One sin which most modern games commit and which annoys me is that they are utterly linear and extremely short. I completed HL2 in 5 days, HL2:Ep1 and Ep2 in 2 days each, F.E.A.R. in 4 days, F.E.A.R:Extraction point in 4 days, Condemned:Criminal Origins in 3 days. All of these at the hardest difficulty level.
I mean, come on. I pay good money for these games, they have very little replay value, and I can play them through in 3-5 days at the hardest difficulty level? It feels a bit like a ripoff.
Fortunately there are games which are rather different. For example the main storyline in Oblivion took me something like a month to complete. Right now I'm playing Thief:Deadly Shadows, and it looks like it will probably take me many weeks to complete. The main reason for this is that they are non-linear. For example in Thief:DS I can complete perhaps 2 levels at most in one day. I don't know how many levels it has, but if it has as many as Thief 2 had, I'm for a long ride. That's how games should be: Non-linear and non-obvious, which cannot be played through in 3 days.
One thing I dislike a bit about this article is that it's clearly the author's own opinion, but it's written as if the author knew the general opinion of all gamers. That's a bit presumptuous.
As for the individual points:
"Thou shalt let us play your game with real-life friends."
Not all games are designed to work as multiplayer games. Even many of designed-for-multiplaying games are not designed to be playable on the same screen by multiple players. You can't demand that *all* games be playable by multiple players on the same screen.
Sure, there may be some games where there's no excuse why they couldn't support multiple players (on the same screen), but he's writing as if that was the case with *all* games.
"Thou shalt not pad the length of your games."
I disagree with the claim that Oblivion was artificially made longer by "padding". The whole idea of the game is to have a huge world you can explore freely. I don't believe the size of the world was selected to make distances (and thus traveling) longer per se. The purpose was to create a realistic world, just like an RPG should have (and they succeeded pretty well at that). I agree with the lack of variation in dungeons, though.
HL2:Ep2 is shown in a screenshot as another example. That one I don't understand. The whole point in Ep2, its story, is the journey to the rebel base. What does the writer would have preferred?
"Having to replay levels due to limited save points."
There's a type of game where the idea is to complete it in sections. Some people may not like that type of game, but some may. It's no different than someone not liking, for example, RTS type games or puzzle games. You can't please everyone. People have different tastes and dislikes.
Clearly some people *do* like section-by-section type games because they sell. You can't just go and give a generic rule that "you must not write that type of games" if people like it. It's as absurd as me saying "you must not create RTS games" for the simple reason that I find RTS games unappealing.
"Instant failure quicktime events."
Again, it's a type of game. If you don't like it, that doesn't mean nobody likes it.
"Starting us with a bullshit weapon."
I agree that in most FPS games they should come up with a good and believable storywise reason why you start with a single weak weapon (most FPS games don't even attempt doing that), but I don't agree with the view that you should be able to start with a kick-ass weapon from the very start.
"Bullets that have no visible effect."
Most FPS games are not physically realistic in this regard, and that's completely intentional. If they were realistic, one single shot would usually take down any enemy, which would not be very challenging.
Admittedly sometimes it's just laziness from the part of the game developers.
"Filling the game with hordes of cookie-cutter bad guys."
Sometimes there *are* technical limitations to this. There's just so much memory in your graphics card. Models have an ever-increasing amount of polygons, and they have to fit into that tiny amount of memory. If you changed the facial features of all the enemies visible on screen, that would increase the amount of memory required from the graphics card. It might not be enough.
Although, once again, admittedly this is also sometimes just laziness from the game developers.
"Thou shalt admit when enough is enough."
If a game genre sells, then it sells, whether you like it or not.
"CPU-controlled squad teammates."
It's not impossible to create well-working sidekicks in games. IMO HL2:Ep1 and Ep2 are good examples of this. Don't diss a game feature simply because most games get it wrong.
"First-person jumping puzzles."
Again, just because you don't like certain game types doesn't mean nobody does.
"The grizzled space marine."
What does it matter what you are? It's not like it affected gameplay.
"Hiring real writers", "then hiring competent voice actors to say the lines."
I have to agree with this. A game is a story, and a story needs good storywriting and good acting. Nothing destroys a good story more effectively than bad writing or bad acting.
What I'm wondering is: Where exactly at tasvideos.org are there direct AVI downloads (which would potentially cause the bandwidth problems)?
(Edit: And if the problem is indeed with AVI files, can't you add a rule to your ban that it's banned only if the requested file is an AVI file?)
This is my improvement to Walker Boh's NES "warpless" Rygar
[...]
I die once to save a long trek in Garloz.
Hmm, can't watch the video right now. Could you (or someone) explain what exactly this shortcut by death means?
In the past the "warpless" version of the Rygar run was equivalent to "uses no death", as at that time dying was the only known way to warp to the final boss. (Of course this changed later when it was discovered that it was possible to perform the warp without dying.)
