Will be there an encode soon? I would like to watch this TAS without downloading an extra emulator for being able to playback the TAS file for one time.
Sorry I wan't trying to trick you or anything, I was adding to gallery when you first looked at it. I didn't expect you to look at it right after i posted it. The Sixth one, you can go underneath, but the option to go above is only available to with a air slide, because after the intial air slide you would have to 2 more air slides if you went the bottom route http://i.imgur.com/lIFWz5G.gifv
Sorry, my bad. Seventh. Specifically:
http://i.imgur.com/yk7TW0T.webm
But yes, the ability to cross a set of randomly plopped down spikes to forgo jumping up from a lower platform is not exactly convincing me either.
Here is an album of just a few places that air sliding is meant to/being used http://imgur.com/a/8InpT
I think all but one of those can be cleared with a basic dash jump, to say nothing of the other pre-existing mechanics that you mentioned yourself. The fifth one isn't even that. Just basic jumps.
I am now convinced you've never even played a mega man game. Those jumps are completely impossible in any normal setting.
Since you've gone ahead and changed the order and added more, I continue to stand by that statement, except now the blatantly easy jump is the sixth. You should remove that one from the gallery instead of reordering them. That'll get me!
Garrison wrote:
Tangent wrote:
hagspam wrote:
Here is an album of just a few places that air sliding is meant to/being used http://imgur.com/a/8InpT
I think all but one of those can be cleared with a basic dash jump, to say nothing of the other pre-existing mechanics that you mentioned yourself. The fifth one isn't even that. Just basic jumps.
Dash jumping (as mentioned in the notes) isn't even a mechanic in Mega Man 4...
I'm aware of that. That has what to do with the air dash that I was talking about?
Did a single person even watch the TAS or read any of the notes or anything? Vitriol versus stupidity is a pretty understandable thing.
Many of these things that you say are good changes are either nigh invisible in a TAS (robot master AI changes), are really trivial (weapon tweaks), or are very debatable as to making a TAS more entertaining. Not needing to go to the pause menu or stop to wait for meters to refill are quality of life changes for a regular player, but in a TAS, it removes the strategy, variety and planning needed, and replace it with simply manipulating constant weapon energy drops.
And simply changing a core mechanic isn't a good enough reason in and of itself, especially when it only serves to make a game much easier. If the levels weren't designed for the air dash, then why is its inclusion a good thing?
Or I guess you could keep calling everyone who disagrees or wants clarification stupid. That seems to be working well.
hagspam wrote:
Here is an album of just a few places that air sliding is meant to/being used http://imgur.com/a/8InpT
I think all but one of those can be cleared with a basic dash jump, to say nothing of the other pre-existing mechanics that you mentioned yourself. The fifth one isn't even that. Just basic jumps.
I dislike the concept of adding an air dash when there really wasn't much call for it other than to constantly fly above enemies. It wasn't exactly worked in as a core game mechanic, just, to repeat what was said in http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14576 , made it look like a regular Megaman run on fastfoward with much less care and strategy needed since the modified dash jump was the answer 9 times out of 10.
Garrison wrote:
it's pretty absurd (once again in the great traditions of tasvideos.org) to have people who don't even comprehend the basic mechanics determine what the game plays like.
Yes, yes. I just don't get the ethereal glory that is this hack and how its inner beauty is beyond my ken. I'm the filthy unwashed, unable to comprehend the ineffable greatness.
Megiddo wrote:
Tangent wrote:
I dislike the concept of adding an air dash when there really wasn't much call for it other than to constantly fly above enemies.
Except this almost never happens because it's faster to kill things in your way and do small hops on the ground. Did you even watch the video?
Yes, I was referring to what the hack changed; the times when it wasn't exactly like every other NES Megaman run on fastforward. So are you conceding that it mostly is like every other NES Megaman run except on fastforward then?
I dislike the concept of adding an air dash when there really wasn't much call for it other than to constantly fly above enemies. It wasn't exactly worked in as a core game mechanic, just, to repeat what was said in http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14576 , made it look like a regular Megaman run on fastfoward with much less care and strategy needed since the modified dash jump was the answer 9 times out of 10.
Compare our encodes! They are of course identical!
They're very obviously not from the very start. What the hell are you talking about?
You don't what I mean, sorry. I'm talking about "defense animation". 1st stage is almost identical :-)
No. They're not. He frequently misses the presses and/or holds the blocks for technically longer than needs to so you can actually see them. By about 5 seconds in, he's already very noticably behind.
Are you supposed to be able to become invincible this often? It seems like that removes all of the difficulty of the run.
