It has always been an open question how "legal" any of the videos published here are.
One thing, however, is quite clear, as far as I know: Publishing entire soundtracks, as happens with most of the videos, is - at least technically speaking - illegal in most western countries. *Downloading* such a piece of music may or may not be legal depending on the country (I think the current copyright in Finland is a bit fuzzy about that, but with the old copyright it was legal), but *distributing* such a piece of music is illegal in most western countries.
I actually have no idea about the graphics. A couple of screenshots may be seen as fair use in most countries and a lawsuit would probably never hold in court, but we are not distributing a few screenshots but in the worst case several hours worth of the game's graphics.
I'm only speaking from a technical point of view, of course. I doubt any copyright holder would care about these videos. And even if someone did, he would probably (well, hopefully) just contact the site administrator to make him remove the offending video. AFAIK this has yet to happen, so I suppose they are mostly ok with it.
In Finland, however, there's nowadays a small risk. Even if the actual copyright owner doesn't care, the "Finnish RIAA", teosto, has the power to do some harm, even in cases where they don't have *any* rights to the music in question. This has been seen in practice many times. For example, recently an individual got a fine of several thousands of euros for downloaded mp3s even though teosto couldn't prove they had any ownership to those. It's getting crazy around here, as crazy as in the US.
This has already been discussed in the past. Doing this is controversial.
The TAS scene had to fight for years against all the badmouthing and lies about TAS videos before it got widespread acceptance. One such widespread lie was that TAS videos were edited to achieve shorter times and impossible feats. One of the main points in the FAQ is precisely that these videos are *not* edited in any way, but are 1-to-1 video captures of the emulator playing the game using the stored input key sequences.
Publishing edited TAS videos kind of nullifies all the effort put into convincing the public that the videos are indeed legit emulator captures, not edited ones. There's always the danger that some moron will post in some popular forum a link to the edited video and start badmouthing TASing using that video which "has clearly been edited to achieve an impossibly short time" as proof.
And besides, the intro is a *relevant* part of the storyline going on. It's not "boring". It's part of the viewing experience. Removing it is incomprehensible.
Yay, another Pokémon movie! Not yay that it's the same Pokemon game that was posted the last two times. Let's try Fire Red, Leaf Green, and Emerald next time.
What do you prefer, one almost perfect movie of one pokemon game, or four semiperfect movies of four pokemon games?
Before even creating this site Bisqwit pointed me to Morimoto's SMB3 video and, AFAIR, he explained me it was made with Famtasia, which had rerecording and slowdown features.
I remember that he got interested in making a run of SMB1 in the same way, and kind of challenged me to beat him at level 1 using Famtasia. I tried it a couple of times but didn't pursue it too much (at that time I didn't really see where all this was going to be heading, so I didn't have an enormous amount of interest; at the time it just seemed like a curiosity but little more). I actually don't remember now if he ever got a complete run of SMB1 done; maybe.
Anyways, after setting up a really ascetic first version of the site he got me interested in making a run of Rygar (still using Famtasia at that time). I made some versions of it.
Bisqwit: Do you remember what were the first videos ever published at nesvideos? It would be an interesting trivia.
I know this topic is about xenotactic, but I have played both and desktop td is a far superior game.
I don't really understand why. Ok, DTD shows you the type of enemies which come next (big deal?), but other than that... it feels too simplistic for my taste.
In Xeno Tactic upgrading a weapon gives more visual feedback. While the graphic doesn't change (it would be even better if it did), the change in color gives a very visible and telling feedback. In DTD upgrading a weapon only causes some minuscule dots to appear in the weapon. Hardly very visually rewarding.
In Xeno Tactic the better graphics are not only eye candy. They truely give a better feeling when playing the game. Stronger aliens *look* like stronger aliens. In DTD there are just some circles, pacmen and flying cones. They hardly give visual feedback on the strength of the critter.
Sounds are better in Xeno Tactic and add to the overall ambient. It sounds like a war. In DTD you have some popping sounds.
Your concept of "far superior" is clearly different from mine. I appreciate visual feedback and ambience.
I have played the game and I find the TAS very interesting. I watched the previous one thoroughly.
Anyways, the question is not whether a TAS of pokemon sapphire should be published (because that's already done). The question is whether the existing publication should be replaced with a better one. Given that the new one is not worse than the existing one, I see no reason to not to replace it.
It may be boring to watch for someone who hasn't played the game, but that's true for at least half of published runs. There are many published runs which are rather long (over 30 mins) and somewhat repetitive and which are not really all that interesting if you have never played the game yourself and don't know the subtle details of what's really going on.
