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.
I think this should be handled in a way that works more like a guideline instead of a strict rule. Imagine there are two versions of exactly the same board game getting a TAS, but the strategies used are completely different. It would suck having to reject one of them just because of a really strict rule.
Even if the strategies are different because of something like length of animations? Because Battle Chess comes to mind.
I think most board games fail to qualify for publication on a fairly basic level, triviality. Not every game has a run after all, and particularly things like rhythm or reaction games, while entertaining, are completely trivial in a TAS environment. A prime characteristic of board games is that the number of actions and outcomes are very limited and strictly defined. Certain outcomes may be extremely rare, but so is the outcome of every single turn in a battle of a heavily RNG-based RPG, and most board games have completion/victory states within a few actions, if not only one or two. Take the recent Jenga submission for example. Barring the only glitch stage, it's the same single bit of luck manipulation repeated 10ish times. It is MORE complex than your Wario Wares or what have you, but in my mind, not enough.
If you can produce a particularly creative or entertaining run within those limitations, then there's no question at all, but otherwise, most board games have very easily identified strategies and require a very small amount of luck manipulation to get to them. I don't agree that it's a good idea to create a tier or category just to accommodate them if they can't though.
I feel there's also some clarification left that's needed for goal choice in them if going forward with the extra tier to prevent it from being completely arbitrary above reproach. Hardest difficulty for Monopoly would surely involve the maximum number of players, but I can't see a run like that existing beside the gimmicky moon 4 player quick win/CPU self-destruct ones we have now.
I'm really excited about this, Alyosha! It's amazing what you have accomplished in only four months. Thank you for your hard work. Had your first couple movies not been published at the end of 2014, you would be a strong contender for the rookie of 2015 award.
Tangent wrote:
http://tasvideos.org/220M.html
This thread's 11 years old, a year older than even that run. Why not just make a new one?
Because this forum doesn't have a preposterous rule that forbids posting in old topics, and the great majority of us are clever enough to prefer having all the relevant information about a video game in the same place.
And that place is obviously the 11 year old thread requesting that a run be made instead of the 10 year old thread about the published run.
Really cool end game glitch! Is there more known details as to why and how the Lv. 0 glitch works?
The localization broke the coding on the Stereo/Mono menu (among quite a few other things) and instead of looping like it should, sends the cursor into the negative zone, corrupting a character's data by setting them to level 0 and all their stats to absurdly high values, and messing with a bunch of other things, the main thing of which is that it alters the affected character's name to some weird address in memory which makes things like save/load and battle results take forever.
Shouldn't it be rejected so he can make a new one with a new description, new screen shots, etc?
There's a very nontrivial number of changes listed in the thread so far. Better to have a fresh start if he's redoing most of the run.
I'm completely neutral on this one. I think it deserves to be published in some form, but I don't know or ultimately care if it's vault or moon material.
It wasn't very entertaining, but it's pretty cool that it beats the game in such a ridiculous way. So, I dunno. Abstaining from vote.
It's already accepted for moons :U
That's unfortunate. The first 6:30 or so is pure tedium and the couple seconds of visible glitching is barely a percent of the total movie. I can't imagine anybody wanting to watch this more than once, or sitting through even a minute of seemingly nothing happening without skipping ahead, which screams vault to me.
Here's a "Light Fix" which ends at the earliest input end. I didn't verify with the game if it could be ended earlier.
This is also to remove any headache for anyone questioning the time to the previous.
The previous run didn't use power ups. I know it's an autoscroller, but I find it suspect that only 50 seconds out of a 70 minute movie would be saved without that handicap.
Can't wait until people start TASing the multitude of badly programmed flash game half-clones of other games.
They count so long as they're Chinese, right?
Do you even bother reading the threads when you periodically go trawling through the archives for random runs to bump and ask if they can be put in the vault? I think the answer to every run you've bumped and asked this about has been an obvious no.
In this case, if you'd read the very last post before yours, you'd see that someone already asked this not that long ago and that it has a bunch of syncing issues... which was a repeat of a post just above that... so the answer's still no.
If we assume that console verification is possible (some time far off in the future), would this be verified on an NES or on a Wii? (edit, or 3ds. Whichever)
It seems odd to me that the choice would be the platform it wasn't released for, under conditions (eg emulator differences) that nobody was able to legally/commercially play it. At that point, it's possible that even someone WITH super human frame perfect abilities wouldn't be able to get the same results on the original game as it was released.
