We (me and Warp) have been over the luck manipulation thing before (I don't feel like digging up the topic), I still think that it will be a huge amount of pointless debate about what movie deserves what category, if this movie doesn't manipulate more than than movie, what counts as significant luck manipulation, etc. Just look at how much debate there has been about which movies should have a star.
I'm not saying there should be a strict judging process and a 10-page list of requirements which have to be fulfilled. I'm just saying that the person who grants these categories should give it a bit more of thought and be ready to argument why he gave it the category. Also the submitter should, IMO, give good reasons why the video deserves certain (non-obvious) categories. Just giving a list of desired categories is not enough.
Perhaps also the community could participate: Induce somehow the viewers to comment if they disagree with a certain category. If someone protests, then the video could be reviewed more carefully. (No, I don't have any good idea right now how to induce the community to participate... :) )
It's essentially the same for splitting it into major/minor categories. What do you judge it on? How hard it was to accomplish or how small the chance was? How much time you actually saved by manipulating luck? How impressive it looks? "Why doesn't my movie get the major tag, I manipulated luck a lot :( "
The submitter should propose a category and give his reasons why it deserves that category (minor or major or whatever). If it's rather obvious that the reasons are valid, then there's no problem. If the admin cannot see the connection he could give a lesser or no category and ask for more details. The community could also be consulted on opinions.
It doesn't have to be a strict process. It can be quite relaxed. However, I think that just a bit of work can make the categorization a lot more valuable and informative.
The easiest thing is to apply the category for every movie that manipulates luck (or uses glitches), no matter how minor, and leave the rest to the description.
That may be the easiest way, but it renders the category obsolete. The category doesn't tell anything informative and is useless. Why have the category at all?
When I am watching a "manipulates luck" video, I expect it to be something very remarkable. If the category is given randomly to anyone who asks for it, then it just loses its meaning and value. It would be the same as if the category didn't exist at all because it doesn't tell anything.
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
What if you're not familiar with the game, so you think all the enemies dropping hearts is normal? What if it's a game that hardly anyone's familiar with?
The submitter should describe how he manipulated luck, what it effects are and how much he thinks it saves time, plus any other possible reasons why the video deserves the category. If it sounds concincing then the category can be granted. The community can protest if someone thinks that the reasons are not valid, in which case the video could be reviewed in more detail. (I don't think it would ever go that far, though. After all, most people here are honest.)
The only problem with this is that there are some games that are beaten very quickly due to heavy glitches such as SMB by Phil, and the LOZ-2 glitch run in aout 3 minutes or so, and the ALTTP glitched run.
I don't see any problem in having both runs published at the same time, under different categories. The glitched run of alttp and the non-glitched one belong to different categories (because they have different goals) and thus can coexist. They don't obsolete each other.
(Perhaps the word "category" is a bit misleading here. In the above paragraph I'm talking about the categories given to TAS videos such as "uses no warps" etc. I'm not referring to "TAS vs. concept demo".)
But, there are other movies like Bisqwit's SMB walk-athon. This is clearly a demo due to the fact of the game is played differently to show a "demo" way of beating it that is slower than the original.
Personally I disagree with it being considered a concept demo. It is a completely valid and perfect TAS which uses a rational valid limitation for entertainment purposes (completely akin to "uses no warps" or "collects all items"). There's nothing in it which "breaks" the rules of a legit TAS, and thus I don't see any reason for it to be considered a concept demo.
So, A demo in my mind can be:
- A slower movie using a different movement to beat the game.
- A slower movie using a different character to beat the game.
I see absolutely no reason why those could not be considered regular TASes. They just have different goals than the "main" runs and could perfectly coexist with them, under different categories.
- A movie of a "hack" ROM
This would indeed be a concept demo because it would break one of the main rules of a TAS.
I disagree. I liked Morimoto's original Rockman video (that abused next to none glitches) because it employed interesting choices regarding the weapon selections. It was colourful, not monotonous. In that aspect, my video loses to it. Mine is monotonous in the sense of regular playing strategies.
The problem I see is that once you *know* that a trick can be used to complete some part faster, a run not doing so becomes (in my opinion) exasperating and boring (especially at some parts, such as the long corridors before some of the bosses).