If we followed the "it must be interesting even for people who have never played or even seen the game" rule strictly then this site would probably have less than 50 runs published. I don't think that's really the point, though. Most of the runs are for people who have played the game and are interested in seeing a "perfect" run through it. While some minimum interest must exist, naturally, we can't just go and strictly forbid anything that might be seen as "boring" for someone who has never played the game.
I have played Pokemon Sapphire and I'm interested in the run, even if it's only a 1.5-minute improvement.
Considering the movie length, this improvement is quite minimal.
So what? Why keep a suboptimal run published when a more optimal has been done? Who does it hurt to publish the better one? Ok, it takes a bit of time of one person to create the avi, but that's about it.
I don't really understand. Is it some kind of advantage to keep an old run over a faster run just because the faster run is faster by a small percentage? I can't even begin to imagine what would be the advantage of that. I don't think the purpose of this site is to keep suboptimal runs just for the sake of it.
Certainly not enough to warrant watching pokemon for an hour plus... again.
Who forces you to watch it? If you don't like it, don't watch it. Why would you care if the faster version is published or not? It's not like you *must* watch all new videos.
I vote Meh and propose some sort of minimum improvement ratio be determined so that judges and encoders don't have to waste an hour of their life everytime someone shaves another few seconds off pokemon.
This has been discussed before and as far as I can remember it has always been considered too difficult and controversial to implement. You just can't set a fixed percentage for how much an improvement must be faster than the previous published movie because it depends a lot on the game.
Besides, this is not a "few seconds" improvement.
PS: I would vote No, but I would have to watch this movie first.
But you said you voted meh above. Shouldn't you watch before you vote anything? Or is a meh vote some kind of exception?
I tried to see what's the *minimum* amount of weapons (as in the number of weapons, upgrading is ok) to pass mission 1 without any alien getting through. The best I got was this:
http://warp.povusers.org/snaps/xt_mission1.png
Almost. 1 alien passed through (the last alien, seen in the screenshot, died from the plasma blast, also seen in the screenshot, before passing through).
It's actually quite difficult to get no aliens to pass through with a minimal amount of weapons. I tried up to 5 weapons, to no avail. (The problem is that with more weapons it's more difficult to upgrade them fast and thus they are not powerful enough to not to let anything slip through; fewer weapons are easier to upgrade faster, but being fewer they also let at least one alien through, or at least I couldn't find a strategy which avoids that.)
I also tried something similar with mission 3, but this time just completing the mission is enough (regardless of how many aliens pass through). While this is not the absolute minimum setup for that purpose, I think it's still quite small.
http://warp.povusers.org/snaps/xt_mission3.png
And to think I had big trouble passing mission 3 the first times I tried it... :P
At 11:05 (in the avi) why can't you jump from the platform to the right, warping from the right edge of the screen to the left and thus to the door? Has this been disabled somehow in the game?
This is the second game I play through solely because I wanted to watch and better understand the TAS (the first one was Earthbound), ie. I played the game through before watching the TAS.
I just can't figure out what to do in mission 4. Whatever I do, I die. It just doesn't seem possible.
I have tried two strategies:
1) Buy a lot of anti-aerial guns. The vast majority of the flying aliens die (1 or 2 slip through), but the ground aliens then get through and I lose: http://warp.povusers.org/snaps/eipysty.png
2) Forget about the anti-aerial guns and hope that the upgraded plasma cannons will kill the flying aliens. Nope, most of them get through and I lose: http://warp.povusers.org/snaps/eipysty2.png
I just can't figure out what to do. Whatever I do, I lose. Strategy 1 gets me farther (level 37 vs. 28 in the screenshots), but it just seems impossible nevertheless.
Here's the idea: NesVideoAgent gets a massive database of ROMs, and when a new video is submitted NesVideoAgent automatically creates an AVI and uploads it to Google Video
Besides the quality being horrible, it would open a great tool for a DoS attack.
What I am getting at is that desktop screenshots are supposed to have most applications closed minimized, so that the desktop is visible, even if the desktop behind them is boring.
But that is the distinguishing feature of what makes them desktop screenshots, as opposed to browser, IRC, or other application screenshots.
If I posted a screenshot of my desktop with all applications minimized I could just as well just post a link to my bg image. I don't have *anything* in my desktop. Even the task bar is completely hidden by default (ie. when not hovering it with the mouse). It's just a plain bg image.
saying that its "free software" strongly implies that its free software
Yes, that's correct. Saying that it's free obviously implies that it's free. That is, you don't have to pay to use it.
(Just because some FSF or such organization wants to redefine the word "free" to mean something completely different doesn't mean they are right. Free means free: You don't have to pay. Period.)
Tetris is one game where the best people in the word do indeed have mad l33t skillz. Ever seen any video from a tetris world championship?
All the harder it makes to judge whether any given tetris video is tool-assisted or not.
