That is what echo chamber means and he's been using it incorrectly. You (plural) agree with the echo in the group/chamber (or everyone is echoing each other), making it seem like there is a firmly supported, backed, and/or unanimous opinion. If there are disagreeing views, even if there are other alternate disagreeing opinions elsewhere, it's not an echo chamber.
Tangent away.
So we got a little derailed on the topic, but what does everyone think about this run's entertainment value?
Run right for justice about sums it up. Occasionally climb a ladder or fight a boss by faceplanting into it. Even if the movement was optimized, there aren't any even slightly interesting mechanics or gameplay here. Some of the hits taken seem a little dodgy to me in places too.
I'm just wondering why are we're referring it as "cheating". It may be deceiving, but cheating? In context to (offline) video games, isn't that usually referring to Action Replay and other devices? The word "cheating" makes it sound like you're editting values rather than using the bot in write stuff for a casual viewer.
Doing one thing, but masking it with other input that appears to be what's actually going on but is a complete fabrication leads to bad situations. eg
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12652
It's easy to imagine some kind of graphical corruption that would then let somebody clandestinely use cheat codes or passwords that they wouldn't normally be allowed to. That's why people don't have any issue with the seemingly blank input. It's an accurate reflection of the trick that's being used without a bunch of completely unrelated things obfuscating the actual situation.
It strikes me as a bit overly dishonest to do that trick in conjunction with drawing a picture, but I'm having a hard time rationalizing that, even to myself. I kind of feel like it's the difference between doing actual sleight of hand (even if you're shown/know how it's done), and pretending like you're doing sleight of hand but it's actually camera tricks. Both are tricks, but I'm pretty sure most people would feel betrayed if they found out something was the latter instead of the former. It's violating the audience's 'trust' in their assumptions about what's happening.
At the same time though, I had assumed (before glancing over and not fully understanding the other thread) that the OCR for Brain Age was based on the last few strokes drawn, and what was going on in those was that after the image was fully drawn, the correct answer was giving within it in some way, which would be trivial for anything with a solid portion of any appreciable size.
I doubt I put it well enough, but my gut agrees with the sentiment others have expressed that it's fine enough to show a few times that it'll accept a 'blank' input, but otherwise, it shouldn't be used and perhaps something else, like highlighting the input that the game is actually 'recognizing' to get the answer, would be preferable if a new one is ever made to try to be artistically superior.
By all appearances from the other thread, it was done in only two weeks (and submitted about 40 minutes after asking for 'feedback before submission'), so it really doesn't seem like it'd be that much of an ordeal to redo it with the known fixed movement pattern. I'd suggest another pass regardless, to be more careful in general, and not to take everything so personally. I'd think you'd be used to it by now since your submission history is full of things that needed and/or had fairly basic further optimization to be done.
In any event, I find it interesting that four, arguable five, of the first six Final Fantasies have been completed through sheer repitition of a given action. Is this a common trait among RPGs of the day?
Eh, it's similar to the overloading in Super Mario World and Megaman. The Final Fantasies are just turn based, so it gets stretched out a lot more.
It was a mistake to accept the previous submission as it was. To argue that the new submission should be accepted based on a previous mistake is fallacious. I respect that Keylie has been receptive in addressing this issue, and even has a plan. You are a true TASer, sir.
Agreed. I feel it provides a solid, distinct measure of completion. I think if the softlock occurred much sooner in the ending and/or the ending was much shorter, there wouldn't even be a debate here after the Pokemon glitched ending ruling. That it slips by seems more an artifact of the ending being really long than it does realizing that it doesn't fully play out. If a faster run of this was made that froze as soon as it tried to load graphics from Kefka's tower for the ending sequence, I don't think anybody would count that as valid.
Assuming that it doesn't take much to address it, as seems to be the case, I'd suggest this should also obsolete the Sketch Glitch run (and obviate the precedent issue) since both are memory corruption things, although I really don't follow the technical side enough to say whether that's appropriate or not.
There is no such thing as finishing a game. It is a vague concept. One day you finish a game and next day the game is there again. The question is: Does this run accomplish something interesting? The answer is obvious.
The regular sketch% speedrun softlocks at the same point in the ending. It's waiting for an NPC to walk over a trigger but because it's not initialized properly he'll never get there.
If it really bothers people, is it possible to modify the TAS so it won't softlock?
It seems like a valid concern. A number of runs that skip to one ending screen or part of the ending sequence have been rejected for not leaving the game in an actual completed state.
This game is kind of like a Korean version of gin rummy, but far, FAR less complicated. And it doesn't look like you did any kind of luck manipulation, such little as there is, at all.
By the board game rule, this doesn't qualify for the vault, and I'm pretty sure it fails to meet both technical muster or pass the bar for non-trivial gameplay.
Edit:
Wikipedia's article explaining the game is horrendous. It's a very simplistic game as far as actual play goes.
