Going through that post, I'm seeing a lot of either "this will more or less be the same" or just talking about level wraps and zips in general.
Here's the big problem that I see: S3K is zipping. It's a lot of zipping, level wraps, watching a screen fly by in fast motion until it finally lands at the boss of the area. The only way these runs differ is in the decreasingly often sections of actual gameplay, which most of the time is just to set up the next zip, and most of the time the setups are near identical except one method is slightly slower than another. This would be a MUCH different story without the zipping, if every character actually had to play the levels and were able to get through using their unique abilities.
Going off of one of your earlier posts in the thread, I think the branch thing isn't mentioned in Movie Rules because it's almost never a problem, it's only in very few cases where a game could actually warrant the publication of several branches. I admit that's a flaw with the rules. It's mentioned in the
Judge Guidelines, which is why the current Judges (and myself as a former Judge) are even talking about it in the first place, but I do agree that it should be more clearly communicated to TASers and audience as well.
I understand that a game's community would see no reason not to have every possible branch published, especially in S3K's case where there are actually different playable characters that would normally lend itself perfectly to having a run for each character, but the community has to try to see things from the general audience's perspective. When it comes down to it, is there a reason to watch all 9 published S3K runs (competition mode is excluded here, Amy hack is included)? Is it worth it for a member of the general audience to specifically sit down and watch every single branch of this game? I'd argue it isn't, and part of my argument is that I already am a member of the general audience, and recently I've watched four of those runs, plus this one multiple times, and I can honestly say that there wasn't much difference to me, and I'm clearly not the only one who thinks that.
Keep in mind that even if this run gets rejected, it doesn't mean it can't be looked at again and published in the future. The rules can change, and they HAVE changed, and runs have gotten second chances due to these rule changes and a lot of them have ended up published after all. Timeframe isn't an issue either:
Look at when this run was submitted VS when it was finally published. 11 years. Rejection is only really the end of a run if it's noticeably suboptimal (which this run absolutely isn't) or if there are other glaring issues (emulation, flagrant rule-breaking, things like that, which again this run isn't any of those things). The branch thing isn't even so much a
hard rule as it is a
philosophy, even if there are times (like now) where we do enforce it as a rule.
It's a really difficult case. I just hope that if it does end up getting rejected, it doesn't kill the community's motivation to improve the other runs, as there seems to be a LOT that the published runs are missing. Maybe we can take a look at this run again when the other categories are finally improved and it's a lot easier to compare? Otherwise, we can take a look at it again in the future when the rules change, and yes I'm fully expecting that to happen.
