This run reaches the credits in the fastest possible time.
Since the Pokemon Yellow run (seems to have) set the precedent, this is actually a completely legit game completion, so it's not even a joke submission.
Good to know the game saves. Also, I'm going back on previous opinion, since I forgot to consider the contents of the save data: the completed game flag in the save data appears to me to be a perfect and self-sufficient criteria to determine if the game was beaten, so considering this I'd classify this run as valid even if the end of the credits doesn't happen.
Even though the game enters in an infinite loop, making it impossible to fully finish, return to the main menu and continue with the saved game?
Maybe it was a nice little movie, and a neat project which also served as practical experience and as the senior film for its director. But in the end, it didn't have the same nice animation, voices, pacing and interesting story to it. Instead it was filled with out-of-place internet/movie references or crossovers that didn't even make much sense.
There were definitely pacing problems. One can clearly tell how the pros have the experience to create the story so that it remains interesting to watch throughout and keep the story advancing at a good pace (not too slow, not too fast).
(Not that amateurs aren't capable of this, of course. There are many amateur productions that are very well made in this regard.)
and it's one of the reasons I will never call myself "brony" because it is a term that those thousands of people coined.
You can deny it all you like, but that doesn't change the facts. If you are male, and you are a fan of the show, you are a brony. Get over it. ;)
In 2011 I "liked" and "favorited a lot of MLP videos and I noticed my subscribers would unsubscribe and tell me they don't want to put up with "my MLP crap on their page every morning".
How is it different to convince the game that you have beaten it or to convince the game that you are suddenly in a different room when both results come from effectively the same tactics?
We have to remember that we are making TASes for viewers, not for the games.
If the "game completion" is completely nondescript to the viewer, basically indistinguishable from randomness, does it even matter if certain bits are turned on or off inside the game's data that indicate the game ending from the game's own perspective?
(What I'm trying to say is that completing the game from the game's own perspective should be a minimum requirement, of course, but should it also be a sufficient requirement, or should there be something else as well?)
right after you see thispokemon, the game saves, and if you reset you see this.
I hope this makes the ending valid :)
It raises the question: If someone succeeded in making a TAS of this game that only makes the game create the endgame save, but otherwise does not visually do anything to indicate that the game has actually ended, would it still count?
Also: How corrupted can that save file be before it's considered not a valid endgame save?
(One cannot help but wonder at which point "completing the game" changed from "playing through the game" to "execute some routine that's run when the game ends"? This is not playing the game anymore, and it kind of defeats the idea of speedrunning, which should be about playing the game with incredible reflexes.)
Some people have mentioned that the game saves when beating the game. At which point does this happen exactly? If this is after talking to Oak in the hall of fame, I would consider it a requirement, and I believe it is not met.
I fear that if we keep piling up requirement after requirement of what exactly constitutes a valid completion of this game, it will become really complicated, and people are probably still going to find ways around them.
For example, if the requirement is "the game must make a valid 'end game' save", then what stops the TAS from simply hacking the game into doing that, and only that? And so on, and so forth.
Maybe it would be just easier to ban this form of glitching completely, in this particular case.
What about runs of games that never end? Or those that use a password system to resume prgress? Does that mean we should unpublish all of those kind of runs?
Different category of games have their own separate rules. This is most certainly not a game that never ends, therefore it's inconsequential.
A speedrun (tool-assisted or not) is by definition a completion of the game done as fast as possible (sometimes with additional alternative goals). If the game is not completed, it cannot really be considered a full speedrun.
If completing the game is removed as a requirement, then a speedrun of half of the first level of a game could be just as acceptable as a full playthrough. Which would make the whole concept of speedrunning pretty much meaningless.
This website cannot attribute creative commons to images owned by Nintendo, for example.
The game company has the sole right to reproduce and distribute any part of the game; audio, video, characters, graphics, etc.
"Fair use" is murkier though.
It's a safe bet to say that game screenshots do not constitute copyright infringement. Else every single gaming website in existence would be shot down. (Moreover, a visitor of those websites cannot be held liable. Not only are those screenshots perfectly under fair use stipulations, but a regular user cannot control what kinds of images a web site will offer.)
Downloading the speedrun videos is a harder question, especially since they often contain entire music tracks, which are very definitely copyrighted (and thanks to the incredible lobbying power of the music industry, no amount of it falls under fair use.) However, especially if you are watching the videos on YouTube, I think you are safe. They do not originate from tasvideos.org, and I have hard time believing that even those draconian ISPs are going to block your access to YouTube.
tl;dr:
I can't say whether this counts as the correct ending. However, what I can say is that the game executes a code specifically made for THE END. And to clarify it to everyone, it does that infinite times.
That's good enough for me. Thanks!
You mean that you consider it an acceptable game completion?
Curious, because to me it looks like the exact opposite. To me it looks like it does what I was suspecting, ie. simply jump to the routine that displays the "The End" picture on screen. What's worse, it causes said code to enter an infinite loop which, I assume, is not the original intent of the game code. Therefore it doesn't even proceed as it normally would if the game where played to the end in the regular way.
What I find interesting about this discussion is that seemingly everybody accepts (and accepted) the ending of p4wner's run as if it is valid
I think that it's more a case of the question not having been raised then (because it wasn't so obvious, and it didn't seem so relevant either, as much more of the game was being actually played.)
