Fro reference, the difference if the oracle games are in GBA mode is that you have access to the advance shop. this has 3 items for sale for 100 rupees each.
1. A unique ring (one for seasons and 1 for ages). Cosmetic only, but requird for 100%
2. a random tier 3 ring. saves time verses growing one, but current routes don't need any of the tier 3 rings (ages uses the experts ring, which is tier 4 and the red ring, which is obtained by glitching, and i don't belive seasons uses any rings)
3. A gasha seed. The current route of ages uses two of these, and this seed is one of the two fstest to get by several seconds campaired to the back up, so GBA mode is fastest for ages right now. IIRC, seasons does does not use a gasha seed, so gba mode has no effect on the current route, but i could be wrong.
I was under the impression that we should go with either the fastest difficulty or the hardest, but I'll keep that feedback in mind.
For reference, the relevant guideline reads as follows:
site guidelines wrote:
Select your difficulty well
When a game has multiple difficulty levels, it is preferred to play on the difficulty that would make the most interesting and entertaining run. Usually, this is the hardest difficulty, and as such it is the most preferred choice for a TAS. However, there are cases where harder difficulties do nothing but add repetition to runs, such as only giving enemies and bosses more HP, where the extra work required to kill them is uninteresting. In these cases, it is preferred to use an easier difficulty in the interest of reducing repetitive actions which do little to entertain upon frequent use.
Good reasons to use the hardest difficulty are:
More stages, such as Contra III
More interesting boss fights, such as new attack patterns, and new variety of methods used to whittle down their HP
More overall action without repetition, such as more enemies in a game that are interesting to kill
Miniscule time differences between difficulties
If you're unsure, always go with hardest
Good reasons to use easier difficulties are:
More health for damage boosts
Less boring enemies leading to less lag
Faster bossfights on repetitive bosses, especially if their lower health can lead them to be one-cycled, and they are not interesting to fight for longer periods
Note that every game is judged on a case-by-case basis, so these reasons do not always apply. For example, if a bossfight only requires an extra hit or two because of higher health, that may not be repetitive enough to warrant using a lower difficulty.
In cases where the difficulty does not matter at all, such as in glitched runs that skip straight to the credits, then you do not need to change the difficulty at all. Using an in-game password to unlock harder difficulties is perfectly acceptable, as long as no other passwords are used, and the password does nothing more than make the game harder or unlock extra areas which will be played.
TO summarize, the most interesting difficulty is preferred, which is generally the hardest. Note that this guideline says nothing about speed. This would imply that if hard is boring slog, but normal is more interesting than easy, than normal is the preferred difficulty. That being said, the guideline does not really specify what to do if the hardest dificulty is bad, but there are multiple other dificulties. I would think that you would discard any "bad dificultys from consideration, and use the guideline again, which would also result in normal difficulty. It is worth noting that this is a guideline, and subject to interpretation on a case-by-case basis.
I'll repeat my Question for Glory!
From here on out the games in the series get longer and more complicated, and there may come a time when there is an advantage to start from a character file exported from a previous game. Unfortunately, if I use JPC-rr to generate a verification movie, I don't know a way of exporting the generated character file from JPC-rr to a hard drive to be included in the actual run. Would a DosBox video would suffice as a verification movie? If not, what method would be needed to be able to start QFG3 (or later) from an exported character file?
Let me know what you think! Thanks. :)
Is transfering previous save data even allowed? The closest I can think of is the "no dirty sram" rule, but that refers to saves of the same game.
We do not allow save-anchored movies.
We want a standard starting point for movies (power-on). Saves introduce an infinite amount of possible variation that may cause the game to behave differently compared to starting from power-on. They also can be hacked, allowing nearly transparent cheating.
However, there are certain games with unlockable modes, second quests, or other things of interest that can only be accessed if a save file (or an otherwise "dirty" SRAM) is present. If you really wish to submit a movie made on such a mode, you will need a verification movie made and provided alongside it. Any input file that starts from power-on (for example, a previously submitted movie for that game) and creates the exact circumstances for your submission to sync will generally do.
