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Now-cancelled submission of mine: #8122: Samsara's NES Sweet Home in 18:10.55
I'm estimating there's at least a minute of known improvements, and still a lot of potential, but I also estimated that run wouldn't even be sub-20 so what do I know about accuracy?
I had a running list of ideas in the submission thread, I'll crosspost it here and update it with a bunch of new things and ideas. Starting with the known improvements:
Skipping the Asuka clone fight looks like it saves about 8-10 seconds, assuming the Mamiya fight doesn't need to be changed.
I found a small reroute in the Courtyard. The red path is the one taken in the submission, the black path is the reroute. The reroute takes you directly to the fountain room, and you can move glitch past the statue to be able to push it into the fountain. This does force a battle with a Mirror, but the current path takes a battle as well so that part evens out. This path can also be taken on the way back from the Lake, since the Bowgun isn't necessary to cross the ice room. On paper, this is maybe 20 seconds of timesave. In practice, it may be less because of battle shenanigans.
It is in fact possible to skip the first Tonic and still have the move glitch work, which is a 7-8 second save right at the very beginning. I have no idea why it didn't work for me any other time I tried it, I just tried it again out of the blue and it worked first try.
One small movement optimization I found on accident is that Emi can usually be move glitched into a wall or obstacle and survive as long as she moves onto a safe tile on the first possible frame she can. At the very least, this cuts out a handful of steps at the Lake, as I'm able to move glitch directly onto the Monument and move off of it rather than needing to walk around and move glitch up from the boat dock. This also slightly optimizes movement with Taguchi, as he doesn't need to move as much.
Speaking of Taguchi's movement, something I want to do is find the best place for him to start his move glitching "route". If I can find a place that doesn't require him to be reset at any point in the run, nearly every QTE can be skipped with minimal time loss, saving a few seconds each.
Here's the stuff that didn't work:
I tried move glitching past the Mamiya encounter to see if I could get the Gold Key early, which would remove the need to take Kazuo and Akiko into that room, but it's triggered on pretty much every tile past the point where it normally happens. Even move glitching into walls will trigger it.
I tried skipping the third Silver Sword before going into the Inner Sanctuary. The plan was to put the first two swords on Kazuo and Akiko and then not have Emi equipped until she picks up the Pitchfork in the Dungeon, but battle order prioritizes Emi, meaning most battles were taking longer to finish by default.
And here are some potential ideas that I have yet to test or account for:
Battles. Like, just in general. Better step counter manipulation, getting better battles in general, manipulating better damage values to possibly save turns, there's probably a lot of wiggle room here. I'm also considering the possibility of using Taguchi way more liberally to truly minimize step count. Battles in the late game can end up being 15-20 seconds or so, spending a handful of extra frames as Taguchi could mean a time save from skipping a battle that would have otherwise been fought.
I'm also wondering if it's worth taking a little bit of extra time to EXP glitch off of higher EXP enemies. In the submission, Akiko glitches off of Worms (6 EXP) and a Hound (30 EXP) and Kazuo glitches off of MAN (35 EXP), and by the Mamiya fight they both end up at level 19, one away from max. Level 20 would give them both a decent damage boost in that fight, which may cut down on turns in the second phase where damage actually plays a part. Higher EXP helps Emi as well, since she needs to be level 7 before the Monument puzzle, and any extra levels she gets before the final fight could also help cut down on turns on Mamiya.
I need to experiment more with routing and the move glitch. It is possible to move glitch entirely OoB, but I wrote it off as useless since it didn't seem like you could move at all. Further investigation may yield some interesting results, but I get the feeling I'll just be moving this point into the stuff that didn't work section.
One more thing I think is definitely worth mentioning:
I was messing around with the corrupted party member (a glitch I specifically avoided because it makes it impossible to switch characters) and found that there's a lot more to it than I originally thought. The main thing that interests me is that it completely disables the ability to get into battles. The step counter just depletes and overflows over and over. Being captured by spirits is also disabled in this state. I wasn't able to test this further, mostly because I was working from a new game and didn't have access to most of the map, but also because I discovered something a little more... Well...
SOUND AND FLASHING LIGHT WARNINGLink to video
I probably shouldn't have gotten my copy at a garage sale from that man with the thousand yard stare, to be fair.
