The S3&K run is another matter. This game just isn't star material. I don't think it's completely a matter of opinion. This game here is almost self-scrolling and extremely repetitive. Even the wrapping around gets old after 20 minutes (not to offend the run, it was mostly very good and entertaining).
A star? Don't you think that's exaggerating just a bit? It's a very repetitive beat'em up game. No matter how fast you can complete this game in my book it should definitely never get a star. I think the whole "GIVE THIS A STAR!" business is getting out of hand. As for the run, it was great and I liked it.
Because the civilian service is over twice as long as the minimum armed service time, Amnesty International has declared that civilian service in Finland can be considered as a punishment for not serving in the Defense Forces. Thus, people who refuse from serving in any way are protesting against the unfair system. This is what makes them political prisoners: they have been imprisoned because they protest against the government, not only because they are pacifists. In fact, some people who refuse to serve aren't pacifists at all, but are merely protesting.
If anyone wants to know the reason why Jehova's Witnesses do get a special treatment, I'll tell you. It's nothing more than the Finnish government feeling guilty.
Jehova's Witnesses have always refused to serve in the army. In the 50s and 60s, they were the only large united group of people who refused completely from serving. That's when the government decided to start special camps for Jehova's Witnesses. In these camps they would have no possessions except their one set of clothes and a few personal items. They were forced to live underground in very small quarters and they were not given enough nutricious food. By day they had to work to earn their keep. They had absolutely no idea when they would be released, as it seemed to be pretty random. One or two were released now and then, but some people had to stay at the camps for years. Sound familiar?
Anyway after all this leaked to the public, it was of course a huge scandal and Finland's president came to personally inspect the camps. He of course found that the prisoners were living in inhuman conditions, and because the government felt bad, Jehova's Witnesses were given the special right they have today.
Not even many Finnish people know that there have been concentration camps in Finland, as the matter has always been a huge shame for the government. Jehova's Witnesses' special right to not have to serve is probably going to be removed in the next 5 years. There has already been some talk of it at the parliament.
Let me stress that it doesn't matter whether you are Finnish or not. At the moment most of the pressure for Finland to change its laws is actually coming from outside Finland, because Finland is the only EU country where there still are political prisoners. The European comission, the United Nations and Amnesty International have all requested that Finland change its unfair laws so that they are less discriminative against pacifists and antimilitarists. Finland has the longest civil service when compared to the minimum service in the Defense Forces of all Europe.
What I'm saying is that the issue is international and it's everybody's responsibility to make this world a better place. And if I wasn't clear about the place of residense you can just write the name of the city or state you live in, you don't have to be more specific.
It's not about the army being that bad, it's a matter of principle. I do not believe that violence solves anything, which is why I chose civilian service. I didn't have the balls to go to prison and my girlfriend would have killed me but I admire the people who do have the guts to make a stand and go to prison for what they believe in. I feel that it is wrong to punish someone for not wanting to learn how to kill other people.
At this very moment there are 17 political prisoners sitting in Finnish prisons. In violation to the UN human rights committee's rulings, Finland has not agreed to let go of its backwater traditions.
It is still mandatory in Finland for every healthy young man to go into the army to serve for a minimum of 180 days (6 months). If one refuses to go to the army because of a religious or an antimilitaristic conviction, he can choose to perform civil service for the city or government for a period of 395 days (13 months). Because the civil service is unreasonably longer than the minimum service in the army, some people refuse to serve in any way. Many of them also see themselves as being discriminated against because women, Jehova's witnesses and people living in an autonomous area off the coast of Finland do not need to serve. The people who choose not to serve are sentenced to 197 days (6,5 months, half of the civil service) of imprisonment.
I am urging anyone who feels that this is wrong to sign a petition to the President of Finland, Tarja Halonen, to free Finland's political prisoners. The petition can be found at http://www.adressit.com/totaalit. For people who are not Finnish: the fields you must fill are from top to bottom: first name, last name, place of residence. Also if you do not want your name seen on the Internet, check "Ei" instead of "Kyllä" from under the last field. Once you have signed, click "Allekirjoita adressi".
Thank you for reading my post. Even if you choose not to sign, it is always positive to spread the word that there are people senteced to sit in a prison among criminals because of something they believe.
Good job! I honestly can't spot any significant improvements.
Also it's really nice to see that almost all of my initial tactics made it to this version as well, I guess there's not too many things to do differently in this game. It's just a shame that so many weapon switches had to be sacrificed for a better time. And I'd still like to see an improved no-damage version but I guess you can't always have everything :)
Okay, watched it. It was surprisingly entertaining but I saw lots of things gone wrong:
1) No enemy boosts!
2) Why on Earth did you wait for the heart container from the Dodongo when you never take damage?
3) The level 4 and 8 boss fights (Gleeok?) were suboptimal
4) Oftentimes you go so out of the way to get your bombs or rod to hit many enemies simultaneously that in the same amount of time you could already have hit them all separately
5) Are you sure you needed 16 bombs in the end? I think just better manipulation of drops would have saved you from the second addition of bombs.