At those times it was also under discussion whether using death as a shortcut at all was stylistically acceptable (at least at that time it was a bit controversial to die in a "perfect" run, as it could be seen as the run being "imperfect"). Nowadays the view about this has changed (ie. basically anything goes that makes the run shorter).
However, what I'm thinking is whether it's reasonable to use death as a shortcut in a warpless run... (I also cannot help to feel that using death as a shortcut was a "cheap" trick to get a much better time than walker boh, who made his run with the mindset that using death as a shortcut is not ok in a warpless run.)
I suppose it depends a lot on how you used the death for the shortcut.
While I already knew quite a lot about the Ion Storm and Daikatana issues, I hadn't read that article before, and it was quite an interesting read indeed.
There is quite some confusion here.
H.264 is not a codec, it's a video format standard. x264 is a codec which can encode and decode the H.264 format. (It's one of many codecs which support the format in question.)
We don't "use the H264 codec", we "use the H264 format". Also, effectively saying "I use x264, not H264" is wrong. You are creating H.264 videos when you use x264.
Wouldn't that be kind of "cheating"? You would be getting a much shorter video than the speedrun really was. (The TAS community has always been trying to make clear that we never cheat eg. by video editing tricks, so this could be seen as controversial.)
Your slippery-slope argument is not valid.
Firstly, nobody (at least not me) has *complained* about the ending. I simply noted that it might be controversial. I was in no way suggesting that the shorter movie should not be published.
Secondly, more related to your slippery slope, there's a limit about how much a very small optimization should be allowed to degrade entertainment. As a hypothetical, and completely extreme example, assume this:
Suppose a "regular" run through the game takes 25000 frames. However, a glitch is discovered which allows jumping right to the end boss, but this glitch requires the player to stand still, doing nothing for a very long time, and the total number of frames of the movie when using this glitch is 24999. In other words, just 1 frame was saved, and the whole movie is nothing else than the character just standing still and nothing happening.
Quite clearly this would *never* be published here. It's much better to "sacrifice" that 1 frame to make an entertaining run than to publish a movie where nothing happens.
The river city ransom movie where it took something like 2 minutes for the end boss to kill himself (while the player just stands there doing nothing) was a bit of a stretching. Too much for it to be considered acceptable. Most people agreed that it crossed the line where saving a few frames degraded entertainment too much for it to be acceptable.
This line may be very fuzzy, but it clearly exists. And there's no slippery slope: Just because *some* movies are not accepted if they degrade entertainment too much for a minuscule saving in frames, that doesn't mean that speed doesn't matter at all.
Again: I'm not saying *this* movie is such a case. I just pointed out that it should be considered when voting. If most people don't consider it a degradation of entertainment, then it should be published, of course.
Yeah I end input early, I just find a position that will render me imortal and the boss commits suicide about a minute after the movie ends.
Ah, we have again this controversial situation, the same we had with the river city ransom movie (IIRC) which also ended early and caused the final boss to kill itself after a rather long period of time.
When the movie should be ended is subject to debate, as pointed out at http://tasvideos.org/Rules.html#3TheExactTerminationPointIsSubjectToDebate
Personally I like #5, which is also Bisqwit's favorite: Ending the movie at the moment when no further input can cause the game to end faster.
This doesn't always make the movie as short as possible, but IMO it conforms more to the "the movie must be complete" rule. Of course all this is heavily a matter of opinion.
Then again, a simple packet filter can't stop outgoing traffic. Nothing stops a program from opening a URL in your browser (which probably is allowed to connect) or just silently running ping.exe. If you want to sneak traffic out, you'll find a way.
Code that's executed by buffer overflows in your browser (or the notorious flash plugin) won't be stopped by a firewall at all.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't use a firewall at all. At least it stops most attacks (inbound or outbound). But you are right in that one shouldn't assume that it's a 100% secure protection.
But Windows doesn't have a helpful mechanism for privilege separation (neither do most linux distros out of the box)
Are there any linux distros which don't support, out of the box, creating additional accounts with an easy-to-use GUI setup program?
OTOH, linux people usually don't run random binaries from random websites. It just doesn't fit very well in the linux mentality.
What I think is more noticeable is the much greater precision and playing more with danger.
That's cool. Since this is a "100% kills" run, it should indeed kill every killable enemy if it is physically possible. My run didn't, and the currently published run doesn't, so this is indeed something which ought to be improved.
Makes the TAS more admirable too, IMO. Aiming for 100% kills in this game is quite hard and laborious. I know. :)
So the real explanation is that this is real, despite the highly unlikely positions of his center of mass over his base of support? If not, what's your idea of simplest explanation?
I'm not saying it's real. I'm just saying that it could be. It's very easy to see forgery when one *wants* to see forgery.
The "yoga levitation" photographs are a good example of this.
The photos are usually completely genuine and unmanipulated. However, they are photographs. They represent one single moment in time.
The vast majority of "yoga levitation" photographs represent people at the highest point of a jump. They are not levitating, they are jumping. The photograph has simply been taken at the exact right moment to make it look like they were levitating.
