Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Lex wrote:
Here's a good method of enjoying speed runs during this new era of the existence of these distasteful categories. Watch and play the categories you prefer. Recruit for your preferred categories if they're not popular enough and you'd like more competition in them.
That's what everyone is already doing all the time. Edit: So are you saying people shouldn't discuss their opinions? You wouldn't be surprised to find people discussing things in a discussion forum, would you?
Edit:Let me try this again: I agree with that general sentiment but I still think it's fine to have a discussion about it, which is what a forum like this is for. But yeah if you want to make a real change, you have to go and make the change yourself instead of telling others do it.
Yeah you know what, I shouldn't have mentioned Ocarina of Time in this context because that's just an awesome glitch, not save/load abuse. Actually, come to think of it I can't think of any game where I'm completely OK with using saving/loading as part of the route. In Dark Souls it's not really used in any routes, but only to recover from mistakes, I think. (at least the speedruns that I have seen)
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Hello, sorry I didn't read the entire thread carefully (only skimmed it, you guys are just talking in circles anyway) but I agree with Warp a lot, although I'm not really worried about the situation. I remember being excited about the Minecraft speedrun at GDQ and then when he did the "trick"... I simply lost all interest, the run was dead to me. They stepped outside of the game to gain leverage. But hey, that's what the runner wanted to make, so that's fine I guess... I just will not watch it or be remotely excited by it.
Minecraft is the absolute worst example I can think of though. There are other games where exploiting the save system doesn't bother me, like Dark Souls (saving and reloading resets the enemies). I also love the wrong warp glitched Ocarina of Time run. So I guess it's all opinions and no objective answers, each game will have to be considered separately and there aren't any rules that will apply to all games.
Not all games are created equal anyway. Some games are simply less suited to speedrunning than others. Those games that have a "fastest but boring" way to play them I consider to be duds for purposes of speedrunning. Just for playing, not for speedrunning. Not for me anyway. I think it's fine if some games are crap for speedrunning.
In the end, people are just going to make the speedruns they want to make. Hell, some people even make New Game+ speedruns and many consider it a legit category.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
I don't even understand why anyone would bother. There's a NES Flintstones TAS with the title "Duck Tales 2". They can't be getting ad revenue, those videos aren't getting any serious number of views. Hell, this one guy doesn't even appear to be stealing credit. Do these people just like uploading stuff to servers?
Edit: oh man, this thread was older than I thought...
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Well.... that happened. Yeah, I didn't even know about the warp in the first level when I made the first TAS. I did discover it though when I attempted to remake it later (which I never finished). Probably a good thing, since this one blows it out of the water completely in every way. Great job making the old TAS look like absolute poo. Well done!
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Warp wrote:
Guinness World Records seems to consider them a reliable source of information... If that's not "official", I don't know what is.
By that, do you mean that they just take their word for it, or do they actually make them produce evidence (video, etc), then verify said evidence themselves? If they do that, then they're no more official than anyone else who can make evidence (videos, etc).
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
twingalaxies is certainly *not* the "official" score-keeper of anything. In fact they are nothing but a bunch of whining babies and it makes me kinda angry that anyone would give them any credit for anything at all, let alone calling then "the official" anything. For actual verifiable scores, see speeddemosarchive.com. /rant
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Scepheo wrote:
I found only Mario and Mega Man useful.
What? The Contra guy is unstoppable once you get the spread gun. The only thing I ever had any trouble with is the rotating flame things in 1-4, but that's just because he moves much slower than Mario, as do all the other characters (other than Mario, of course).
So in short: if you want the best characters for every level, use the contra guy for everything except the castle levels. Use Mario for those.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Ah, cool, so it's like a grade challenge mode where you get a grade, but the number of levels left to complete isn't relevant at all? If so, I will be very happy because I can then put this game aside and not play it again ever. (I have gotten kind of sick of it). Though, since there's a different puzzle every time I guess I'll have tp play those 45 more times to feel completely satisfied. Hmmm....
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Hello! And happy new year, and everything.
Lately, I've been totally addicted to this Japanese puzzle game called Slitherlink. I spent a lot of time completing every puzzle in the game. Once I completed all of them, I noticed this extra menu option. But since the game is all in Japanese, I have no way of understanding what this is. I know there are at least a few people on here who can read this, so I request your help in getting me to understand better what's going on here. Are these randomly generated levels, are they bonus levels, what are they? I haven't found anything by Google, so my last hope is to ask myself.
This is the main menu. By experiments I'm guessing the rightmost boxes are something like "play", "tutorial" and "profile options". The left box is what I'm curious about. What does it say? Also, the icon-thing above it baffles me. I think it's some kind of ranking as it changes sometimes if I complete puzzles.
This is what I get if I click the mysterious option from the main menu. There are two options there I am mystified about. As far as I can tell, they do exactly the same. A puzzle is brought up which I have to solve. Can you tell me what those two boxes say?
This is what I get if I complete a puzzle in Mysterious Mode:
This I guess says something like "Completion!" which is what comes up in the normal playing mode when completing a puzzle. Only in this mysterious mode does *this* show instead. Then this shows up:
I'm guessing this says "saving game" but I can't be sure.
Lastly, this is what I think is the "profile options" thing (clicked on from the main menu). I know the upper option is to change the profile name. Can you confirm or deny that the bottom one is to delete the profile? It brings up a confirmation box and I'm not about to experiment by confirming it.
Any assistance is appreciated. And happy new year again!
