I would've preferred a donation setup - I think the site is popular enough that you'll probably be able to keep it afloat on donations alone - and it's not intrusive like forced banner ads are.
there has been a paypal-button on the main page for ages. See here how that worked out.
I watched half of it, before snes9x inside wine crashed again. I'm in no mood to put up with wine again for now, but I'll watch it again later.
As I played and finished Metroid Legacy, I enjoyed seeing the locations of the items I missed, and those really really weird routes you took. I have tried some of them on my own and failed (unassisted though), it's interesting to see what can be done with tool assistance, including all those shine-sparks you managed so squeeze in.
I can't comment on the quality of this movie as a speedrun (judging by the posts it could probably be done faster), but it entertained me. As that's the question asked by the poll, I'm going to vote yes after I finished watching it.
I'm a bit worried about google tracking where I browse. They could store a complete history of every site with google-ads I visited, and google is known to store excessive data. Although that may seem paranoid, that's the main reason I generally block their ads.
recent adblock versions have a whitelist though, and you just got whitelisted. my google surf profile will from now on be "google, sda and bisqwits" ;)
Those ads are fine with me as long as they pay for hardware costs etc. If you're making excessive profit off them, it'd be fair to give the movie makers their share or pay back donations. But we can talk about that if that ever happens, you don't seem like someone to just hoard the money without telling anyone.
voting "I support the decision".
btw, phpbb-hacks ftw!
When you vote, please also post a message that explains your opinion.
This helps the author of the movie and the judges who decide whether to publish it.
me = addict. wine to the rescue! Although it has issues (lots!), I'm now watching your run.
On your quest for getting the worm, cockroach and golden fly for the cooking contest, you enter the windmill on the roof, pick 3x 1000c from the wall, then ride the elevator down. You don't need the cash down there, so wouldn't it be faster to grab it on your way back (somewhere around frame 379.800)? Or do the coins mysteriously disappear by then?
the minish cap run is barely 2/5ths done, and will be done after i finish this (I swear Tub).
I'll get back to you on that :p
I've played BoF2 long ago, just once, not even sure I finished it. Unfortunately the last Windows-machine in my network died a couple of days ago, and I could neither get nitsujas snes9x-version nor his vgb-version compiled on linux, so I'm not going to post here much for now.
not much to say about the run, except 'yes vote'. Usage of the glitch added a surprise and variety to this boss-fight-biased mode and skips some of the slow walking, so I agree on the usage on julius mode.
I don't mean to influence anyone on what run to work on next, or anything, but...
/me whistles innocently and slowly walks away..
I just found out you can pass through walls if you get hit while climbing a ledge. No idea if there are different ways to do it, I'm mostly playing in real-time with few savestates and didn't investigate further.
Maybe there are other areas where it's more useful than here.
Movie
now that the .avi is available I could finally watch it :)
I once had a game for my Amiga called Troddlers which mixed elements from lemmings and solomons key. You only have a limited number of blocks you can place (but regain them when removing blocks), and your goal is not to get yourself into the exit, but a couple of small lemming-like creatures that walk around floors, walls and ceilings. You had to place blocks to create paths for them and you, always taking care not to smash a little creature with a block, or to lead them into traps and enemys.
While googling I noticed that there's also a SNES version of the game, and it seems equal to the amiga version in terms of gameplay. Maybe something worth checking out for fans of solomons key.
Next time I'll add big bright irony tags, smilies seem overused these days. Honestly, I doubt there are many people who will notice that those fights could be improved unless they were told so.
now shoo, I'm trying to watch a movie!
Having seen your WIPs this should be a yes-vote. It has flaws, but if you close your eyes during the core-X-fights, it's still entertaining :p ;)
As this is not going to be redone soon for a couple of seconds, my vote is to publish this in the meantime.
now I'm going to watch it, then I'll vote yes :)
warning, long pointless drivel ahead, if you don't care, just skip to the last paragraph ;)
I played the game for the first time yesterday, and by todays standards I couldn't help but hate it. The floating blue ball doesn't only irritate me, it also prevents magic from being useful. The RPG-system doesn't have anything like character development, actually leveling or anything. A first-time-player that has to free every spawn-point has an almost fixed number of enemys, so they might as well have placed a new sword & a heart container at certain intervals. The storyline differs from the usual "save the world from destruction". It's "You fucked up, world is destroyed already. Now save the world by rebuilding it!". Still, the storyline is as shallow as a dried-up puddle. Then there's the fighting. Two attack modes, reducing tactics to spawn-camping and exploiting AI weaknesses. No diagonal walking either, not even in crab mode.
So after all, I hated the magic system, the fighting system, the storyline, pretty much the whole game.
Then I watched the speedrun, and suddenly this game amazed me. Seeing the magic being used in an intelligent way was fun, and I enjoyed the fighting tactics I found so limited being used to their full potential. Well done, Kaz!
It still has one flaw: the first town is pretty boring, and the last towns get repetitive. If the game was shorter, just two or three of the later towns, I would have finished watching without forcing myself to.
All in all, a meh. The run is well done, but the game lacks entertainment value. This may be lots of fun for fans of the game, but for the casual viewer, it just hasn't enough variety for 1h46m. Let the fans vote yes to see if the fanbase is big enough to warrant a publication ;)
Just when I thought you were done..
now that's it, I refuse to vote on any more monopoly submission until there has been a full week without improvements. :p
After reading your topic I played the game for a while. I agree that it'd make an interesting watch when speedrunned (either TAS or on a real console).
