Zelda: OOT alone has more versions than most Windows games that are TAS-able (in general, not referring to Hourglass's progress).
There are always outliers, especially if you're going to pick from the very top of the pile in terms of re-releases and ports, but if you want to compare number of updates from that area for top games, then Civ 2, a game that came out two years earlier than OoT has had literally over a hundred. Starcraft, a fellow 1998 game, has around 30. Also, if we are counting ports as different versions, V*6 has at least 7 so far.
PC development follows a very different course for this kind of thing than console and I think should be treated differently due to that. I wouldn't mind if it were either the first version or the most recent, but updating to a specific short lived intermediary version rubs me the wrong way.
/$.02
Intentionally playing a specific version of a PC game instead of the most up to date because of a bug in that version and only that version is really dubious to me.
(derail) What would you say then about, say, playing the original NA Metroid Prime instead of the Greatest Hits version, which was modified to remove sequence breaks without fixing the bugs / oversights that originally made those breaks possible
I think the issue is that this bug was not in previous versions, and is not in future versions. Honestly, though, I can't answer you hypothetical objectively because I am a HUGE Metroid fanboy and I love any and all forms of sequence breaking.
We're not talking about Metroid Prime. We're talking about this game. And there already are rules in place for that, although bug fixes addressing such usually happens during localization, but they still create stable console releases. Stable being the key word.
This is on a platform where major bug fixes and updates like this are common instead of extremely rare, and this particular bug only existed for a single version that lasted a month.
If/when TASing full PC games from the age of downloading patches becomes common, I'd hope the rule would be "Use the stable release," not picking whatever intermediary patch has the most severe glitch in it. Maybe this is a good chance to debate it.
Why was "Press R to die" removed in version 2.1? If there is a good reason, then I think you should go ahead and use version 2.1 for any attempt at obsoleting this; one of the arguments against using fan translations of games is that we don't want runs on outdated versions, and I think the same logic applies here too.
Got to agree here. It was a bug introduced in 2.0 (I'm pretty sure) that was fixed a month later.
http://distractionware.com/forum/index.php?topic=693.0
R to restart from the last checkpoint now only works in player levels (as it should)
Intentionally playing a specific version of a PC game instead of the most up to date because of a bug in that version and only that version is really dubious to me.
It's considered by many to be the earliest true fighting game (especially in Japan) with the template for today's 2d fighters, mainly for the large cast of differentiated characters each with their own movesets instead of two identical characters with a very limited set of identical moves.
I notice we have a couple of no/meh on this. Can those who voted so explain their rationale? Thanks.
I voted purely on entertainment and I think I voted meh. Maybe no. I can't remember.
It's mostly the same rationale as the other similar hacks. The level design is indeed much better (although there are still a number of ugly portions and arbitrarily placed hazards), but the hack is essentially impossible without tools anyway. The breaks that exist often end up just clipping through some barrier to run over/under/fly through the level, or clipping through to an arbitrarily designated spot. Much of them are also based on "Oops, you have Yoshi and you're not supposed to," which I think is less forgivable for a hack, especially one that's specifically meant to railroad the player's actions and available power ups. That says to me that the hack's poorly done more than anything. Which only leaves the playing around during the autoscrollers which I don't think adds enough above the regular runs to distinguish itself besides the janky level design.
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6223
This one is faster than yours, but got overlooked for the vault because it was canceled by the author.
Or is there something else going on between the two?
When adelikat and I were creating that page, we came up with a couple of examples of games which were not serious. Such as the NES Sesame Street game, or Elmo's Fun with Numbers/Letters. Another example is Color a Dinosaur.
I don't know about those others, but Color a Dinosaur has no well-defined ending, nor any gameplay for that matter, so that pretty easily excludes it from being acceptable.
However, this game has actual gameplay and an actual ending (heck, it even has end credits.) So what exactly is it that makes it not a "serious game"?
It being harder to lose many of the minigames than win them probably has something to do with it. Some I think are flat out impossible to lose. And almost all of them are completely trivial exercises in following instructions in real time, let alone a TAS.
And I don't see how an ending makes much of a difference. Candyland has a winner, but it's not a game in any meaningful way.
So.
The glitch is that you can make it load from the wrong file?
Maybe you should chill a little and actually look at what the other run is doing instead of... this.
At 11 in, the enemy has 2000 LP left. You have two monsters with over 2000 on the field to his one defender.
You then proceed to fuse a monster that has under 2000 attack, attack with it, and only then attacking with your >2000 attack monster.
