only. Another problem is that some RPGs have very many characters. Also, what tags a Lemmings movie should get?
Maybe splitting the tags is not a good idea. Ranger X sucks anyway, I suppose?
A more workable solution would be to realize that the controlling method for Ranger X is so rare (probably less than 1/3000 games) that the tags won't need to consider it.
upthorn wrote:
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I agree that talking about controllers in the tags may be a bit misleading for a casual visitor, just like talking about the "one player" who controls many characters.
alden wrote:
Don't LoZ and metroid use 2 controllers for reset sequence?
Yes. I see no problem using the "uses 2 controllers" tag in those movies. Oh, wait... Actually, there is a small problem. If the only reason for using the 2nd controller is to activate the game restart sequence, then the movie would have two different tags with the same meaning: "uses 2 controllers" & "uses game restart sequence". :/
It seems that nothing works perfectly. :)
Maybe we should invent a bunch of new words to describe all these different situations? Afterall, we are now trying to cope with a set of words that was originally used only in ordinary gaming... umm, no, it is a bad idea.
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By the way, for Maniac Mansion (and Humans as well), isn't the tag redundant, because the multicharacter situation is the default one? You always control three characters in Maniac Mansion, am I right? (Isn't this situation like saying "takes no damage" when actually 1 hit is a deadly one?)
In the same manner, you don't say you "control multiple characters" in a real-time strategy game, because it is obvious.
Four might actually be the highest amount of simultaneous characters in any game in the currently supported systems. When it gets higher than that, the characters are not controlled simultaneously anymore and the movies would not need the tag at all.
Hey, maybe a better idea would be to use something like "uses # controllers". This would solve many problems. And afterall, that is the relevant information: How many controllers are used? It doesn't matter who controls the controllers or how many individual charactes there are, so from any-point-of-view-I-can-think-of, the number of controllers is the most meaningful way of delivering this information.
I suggest changing the tags to "uses # controllers".
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That was nice. A hard and irritating game made look easy. Thanks, I enjoyed watching it. I also think it is the most precise movie I've seen from you. I could not see any mistakes, even though you say you already improved it.
7 seconds is quite a lot for a short game like this, so I encourage you finishing the improved version and submitting it!
It is not the most interesting game, so there's always a chance it will get rejected, but I'd say go for it!
Hmm, maybe the slight nudity in the ending will encourage some extra "yes" votes:
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Could someone please add "One player controls 10 characters" tag to the Humans movie.
The tag is missing from that movie and the case does not differ in any way from the Maniac Mansion movie, which is said to control 3 characters.
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Xkeeper wrote:
Warp wrote:
Bisqwit wrote:
In Super Mario Bros I think it is keypad input, because I have seen it desync.
It seems that desyncing recordings are a much older problem than I thought... :P
I always thought it was intentional, since it seemed to always alternate between them. Oops?
One interesting thing is that it always desyncs in the same way (one frame off), and it always causes that second Goomba to vanish. Neat.
In Genesis Gods, there are several gameplay demos that are loaded after each other, if you wait in the main menu. They use predefined keypad input. However, just before a demo loads, there is 1 gameplay frame where player has control, so it is possible to make the demos desynch in more than just one way. It is a minor programming error, a funny one.
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Haha, I just watched my current Gods movie, got a stupid idea and made a new version... 2 frames faster! :D
It is an unnoticeable improvement in the first level by doing some trivial tasks in different order. I seriously did not intend to play Gods anymore, but the improvement just happened.
It is strange how this kind of stuff happens so easily after having a long break from the game. The improved version took me only about five minutes to make. Maybe I'll wait another few months and then replay the movie again with fresh insight.
It seems that I have finally learned to not submit a movie too early.
Edit:
Haa, found yet another improvement in worl 2-3! It saves around 20 frames! How did I miss all these things earlier...
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Yeah, maybe it is ok that way. It definitely works as a statistic. It just seems a bit strange to use a real-time time-unit in the division, because re-records have nothing to do with real-time. It is the input frames, which are re-recorded. That is the reason why I think 30 FPS movies (N64?) now get only 50% of their re-record density compared to 60 FPS movies. But maybe it is not worth the effort to implement the frame-specifications to the system.
Oh, here's a funny and somewhat related TASVideos FAQ quote: "Once upon a time, someone calculated that in a 11 minute movie that has been re-recorded 50000 times, a savestate has apparently been loaded on average 75 times per second. What is wrong with this figure?"
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VolcanoStormWind wrote:
In the crypt room I jumped for a very good reason : it prevents the firing monster from spawning ! Otherwise how would I take the mosaic piece that early and with no damage ;)
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VolcanoStormWind wrote:
And none of my guides ever talked of a "super-secret" in the final level.
There it is, but at the moment I can't remember how to get it actually. :) (The screenshot is from the Amiga version, but I think the giant chest exists in the Genesis version too.)
By the way, game guides are usually written by average gamers who just want to write guides, so they often tell you misleading stuff. It is sometimes a good idea to read them, but I almost never believe what they say. I bet you, VolcanoStormWind, already know more about Gods than most of the guys who wrote the guides you've read.
VolcanoStormWind wrote:
Also can you please tell me how did I "really" lost any time, is it like 2 frames here and there or what ?
Here are some of the things I remember from the movie:
- All boss fights can be done faster by timing the shots better and being in a better position.
- Sometimes you could have started walking earlier, like in the beginning of the game and in the beginning of world 2-2.
