That Shinespark is weird. And there's not a lot of limitations on its use, at least under TAS conditions.
I'm not really thrilled by the level design though. Lots of use of the outside-the-Wrecked Ship tileset, long corridors that don't do much, etc. And the portion of the run in which you have the shinespark is pretty brief (and rightfully so), which unfortunately means that most of the run is pretty pedestrian. Especially since the person who made the hack decided to leave the Ceres station section in.
I'mma vote meh.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I have zero familiarity with BizHawk but this sounds like the program may be installed in the wrong location, or that you have some kind of permissions issue with where your storing your files. It's evidently trying to move a file into a location that it doesn't have permissions to move it to.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Interesting run. It does seem like the basic movement is reasonably straightforward (once you have the maps, anyway), which leaves health management and the "bosses" as the two biggest sources of difficulty in the run. Maybe better movement in earlier levels would leave you with more health and enable you to spend more time in "walker" form in later levels despite being dogpiled by enemies -- but I didn't see anything obviously suboptimal.
I assume the last level is just a big pile of powerups? That's what it looks like, anyway, and it'd explain why you skipped it.
Anyway, it's not a great run, but it was interesting to see, and I could believe it's fairly fun to play. Thanks for making the run!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I think he's just referring to the colors used. Green and yellow are not very pleasant on the eyes, though they are more true to the Gameboy's original color scheme than the black and white in Spikestuff's encode.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
...Virus yes! :) While I originally envisioned this as one long chain of unbroken consoles I kind of like the idea of writing a virus that can take over the next console in the chain independently...
Dwango, when I read "virus" in your post, I immediately thought of Final Fantasy IV and someone casting the spell Virus in battle.
So could this be an idea? Say, an event happens on one of the other consoles that has something to do with viruses in the game's story (whether a cut-scene, or someone casting a "spell virus", etc.). After the virus scene occurs, you'd then use that as a swerve to cause the actual virus payload.
Tangentially related, but you could also have a payload that consists of one console providing some form of "commentary" on another console, or recreating an approximation of the events on that console in its own game. For example, the primary run is Super Mario Bros. and the secondary run is Final Fantasy: when mario dies, so does Fighter; when Mario throws a fireball, Fighter casts Fire1, the flagpole at end-of-stage signals the end of the fight, etc. Then you hand the controller of the primary game to someone to demonstrate that the system is working "live".
Though I must admit I'm unclear on how you would read state from console 1 to feed into console 2. Consoles don't have much in the way of output capability that I'm aware of.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I'd like to emphasize that we should think about what this will look like to the audience. Taking over consoles is cool and all, but if the big payoff is just that we show a little demoscene video on an NES (or some other "small" ACE demo), I don't think it's going to have that much of an impact, no matter how much effort went into achieving that video.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
That was a pretty great trench run. Nice work!
I'm ambivalent about co-op runs personally. They're a lot more difficult to make and they tend to be hard to watch, especially when they're split-screen.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Back in college in the early 2000's our robotics lab already had a bot that played Duck Hunt. It's not that interesting honestly. A camera, some servos, and some basic motion-tracking software plus the appropriate aiming code.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
It seems to me that Warp's stance is, in practice, that we should pretend that games do not have bugs when we run them. Does that seem accurate to you, Warp?
No. Absolutely nothing of what I have written can lead to that conclusion.
Are you making fun of me by any chance?
Not in the slightest, and thank you for assuming the best of me </sarcasm>.
The problem is that as soon as you allow the abuse of bugs, you are in unintended behavior. You are no longer playing the game as the developers intended, because they did not intend for you to encounter buggy scenarios. So everything boils down to a difference in degree: there's a continuum here. At the most conservative (category A), you play the game the developers wrote, and conscientiously avoid using bugs. Next to that (category B) is you make use of bugs that happen to have beneficial effects. Next to that (category C) is arranging things in precise ways so that bugs will have beneficial effects (like the SMB3 wrong warp glitch or any number of different Pokemon glitch runs).