I want to play around with this a bit more, maybe have some people with better technical knowledge look into it in ways that my idiot ass can only dream of, but for now I'm going to focus on the things I can actually do.
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I think I've reached the point where I'm more comfortable cancelling this and resubmitting a new run. Too many changes have to be made, to the point where I've already made the decision to remake the entire run from scratch in order to be able to account for everything. I'm not sure exactly when I'll have the new run finished. If it ends up taking too long, I'll uncancel this and let it be judged.
EDIT: I'll be keeping track of things more closely in the game thread.
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I'm going to make a judgement call here and shut this down.
One of the authors attached to this submission (1th?!) is an alias of banned user tfqpq, who was banned from both Discord and the site for consistentlyhostilebehavior, ignoringwarnings, and ended it all on some fun homophobic rhetoric. For anyone keeping track at home: Yes, all of those screenshots were messages all sent within an hour of each other.
tfqpq had mentioned an "Annoying Ass brother" very shortly before the ban as well, in a way that implies that the brother was responsible for some of tfqpq's hostile and disruptive behavior. With this submission having been made, I was able to determine that the submitter attached to this submission (xTASz) appears to be the brother in question, as the accounts were registered 5 minutes apart from the same IP address. Given the implication that both siblings contributed to the banworthy behavior, it makes sense to apply the ban to both accounts, just to ensure that neither sibling is able to act out on the site again. As a result, this submission will be rejected.
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htwh wrote:
How have I been impolite? Honest question. I haven't been calling people names or using rude language, just trying to aid in understanding.
Examples from just this post:
If I'd come in and pointed out a misplaced apostrophe (say a 's instead of s') and received testy and inaccurate responses of "actually 's is right", wouldn't it make sense to explain further?
(*Or, since lurkers=people who lurk, I've been one of the many people who lurk here, plural verb, since it would be pretty silly to say one of the many people, one who also lurks.)
If this doesn't help shed some light, I don't know what will.
"Oh, I think I see what you mean now. Oops! I hadn't thought about it that way before. That makes sense, and it could add some precision to the language on this site devoted to precision. How unexpected but enlightening. I can use this to make my own writing more clear and precise, and help others as well!"
There is an unnecessary tone of superiority in every post you've made past your original. This is not the tone of someone who is genuinely trying to help, in my opinion. It's a narcissistic tone, one that implies that we are but fools and idiots that need to be guided by a true expert. Any intent you have to "aid in understanding" is undercut by the fact that you are borderline insulting our intelligence at least once per paragraph.
This attitude is genuinely worrying to me because a lot of our community members, including and especially staff members, are not native English speakers, and that shows in the way they write and speak in English. It's not unreasonable to think that if you're so adamant about the correction of this single word, you may be adamant about correcting the words of these community members. At best, this would still be disruptive and unnecessary behavior. At worst, it can be seen as racist harassment. To be clear, I doubt that would ever be your intent or anyone else's intent, but it's still a potential problem that I have to consider as a community leader here... Though, that being said, I'm extremely unhappy with the way you tried to drag DrD2k9 back into the argument after he openly removed his post and backed out, so I'm not convinced that you won't cause problems with individual users.
As for humble, I feel as if I started that way, though the more I've had to write to combat misconceptions, the less humble and minor this has all felt.
You started off okay, and I'm even taking you at your word that your original intent was to help. The problem is that this did not escalate because of anyone who responded to you, this escalated because of the way you have been responding to them in turn. Granted, I am not quite happy with the responses to you either, but even then I don't think they contributed to the escalation in any way other than giving you something to respond to.
Maybe I misjudged the atmosphere here, as in my many years of using this site, I have just been one of the many lurkers here*, though I've kept mostly to the front page and only browsed the forums a little. To barge in and make a scene, or stir up trouble, is not my intent. I didn't derail a busy thread, at least.
I would say the atmosphere here is "a niche video game emulation and speedrunning community" and not "a place where people are desperate for English tutoring". Sure, your intent was not to make a scene, nor was it to derail site or staff activity, but it still happened, and it'll continue to happen if it isn't stopped outright. Staff members are volunteers, and discussions like these waste the spare time we have to dedicate to the site.
For accountability reasons, I'd like to be as clear as possible about what's happening. We are taking action against your account solely because of your disruptive attitude. This has nothing to do with the topic of the argument itself. The action taken is going to be a one month temporary ban, and the rest of the moderation team is in agreement with this. Feel free to go back to lurking full time, or feel free to come back on April 22nd and rejoin the community on a better note.