Note that you don't have to optimize the verification movie: it only serves as a save or SRAM generator that makes it possible to claim the legitimacy of your effort. This submission is a good example.
In any case, ensure a run of your unlocked mode provides meaningful content over a fresh game. For example, if the unlocked mode features all new bosses, but your run triggers the endgame sequence before meeting any of them, and this same glitch exists in a fresh game as well, then there is no benefit to unlocking this mode.
It seems Nintendo sold 62M NES consoles, of which 53M were sold in Japan and US combined. (source)
Thank you, I should have used that in first place. Let's now take a look at the Super Mario Bros. sales:
Total Units
North America: 29.08m 72.3%
+ Europe: 3.58m 8.9%
+ Japan: 6.81m 16.9%
+ Rest of the World: 0.77m 1.9%
------------------------------------
= Global 40.24m
The amount of PAL cartridges sold is 4.35m, about 10.8% of the total sales of the game.
So my point about the PAL version being diffused about as much of the NTSC version falls here, but 4,35 millions of sales is still a number. Also note that SMB was the best-selling videogame in 80s, and today is still holding the 5th place.
vgchartz is NOT a reliable resource. The people behind that website have admited to making numbers up when no data was available. Granted, I have heard that they are more likely to be correct for older titles, but still... That being said, the precise numbers don't effect the point, which is that millions of people played the pal version.
Honestly, I feel that this entire debate is the same core question as the "does super metroid deserve to have so many catagories?" debate. Namely, should we give special treatment certain games that are iconic to the speedruning comunity? I think that we should use the submission as an excuse to answer this question once and for all.
I noticed that a lot of people seem to be saying that we should not use the pal version because the localization introduced errors. I wanted to point out that several runs on this site use glitches that were introduced in the localization. Pokemon gold/silver's any% run uses the coin case glitch, which was introduced by the localization team.
It looks like the exertainment exercise bike sends data in specific combinations. I think that the expancion port should be allowed if and only if the imputs emmulate what would be possible on official hardware such as the exercise bike. If this run could be simulated by using an actual exercise bike (or some other authorised snes asccesery that i have not heard of), I say accept it. Otherwise, I say reject it.
Is this intended to parody that one frame tas from a few weeks back, which essentially found a game whose starting position generated an instant win? (This turned out to be a bug in bizhawk, but still...) If so, excellent job.
What's with the dirty sram? isn't that usualy not allowed (except with gameplay modes that need clear data, and even then only when a verification movie is provided, which does not seem to be the case here)?
From what i understand, this is actualy a really common problem with SMW romhacks. IIRC, this was because a common sound inserting hacking tool was only tested on an inaccurate emulator which had too much music ram (or something like that). The tool tries to use this extra ram, so emulators with the right amount crash. IIRC, this has been discussed in other places on these forums
It isn't? that wasn't quite clear from your reply, and the other thread that i read seemed to imply otherwise. However, my argument applies just as well if you start at all zero (which the cheetahmen discussion mentioned that it is permisable to do.) That run would theoreticaly be verifiabe on actual console. But said run would probably be essentaly equivelent to the current any%.
I just wanted to pop in to say that this is an amazing idea!
However, I must refrain from participating in the category discussion.
I think so too, i just think the category is no good is all. Honestly, this situation is really without Precident that i am aware of, so i exrapolated from the chetahmen 2 case. The fact tha uninitialised system ram causes desynchs on existing runs was noted in that run's thread as well and iirc the consensuses was that a runner could pick the best starting state, if it was vaugle reasonable for some actual console. also brought up was the fact that the theoretical tas superhuman could configure the external enviornment so that the system ram started in the right way. This also applies to decay on poweroff as far as i can tell, so the current run could be done on a console by said superman. Therefore, the fault lies in the setup for not being able to do things that are theoreticaly possible but practically impossible.
