If DOS shell commands are permitted, any game can be beaten trivially; simply edit the game's code until it sends you to a winning position fast.
There might be some entertaining uses to editing a game's structure before starting it, however - such exclusions would be arbitrary, but sometimes entertainment triumphs over all.
Isn't there a special kind of file that describes the difference between one kind of a file? If your hack is expressed as one of these files, anyone could confirm that you do nothing except what you say you do.
Even if it is still arbitrary.
Or you could go with a cylinder by having the top of the map link to the closest point on a separate, circle-shaped (or square shaped!) map, and similar for the bottom. Translations between the two areas would be inexact.
Nethack has already been speedrunned, anyway - by including a 'stuffed' bones file with everything you'd want in a run anyway, you can blaze through the game. The only limitation is that you have to wait until turn 2000 to do the quest - you can get the game over with not much after that.
Since this basically corresponds to the luck manipulation a TASer might do to, say, get many many wands of wishing, it practically already is a TAS.
I assume the low rerecord count is because of how easy it is to optimize gameplay once you have perfect control of everything.
I liked the little 'daredevil' stunts - dangerous jumps that you'd never see in a normal speedrun purely because there's no advantage to doing so. In fact, given how easy the game is otherwise to TAS, it seems like there ought to be as many such stunts as is possible to fit in.
I guess the implication is that it would be a bit weird to have a whole category on the site with one or two runs in it, compared say to the huge array of nes runs available.
But it's silly, because then you'd have to reject this run, and there's nothing wrong with the run.
Creating a spherical map that doesn't have distortion or awkward patchwork seems mathematically cumbersome, not easy enough to be worth the benefits it would give.
EDIT: Then again, Populous The Beginning does it, and that's only a PSX game. To be honest...I'm not sure -how- it does it.
I was actually surprised to see that the game was good - or looked good, at least - having never really looked into the virtual boy before.
The problem with making a monochrome encode is, of course, that neither the left nor right version is particularly special - which do you decide to use?
I can tell this was made because it was short and you already knew what route to take. ;)
Regardless, nothing to complain about!
Regarding how you said the enemy appeared in the worst possible spot, though, is it possibly because of some randomness seeded differently before the game began?
This was actually nice to watch - it helps that I have pseudo-nostalgic feelings for it, having seen a machine for it frequently but never played. So I guess for educational purposes, but seeing stuff done at blinding speeds is always good - and I actually think the little human element of having no rerecords might be a plus.
Typically deleting a file just removes the pointer in the directory to the block(s) where the data is stored, and marks those blocks as being free for writing, which is why it's so fast - the data is still there, just overwritable. This means that deleted data can sometimes be salvaged.
If the file is overwritten, which I'm pretty sure a full format does, then there's not much you can do to get it back.
I personally haven't played the game, but I've been reading about it lately - supposedly it has a rank system built into it, that makes the game harder the more advantages you give yourself, and the only way to drop it again is to die (and the less lives you have left when you die, the greater the drop). Why this is important is because the highest rank is supposed to be nigh impossible to survive on, so learning to manage your rank is part of the game. You can read all about it, and in particular the mechanics of the rank system in post 5, here: http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=351
What I want to suggest is that this would make a great TASing opportunity - playing around with bullet spreads that are supposed to be impossible. The goal would be one of two things: 'uses dirty RAM to play on max rank' (1) or 'achieves max rank as fast as possible on v.hard difficulty'.
(1) Note that the game also slightly boosts the initial rank with each successive game, lowering it only towards its base value with every uninterrupted cycle of attract screens - so it's possible without cheating to play starting at the max rank, but recording the whole process of starting games and suiciding would be boring.
Here's how the game looks on the max rank: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=battle+garegga+max+rank&aq=f
I'm not sure if it's the max rank of the v.hard difficulty or of a lower difficulty, though.
EDIT: Apparently, in addition to setting difficulty to v.hard and somehow achieving the max rank, you should also activate the 'harder' mode by pressing B, Start on the title screen. I'm not sure what this changes specifically.
Ages ago, I had a demo of this game on the PSX - even though it only went up to the end of the seven dwarves quest, I played it over and over. I'm not sure why I didn't ask for the full game. Kids are kids.