- The shop cursor is not moved as fast as possible.
- You sometimes stop to shoot enemies which you could have killed in a faster manner, like the enemy near the first switch in world 1-1.
- In world 2-3, you jump for no reason in the "crypt" room.
- Some items could have been picked up faster.
- The invulnerability was not used as effectively as possible.
- I bet there are better strategies for what to buy from the shops.
- Sometimes you could have taken damage differently to die faster.
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You lose many frames even before the game has started. You should use frame advance to find the first possible frame to press start. After the beginning, it can only get worse.
I still think that even though this movie aims for "showing all of the game", it fails at that. How can you say you aim for 100% treasure, when you did not collect the gems behind the lightning bolt? What is the point of collecting some of them, if you don't get them all? I know that the treasure chest won't appear after the boss, if you take the lightning bolt, but these kind of problems in the game contradict your goals and after that the movie is uninteresting to watch. I don't know what the goals should be, but these are not the best possible ones, even if the movements were more precise.
Sorry, voting "no".
Edit:
There also exists a "super secret" huge treasure chest in the final level. You did not collect it.
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Randil wrote:
An interesting thing to note is that some NES games also "run" at 30 fps (the game only updates memory every other frame), such as Solstice. Perhaps this should be taken into consideration for these games too, although I guess it would have to be manually corrected.
Yeah, there's probably too much work to do it manually. Some games even have in-game changes, like Genesis Gods, which behaves like a 30 fps game during the levels, but the shop cursor accepts faster input.
Yet another interesting approach might be to calculate the rerecords per frames that accept input. Oh, actually, it would not work well...
A more interesting idea (though probably not practical at the moment) would be to calculate rerecords per frames that have active input. This would ignore frames that have no input present. It would give a very different top-10 list. For some games this method might give a better approximation of how dense the rerecords are during gameplay. You seldom need to retry level loading screens, cutscenes or other parts where you don't press any buttons, so if the game has lots of those, the rerecords seem not so dense. On the other hand, games with short load times are generally higher in the list. This results in some "error" in the statistics. Technically, there's nothing wrong with the current statistics, but there might be a better way of doing this. I can't think of any practical solution, though.
Well, these are trivial things, but sometimes trivial things are funny and funny things are never trivial.
Hey, for Super Metroid, it might even be interesting to calculate the rerecords per in-game time!
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There may be a mistake in the rerecord count per movie lenght calculations.
If I'm right, it seems that it is calculated so that it does not consider the difference of making rerecords in 30 fps, 50 fps and 60 fps games.
For a 60 fps game
1200 rerecords / minute = 20 rerecords / second = 0,333... rerecords / frame
For a 30 fps game
1200 rerecords / minute = 20 rerecords / second = 0,666... rerecords / frame
The frame count should be used in the calculations, because it gives the real density of the rerecords. The current calculation method gives lower rerecord density for games that run at 30 fps, which is not fair for the authors of those movies.
Correct me, if I'm wrong.
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Cool. Congratulations for your first submission. From the WIPs I saw, I can tell it's a very nice one.
I can't watch it at the moment, but I'll be sure to check it out as soon as possible.
Edit:
Wow! Impressive zipping in world 6! I was surprised how much you managed to abuse enemies as platforms. That was cool.
It is a shame that the giant and clown bosses take so long to defeat. Anyway, this is an excellent TAS, which I really enjoyed watching.
Edit-2: I'm surprised how little attention this submission has received. I thought Mr. Nutz was a well-known title. Oh well...
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LagDotCom wrote:
I think the shopkeeper takes longer to turn up on the SNES, for instance.
True. Also, the invulnerability does not last long and majority of the useful bugs don't work. The only speed benefit in the SNES version is that the character jumps differently, which allows better movement in the air.
Oh, I just realised that it is impossible to make a Gods movie that collects 100% treasures, because (1) in order to get the chest in the end of the first level, you are not allowed to collect the lightning bolt, but (2) you can't get some gems without collecting the lightning bolt in the process.
"Maximum score" run makes no sense either, because it is possible to kill infinite number of bees to slowly gain any amount of score. (Or in the Genesis version, activate a bonus gem loop.)
"Maximum money" would work in the SNES version, but it would be arbitrary and boring, because the player would not buy anything from the shops. (In the Genesis version, it is possible to get nearly infinite amount of money, but it takes hours.)
I don't really know what a 100% run would include (although it is possible to summon "1000% anything" with some bugs in the Genesis version). There are multiple ways to make a 99,99% run, but it is hard to decide how to do it and how to compare movies that do it differently.
Pacifist run is possible in the Genesis version, but it uses the same route as the glitch run and is about 30 seconds slower. Nothing interesting.
A "concept demo" showing bugs and funny things would be cool in the Genesis version, but probably not publishworthy.
Now that I think of it, the only movie I would like to see is an "all bosses" run with the Genesis version. Oh, actually... Heh, I forgot that the first published movie is exactly that. :)
Well, maybe there's no need for another Gods movie?
Damn, nothing happens...
There it is, but at the moment I can't remember how to get it actually. :) (The screenshot is from the Amiga version, but I think the giant chest exists in the Genesis version too.)
By the way, game guides are usually written by average gamers who just want to write guides, so they often tell you misleading stuff. It is sometimes a good idea to read them, but I almost never believe what they say. I bet you, VolcanoStormWind, already know more about Gods than most of the guys who wrote the guides you've read.