Wikipedia's no good for serious, scholarly work, but most of the information on it that I'm able to check on has been accurate, which inclines me to trust the stuff that I can't check on.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Maybe someone could do what's often been done for Super Metroid and make an encoding that removes all the transition/cutscene frames. Obviously such an encoding couldn't be published, but they do tend to make for more entertaining movies.
MM2 has by far the longest "weapon get" cutscenes of the NES series. :\
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
CAD's argument is a simple one of economics: you were willing to pay the price requested for the good offered. If you hadn't been, you wouldn't have made the purchase. The information required to make an informed purchase was available; if you didn't avail yourself of it, well, that's your problem.
You don't really have a leg to stand on if you're going to complain about your purchase when it delivered on everything it said it would deliver. You can describe how it could have been better, but what does that accomplish, really?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Okay, yes, fair enough. :) Mainly it's the presence of techniques that the developers clearly knew could be used for sequence breaking (as evidenced by the use of bomb jumping in one of the demos). A normal player will probably find the Etecoons at some point, and assuming they don't quit in disgust after saving in an impossible-to-escape location, learn to walljump. After that, all bets are off -- any marginally inventive player can find all sorts of sequence breaks. You don't need to have access to GameFAQs or online forums dedicated to the game to realize just how out-of-order it's possible to do things in.
Hell, I went the "wrong way" in the Brinstar shaft long before I found TASVideos, just so I could grab powerbombs early. I had to kill all the enemies in the shaft with super missiles, but it was totally doable.
It's a much fuzzier issue if things like the mockball, or arm pumping, were intended (and thus the ability to get past shutters that would otherwise require the speedbooster). I'd say no on both, but I know others who have disagreed.
Anyway, all of the sequence breaks I've seen in SotN are of the "you have to be an obsessive gamer to find this" type, which is what I mean by them not resembling how a "normal player" would play the game. Realistically, how likely are you to try unmorphing from wolf form in midair? And then trying to use a move that plenty of people never realize they have even if they do have the leap stone?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Er, no, I don't. Should I have to? I guess it could work as a workaround to the issue, but it seems like the forum should be able to track what I've read by, y'know, tracking which threads I click on.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
that's some Twin Galaxies shit right there. i don't think even they would disallow the wolf kick.
Um, okay? This is relevant?
i facepalm at the thought of "natural route" TAS. that's an oxymoron, as the natural route goes against everything TASes are supposed to be. namely, entertaining.
So you're going to tell me that I'm not a good judge of what I find entertaining? Or are you saying that what I find entertaining is so far from what everyone else on this site finds entertaining that runs I like shouldn't be published here? Except that there are quite a few people on this forum who have expressed interest in these kinds of runs.
the run would be nothing more than a frame advanced Let's Play.
And this is a problem?
the fact that TASes are supposed to show superhuman control is already playing the game outside the manner the game creators intended. (speaking of which, you're going to have a hell of a time telling me which order of obtaining the Vlad items is intended. or better yet, telling me the intended route for Super Metroid.)
You'll note that I made several references to the Metroid series as a series where there wasn't an obvious intended order. Thus the type of run I'm proposing here wouldn't make sense for Metroid. Similarly, as you pointed out, there's no significant barriers to progress in the upside-down castle, and thus no intended order there, so whatever order the TASer wants to pick there is fine.
and getting the Silver Ring without the Spike Breaker doesn't use a glitch or a programming oversight.
I think it's an oversight that the momentary invulnerability that you get from using a potion allows you to open doors that you normally aren't able to open because of damaging terrain. It's an oversight of design, not programming, but it's still an oversight.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I have actually commented in the past that I'd like to see a version of S3&K without the wall-zip glitch. So nyah. :p
As Cpadolf noted, this site is not solely about speed, or even about speed while laboring under restrictions (100%/low%/etc.). Otherwise we wouldn't have things like the River City Ransom playaround run or the SMB3 glitchfest run. The site is about entertainment. Make an entertaining run, and you have decent odds of getting it published. Hell, Smash Bros. didn't get published until we had a non-speed-based submission.