All this being said, we do absolutely need to publicize alternate forms of contact, as we have quite recently had an issue where a lack of said resource led to a situation escalating further than it should have. Thank you for bringing this up and reminding us that it is a problem. We're currently discussing this internally and it should be resolved in the near future.
Moving this whole debacle to threaded grue. To everyone: Please do not attempt to revive this discussion.
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jlun2 wrote:
Does board glitch stack? What happens if you do it multiple times? How about on Emi twice?
I can try this as well, but I'll say I don't think it'd work. Even if it did, that's an extra minute of setup in a run that's already gotten to be this short, so the benefits would have to outweigh that.
EDIT: It's actually not possible to do it twice, at least under this setup. Since every character in the party is part of every battle, none of them can be called for help, which is integral to the board glitch process.
Further corruption is something I'm curious about, but I lack the technical knowledge to investigate it further. Anyone else who's interested is more than welcome to try on my behalf, though.
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htwh wrote:
Maybe a humble lurker wouldn't need to make a forum account if this site gave any way to just drop a polite email for a minor correction or site-related feedback.
Buddy, you have been neither humble nor polite, and you have absolutely not been treating this as a "minor correction" given the increasing length and arrogance of your posting. Drop the attitude or you're gone.
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You've submitted the exact same run six times in three days. Please use Wiki: Userfiles for uploading new files in the future, as files can easily be replaced by the Judges without needing to create new submissions.
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I'll be keeping a running list of ideas I've tried, starting with things that seem to work:
Skipping the Asuka clone fight looks like it saves about 8-10 seconds, assuming the Mamiya fight remains unchanged.
I found a small reroute in the Courtyard. The red path is the one taken in the submission, the black path is the reroute. The reroute takes you directly to the fountain room, and you can move glitch past the statue to be able to push it into the fountain. This does force a battle with a Mirror, but the current path takes a battle as well so that part evens out. This path can also be taken on the way back from the Lake at the cost of skipping the Bowgun, but not only could we just move glitch past where we use the Bowgun, there also happens to be another Bowgun in that room that we could use instead if necessary. This should save time, probably 20ish seconds on its own, but it also could potentially remove a battle from the TAS due to taking significantly less steps, which could save upwards of 20 seconds.
I tried move glitching past the Mamiya encounter to see if I could get the Gold Key early, which would remove the need to take Kazuo and Akiko into that room, but it's triggered on pretty much every tile past the point where it normally happens. Even move glitching into walls will trigger it.
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jlun2 wrote:
That's very fast of you making this! Nice work!
1. What happens if you get that item that makes you move faster as Emi? Does she move even faster?
I went ahead and tested this and no, it doesn't affect her speed when glitched.
2. What happens if you made Emi go out of bounds?
Softlock. Pretty much everything that isn't normal walkable terrain is considered to be a pit by the game.
3. At 12:11, why was the name glitched up?
I'm pretty sure this is a side effect of the battle glitch that repeats your attacks. I made a quick mention of it in the submission text, but to recap: I think this is some sort of weird glitched party member that shows up if you have too many battle actions stacked up. This "character" can level up after a battle, and I believe that's what causes the game to lock you out of switching characters.
This really is a huge rabbit hole of glitches upon glitches.
4. How come the fight music suddenly stopped at 12:30?
Honestly, no idea. I TAS with game audio off so I didn't even know how weird the music was.
5. Can a duplicate party member die? What will happen?
I think it's just treated as a normal death. It happened to me in testing, but I never went through and investigated it since I couldn't imagine a scenario where it wasn't run-ending: The best case scenario is that it actually isn't considered a death and leads to some insane skip, but the worst case scenario is literally any other result than exactly that.
6. Can you not skip the fight with your clone at 16:00?
You can, and thinking about it now, I'm realizing that might've been a lapse of judgement on my part. The intent was to reset the battle glitch and shorten the Mamiya fight by having her attack before the party takes any action, but it's probably faster to just skip the Asuka clone, save+reset just before Mamiya, and manipulate her to be vulnerable after a normal round of attacks.
7. I am curious on what you mean by a lot of possible improvements. Unless the bugs allow you to magically obtain the items needed for the statues and last boss (or skip statues/boss) I'm not sure how much more you can do.
