First and foremost, I'm not convinced this branch meets the Moons requirements yet. The original thread has 8 Yes votes and no No votes, but only a single post about voting Yes, and one post about being unsure what to vote, thought "it was still enjoyable to watch". This thread is 7 Yes against 0 No votes, and also two posts about entertainment.
The fact that you can mostly replicate this run by starting from a post-completion save, which we absolutely do accept for Moons, probably can play a role in how exactly we treat this particular cheat code, but still it's not about unlocking new content.
Yeah both using the cheat, or starting from a full completion file are just as arbitrary as one another.
the rest is too similar to the any% movie IMO.
While I'm in no particular hurry to have a Super Metroid hack published, enough people seem to find this one entertaining to warrant acceptance. However, both Nach and I were less than impressed with the overall level design and "polish" of the hack, so I would suggest that a future run of a more impressive hack should probably obsolete this run. Anyway, congrats to the author for the first accepted Super Metroid hack on TASvideos
A movie that goes to Playground:
- Must not break Wiki: SiteRules
- Must break some Wiki: MovieRules (otherwise it just gets published)
Using a PAL version of the game is allowed in some situations:
- There are version exclusive changes to a PAL release that warrant its usage
- Games for handheld consoles (like GameBoy)
- Games that run in PAL60 mode (like on GameCube)
- The original hardware allows it (see the above section on hardware accuracy)
But, the same also goes for most older versions of BizHawk, and lsnes, if accuracy is the main deciding factor.
First, it's not clear when this max difficulty threshold actually occur, or if there is one at all. Reading your submission notes, it assumes that it occurs when reaching 990 points like ThunderAxe31's analysis of the Game & Watch 4 version you linked to, but it's not something that can be easily verified.
The goal choice feels arbitrary to me. I get that saving Donkey Kong can be a legitimate goal, and I also get that achieving a maximum score (999 or 9999 depending if we care about the in-game score of the leaderboards added to the DSiWare version) can also be a legitimate goal. Having a weird combination of both of these goals in a row just makes no sense to me, especially when considering that each stage of freeing Donkey Kong does not change anything other than the number of points awarded. My personal preference is a maximum score goal since gameplay progresses by the same amount regardless of how points have been obtained.
The only way you could tell cheats were used is by the currency saying "999999999" or whatever, but the effect is the same as having any other number - all the upgrades are purchased already; the number means nothing.
My proposal is to allow external cheats to be used in verification movies as long as the end result could also be achieved by simply playing the game, and retains no lasting, unintended effects (like if infinite health somehow stayed on even after the code was disabled and the game was restarted, or if you got a debug item that can't be acquired in normal gameplay and it wasn't discarded before the save file was created, etc - those types of things). Think of it as a shortcut.
- I'm not sure if allowing an emulator that injects its own user name and message during initial system setup should be allowed.
I started thinking about how we would branch them so 16-star route makes the most sense...
I am concerned about would it be partly judged for leniency. Where it hasn't reached the exciting part, or long unentertaining setup just to setup something cool. Imagine smb3 without whistles. (ignoring DCPM workaround) you have to sit through 6 worlds without new content just to see cool stuff. Why should the other parts affect the viewing experience of the real playground - the main focus the author wants to show off?
The issue I'm seeing is we can't create the same game entry that would cover several platforms, which may be desired if the versions for different platforms are indeed the same.
But DOS feels like it should belong to the IBM PC section too, because separating PC into modern and retro would be subjective.