I am actually not opposed to the idea of having a second version of this TAS under a different category, such as "does not abuse programming errors" which could coexist with this main version. However, in the past such runs have not been seen as necessary or interesting. The voters are the ones who would decide, in the end.
Of course the main problem with this is deciding what is considered a "programming error" and what isn't, and what is the rule by which something can be used while something else can't. (One problem is also that if such a submission *does* use something which is considered a programming error, would it then be accepted or not? If it would, that imposes a big controversy: Which bugs are allowed and which aren't and why?)
But, my video contributes a huge number of esoteric playing techniques, which I think greatly compensates for the aforementioned fact.
The virtue of this run is that it's quite unique. Well, not unique per se, but rare. There are only very few games which have so many exploitable and varied glitches. Abusing all these glitches in a creative way to squeeze off even the last frame is the literal embodyment of what "superplay" is. It's the spirit of what Morpheus said (quoted in the common tricks page).
There are, in my opinion, too few of such runs here (because only very few games have such glitches), and it's delighting to have at least some.
This run is crappy and boring no matter how much you say otherwise.
It's amusing how you talk like you were stating an universal Truth and I was a lone stubborn person who is blind and just can't see this Truth. You don't say "in my opinion this run is boring and crappy and nothing you say will convince me otherwise". Instead you state it like a self-evident universally-known truth which is independent of what I say.
Another amusing thing is that you talk in general in this thread as if there was nothing more than zipping and more zipping in the whole movie, and absolutely no "regular play" (in a sense). This is a rather strange attitude when one actually watches the video. The first zipping happens at 1:11 in the video. Before that it's "regular playing". Overall, there's quite little zipping in the first level.
The amount of zipping increases somewhat in subsequent levels, but not nearly as much as being just zipping and nothing more. I would say that the amount of regular playing is considerably larger than zipping. I really don't understand what you are complaining about.
The problem with artifically not using zipping is that, once you know that a certain long portion of the level can be zipped through in less than a second, but instead several tens of seconds are used to play it in a regular way, it becomes, in my opinion, boring. The goal of the run is also lost. What is the goal? Is the goal to show a walkthrough of the game?
There are places where zipping skips boring parts, and I'm sure that even you cannot deny that (unless you are really stubborn). For example the long straight corridors before some of the bosses. Watching the player just run through the corridor at a slow pace would be boring when one knows that it can be zipped through, right into the real action (ie. the boss fight).
I'd rather watch a 25 minute run of the game being completely perfected
You fail to define what "perfected" means. In the context of TASing a perfect run is one which uses the least amount of frames to complete the game. If a run is slower then it's not perfect.
Why would a run which does not use a glitch be "perfect"? How do you define perfection in that case? It is "perfect" doing what? At least not completing the game as fast as possible. If not that, then what?
than a 15 minute run of someone zipping through walls.
I haven't counted, but there's probably less than 2 minutes of zipping, perhaps even less than 1 minute. The rest is "regular playing". I really don't understand what you are complaining about.
I am not going to support runs like this, I'm going to vote no for runs like this, and when they get published, I am going to give them a very low entertainment rating.
Then perhaps this is the wrong place for you? If you want to watch perfect "regular" plays, SDA sounds like a much better place.
Oh, wait, even the SDA speedruns often abuse glitches in games to skip big parts of levels. Oops, it seems that it isn't for you either...
I just don't understand what is it that you want.
I dont care how "unexpected" it is, it looks like a debug cheat, not gameplay.
What the heck is a "debug cheat"? It doesn't look to me like any kind of cheat at all. It just looks like abusing a game glitch.
You ask who am I to say what isn't perfect, artistic or flawless, and I counter by asking you who are you to say what is?
I didn't make any claim about what is and isn't "perfect, artistic or flawless". You did. And you did with a rather presumptuous tone, like you knew better than anyone else what is "perfection" and "art".
If you don't agree with my assessment of this run, that's fine. But the attitude is unwarranted, unwanted and unwelcome.
You should look into your own text and think about the attitude problem that it reflects. You attacked the submission with harsh words, almost insulting words, and you belittled it. Your text feels presumptuous and insulting, and it only begs for the same kind of response.
But if attitude is the way you want to play it, that's fine with me, and I'll inform you that if you don't like what comes out of my mouth, then check out what comes out of the other end.
To be honest, it's difficult to make any distinction between the two.