Hey, I know nothing about this game, so can you please explain the game more? The submission notes seems rather useless, and how does luck even matter?
It helps if you're familiar with Hanafuda cards. This gives a pretty good summary.
http://www.pagat.com/fishing/gostop.html
Basically it goes:
Start: Cards are dealt to players and face up to the table, with a stack of undealt cards left. If three cards of a suit are dealt, combine them into a single stack.
Each turn: Player plays a card from his hand to the table AND draws a card from the stack and immediately plays it to the table
--Card matches nothing: remains on table
--Either card creates a pair: claim that pair (both if they make two separate pairs)
--Either card creates a four of a kind: claim that four of a kind
--Either card (but not both) creates a three of a kind: claim card played plus one other in that set
--Both cards together create a three of a kind: all three remain on the field and will be claimed when the last card in that suit is played
Points are ridiculously wacky and convoluted, but they're scored by the cards you've claimed. When a player has a certain number, they can declare Go. or Stop. Declaring Go means that game continues and if you win, your score increases. Declaring Stop means that you instantly win and other people pay you chips based on your current score. Games can end with no winner (even after Go is declared), in which case points are doubled in the next hand.
I really can't stress enough how ridiculously complicated scoring is, and there are a bunch of extra dumb rules merely for complexity's sake, like:
Both played cards together create a three of a kind on the first turn ONLY, you automatically get 3 chips from all players
Card from hand matches nothing, but then card from deck matches it, collect one claimed card from each player
If you have a three of a kind in your hand and the fourth is on the table, you can claim all four (leaving you with two fewer cards in your hand than you should have), and then skip playing cards from your hand for any two turns
Anyway, that's the general play. Looking at the rules just reminded me that it's an automatic win if you're dealt a four of a kind, so you'd think with any real kind of luck manipulation, this would be very short and very uninteresting.
Oh, something I just now noticed, it's set on the easiest difficulty. That's not generally good.
I also have to wonder about the strategy since it seems counter to speed. Since taking out the leader gives all the territories they had, wouldn't it be better to give the AI a bunch of weak neighbors to easily conquer so you can sweep them all up in one push later?
Caveat, I don't remember the game well enough to really remember how weak Tokugawa's neighbors are or how lazy the AI is about conquering, but I imagine it's fairly lazy on the low difficulty.
Never played this game, so what does the branch even mean?
There are two game modes, 17 fiefs or 50 fiefs. You can think of it as map size if you want, although since each fief has specific stats and a setup, it's a little different than that.
This game is kind of like a Korean version of gin rummy, but far, FAR less complicated. And it doesn't look like you did any kind of luck manipulation, such little as there is, at all.
By the board game rule, this doesn't qualify for the vault, and I'm pretty sure it fails to meet both technical muster or pass the bar for non-trivial gameplay.
Edit:
Wikipedia's article explaining the game is horrendous. It's a very simplistic game as far as actual play goes.
Sorry, I'm not familiar with WarioWare. There is no luck manipulation in that run, probably why it was rejected. (I also don't see any that aren't fixed length but I only watched around 5 minutes.)
There are some easy ones to see in Kat & Ana's games (about 10 minutes in) that are finished before the timer even comes up.
Compare to here, and you can see many of the same that cut off with the timer not yet expired:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=458cfe_Jq-A
And there are lists of the minigames in each set here.
Only a limited number are played from each set in the 'story' mode, so there's absolutely manipulation that can happen to choose the fastest of the games.
Not that the minigames themselves aren't trivial in a TAS setting, but I would say no more than the ones here are, and would involve a lot more luck manipulation instead of playing 4 hardset ones.
I'd disagree with calling them very simplistic if you can save over ten seconds from them.
The suboptimality of the first attempt means that the first attempt was suboptimal. That's all. The amount of improvement possible is not an indication of the complexity of the game.
This run of far more minigames was improved by nearly half an hour and still deemed not complex enough for the vault.
The improvement in that movie is trivial (resetting to skip cutscenes) and each minigame is fixed length. I wouldn't compare them to this game.
That is incorrect. Not all minigames are the same length. Manipulating a different set will save time. Furthermore, many are not fixed length.
It also doesn't invalidate the point I was making. Being able to save time is only an indicator that time can be saved, not that the content is complex.
I'd disagree with calling them very simplistic if you can save over ten seconds from them.
The suboptimality of the first attempt means that the first attempt was suboptimal. That's all. The amount of improvement possible is not an indication of the complexity of the game.
This run of far more minigames was improved by nearly half an hour and still deemed not complex enough for the vault.
It's because the run is only 10 minutes long so it's just short enough for it to be enjoyable. Most vaulted games have the same boring gameplay throughout the run with barely any varying activity.
Each mini-game is at least different than the last and it has cute cutscenes to watch. At no point during the run I felt it was mind numbing.
Only maybe a fifth of that is the very simplistic minigames. The rest is cutscenes and walking to and from them.