The goal here isn't to set an initial state that helps execute a glitch or speed things up, but rather to be able to finish from any initial state. I am thinking "any SRAM" rather than just "dirty SRAM" as in Cheetahmen 2, Chrono Trigger New Game+ and others.
Another possible branch description is "No Resets or Power Cycles". That doesn't give the whole story though because some tradeoffs are made to be able to sync from any starting state. So maybe "No Resets, any SRAM".
The main reason to submit this was to have a Final Fantasy run that could be console verified. I'll leave it to the community to decide on the classification.
But the chetahmen run does not start from dirty sram in the new game pluss sense. the uninitalised values are found in other parts on the ram which have essentially random values on a console. My general point is that a console verifiable run does not deserve its own catagory it no other distinguishing characteristics are preasent.
oh. i see. Is it theoretically possible for the ram to clear itself after a short amount of time given the right environmental conditions, because if so, we can follow the same logic used in the acceptance of the "chetahmen two" tas, which used a bug that meant that a certain uninitialized ram state skipped half the game. The conclusion there was that the hypothetical tas superhuman could manipulate the eniornment to cause the necessary starting ram state. As such, this sounds like a case where the bot simply does not have the environmental manipulation skills required to pull off the tas.
I honestly don't think that this is a good branch idea. Although i like console verification of runs as well as the next person, having a slower branch with a different route just to get it to verify correctly seems rather arbitrary to me, especially because the issue is not an emulator bug and it is the verification process that is buggy. As such, i see no difference between having a separate branch for ( demonstrably inaccurate) console verification and having a separate branch for a buggy emulator. This should probably go to gruefoood delight though.
It's impressive to complete a game that usually takes something like 15 hours to complete in 12 minutes.
I wouldn't think that a Fire Emblem game would ever be all that entertaining as a TAS. Single-select movement (except FE Gaiden), repetitive attack animations, unskippable dialogues in the earlier games, etc. FE4 has ginormous maps and endless backtracking.
But then again Langrisser 1 (Warsong) got a moon.
There are already three fire emblem games with moons. They're extremely different to watch than this run, so that doesn't really weigh in on whether this run should be moon or vault, but it sounded like you hadn't watched them, so I figured I'd mention it.
The three gba FE games are honestly somewhat better vidios than this, partly because you can clearly see the rns being burned in a way that no other games that i am aware of do. Additionally, the strats are more complicated than this in a good way. That being said this run is rivaled only by the mario runs in terms of percentage of content skipped using legitimate means that the developers intentionally included, which makes it moonworthy in my option (although it can be boring at parts, so it was a little bit of a close call in my mind). Also, "fire emblem: the sacred stones" is an excellent example of a hard mode run obsolescing a normal mode run with a lower frame count. (although the strategies in that game were much less difficulty dependent, and the hard mode run included an optimization that would have saved time in the normal mode run, and gave the hard mode run a lower turncount.)
(Make sure to put this in Gruefood Delight if it's rejected.)
Great Idea. After all, it is quite interesting to a reasonably large subset of people, and IMO is optimal enough that it would have been vaulted it glitch skip were a valid category.
As this run isn't vaultable it'd need to be well received, and I see little to no enthusiasm about this goal. Add average level of execution (the author would probably need to do a couple more TASes to get the idea), and see this run rejected, with hopes the one with the retreat glitch is done some day.
Having been really been into golden sun once, i really liked this run (especially how all the bosses were dominated), but it would have been impenetrable and boring if i had not played the game, Partly because it was on the Japanese version. Was there a reason for this given that time saved due to faster Japanese text scrolling is not an improvement? There's no rule against using the Japanese version, but it cuts down on entertainment(unless the japanese version has additional glitches, which is not true here). Also, i was confused about things like the the rational for specific djin being taken, or what was equipped at any given time. A longer submission text would have helped this. It's too bad that this isn't a vaultable catagory, as this run would have a sizable niche audience.