Given the time cut, I definitely can't see anything else truly massive happening, but I'd imagine better knowledge of the game and the glitches could shave off a couple more minutes at most. I've got a lot of half-formed ideas of things that could work, mainly much better usage of the move glitch and playing around with the entire glitch setup to see if things can get even wackier. Off the top of my head:
I have to immediately reiterate how busted the move glitch is, and even the insanity I pull off with it in the run might not be the most I can do with it. I already have a couple ideas on how to use it further to save time, particularly in the latter half of the run.
I'd really like to investigate the speed glitch more. Could everyone be speed glitched? Can it be stacked? Could we speed glitch Taguchi as well to speed up/better utilize move glitch?
The whole route through the mansion could change for the TAS, but that's only a theoretical improvement at the moment. I've been looking for different paths, but nothing's coming up so far. Too many keys blocking off any other early access to places.
One thing I wanted to test was using both Taguchi and Asuka for the move glitch, giving two extra inventory spaces that Emi can access at any time, though I'd imagine this would complicate the move glitch significantly given how it works. Going to tentatively say this won't work out without a new route to take advantage of it.
I do think the first Tonic can be skipped in favor of a later one, but that would mean I'm wrong about it being a requirement to set up the move glitch.
A more minor possible improvement would be EXP glitching Emi. It would absolutely save some time, probably not a lot but definitely some, but I was never able to figure out how to do it. That doesn't mean it's impossible, just that nothing I tested worked. I tested this further and was still unable to find anything out here.
An early idea I had was to replace Akiko with Asuka. I'm pretty sure using Akiko is a safety strat for RTA since it has to deal with status effects, and we have to use Asuka at the beginning of the game anyway for the single pile of glass she vacuums up. This was about 100 frames faster in the first room, but Asuka's join/disband dialogue is much longer than Akiko's, and given how much Emi joins and disbands I don't think this would actually remain an improvement. In theory, the characters that aren't Emi or Kazuo are interchangeable, so there might be a combination that ends up slightly faster.
There's also an extreme long shot idea that just popped into my head, which is never having the full party moving around in the mansion. It would definitely remove a lot of the awkward sections of walking "normally" to prevent softlocks, but planning everything around that would take a huge amount of routing work that I don't think is feasible. Scratch this, the EXP glitch alone makes keeping a full party worth it, and it SHOULD be possible to move better throughout the run anyway.
Honestly, though, the more I think about potential improvements, the more ideas I'm getting, and the more feasible they're sounding to me. I might go ahead and test some of them soon. If they end up working, I'll either ask for a delay or cancel and resubmit, depending on how much the run changes.
8. Could you not glitch through the mandatory QTEs?
I'm sure that's possible, but the biggest problem with the move glitch is that it's limited by the area Taguchi can move around in. Switching to Taguchi, fixing his position, then switching back to Emi and resetting her position, then switching back to Taguchi again to move glitch would both be annoying to watch and may cost more time than skipping the few QTEs would save.
Given the fact that the game is very hard to route without bugs due to XP constraints (I tried making a run of this too), and no one has bothered for a decade, I'm pretty fine with this obsoleting the current run. Or at least until someone actually makes a glitchless run. Like obsolete it for now, but leave the possibility of a new branch open for the far future.
Glitchless would be fun, but yeah, the main trouble with it would be routing. Actually TASing it wouldn't be bad at all as the game is very easy to manipulate, but optimizing the route for the TAS would be a lot of work.
I will fully admit that a lot of the reason I submitted this was to have a finished product that I and others could study and refine. The RTA was a great resource, but it became clearer and clearer as time went on that it couldn't be completely relied on for TAS routing, so a finished TAS does nicely to let me figure out the bare minimum I need.
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Link to video
Almost exactly 5 minutes ahead of the above RTA run using the same route. Keeping in mind that I need to save a little over 8 minutes over RTA (it starts timing at gameplay, about 15 seconds later than the TAS) to have a sub-20:00 TAS time, the fact that I only have about 3 minutes left to save with more than half the run to go is pretty reassuring.