Anyway, I have no problem whatsoever with glitched runs. I just like to see both sides of the coin. There's no need to be exclusionary here. What we're after is a) entertainment, and b) quality. If you have both, you're welcome.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Yes, I'd say that in a glitchless run you wouldn't be allowed to use the wolf kick to get to Olrox's Quarters.
In general, as I said, there is a clearly intended order to the way the game is meant to be played. You enter the castle, go to the Outer Wall, meet the Librarian for the opening stone, go back to the blue door, climb the cathedral and make it to the upper level for the leap stone, and then you can go into Olrox's Quarters.
In short, any route that deviates from the intended route would not be allowed in such a run. And I feel safe in saying this for SotN when it's not safe for e.g. Metroid Zero Mission because all of the available sequence breaks in SotN are clearly glitches and/or programming oversights. Not "this jump looks too far to make, but if you're pixel-perfect it's doable", but "this jump requires you to do a bunch of fiddlng to reset your state so you have access to an ability you shouldn't have."
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
There's an obvious intended order to Symphony of the Night; this isn't Metroid Zero Mission here. You can't reasonably claim that the game designers intended for you to be able to get to the library before the Outer Wall, given the locations of all of the library cards.
Yes, sequence breaks are possible, and sequence-breaking TASes are a classic staple of the artform, but that doesn't mean there's no room or demand for TASes that look basically like how a normal person would play the game if they didn't make mistakes. That's the basic argument for the "BLJ-less 70-star SM64 TAS".
And personally, I do think that using Luck Mode to retain the Alucard equipment is, while fine if your only goal is speed, disappointing. There's tons of neat equipment in SotN and just sticking with the same stuff throughout is boring. One-hit KOing enemies isn't entertaining. If you're going to make the decision to not use one glitch (say, edge walking) because it's not entertaining, even though it makes a faster run, then you should be able to say the same about any other available glitch. For my part the same goes for anything that isn't a glitch, too. I don't think the Shield Rod + Alucard Shield combination is entertaining, for example, even though it's a legitimate spell that real players use all the time. Same goes for Soul Steal. Make the most entertaining movie you can, and have speed as a secondary goal, I say.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I've noticed an issue with the forum tracking which posts I've read. It seems like sometimes it doesn't notice that I've seen a post before. My usual process is to open up the main forum page, then open all of the subforum pages that have the yellow mark in tabs, then open all the threads in those subforums that I haven't read, also in tabs. Frequently I find that when I get to one of those threads, one of the following is true:
* I've already read all of the posts in that thread
* I've not read all of the posts, but the post I'm sent to is one I've already read
So for example, in thread A, I'm told there's new content for me to read. I click the link, get taken to post #33, read it, post #34, and post #35, and go away. Later I come back, and thread A has even more new content! Yay! But when I click on it, I'm back on post #33 and there's no new posts. Or there are, but I wasn't jumped to post #36 like I should have been.
This seems to eventually clear itself up. I've not noticed any pattern. I'd initially say it was a browser caching issue, but that doesn't match up with the behavior of having new posts in the thread but still jumping to the old "last read" location.
Any ideas?
Edit: as a quick example, I've been to the SotN thread on the workbench three times now, and each time it's taken me to the first past.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
This is what I meant by game choice biasing my voting. Should a TASer's quality be based on the quality of the games he chooses to TAS, or on the quality of TASing he does on those games? I'm inclined to think the latter, but that makes voting much more difficult because it's horribly hard for the uninitiated to judge how well a TASer does on a game.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
So we've got Castlevania games, and ninja games. Nice.
I don't think I can reasonably vote on this because my opinion is heavily swayed by game choice.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I guess our moderators and encoders have been busy lately, as the queue's built up to be a bit longer than what I tend to think of as "usual". And yes, I know things've been in the queue for over a year before, but half a year ago the queue had all of three things in it, too!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Cute game. Not very kind, though. The controls are kinda loose (it's very easy to jump into enemies), and your sight radius isn't so great easier (it's very easy to jump into enemies). Halfway-decent voice acting, though, which is a nice surprise. And I like how Slick's ears wiggle when he's feeling smug.
