I have actually always wanted to see the TAS of a game where there's no upper speed limit. I believe no such game exists (at least not for the older consoles)?
Fair enough, although I don't think there are that many people that own PS1 games and a PSP, but no PS1/2/3.
But if it would be possible to play PS1 games on the PSP (I don't understand how it could be, but assuming), then perhaps some PSP owners could buy PS1 games.
I don't see why anyone would want to play PS1 games on a PSP when they can play them on a PS1/2/3.
Because they don't own a PS1/2/3?
SXL wrote:
it's mostly homebrews, and downgrading is illegal to begin with
There's no need to downgrade. The tiff bug exploit has been upgraded to work with all firmwares from 2.0 to 2.71. This means that you can run homebrew without touching your firmware. Works for me.
(OTOH, snes emulation *is* slow. I get something like 5 fps. Doesn't make too much sense when I can play the same games emulated in my PC at full speed.)
I've already decided that any console games I make with a heavy amount of text/cutscenes will have a "hidden" speedrun mode that allows any text and cutscenes to be skipped
IMO skipping cutscenes is only desirable for the person making the speedrun (tool-assisted or not), and perhaps for people who have played the game 10 times over.
In my experience the best speedruns (the regular ones, made of newer PC or console games) to watch are those of games where cutscenes cannot be skipped, and this regardless of whether I have played the game or not. For example the Prince of Persia sands trilogy is excellent for this purpose because in these games the cutscenes cannot be skipped, making the story whole and complete, which makes it enjoyable to view. I have played all three games through, but I still liked to watch the entire speedruns, cutscenes and all.
Speedruns of those games where cutscenes can be skipped are a bit annoying because the story suffers. It's especially annoying when I have not played the game.
I don't get it. If a game is a port it's somehow worse than an original? Why would that be?
Believe it or not, there are people out there (like me) who have not played GBA games. Even if a game is a port from another platform, it's still a new game to me.
And I happen to like the size of the PSP screen.
A computer chess game would be rather awkward to TAS. On one hand you would want to make the computer player as strong as possible, but that would make it take exorbitant amounts of time (at least in old consoles with their slow CPUs) which would make it really boring to watch. On the other hand, if you set the computer's thinking time to something small, it will not play very strongly, making beating it rather trivial.
Assuming optimum conditions: A top-of-the-line modern PC and one of the best computer chess programs in existence (such as Fritz or Shredder), it would actually be quite hard to beat it. The TASer would have to be a really strong chess player to just do that, regardless of having infinite "undos" at his disposal.
There's an ironical problem with firefox extensions: If you run one, you basically expose your entire system (or at least anything you have access to) to whatever code the extension has.
Why is this ironical? Because that's exactly why ActiveX was criticized.
Some people may have got from my past rants the idea that I'm a hardcore frame optimization fanatic (meaning I want every movie to have as little frames as possible), but that's just not true. In this case even if avoiding the murder beam would make the movie some seconds longer (in frames) I would still much more prefer it because of the entertainment value. OTOH, I believe the movie is actually a bit faster without the murder beam?
Why would anyone care about the game's inner timer in this case? I certainly don't. Assuming that the pause screen stops this counter, it might be possible to save time by continuously pausing and unpausing (it probably doesn't, but let's assume for the sake of it that it does): It would be really annoying. The inner timer in this game serves no useful role, at least not for the casual viewer.
This may be completely different in games where the inner counter has a very prominent role, one good example being superpunchout. In that game it makes a lot of sense to try to beat the game's own clock instead of the number of frames of the previous submission.
If it's a joke, then it doesn't make much sense. You are just deliberately annoying people. That's not a very wise way of joking.
If you are being serious, then *sigh*
In that case perhaps you need some professional help?
The jokes are allowed but if jokes are only for your gang to understand then it's clearly not needed.
I think there's a big difference between having the opinion that the movie description is not a place for obscure jokes (debatable, but everyone is entitled to their opinion) and actually starting an edit war.
You are very entitled to your opinion, but IMO engaging in edit war just because of it is juvenile and out of line. It makes you look like you think that you have some kind of higher authority over other editors and that your opinion has more weight than others.
Details on disagreements should be discussed in a civilized way in the proper forums.
Another example: Murder Beam glitch in Super Metroid. If aiming for in-game time, one may choose to use it and win ~20 seconds, which is a lot for a TAS.
20 seconds? I have a clear memory that it was approximately 1 second of in-game time that was saved. (And in movie length time using the murder beam was actually slower.)
I'm curious: What is it that makes Rocky IV so popular? And I'm seeking for an answer other than "Ivan Drago".