I'm not even sure if this is going to be the final run, yet. There's still a ton of things I need to test and figure out. I've been working under the brutal assumption that all the weird little things the RTA run does are necessary, mostly because that assumption has turned out to be true in about 100% of the times I've tried. That's not a joke about me having only tried one thing, by the way, as there have been somewhere around 15-20 ideas I've had that turned out to be either slower, useless, or completely broken. I'm not even sure the stuff I have found is legit. Anything I've changed so far has the potential to break something else later on down the road, and I won't know until I've gotten there.
Either way, this should be a good preview of what the new TAS will look like from a "what the hell is happening" perspective.
EDIT: Pretend I grabbed the key after the Monument puzzle. Also, unrelated note, never TAS while half-asleep.
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RTA WR from about a year ago, 12 minutes faster than the published TAS:
Link to video
I've spent the last couple days looking into this and it's turned into a real deep rabbit hole of things that don't make sense. I'll try and give a proper writeup of the things I'm finding out, but it may take me a while to even come close to beginning to understand anything that's happening here.
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Hey, Fista! Welcome to TASVideos!
I feel like this is the first time I've seen a dev team actively reach out to TASVideos like this, and I gotta say I really respect the passion here. I noticed quite a few lovely things from you while judging Cephla's TAS of The Arm Wrestling Classic, namely that you're actively moderating the games' speedrun.com boards (and speedrunning the games as well!) and promptly responding to comments and feedback on Itchio. It's definitely clear that you love what you do and what you create, and I honestly think more devs should be embracing the speedrun and TAS communities in the ways you have.
There is something I need to address that's specific to TASVideos, though. I think by now you've submitted runs for all of your TASable games (except The Arm Wrestling Classic), so this is a bit of a late suggestion, but just for future notice: We operate quite a bit differently from SRC. It takes longer for us to verify submissions because we have a much smaller team that has to process everything instead of having individual mods for individual game leaderboards, and on top of that the process of judgement is more time-consuming and strict. This means that multiple submissions should be spread out over time in order to not overwhelm us.
Also, I assume these submissions were done to introduce your games to us and encourage the community to work on them and optimize them. I will say there's nothing wrong with this kind of promotion. I like it, in fact! However, making formal submissions to the workbench is generally reserved for runs that are as fully optimized as possible. We're a records site, not a leaderboard! For runs like this batch of submissions, we have a feature called Wiki: Userfiles that allows anyone to freely upload as many input files as they would like without them being subjected to the judgement process. These userfiles can then be posted to the NES Games subforum or our Discord server for others to look at, give feedback on, and potentially work off of for improvements. The fact that these are not optimized means they will likely be rejected when they are judged. I bring that up now because I want to make it clear that this is not a punishment or shaming of any kind, just a normal part of the process that all submissions are subject to.
I don't want to sound discouraging in any way, here! We'd definitely love to see you stick around and continue to support our community. In particular, I love the idea of TASers being able to talk to the devs of a game while TASing it. That sounds like an incredibly mutually beneficial relationship, and at the very least it would be something fascinating just to watch play out. In return, I'm sure we'll have people digging deep into your games and optimizing them to their maximum potential. We've already had that happen with The Arm Wrestling Classic, after all, and we've had quite a growing interest in homebrew/demake TASing as of late so I feel it was only a matter of time before your other games were TASed anyway! I just had to make our standards and practices clear, though, as this was kind of a huge rush of submissions coming in all at once and it did prompt some internal discussion since we already have quite a large backlog of other submissions to go through. No harm, no foul, though! This isn't a warning or a strike, just a heads-up for the future.
No matter what though, I'm glad to see you here and I'm looking forward to future interaction!
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First TAS I end up completing after being made a judge and of course I end up doing something kinda dumb. Sorry about that.
Actually, from a judgement perspective, this is a very smart move. It provides a great opportunity to finally revisit the Pinocchio submission, which is something I've been meaning to do for a while now because that judgement never sat quite right with me and I'm pretty sure we've fixed all the weird rule things that led to it being rejected.
One fun fact about TASvideos is that video-type games for small children tend to be the things that make the most impact on our rules, for better or for worse. Thankfully, unlike Gummy Bears Minigolf and the absolute nightmare train of conversation that ensued from it, this submission should be a "for better" case.
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Additional instruction to grab the SWF from Steam: The Eternal Edition DLC must be disabled before going through the steps outlined in the submission text and annotations. This can be done by right clicking TBoI -> Properties -> DLC -> unchecking Eternal Edition. Doing this provides the correct SWF file, and I've confirmed sync on my end using it.