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
I'm pretty sure that once a game is created in Diablo 2, the random seed is generated right then and there, and the entire world is determined from that point. Every monster, item and dungeon is derived from it and it doesn't change until you create another game. It's the same in Diablo 1.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Warp wrote:
What is worse, when you find a solution, there's no way of knowing if it is the optimal solution (you can only know if it's better than the solutions you have found so far during the search). Basically you have to try all possible permutations before you can be sure that you have found the optimal solution. In typical puzzles that's an O(n!)-time approach, so for puzzles with just a couple of dozen states you may have to wait until the Sun explodes before your algorithm has checked all possible permutations.
Am I not understanding, or is this a slight exaggeration? You don't need to check *all* possible permutations. If there is at least one known solution, then the depth-first search need only go so deep. It doesn't need to find any permutations longer than the known solution. So after a certain number of steps, if a solution has not been reached, it can stop checking anymore in that direction because it will always be longer than a known solution anyway.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Most of my friends aren't really interested in this stuff. They are aware of it, but mostly don't watch TASes and don't follow up on developments. I did show the latest (I think it still is) Mega Man 2 TAS and they were completely BLOWN AWAY by it. (don't worry, I made sure they understood how it was made). My brother and his friends are aware, but not really that much into it. My mom is very untechnical and are barely aware that there are even such things as emulators, or what they do. She would find it strange how it's possible to play NES games on a PC. My dad is more technical, but doesn't really have a clue about emulators either, I think.
I did an essay on TASing for my English class a few years ago. The teacher said it was "quite technical". :P
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
The best way to spin the control stick is to hold your left palm out, then hold the controller with your right hand and gently press it against your palm. Then you move the entire controller in circles with your right hand. (reverse hands if you're left-handed). If you do it like he describes in this article, you are much more likely to get blisters.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Hey, we can do romhacks/Lua scripts. How about Megaman 3 with all enemies sped up 500% and immune to all weapons except Mega Buster? (apart from those who are actually immune to it). Or something along those lines.
It would have to be interesting hacks, though. Not something like Super Mario Bros. with jumping disabled. That would be properly impossible.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
To understand more clearly why you should always switch in the Monty Hall game:
Instead of only 3 doors, imagine that you have one THOUSAND doors, 999 of which contain goats, and one contains a car. You choose ONE door. Now the game show host opens 998 of the other doors, all of which contain goats. Now you are left wiht two choices. Your original choice, or the one other door not opened by the host. NOW what do you think, should you switch? The actual Monty Hall problem is in principle exactly the same, but with fewer doors so the advantage of switching is much less pronounced. (and thus less obvious).
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Sonikkustar wrote:
There was another PC game that was probably a Playstation port. You were this ship crawling around tight spaces. It was like a first person shooter except you can shoot from both sides. You were fighting off hordes of aliens & insects on this spaceship. You control the ship kind of like an airplane except you can stop anytime.
Your description reminded me of Descent, though I haven't played it so I'm not sure if it really fits. (see also: Descent 2 and 3)
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Swedishmartin wrote:
I meant if you got sickened by seeing them, why not just get rid of them?
Ah, ok. I don't really know exactly what I was thinking when I made that previous post. It doesn't make sense.
Also, your insistence of buying new computers despite of your guilt about your old ones is hypocritical. You should either be ignoring the climate or helping it, preferably the latter.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Player
(67)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Warp wrote:
Warp wrote:
How about instead of using a logo in the gap, you used an actual clipped photo of that part of the real device there? Probably less bothering than the logo.
In fact, I think this idea could be taken even further: Add the borders of the real device to the left and right sides of the video as well. This way the center gap will feel less out-of-place. Since the video already has a very vertical resolution, making it a bit wider shouldn't be any problem (and since the added parts will be completely static, it shouldn't even make the video file any larger, at least not significantly).
EDIT: As a proof-of-concept I took a pic of the DS from the net and pasted the two parts of a frame in the current TAS, to see how my idea would look:
(snip)
The gap seems "too" large in the real device. Does it really look like that in the real thing? Maybe if we do this, it might be a good idea to "cheat" a bit and make the gap a bit narrower by putting the two screens closer together...
Hey, that gives me an idea. If the "DS" is visible, you could show the input on it, too. So when A is being pressed in the movie, the A on the DS would be pressed as well. And so on. It would probably be a bitch to implement, though. But it would make the movie extra 1337. :)
This is the main menu. By experiments I'm guessing the rightmost boxes are something like "play", "tutorial" and "profile options". The left box is what I'm curious about. What does it say? Also, the icon-thing above it baffles me. I think it's some kind of ranking as it changes sometimes if I complete puzzles.
This is what I get if I click the mysterious option from the main menu. There are two options there I am mystified about. As far as I can tell, they do exactly the same. A puzzle is brought up which I have to solve. Can you tell me what those two boxes say?
This is what I get if I complete a puzzle in Mysterious Mode:
This I guess says something like "Completion!" which is what comes up in the normal playing mode when completing a puzzle. Only in this mysterious mode does *this* show instead. Then this shows up:
I'm guessing this says "saving game" but I can't be sure.
Lastly, this is what I think is the "profile options" thing (clicked on from the main menu). I know the upper option is to change the profile name. Can you confirm or deny that the bottom one is to delete the profile? It brings up a confirmation box and I'm not about to experiment by confirming it.
Any assistance is appreciated. And happy new year again!
[/URL]
Truly crappy, I know.
[/URL]