I'm not so certain that killing enemies for money is going to be the best way to get all of your cash (some of it sure, but not all of it). I say this because I don't think I've seen an enemy give more than 80G yet, and it takes a decent amount of time to kill an enemy and then wait for the cash to drop. I'm assuming here that you can simply walk/jump past most of the enemies in the game. Naturally, if you do need to farm it's best to find an area with several enemies that you can kill simultaneously. Parallelism for the win, hey?
Right now I'm stuck on the giant/dragon guy in the second area (the one that alternates between sleepy and berserk). Stupid falling rocks...
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I've seen probably dozens of threads in which someone new says "Hey, I'm looking into TASing <game nobody's ever heard of>!" And the response is invariably one of "Well, that game looks like crap; you're welcome to give it a shot but I don't think it'll be published" or "Someone submitted a run for that game five years ago and it got rejected."
In other words, the vast majority of games that newcomers consider TASing end up being bad game choices using our current definitions (and I think they're pretty good definitions for the most part). Which, to me, says that we have very few good games left to TAS; everything worthwhile's been gone over in minute detail already by a TASing veteran. Oh sure, there's obscure but worthwhile games, but they're obscure, i.e. nobody's heard of them to know that they're worth TASing.
I don't know what the solution to this problem is. But it does exist.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Isn't it weird how he stops the door just to wiggle his eyebrows?
I've been saying for a while now that the next Mega Man game needs to have Wily Man as one of the robot masters, with his weapon being Eyebrow Laser.
Edit: it's also amusing to think of R-type ship variants for different games. Anyone who's played R-Type Final will know what I'm talking about. So!
R-20XX Skull Fortress:
Red: Eyebrow Laser
Blue: Third Form Laser
Yellow: Met Hat Laser
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Amusingly enough, I find myself saying the word "etsee" instead of "et cetera" more often than not. But I have an excuse! *nix operating systems have a directory named "etc", and if you want to refer to that directory, you'd better not try to call it "et cetera", which would be a totally different and probably nonexistent directory.
In other words, this is a case where an abbreviation became a word in its own right.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Hah! Whoops. You got me. :) Guess I was just tired when I wrote that post. I think my thought process was "Viewer mentions chainsaw legs...hunh. Haven't heard of anything like that; maybe he found a secret evolution option. Oh, hey, there's an image! I've got to know more!"
Mind you, it would have been pretty awesome if the normally-unavailable evolution menu had various silly bits of content created by bored developers. :)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Wait, what?
I never even considered the possibility of debug content in the greyed-out evolution menus. Is all that's necessary hitting select and move on the same frame? Are there any other menus like that?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Any popular game that includes a timer will end up with nearly-frame-perfect routes anyway, assuming that there aren't techniques that require repeated rapid frame-perfect button presses.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
In short, arrays are sequences of variables, each of which has the same type. For example, you can have an array of 10 ints, or an array of 50 chars. You can use the [] notation to extract an element from the array: foo[0] means the first item in the array named "foo", foo[1] is the second item, et cetera. This is called indexing into the array: the number is the index of the item. C does not prevent you from trying to use an invalid index; with an array of 10 ints, foo[9] is valid but foo[10] is not. If you try to do that, you will get garbage results because C just looks at whatever would be there if the array was that long, and return it. If you try to write to foo[10], then you might be modifying memory that's being used by something else, which will at best simply cause the program to crash (and at worst can cause just about any kind of bad thing you care to think of).
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Is this movie in any danger of cancellation because of a lack of entertainment? The ratings look pretty solid to me.
In any case, mz, you act as if there's an either/or here. It's not like those Super Metroid runs are interfering with publishing other runs (Well, excepting in how every time a new kind ofSuper Metroid run comes up, we all get into a huge argument over whether or not it should be published and waste a lot of everyone's time). There is plenty of room on this site for original and different movies.
Generally when a movie gets cancelled, it's for one of these three reasons:
* The author is working on an improvement
* The author isn't working on an improvement despite glaring flaws in the gameplay (these tend to be from inexperienced TASers who didn't share WIPs before submitting)
* The game is so bad it's gone past So Bad It's Good and into So Bad It's Horrible. Generally when these come up the author didn't seriously expect to get published anyway.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