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OtakuTAS wrote:
However, this did not allow for the removal of the sega splash screen before submitting. I was not familiar with the TAS timing "from power on" when starting this, as such the splash screen was overlooked until after initial submission when I was contacted by EZGames69 mentioned I could. optionally, skip the splash screen.
Removing/changing elements, inputs, or even frames from the run destroys the entire run by desyncing both lag and RNG.
Thankfully, this does not seem to include the splash screen (as its removal would destroy the run within the first few frames let alone over 1,000 of identical play and RNG), however, upon fixing it, this seems to trigger the glitch in BizHawk.
I am looking into it further (apparently as well as Samsara).
Just wanted to quickly provide an update here since it's been a couple weeks: I actually managed to "resync" most of the run, however a lot of input editing was needed at certain points in order to line things up, to the point where I found myself actually re-TASing some sections. Because of that, my efforts wouldn't have resulted in an accurate resync, and anything I redid was likely suboptimal anyway, so I scrapped it in favor of leaving everything as you originally intended. Sorry for taking so long to report back!
The run is definitely fine as-is, the gameplay improvements are way more than enough to make up for the timing slip-up. That can be corrected on a future improvement.
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Going to make a quick note of this for future runs: The first input per match can be done two frames earlier (before the first lag frame instead of after it). From what I tested, this seems to save 3 frames per fight, though it would require completely redoing the run to account for the different RNG. Nowhere near enough to reject, of course, this is less than a second of total improvement and the rest of the run looks optimal.
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Just going to back up Noxxa's post, here. Yes, the publication was my decision:
To further clarify my statements: I was aware of this run's existence from the post made in the other submission's thread, and I was hoping this run wouldn't be submitted before that run was published, but Spike was held up on publishing for various reasons and couldn't process it until, unfortunately, very near the time this run was submitted.
Also, I never liked our past policy of rejecting runs that were improved after having been accepted and claimed for publication. In fact, that situation is quite literally the only time I have ever had a full run of mine rejected. In a way, that actually does make the publication the result of a vendetta: The one I have against our old, harmful, elitist site policies.
And yeah, at the end of the day, the publication does not affect this one in any way. Even if it had been rejected, it still would have been used as a direct point of comparison. The only change the publication could possibly make is the judgement note on this run saying "accepting as an improvement" instead of just "accepting".
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2120)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2792
Location: Northern California
I've got good news and bad news. The bad news is that we just lost 5 of our Reviewers. The good news... is that they became Judges!!!
Please welcome DrD2k9, nymx, ikuyo, ViGadeomes, and Darkman425 to the team!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2120)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2792
Location: Northern California
I may have found a new strategy: User movie #638121895034449643Link to video
Looks like it has the potential to save 3-ish seconds per fight, assuming it can be used adequately and optimally every time.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2120)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2792
Location: Northern California
Hey, hi, it's been a while since this Awards season wrapped up, hasn't it? I just wanted to give one last quick update on the sole thing that has yet to happen, which is the actual trophies being handed out. This should be happening soon! Brief explanation of why there was a delay: I volunteered to make them, personal life gave me a big ol' slap in the face for a few weeks so I had to bug the rest of staff to help out, and it took a bit longer than normal since brand new icons needed to be made for all of the new categories we added. Everything is made now, so we should be able to distribute them in due time.
Sorry once again for the delay!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2120)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2792
Location: Northern California
As you can probably tell by now, I downloaded the European ROM and changed the region to NTSC instead of PAL. I'm not sure if this is allowed, but it's worth a go.
To further clarify my statements: I was aware of this run's existence from the post made in the other submission's thread, and I was hoping this run wouldn't be submitted before that run was published, but Spike was held up on publishing for various reasons and couldn't process it until, unfortunately, very near the time this run was submitted.
Also, I never liked our past policy of rejecting runs that were improved after having been accepted and claimed for publication. In fact, that situation is quite literally the only time I have ever had a full run of mine rejected. In a way, that actually does make the publication the result of a vendetta: The one I have against our old, harmful, elitist site policies.
And yeah, at the end of the day, the publication does not affect this one in any way. Even if it had been rejected, it still would have been used as a direct point of comparison. The only change the publication could possibly make is the judgement note on this run saying "accepting as an improvement" instead of just "accepting".