I prefer the 3d version though ;)
something I found while playing on the european version:
Death can be evaded sometimes
The voting system has flaws, that's true.
The problems that arose at those two threads are because not all goals of a movie were achieved. Gradius is entertaining (to some), but has not reached perfection yet. Star Ocean is well played, but not entertaining to many, possibly being a poor game choice. The current Holy Diver submission is well played (to my knowledge), but doesn't surprise the viewer. Then there might be a submission that excels in all of the Guidelines, but is still inferior to a previously published run (or a different run soon to be published).
No single question can answer all these different facets, and Arc's splitting into a 1-5 rating system won't help much either.
Now you could think of casting different votes on different aspects of the movie, like
Did the movie entertain you? (Yes/No/Meh)
Do you think it's as fast as possible? (Yes/No/Meh)
Did the movie surprise you? (Yes/No/Meh)
Do you think it's better than the currently published movie? (Yes/No/Meh)
...
but as far as I know phpBB doesn't even support that.
Then again, does it really help to make the voting more complex?
When you vote, please also write a message that explains your opinion.
This helps the author of the movie and the judges who decide whether to publish it.
Anything you wish to add that exceeds a simple "yes, no objections whatsoever" or "no, trash it completely" can be added to a post.
Ultimately it's the judges that decide what to publish, and they consider more than just voting ratio.
Despite the no-votes Star Ocean was published, and despite the yes-votes Gradius was not, the system still works.
If you think of votes more as a rough guideline than as the final judging, the problems with voting seem to disappear. And a different wording of the question certainly won't influence any publication to come.
Much better than your last submission. The poll asks "Did you like watching this movie?", and to that I'd reply yes.
If the poll asked about obsoleting the current gradius run, I wouldn't know, as I didn't watch the old run for a long time.
If the poll asked whether this run is as good as it can get, that'd be a no. I'm mostly with Atma there, so I won't repeat things.
Another thing you could have done is carve weird narrow tunnel systems into shootable walls and fly through them, the blue diagonal nettings on the later levels seem fitting for it. You did that a little, but IMHO it could be used more.
On the other hand, I think the shield was a bit overused this time. Avoiding hits looks better than deliberately taking them, and an unsuspecting viewer might think you needed those shields to survive and dismiss the run as "noobish".
I won't vote yet.
I don't know what exactly you're talking about, but here's two pieces of metroid trivia:
- killing the two bosses gives a +75 missile expansion each
- the metroids right before mother brain's room can drop missile refills that refill way more than 2 missiles (don't remember how many exactly).
does that answer your question?
Tub, just so you know, it doesn't cost time at the tally-up screen.
I remembered Slotermeyer's submission comments there, but didn't verify them - note the conditional in my last post to be safe ;)
thanks for the information, doesn't change my vote of course.
What bothered me most about Slotermeyer's run was that he couldn't even keep his ship steady when flying a straight line. Your movement looks much smoother, and you even added some non-obvious shortcuts. I liked the fuel-tank-juggling in level 13.
The bonus stages made me laugh. Even if that costs time at the tally-up-screen, IMHO it's worth it.
Now I'll just click 'yes' and try to watch it at 200%.
hmm.. I'm not a big fan of the early castlevania-games, but this movie kept me watching. It had some interesting parts.
Those "puzzles" with freezing stuff were a bit annoying.. some of the graphical effects seemed just wrong, either emulator troubles or developers on drugs.. and the movie lacked interesting glitches or other surprising moments.. there were lagging parts, looks bad.. but that probably can't be helped.
Still enough for a yes-vote on entertainment.
About speed.. It looked sloppy at times, but that doesn't mean it is - I don't know enough of the game to tell. From reading your thread you apparently spent enough time optimizing, so I'll have to trust you here :p
one question though: why did you kill the first boss with the double-shot, and others with the default shot? Where's the difference between those bosses that makes different weapons faster?
I watched the old run once, a long time ago, and I deleted the .avi, so I can't really compare. I won't vote.
This run didn't entertain me much though. You evaded everything (how surprising!), but I didn't see anything special - like showing off interesting glitches, embedding messages into shootable walls, flying complex figures while dodging enemy fire...
Quite often you just stood there until you were forced to move, and then just moved a few pixels - to entertain, you shouldn't just react, you should act. If you just react to enemy fire, it looks like the game is controlling you. You should make it look as if you were controlling the game.
I liked the last boss though. :)
hehe.. and I thought I was the only one who watches speedruns to fall asleep :)
For me any run works that I've watched before (so I don't force myself to stay awake to see what happens) and that doesn't feature sudden volume changes (mother brain screeching = me awake again). I just can't use them too often, or they'll get boring. So I usually watch new runs while being awake for entertainment, and pick a run I've recently watched at night.
I remember this one worked quite well, will watch it again tonight.
it's not just about skill, it's about entertainment. If you can surprise the viewer without much skill, do it.
You don't have to end your movie after painting scream though. If you're still not bored after doing it, you can go ahead and change the painting into mona lisa, or just replace parts of the background until the screaming guy is standing in hyrule or something. Be creative.
/me whistles innocently and slowly walks away..