Sure, Ivan Drago is a cool character, but in my opinion a movie can hardly be called the best of the series just because it has one cool character.
What is it that makes it better than Rocky III?
But one thing ladies and gentlemen that truly lifts this movie up significantly is the fantasic music.
That's one of the things that made Rocky III so great. The choice of music was excellent. ("Eye of the tiger" was made by a one-hit band, who thanks to that song raised to fame and plummeted to oblivion afterwards, but it's a heck of a song. Probably one of the best known movie songs of all times.)
Rocky I tells a story. It's not so much a fighting movie as it's pure drama. It tells the story of a nobody who is given the chance to fight the world champion (this idea is actually loosely based on a similar real event). This is the strength of the movie.
Rocky II is a bit awkward. It's feels kind of like "hey, Rocky lost in the previous movie, that's not good, he needs a rematch and to win this time". It raises the question whether this sequel was really necessary. OTOH, it has a rather good story too, continuing from the first movie, and it's not nonsensical at all, so I suppose it's quite ok as a movie.
Rocky III changes genre. It's much less of a drama and much more a fighting movie. The cocky champion is beaten to pulp by a newcomer, the now ex-champion needs to come down from his pedestal (both literally and psychologically), go back to the roots, train hard, and rematch this newcomer, this time seriously. IMO this is a superb movie of the fighting genre. Since I myself am not so much for drama and more about action, I actually liked this movie a lot, even though I understand the value of the first two movies. I voted for this movie.
Rocky IV starts becoming ridiculous, I'm sorry to say that. The basic idea is cool, but the execution is subpar. This movie lacks a story completely. There are three elements in this movie: 1) Big russian boxer comes and kick's the ass of the ex-champion (fatally). 2) Rocky seeks revenge and goes to Russia to train. 3) Rocky fights the russian and wins. There's *nothing* else happening in this movie. These three things have been stretched to 90 minutes, without anything else happening at all, and at some points you really can feel that. (Ok, there are really tiny bits of "story" happening in the beginning and in between, but most of these tiny bits are simply ridiculous; just look at the completely ridiculous robot. Who ever thought that could be a good idea?)
Rocky V goes back to tell a story. Most people (including Stallone himself) diss this movie, but IMO this is a very good one. It's good drama. It tells a story. It tells about a father-son relationship. This movie goes back to its roots, back to what the first movie was made of: It's not a fighting movie, it's a drama movie, and IMO it works well.
Spoilers:
Rocky VI continues this good trend: It also tells a story, it's not a fighting movie. It now tells the story of an ex-boxer who lives in the past and can't let it go, who only thinks about how things were better before, and who has a passionate desire to fight once more. It also continues excellently with the father-son relationship. The final fight is a symbolical one. Winning or losing is not the point. The point is that the old champion shows that he is still the man. Age is not a limitation.
Definitely. I just interpreted "TAS proof" to mean something that closes the gap between TAS and speedrun, while maintaining the characteristics of a game.
I'm not sure if it would close that gap at all. The same "you are playing too well, let's make the game more difficult" rule applies to both types of runners. The advantage of the TASer is that he can search for the optimal compromise while the regular speedrunner needs to go by the feeling.
Or reaching the end of level 1 in less than X seconds makes level 2 proportionately harder.
That wouldn't make TASing impossible. It would simply cause the TASer to need to find the optimal strategy, the optimal compromise between speed and difficulty which minimizes the overall time.
Tub wrote:
on the topic of a fixed seed for the PRNG that is saved: having predictable and unchangeable randomness once the game is started will be abused by unassisted speedrunners or even regular gamers. Memorisation replaces reflex. Don't do that.
I think that the idea was that the game creates a random seed (from user input delays or whatever) and then initializes a RNG with that seed, after which the RNG is not affected by anything anymore. Changing the initial seed will create a completely new and unpredictable (well, for a human at least) random number sequence, and since it can't be affected anymore by anything, TASing won't help.
on the other hand, there are games with a fixed PRNG where randomness can still be manipulated: by polling more or less random values from the PRNG. Like creating dust-sprites in Mega Man X.
The idea was that there would be several such RNG streams. For example one stream would be used exclusively for randomizing the time between encounters. Since there's no way to pull numbers from this RNG stream (because separate independent streams are used for other things), it cannot be affected.
In other words, it's like at the beginning of the game each single random encounter would have been fixed, and there's nothing that can be done to affect that after this initial randomization.
This should be perfectly possible to make even in a NES. There exist simple formulas (of the form "seed = seed*constant1+constant2") which, using eg. 32-bit numbers, go through the entire 32 bit value space in pseudorandom order.