And finally you have ACE, category D, where you abuse bugs to enable you to write your own code. Note that subtle versions of category D can look incredibly similar to category C -- like, you can't arrange the precise jump-to-memory that you want by manipulating memory "once", but you can arrange a jump into the sprite data, and then arrange said sprite data so it looks like "jmp address-of-end-cutscene". That's technically ACE, but it's barely different than category C, hence why I said it's a continuum.
You don't like category D runs, but you're okay with A/B/C? Okay, well, there are players who don't like category C runs. And players who don't like category B runs. And there are players who find it offensive that they should be constrained to just category A. Everyone's gotta make peace with the fact that there are different kinds of runs that play to different tastes.
The way I see it, as a consumer of this free entertainment product (viz. speedruns produced by other players), your options are either a) enjoy what is available, or b) learn to make your own speedruns. Telling the people, who work on this in their free time for no compensation, that you don't like what they're doing is not likely to win you any friends.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Frankly I think that total control TASes are a bit overplayed now. Chaining together multiple consoles is an interesting technical challenge, and it worked well for the Pokemon Plays Twitch demo, but I don't think most watchers are really going to appreciate a show that amounts to "we do what we did last year, only even more so." That, combined with the inherent technical risk that Nach referred to, makes this proposal have a poor risk:reward ratio, by my estimation.
I'm not sure what I'd suggest as an alternative, but things that have strong interaction with the audience seem to go over well. Giving runners the chance to play their games in ways they haven't seen before, making nods at Twitch, etc. I suggest focusing on the content of the payload rather than the mechanism of the payload. After all, the content is far more visible to the audience than the little bot and laptop are.
I guess one possible suggestion would be trying to rig up some kind of AI to play "against" the player (or at any rate to rig the normal level hazards) in a nominally-singleplayer game.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
It seems to me that Warp's stance is, in practice, that we should pretend that games do not have bugs when we run them. Does that seem accurate to you, Warp?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Depends, do you count programs written to speedrun games as being nonhuman speedrunners?
I admit that that chimp is pretty speedy at that game, but are they really striving to be as fast as possible, or are they merely playing it? I mean, I'm not a speedrunner of, say, Angband, even though I'm pretty good at it and a lot faster than your average player.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Has it even been confirmed you can beat the game like this? I can imagine some of the Speed Booster segments are impossible with the game turned on its side.
If you look at the forum thread, there was a race of this hack done -- with the item randomizer turned on, even. The hack is more than just a 90° rotation; the terrain has been changed at points (including the removal of all shoot-to-open gates) and underwater physics were adjusted.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I won't be making it a YouTube module, so bare with me here on how I'm going to explain it.
First Semi-TAS that was created, by using a special name in the name field.
Aside from falling down in the leaf labyrinth room, getting hit, and the obvious hangups on the terrain, I've read that in the room with three rocks, you only need to interact with the third rock (i.e. the top two can be left alone).
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
You always start with 30 health. If you want more health, the recommended way to do this is to find a password that leaves an easy-to-get E-tank (like the one in Blue Brinstar) uncollected, as that will refill your health when you pick it up.
By the way, these forums are more dedicated to making superplays of the game, not so much for general gameplay advice. If you have more questions, you'd probably get better advice from a community dedicated to Metroid like m2k2's forums.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Standing on frozen enemies isn't a glitch; there's at least one place in the game that's explicitly built around you using that technique to climb a vertical shaft. If the level designers failed to take that into account for the Arena's area, then that's their problem.
Could you explain the slow-falling trick? I'm not familiar with that one.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I think my favorite thing about this game is how the train level, which features soldiers and biplanes with machineguns, has a coal monster for the boss.
Nice work on the run! You found some impressive skips. I don't know that there's a right way to play this game, but it's almost certainly not what you did. Good job.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Batman has a pretty doofy jogging animation in this game.
This game is far and away better than the other Lynx game we've had a run for. Everything's pretty smooth, the graphics and sound are inoffensive, and there's a good variety of environments and enemies. It's still not that great though.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
What happens if you fire the Balloon later at the end of the Robot Master fights and then land on it during Mega Man's victory jump? You seem to time it so the Balloon disappears mid-jump; I'm just curious.
I was all set to skip over the refights, then discovered that there were none. Good job skipping the worst part of every Mega Man game!
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