Why?
And assuming you're talking about the US, they're not illegal.
They're not protected speech.
There is a difference.
Ok, I'm not american. Can you please tell me the difference? I'm really serious.
Unprotected but legal speech is actionable, but not necessarily punishable by law. If you made a bunch of racist/sexist comments or sent a picture of your dick to a coworker, for example, your employer would have sufficient cause to fire you and people could sue you, but the government wouldn't ticket you or throw you in jail for it.
There -is- some crossover, generally falling into either disrupting the peace/endangering the public (shouting "fire" in a movie theater for example) or incitement to illegal action/violence in some way that certainly are illegal. There also exist a number of laws stipulating additional penalties when hate speech and the like is part of a crime.
There are many full-fledged games containing pornography that would be very interesting to see a TAS of, but due to licensing requirements, they're pretty much all PC and out of current TAS scope. If/When TASing actually reaches that level, I suspect that the question will get a lot more interesting.
I'm not aware of that. Are those games played solely for their porn content or is there actual gameplay involved?
OmegaWatcher, do you really want TASVideos to be known for publishing Tool-Assisted Porn?
There are many full-fledged games containing pornography that would be very interesting to see a TAS of, but due to licensing requirements, they're pretty much all PC and out of current TAS scope. If/When TASing actually reaches that level, I suspect that the question will get a lot more interesting.
The good thing is, that my submission is not going to be rejected because of the "records on Cyberscore" because there is still a chance that times could be faked. There is no video proof of any of the times.
To RNG manipulation:
I found out that the address for the RNG is 030001F8 (4 byte) and the next RNG is calculated like this:
newRNG=RNG*0x41C64E6D+0x00003039
So in the worst case you would have to wait 4294967295 RNG changes to get the best time on one stage.
So if the RNG would change 6 times per frame, it would take about 138 days to get the best time...
"Frame wars" done so quickly on such a short and simplistic game doesn't speak much to the attention paid in the first place. This is the kind of thing I'd think would be more suited for a dyanamic programming type solution than... this.
I'm failing to see how this has gotten any more entertaining a game than the first run.
It's a lot more optimal now, and just the speed of it makes it more entertaining than the original submission.
Tangent wrote:
but it's still the same terrible game now as it was when the run was a few frames longer.
That's why it's being published to the Vault. Game choice doesn't matter anymore.
Voting No. Definitely publish as an improvement though.
Yes, that's my point. The votes for the first one were anything but overwhelmingly "Yes, this is an entertaining movie," but now they are. Over nothing but a few frames shaved off a 20 second run. Just pointing out a flaw in the new system.
I'm failing to see how this has gotten any more entertaining a game than the first run.
It absolutely should be accepted as an improvement, but it's still the same terrible game now as it was when the run was a few frames longer.
Didn't have a chance to watch this before since I'm lazy and reliant on an encode, but I'm fairly sure that quite a lot of time could be saved in this run. Mainly through better RNG manipulation. It looks like the opponents aren't manipulated at all, so he ends up in the head to head always against characters with high health instead of the lower health ones or even depleted HP ones that participate in multiple events.
Likewise, I know from experience that the AI can screw up all of the first four jumps in the rooftop run, ending it sooner (and since the one they show is automatically second place, it creates some technically impossible results). Wouldn't surprise me if the AI could've been manipulated a little better on the hammer throw too.
And as a side but related note, it won't generate the actual ending, but I'm fairly sure that picking Lincoln instead of Southside would be faster. Artie and Skip are both stronger than Crash, and Wheels is the fastest character in the game. It'd also let you RNG Noise on Southside as an opponent who has the least HP AND worst Def in the game.
That's also the Double Dragon team if you're using the Japanese version. ^^
Pacifist, but it should probably be rejected anyway for either A.) Using a code to unlock a boss character (IE broken as hell to begin with) or B.) Not being sufficiently different from unassisted play.
It's just flying backwards out of bounds and the AI automatically chases out (and loses first since they're not flying/floating). Since it's a boss character, they're not designed to NOT run after something out of bounds. That's trivial to do in real time too even if the short hops might save a second or two.
I'm fairly certain that the courses are nonrandom, and staying at the bottom means that you naturally avoid about 95% of the obstacles regardless, so I have to say that it's no more interesting than any autoscroller would be if you just stayed pressed up against the wall. Which I do know is required here to stay at top speed, but that just turns it into largely an autoscroller with loose controls. Could've at least taken potshots backward or scored some points to make it marginally interesting.