The time blocking is in effect is absurd. I'm guessing that they forgot to force the animation for the duration of it. Even in regular speed runs, it looks ridiculous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qsgk2VELAI
This run is actually completed with the help of frame advance and slow motion. At least, frame advance was used for the fastest blocks as the encode doesn't show some of blocking animations (just interrupts).
Your basis for these claims are what exactly? Because it's quite easy to just tap a button and Youtube's encoding will miss it. And the author explicitly says nothing like that was used. But sure, I guess he was lying and just left other mistakes and missed presses for fun.
Are you supposed to be able to become invincible this often? It seems like that removes all of the difficulty of the run.
The time blocking is in effect is absurd. I'm guessing that they forgot to force the animation for the duration of it. Even in regular speed runs, it looks ridiculous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qsgk2VELAI
Rejecting this movie since it is clearly un-optimal by today's standards. An already faster TAS by DennisBalow using Kirby has been posted on YouTube in 2009. A new and faster submission using (most likely Kirby) would probably be accepted for the vault tier. Until then, it is meaningless to publish this as it fails to beat known records.
I wasn't referring to SMW Kaizo, I meant Hard Relay Mario.
And this isn't helping either, I asked for a hack that brings anything new, you haven't answered my question.
It's a question made in bad faith. The existence of hacks doesn't mean that there exist hacks worth publishing. There are 50+ hacks of Final Fantasy 1, and I highly doubt any are worth publishing since they're almost all things like balance tweaks, cosmetic changes, and rewriting what passes for the story in the game. If you/he can find an obscure hack that does bring something new or different enough, great, but there's no shortage of relatively obscure hacks that don't.
And for the record, I despise Hard Relay as well.
The game seriously had a required stage where the intended route was blocked? That's a really dumb bug / lack of playtesting, like that one stage in Battletoads that Player 2 can't finish.
That's highly debatable. It's not like the alternate exit he uses is some glitch. It's a valid exit coded into the game. The 'normal' exit requires traversing a gigantic maze, collecting a bunch of key cards, and then when all the doors are opened, the door itself is blocked by spikes. So if you could get to that area, there's no way to get through the door.
Here's a map.
http://www.shikadi.net/keenwiki/File:Ck3lv15.png
What's blocking the area itself is the 1 block high gap on the bottom left, but the spikes past the doors make it impossible as well. It's very likely that the 1 block gap is a design oversight, but it's hard to call the spikes an oversight. It's more likely just supposed to be frustrating (there are also next to no bonus items in the maze while the rest of the game is full of them) and force the player to think outside the box and go around the maze instead of through it. You could also see that it was impossible to get through the exit from the alcove above it, which was accessible.
That said, Keen 3 was full of bugs. Half of another stage was fully designed but there was no way to reach it.
Voting No. This hack doesn't bring anything that new to the table, except for different sprites.
A good hack doesn't need new mechanics or physics to be good. As long as the levels are fun and the core gameplay is intact, the hack in question will be solid.
That's true for purely cosmetic hacks too, so your definition is lacking.
If we're trying to apply vault rules to a board game tier, why are we not just accepting board games to the vault tier instead?
Tangent wrote:
If the current rules ARE sufficient for board games, then no additional tiering or categories are needed.
Board games are not (generally) vaultable because there can't be any% or 100% completions of them. (See the first post in this thread for a deeper analysis of that aspect.)
Has there been any discussion or debate about that point in the thread? Yes, ones with actual campaign modes provide something more analogous to regular game (but are no less tedious: See Super Battleship), but where are you seeing the debate on whether winning a match of the only game mode available in Chess, Monopoly, Othello, etc is actually winning the game?
By creating a board/sports game tier, we would be accepting that our standards of acceptance for that tier are vastly lower than other tiers, in terms of speed/entertainment goals.
I don't see how. The core standards of the vault tier are: Play at the highest difficulty (unless you have a very good reason otherwise), complete the game as fast as possible. The "board game tier" would have those exact same requirements.
As for entertainment, it's a rather non-issue for vault, so why should it be an issue for this proposed new category?
The entire reason why board games aren't excepted to vault is because they're all too "same-y" and typically not interesting. That's why this discussion is happening instead of just accepting them to the vault. If we're trying to apply vault rules to a board game tier, why are we not just accepting board games to the vault tier instead?
I think a major part is also that by and large, they don't stand out very well from regular play because the path to the 'win' is trivially obvious and there are so few parts where player input is actually given because 'actions' are strictly and discretely defined instead of being continuous as in most other games, as well as so few compared to things like turn based RPGs which also have strict and discrete actions.
