Posts for Obob

Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/21/2009
Posts: 5
Any chance we could get an encode? Looking forward to watching this one.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/21/2009
Posts: 5
"I pressed A on frame #396 Step 2: I pressed A on frame #498 Step 3: I pressed <^>v on frame #461" So this run crashes the game by going backwards in time to press all four directions at once? Yeah, the programmers must have been really careless making this one... I know pressing opposite directions is widely accepted here, but when it introduces new glitches into the game that wouldn't otherwise exist its just stupid IMO--this should be viewed as a hardware limitation, i.e. something where emulation is going beyond what the system actually allows.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/21/2009
Posts: 5
No, I didn't miss that you changed it DarkKobold. I think it is fine now the way it is; just other people are debating whether it was actually played on the hardest difficulty or not. I'd also like to say that I finished watching the run, and I'd like to say well done! Especially after reaching north parmecia the run is really great. Having seen the run, I can confirm that playing on super would mostly just change the first half of the run. There are definitely several battles that would need different strategies, though, because you would be taking too much damage to survive. The most active shining force forums are at http://www.shiningforcecentral.com/ (as DarkKobold is well aware). All the veterans there play almost exclusively on super or on hacked versions of the game which increase the difficulty. The fact of the matter is that the AI difference between Super and Ouch is virtually negligible, if it even exists at all. It is likely that Ouch was also meant to have the 25% boost to enemy attack values, but that the abscense of this boost wasn't noticed in playtesting. In fact, people only rarely play on super until they are told it is harder; after beating the game once on normal they figure they are ready for the hardest difficulty setting, and automatically assume that ouch is the hardest. It's not hard to see how playtesters might have missed this issue. There's also evidence to suggest that at one time there may have been plans for "normal" or an "easy" difficulty to penalize monster attack scores by 20%; the raw attack values stored on the cartridge for monsters are 80% of their values on normal, hard, and ouch difficulties. For instance, the attack value of a mist demon in the monster stats database on the cartridge is 80; on normal hard and ouch difficulties they have 100 attack, and on super they have 125. All it takes to give the super difficulty damage bonus to ouch difficulty monsters is changing a single bit in the entire ROM.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/21/2009
Posts: 5
Ouch! is not the hardest difficulty, although the programmers intended it to be. If the programmers of a game replaced all the enemies by cuddly bunnies and called that the hardest difficulty setting, that doesn't mean the game was played on the hardest difficulty if the "2nd hardest" is actually much more difficult. Except for minor AI changes, normal, hard and ouch difficulties are all the same. On super, the enemies get a huge attack boost. Anybody who has played super and any other difficulty can tell you how much ridiculously harder super is than all the others. I never meant for this to be grounds for preventing publication; the run should definitely be published. However, it should not be published with "plays on hardest difficulty" as one of the criteria. A super run which beats the game in a similar amount of time should be able to obsolete this.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 5/21/2009
Posts: 5
I'm a huge fan of SF2, and I'm sure I'll enjoy this when I watch it later. However, it is misleading to class this video as "plays on hardest difficulty setting." It is widely accepted that "Super" is the hardest difficulty setting, not "Ouch!" which this is played on. Some people think the AI is slightly better on Ouch!, however all enemies have 25% more base attack stat on Super than on Ouch!. In practice, this makes Super MUCH more difficult, even though the game lists Ouch! as the last of the 4 difficulty settings.