Out of curiosity, why didn't you use the Mack skip? You don't get anything unique for beating him and you get the star automatically when you get the next one, so killing him doesn't fulfill the conditions you set.
In a word no. And an optimized AI is not equivalent to a TAS at all. Mainly, it can't predict the future to make a suboptimal decision now that leads to a more optimal outcome later.
The best you can get is using a dynamic programming-like solution, but that's computationally unfeasable for just about every game out there and would require it to be actually playing the game (or a complete fascimile of it), simulating such things as save states anyway. Even then, the end result's not really an AI playing the game, but creating a script, at which point actually 'playing' becomes the Chinese room problem (following set of defined state instructions, not actual intelligence).
Or I guess if a game had no randomness at all and a single optimal solution. But that would be silly.
I have not watched this yet; when I get home and have my emulators, I'll watch this. I'm very excited about it, since these sound like very big improvements!
What counts as 100%, though? Is there a way to do an "any%" run that visits fewer stages?
Bon travail, zoboner!
It's not 100%. He (and the previous runs) use a warp to skip a bunch of stages.
100% definitions are sometimes more obvious than other times, but they are basically never non-arbitrary. If there's really a big consensus that this run should do something additional to qualify, and there's someone willing to make that TAS, then I guess I would support the new movie obsoleting this one, but until then, this is a fine definition and a fast run, and deserves its spot in the vault.
Not all games have a viable 100% category, especially the ancient ones before such things as warp zones. I'd say this is one of them.
For other people's information, you can retire and end the game at any time, it just doesn't 'update' your score IIRC until the end of a fiscal period. Otherwise, the game just ends when it hits the end of the timeframe (varies by difficulty).
The high score is from the overflowed cash, high difficulty, and minimal game years passed. Prime Minister/President is the highest rank.
Renewing my disagreement with an "all items" category as a vaultable 100%.
Collection isn't counted in any way except points, which are given for all kinds of other things so it's pretty arbitrary. Why not the hammers too then?
I'm also pretty sure that all manuals say to collect whatever the game's collectables are; be they accessories, coins, stars, fruit, etc. All coins isn't a 100% run for a Mario game, all bananas isn't 100% for DKC, all fruit for Pac-man, etc.
And plus, the differences between a regular run are little more than trivial, and almost all from one level, so I don't see what this adds over a regular run.
I am wondering about a detail in the medusa-fight: AFAIK, you shoot as quickly as possible. Shouldn't it help the to shoot the first shot from a longer distance and the last one from the shortest distance possible?
Since the first shot can be released sooner and the last shot takes shorter to reach the target, this should gain some time.
I vaguely remember testing this and I'm pretty sure she takes damage on the first possible frame for every hit, so shooting earlier would have no impact.
That's not what he meant, but it wouldn't help anyway. He's assuming that the only limiting factor is Pit's firing rate, in which case, starting further back to get the first shot off soonest (in addition to hitting her on the first possible frame) would be fastest because you'd get the second shot (and all subsequent shots) off sooner.
However, all shots on the screen are erased when Medusa takes damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyuS0NfqEkA&#t=30
So you're limited by both Pit's fire rate AND only allowing one shot at a time on screen.
Is that really the fastest you could get on Testament? And Milia to a lesser extent.
I mean, this is boring as sin anyway, but it seems odd that you'd need to sacrifice multiple seconds and do various dodging.
Just create a "TAS-Community" faux user if there are expected to be multiple runs like this in the future. He can be then link to a wiki page made up of the contests or users or whatever.
[842] NES Mickey Mousecapade (USA) by Randil & CtrlAltDestroy in 07:23.68
First stage route is extremely improvable and affects routing/strategy for the rest of the game.
The Minnie kidnapping recovery 'minigame' always deposits you on the bottom left corner of the screen. There are two possible places this can be used to save time. See green arrows. The left is a huge save on the way back, the right is (likely) a minor save on the way there. Note that this makes it much less of a detour to collect the second weapon so will probably save time later to do so. Also, route on the way there (killing the cat) will probably need to be modified, and Minnie's presence both saves and costs time in different places, so some thought has to be put into the best spot to get her kidnapped.
Note that deaths behave the same way, but getting hit that many times takes forever.