Like Othello here. Even if it was played on the highest difficulty, that doesn't change anything in the judgement given.
http://tasvideos.org/4550S.html
And for all the dice rolling games... manipulating luck on an RNG that has a grand total of 6 outcomes isn't really a wowing bit of superhuman play. Nor is manipulating an AI into making one or two stupid moves, especially on these early systems when they're known to be fairly rudimentary.
Belated edit to emphasize what you said:
If the current rules ARE sufficient for board games, then no additional tiering or categories are needed. Just remove the rule saying "No board games." I don't think they are though, and that's also a little different from the sentiment that every game deserves a TAS.
I agree that there should only be one branch unless a good argument can be made otherwise, but you haven't said what that branch should be. "Hardest" is an inadequate definition. What number of players and which mode is correct in that example? Why?
The same as with every other game on the site:
(1) if there's a difficulty setting, set it to hardest.
(2) pick any other options based on "whatever is fastest".
(3) done, you now have your "any%" fastest branch.
(4) any other combination of options needs to either give a substantially different run, or be entertaining enough to qualify for moon tier.
For example, if an RPG allows you to pick out of six classes for four characters, that's already 1296 combinations, which is way more than most board games. And this is an issue that's already been solved: You pick whatever is fastest.
For all your Mahjongs, Risks, Mario Parties, Pokers, etc, (2) would mean one CPU at maximum difficulty and then the rest as colluding humans, or using Clue as a (shaky) precedent, all players as colluding humans. That clearly wouldn't qualify under the "has to stand out from regular play" standard. Where do you push the sliding scale to make it stand out then?
jlun2 wrote:
Radiant wrote:
For example, if an RPG allows you to pick out of six classes for four characters, that's already 1296 combinations, which is way more than most board games. And this is an issue that's already been solved: You pick whatever is fastest.
I'm just more concerned that people would then argue for different branches/modes, and when that/those are made everyone seemingly votes yes, thus going to moons. But then the ratings later reveal its quite crap. :P
This can happen to any game with more than 1 mode/character/etc, but with board games it can be quite glaring.
What I imagine will happen is that it becomes "first in wins," since they're almost to a rule entertainment deficient.
For example, you might as well ask if Super Mario Bros 2 should have thirty different runs, i.e. Mario+Luigi, Mario+Toad, Mario+Luigi+Toad, Mario+Princess+Toad, and so forth for fifteen permutations plus warpless version of each.
In case you were wondering, the answer is "no, obviously not". So that also means that Uno does not require separate runs for 3, 4, 5, and 6-player mode.
I agree that there should only be one branch unless a good argument can be made otherwise, but you haven't said what that branch should be. "Hardest" is an inadequate definition. What number of players and which mode is correct in that example? Why?
Board games are different from other games because they generally do have these kinds of freely editable game settings that have significant effects on difficulty and length, as given with the Monopoly examples above. They're neither the fastest they could possibly be, nor the most difficult. Under Moons, they fall back on entertainment, but is someone made another Monopoly run on a different platform, and Monopoly exists on bloody everything, should they still be using 4 players despite that being neither the fastest nor the most difficult to win?
I'm still in the camp that board games shouldn't be accepted unless they qualify for Moons anyway, since again, most are just navigating a few menus and then manipulating luck a couple times if not just really simple dice manipulation. They're intrinsically not like other games, the existing guidelines are inadequate for handling them, and next to none would qualify for entertaining (with stipulations already in place for the few that do). They belong where they currently are off with the sports and rhythm games.
The "hardest difficulty" in this context usually refers to the game's own explicit difficulty settings, rather than ancillary difficulty that may be produced as a kind of "side effect" of, for example, choosing one playable character rather than another.
In the case of a chess game, it likewise would mean that you have to choose the hardest computer player difficulty, the choice of color is not part of this.
That doesn't address things like number of players or other specific settings that can be altered. Let me use a specific example: Uno 52 for the DS. Its default settings are:
1 human
3 CPUs
Easy difficulty
Endless mode
What are the settings then that would make it eligible to be published? Would there be five possible runs for each of Chips, Uno, Poker, Pot, and Survival modes, all with 3 CPUs on Hard? A single run with 1 CPU on Hard on whatever mode's fastest? A single run with 3 CPUs on Hard on whatever mode is the hardest for the player to win?
And to expand from that, what if someone did the same kind of Monopoly run as we have now with 3 players? With 5? Would the 3 player one be rejected for being the same even though it's faster? Would the 5 player one be rejected for being the same even though it's harder?
Most games have a single difficulty setting which makes it simple. Except for chess, most board games tend to have a lot more settings to tweak that would have significant effects on the length of the game, which makes the general guideline of "hardest" vague.