When a game has such a glitch that you can only "jump forward" in the game to very few and specific places, it feels more like a game completion (which simply skips parts of it), while in this particular case where we can basically jump anywhere in the code we want, it becomes a question of definition and opinion (of which part, exactly, is the "true ending" of the game), which is inevitably arbitrary.
If I understand correctly, the only way to glitch this game is to corrupt the save game data. Thus assuming that we wanted to rule out glitching to an arbitrary routine in the game as a valid game completion, it would probably be enough to simply rule that, with this particular game, corrupting save data cannot be used to complete the game.
(I assume that this idea will never fly, but I'm presenting it nevertheless, just as food for thought.)
Btw, I find it quite interesting from a technical and also kind of philosophical point of view, what exactly should constitute game completion.
With the vast majority of games there's nothing to discuss because you just play the game through (even if it's done with superhuman reflexes) and that's it. However, with games like this one, where there's basically no limit to how much you can glitch it (all the way up to being able to freely run any arbitrary code that the CPU supports) it becomes a much more complicated question.
I think that most people would agree that, if the game has some kind of end screen picture, simply showing that is not enough to constitute a game completion. So what exactly does? It's an interesting question.
If, like here, we can basically jump to any part of the original game's code, which part is enough to constitute the "ending" of the game?
Maybe, and I'm just throwing the idea for consideration, we could actually remove the controversy and not consider any form of glitching directly to some arbitrary "end" routine in the game a valid completion, in this particular case. The rationale for this is that since you can basically jump anywhere, it becomes impossible to accurately define where the game's "end" actually is, because it's heavily a question of opinion and there is no correct answer. Thus, perhaps, it would be better if we don't accept a glitched run as being a valid game completion (for this particular game) at all...
Just thinking out loud.
You're only voting on whether or not you found it entertaining. Whether it's really an "ending" or not shouldn't influence your vote.
I have to disagree with that sentiment. I think it should be possible to express with one's vote whether one considers the submission valid for publication or not. (For example, if a run obviously and blatantly broke one of the most basic rules, making it completely ineligible for publication, voting "yes" would feel rather contradictory.)
Does showing the "The End" picture on screen constitute completing the game?
You may as well ask if talking to Professor Oak without first beating your rival counts as completing the game.
I'm not quite sure I understand what you are trying to say.
Ostensibly there's a subroutine in the game for displaying the final picture. If this run simply glitches the game into jumping to that subroutine and then do nothing, does that constitute completing the game? (I'm not saying that's the only thing this run does. I'm asking that if that were the case, would it be in principle considered a game completion?)
Let's consider a slightly different situation: We glitch the game into running arbitrary code. We use that to write a small routine that reads the end screen data from the game ROM and display it on screen. Would that constitute "completing the game"? I think most people would agree that it wouldn't. It's simply showing one picture from the game's ROM data, nothing more.
Now, if instead of writing our own "dump-picture-onto-screen" routine and glitch the game into running it, we make the game simply glitch into jumping into its own "dump-the-end-picture-onto-screen" routine. Does that make much of a difference in the end?
I suppose that if the game itself considers the game as finished at this point (eg. if you save now, it would consider it a "game completed" save), it could be considered a valid completion. (A rather nondescript one, I might say, but still a technically valid completion.)
From the perspective of a person who has no intimate knowledge of the technical details, somehow this kind of lacks the feeling of the game being actually completed. Yes, it says "The End", but is that really the ending of the game, or is it perhaps just somehow glitching the final picture onto the screen?
Does showing the "The End" picture on screen constitute completing the game?
I have heard that people use "I could care less" (instead of the obviously correct "I could not care less"), but this is the first time I have actually seen it in the wild.
Or maybe he did mean that he cares at least a bit.
To please the minority, the only way out is to develop the rules so that different types of playarounds can be published for the same game alongside. If you guys have ideas, post them, pure protesting leads nowhere.
I was not advocating publishing both runs. I was simply saying that given the choice I would prefer the first one over this one. However, this is a majority vote thing, so there's little that I can do.
(I really hope someone makes a third version which gets to the arbitrary code sooner, like this one, but where there's an awesome payoff. I'm still hoping for a "rickroll hack" or something along those lines.)
bangbaew, this is one of the major problems here:
TASVideoAgent wrote:
The game "Super Mario 64" has 120 stars in game and must have at least 70 stars to beat the game , this is TAS video and it use 16 stars to beat the game.
The goal of completing the game with 16 stars is completely arbitrary, and generally we don't accept runs with completely arbitrary goals. It's completely arbitrary because there's no reasoning behind it; why not 15 stars, or 17, or 5 for that matter? Is there a rational reason for it to be precisely 16? If there isn't, then it's completely arbitrary and has no reason to exist as a goal for a speedrun.
(Yes, I know the history of speedrunning the game, and I know that for a time 16 was the minimum that was known. However, the second that someone discovered that the game can be completed with less stars, the number 16 became arbitrary. There's no reason to aim for it anymore.)
70 stars would be a non-arbitrary goal because it's what's necessary to complete the game in normal circumstances, via regular gameplay. However, for that goal to make sense you would have to restrict the run and ban any glitch abuse that could be used to complete the game with less stars. Only then would that goal make sense.