More recently then that, I've played through it on a playstation emulator, and it was a blast - I didn't quite get to the end, though, and I still left lots of side stuff uncompleted. Not sure what stopped me from finishing, but I do know that everything I found hard you blazed through - math beads in record time, every evil pig dispatched very quickly, the irritatingly easy to fall in lava caves, etc. So, yes for sure.
For the video comments - those two bulky paragraphs describe what you do in the early game could probably be trimmed down a lot. Just talk about things you needed to do for these parts, explain anything that look suspect and explain anything that you'd like to be able to do to make it faster, but couldn't. Just don't say anything you could infer by watching.
EDIT: Actually, after reading an faq, I have a question.
Now, when both flowers are open, jump on the blue one and throw it in
to the red one. If you've got it right, both mushrooms will fall off
the screen and a starred mushroom will be left behind. Pick it up.
*Event cleared: Red + Blue = ?*
Tombi will have turned black and white. This lasts until you lose your
next life, and makes him move a lot faster.
Would this save time, or does it not, say, boost animal dash?
While this doesn't apply to EBA, I thought of a way that a rhythm game playaround TAS could be made, but it first requires a game that does keysounding - e.g. when you hit the note determines when the sound is played, and you can hit notes while nothing is there to create sounds. So, something like DJ MAX, IIDX and Pop'n music.
What the TAS would do is deliberately mistime, omit and add in notes to create a new song. You'd have to work with what samples you can access at any moment (hitting a column when no note is in it hits the last note that played in it, so you can gain/lose access to samples), so it would be an interesting technical feat.
I'd love to hear how the heck they managed to screw up like this. What exactly is happening? Full details please!
I recall a similar glitch in Super Mario World where grouping three wrigglers in a way such that you can keep respawning them and bouncing on them pushed the 'reward you get for a jump' counter to ridiculous heights, reading random locations of memory and popping up absurd graphics/absurd coin/score rewards.
Perhaps this is similar?
Is it possible to control your character while he runs left and right to grab the jewels at the end? Because I wasn't sure if the route for it was optimal.
Now, having two TASers play a 2-player game competitively, (Each frame would be a "turn" with each revealing their input value to the other at the end)... That might have potential for depth, assuming the game in question itself had deep enough play mechanics.
I thought of another way to make a game hard to TAS: Make all actions have ultra-far-reaching consequences that aren't immediately obvious.
Think of a game like go, with a huge board and moves that individually do not alter it much - tactics come together over the course of many moves, and strategy lasts the whole game. The depth of the game comes from there never being an obvious next move - you have to grasp the board intuitively, rather than logically, because there's just too much of a tree of possible moves to search through.
In such a game, having rerecording control of your next move is not as useful as it is in a game where actions have obvious, instant consequences.
Placeable cursor on the screen, plus editable textboxes for its exact co-ordinates, plus progressively faded targets for the cursor locations of the past X frames?
I never found much of an issue, just because the game starts with a random state doesn't mean it CAN'T start with the same state as the emulator does.
The game can not be infinitely random because there must be a memory limitation on how high whatever number is generated can go. because the game must be finitely random, then at least 1 of these random startups will coincide with the initial state of the TAS. Therefore, TAS's are possible on real hardware, and this entire thread and closing of the site is for nothing.
case. in. point.
edit: read the front page. got it.
That would be true, if not for the fact that the NES were also affected by external conditions; slight variations in timing crystals and so on.
It's been discussed already - you'd need not only the right starting state, and for all physical conditions to exactly match the 'averaged' assumptions of the emulator.
I actually thought the issue brought up a reverse problem for me: Should TASers be allowed to start with whatever uninitialized memory, entrophy, etc they want? It would still be a run possible on the actual console, just as likely as a run with any other starting memory and entrophy (however vanishingly likely that is; hmm, instead of making static TASes perhaps we need to make smart movie files that adjust their input slightly whenever the output of the console isn't exactly what's expected. ;) )
You guys should check up on your algorithmic information theory. A true random number is uncomputable, so no algorithm can create one (there do exist approximations, but they all deffer depending on your formal language).
If so, surely the universe cannot 'compute' a random number either?