The "you must choose the hardest difficulty" is not a rigid rule with no exceptions allowed. If in some game there's a good reason to use a lower difficulty, then it's usually accepted. In general, "it makes the run faster" is not such a good reason (with possible exceptions).
I know it's not absolute, but it's also not strictly enforced for the vault which is supposed to be pretty cut and dry, publishing with the stipulation that a later run on the correct difficulty obsoletes. Why would another run be published on an incorrectly chosen difficulty but not a board game? Would that be the new guideline going forward? Or would the guidelines about difficulties going to be an absolute rule for board games unlike others?
The question of difficulty level still remains. Personally I would go by the rule that games should always be played on the highest difficulty, even board games.
Yes, that aligns best with current publications.
Tangent wrote:
Would all chess TASes need to use black then to be at maximum difficulty?
I'd say no, for the same reason that (e.g.) all RPGs do not require that you start with the weakest character class.
That holds for most boardgames too, especially things like Monopoly. Going first is an advantage. Going last is a disadvantage.
I'd say no, because who goes first is (in most cases) decided by dice roll, and is therefore subject to luck manipulation.
At any rate, if there are games with unusual difficulty factors, that can be discussed in a thread for that individual game, precisely as is already done for non-board games (e.g. games like Shining Force II where the purportedly-highest difficulty is actually easier than the second highest).
Fair points, although I meant to say that there's still a great degree of arbitrariness as to what 'highest difficulty' means. The Monopoly runs, for example, use 4 players. 8 would obviously be harder. 3 would obviously be faster. I think the Clue run (fringe case since pre-vault, I know) uses just 3 human players and no CPUs.
There's also already at least one recently vaulted run that was played on the completely wrong difficulty, so that requirement is already not particularly enforced. Is that policy going to be changing then?
Perhaps the easiest implementation would simply be to allow speed-focused runs of board games in the vault. Because it seems the majority of users wants board games publishable in some fashion, and it would be straightforward to amend or strike the "no board games plz" rule that the vault has.
The question of difficulty level still remains. Personally I would go by the rule that games should always be played on the highest difficulty, even board games.
White has an advantage in chess over black.
Would all chess TASes need to use black then to be at maximum difficulty?
That holds for most boardgames too, especially things like Monopoly. Going first is an advantage. Going last is a disadvantage.
The sentiment I'm getting from people is that if he had submitted this a week or two later, there'd be no hurt feelings at all? Or if it had been someone more established originally submitting it, it'd be just fine? These seem silly, particularly for a game this short.
...
I'm not even sure why "maybe someone's feelings might be hurt" are even entering into it though.
You don't care about peoples' feelings being hurt? That's shocking, coming from you. You've always been so nice and caring and kind to people in the past. It really breaks my heart to see you say that.
The sentiment I'm getting from people is that if he had submitted this a week or two later, there'd be no hurt feelings at all? Or if it had been someone more established originally submitting it, it'd be just fine? These seem silly, particularly for a game this short. There's also the issue in the original run that if it DID have a bunch of known improvements and sloppy things like blank trailing input, it should have been rejected to begin with, especially, again, for as short as it is.
I'm not even sure why "maybe someone's feelings might be hurt" are even entering into it though.
This is assuming that he did redo all the input, which given the nature of the game and length, is reasonable to me.
Is it better to accept them all, or have them obsolete each other due to similar content?
I'd go with 1 game per platform for each category. That way, any% might beat one version, and hardest difficulty would beat another version of the game due to the result looking more interesting or spending less time on an equally interesting/challenging run. Somewhat like polity for hacks.
IMO I don't see any problem in accepting several eg. chess TASes for the same platform if the submitter can argue why it's different enough than the existing one(s).
For example, one TAS could be of battle chess, just because it looks cooler. Another one could be of a notoriously strong chess game for the same platform, just because it would be interesting to see how many moves it takes to beat it.
I don't think ANY chess AIs running on that kind of hardware could be called notoriously strong, but even setting that aside, how would you show that one is stronger than another? Is a brute force AI that looks deep and wide but can still potentially make horrendous mistakes better than an AI that has hardset opening books to prevent fools/scholars mate but otherwise searches much more shallowly?
And how would someone back up their claim? By disassembling the games to show the algorithms used between each?
There are a billion little indy/flash games like this, and this seems like a particularly half-assed one with under 19 seconds of actual play.
It's meant to be a short game anyway, but it usually takes a lot longer to finish, up to 100 seconds of ingame time if you never die. This TAS plays through it much faster than a casual player, making the game look shorter than it is.
The keys are always in the same place, so the casual player plays once and has seen every single thing it has to offer. Mastery is simple rote memorization, same as every 'puzzle' game, for a very loose definition of puzzle, and again, this is miniscule even among short ones.