6) I know the money is extremely hard to plan ahead but you were left with 44 rupees or something like that, so it seems to me that you could've gambled one less time
7) I don't think we really need a swordless run, it's just long.
Your movie won't get published if you do not use all emulator features to your advantage. The whole point of the movies on this site is that they show what could be done with the game if human limitations were not considered. If you do not use left+right or frame advance and because of that your movie is imprecise or or somehow imperfect, the movie will not get accepted. I'm just letting you know, because you talk about submitting the movie in your post.
We have SNES Super Demo World - TLC (1.1) in 2:13:18 by Fabian (?) & JXQ (?) and SNES Super Demo World - TLC (1.1) in 19:33 by JXQ (?). If there is a difference, the respective movie entry should be modified to show it. I still can't see the difference though, and I think the movies even run using the same rom and patch.
EDIT: Scratch that, I see what you mean now. What's so different in SDW and SDW:TLC though to warrant two different movies? I'm not sure I ever even tried SDW 1.0.
Saturn, SDW and SDW - The Legend Continues are the same game. We only have one accepted SMW hack.
Personally, I don't understand what you are suggesting, moozooh. Those criteria you described are already used by Bisqwit when he is determining whether a hack is good enough to be accepted or not. As you said, good hacks are extremely rare, so it's not like there are many hacks left out because they have to be manually accepted by Bisqwit. I guess my question is this: what's wrong with the system we have at present? If you want to introduce a hack to the community, make a thread. If you want to TAS a hack, ask Bisqwit either in the thread, in a PM, by e-mail or via IRC. Good hacks almost always stick out of the crowd and I don't think it's hard for Bisqwit to see what hacks should be accepted and what shouldn't. Borderline cases are rare. In my experience, if Bisqwit doesn't know the original game very well, he will ask for help from people on the site (as in the case of Metroid Legacy, where a lot of people recommended it to be accepted).
I have not watched the run and just quickly skimmed through the topic but I think I noticed you say at one point that you needed to use one shuriken, even though your goal was to not use any. This is a huge but conserning trying to get this published, as it falls directly under "doesn't achieve its goals" which usually means an instant rejection. Solution? You should remove the goal "does not use shurikens" entirely and use them as freely as you want or not use shurikens.
How is it impure if it's in English? I understand that the original game is in Japanese, but I'm sure that for many of us the English version is much more familiar than the Japanese version. I'm sorry but for me it's just hard to understand how using the English version corrupts the movie.
This I don't really understand. Does it somehow ruin the game if it's in English so that it's not a masterpiece anymore?
I can appreciate the movie comparison since I absolutely hate dubbed movies. Here however I don't see the English text taking away anything. It might of course be different (and almost certainly it is) for people who understand Japanese, but do you want to make the movie only for those people? I'm sure that the majority of the watchers can understand English but not Japanese.
I don't agree. I am familiar with the game and have played through it many times but I could not keep up with Boco's WIPs, for example. And even if I hadn't played the game I still might be able to understand what's happening if it were in English, but there would be no chance of that were the movie in Japanese.
I don't actually care about the dialogue and the story textboxes. For all I care they can be in Japanese. I think anyone who watches a TAS for the story is missing out on the game. My beef is with the textboxes in battle.
Not many of us know everything about the game. When I'm watching the Japanese version being TASed, I can really only see what happens AFTER the commands have been input (ie. the animation and the damage numbers). I can't see what the commands are and I would probably have no idea of what's going on. I'd probably just wonder how the hell the player was able to do such massive damage.
If for example the FF6 run was in Japanese, I'd have absolutely no idea what was going on in most battles. You don't need to slow the game down to see the commands used in battle, so I don't think the point in the quote is really an important one.
EDIT: Oh, and I'd like to add that it's nowhere near as satisfying to read what's happening from subtitles or a submission text after/before watching the movie. I'd really like to be able to follow the game when it's actually happening, not afterwards.
I read through the thread a couple of times and could only find 3 points that support banning using fan translations:
1) The games are not authentic. FFV hasn't been released in English.
2) The translations are constantly being updated.
3) It's faster to use the Japanese verison.
For point 1): We already have movies of games that are not real. Air, SDW and Mario adventure have all been published because it was decided that the movies are entertaining and deserve to be published. In this case (when I don't think watching the original being played is interesting at all for most people) the entertainment value of using the translation patch heavily outweighs any cons that using a patch could have.
As for 2): As Simon said, the latest update for the complete FFV translation patch was made in 1998, which leads me to conclude that there are no more updates coming. Even if there were, I don't see how it could possibly be a problem.
For 3): As I said earlier, this doesn't improve the quality of the movie at all. The dialogue boxes in the English version are not significantly slower than in the Japanese version. What I mean by this is that it's not any more annoying to watch the English textboxes go by than it is to watch them go by in Japanese. As someone said, we're not going for the amount of frames here, but for the quality of play and entertainment.
Since the exceptions for hacks and translations are made on a case-by-case basis, I don't see the amount of hacks and translations as a problem either.
Honestly I can't see any points that support the banning of translations at all.