I rated it 0/5
The rating system is not there to express protests and resentment. Especially the technical score is something intended to be given in as a neutral way as possible. However, you have completely ignored the goal and reason why the rating system exists and used it as a way to protest, to express your disgust, your disagreement with everyone else. Instead of understanding what the technical perfection score means, you give it your own twisted meaning and thus get an excuse to contaminate it with your opinion on the entertainment value of the video. That's certainly not why the rating system exists.
By doing this kind of "protest" you are just showing your stupidity.
I often feel that these categories are granted for the videos too lightly anyways, and it's not only this "ignores semi-important goals" but also others (such as "abuses programming errors" and "manipulates luck"). I often feel that it's enough for the submitter to give a list of categories he would like the video to have, and these are more or less automatically given to it.
IMO these categories should be given to videos where the effect is very *significant*. Basically *all* videos "manipulate luck", but that doesn't mean that all of them should be categorized with that tag. Only videos where luck manipulation is extremely obvious, significant and saves considerable time (eg. heart-collecting in castlevania2) deserve the tag. The same goes for glitch abuse.
Or perhaps there could be more precise categories such as "manipulates luck slightly", "heavily manipulates luck", "abuses some minor programming errors" and "heavy abuse of programming errors". There could also be categories like "skips important but non-mandatory goals" and "skips mandatory goals".
Another category idea: "Skips significant portions of the main route."
I would however be interested in hearing your thought process behind why you feel some movies with non-standard goals/limitations should be categorized under "regular runs" while others should be put in the "concept demo" category.
I don't think there's a "standard goal" other than to play the game optimally (which usually means playing it through as fast as possible). I wouldn't say that a subcategory like "complete the game as fast as possible but without abusing the warping glitch" is any less "standard". It's just a subcategory which exists for entertainment: Sometimes it is entertaining to put some rational limitation (eg. not using a warping glitch) which eg. forces the entire game to be played through (Rygar is a good example).
A concept demo is a video which doesn't conform to the main rules of TAS videos. For example, if a run does not start from reset, as required by the rules, but it is nevertheless published because it has great entertainment value, it is a concept demo, not a rule-obeying TAS.
The rules exist to forbid "cheating". Cheating in the context of TASing is to create a video which tries to lie to the viewer: The viewer thinks that it's a whole run through the game, done just by giving the emulator timed keypresses (in other words, it simulates the playing of a superhuman person with perfect abilities) and that's it, but if the video does something more than that, it is cheating. For example if the video uses gamegenie codes or such in order to affect how the game itself works, that's cheating. The requirement to start from reset also tries to forbid any kind of cheating which could happen if the video started from a savestate instead (because it would be difficult to know if the savestate actually did something to enhance the gaming, and thus the video seen by the viewer would not be a *complete* run through the game).
Sometimes these strict rules are loosened up a bit for certain videos which have great entertainment value. However, given that they are not pure TAS videos they are put under a completely different category: Concept demo. This tells to the viewer that he should not expect it to be a pure TAS as defined by the basic "anticheat" rules.
Watched the castlevania2 review video so far. His voice and style of speech is not the best possible, and he uses a lot of profanity, but still, somehow, he succeeded in making the commentary interesting. I watched the whole 10 minutes of it and found it interesting (regardless of whether it's just "whining" or valid points). Thumbs up from me.
The point of a TAS is to use tools to create a movie that is BOTH fast and fun to watch.
"Fun to watch", as you seem to define it, is blatantly in contradiction with "fast". What you seem to want is a machinima video, not a TAS.
There are at least 300 videos in this site which are like you want: They run through the game using the intended route, "skilfully" (in a sense) dodging enemies and so on. There's an overabundance of this. It even goes so far that many of the videos are somewhat boring because of that ("ok, it runs through the game at optimal speed without getting hit... so what? there's nothing really interesting here").
The fun in the few videos like the rockman1 one is that it does something completely *unexpected*. When someone watches the video, especially if he has played the game, he will go "what the h*** happened there?!? what is he doing? whaa...!" That's the whole point: It's surprising, it's unexpected. That's the whole cool factor in this kind of run, something which is very rare.
A run of rockman1 which does not abuse glitches and goes through the intended route would be *boring*, completely opposite of "fun". You can call it artistical or whatever, but that doesn't change the fact that it would just become part of the grey mass of other similar (300+) videos in the site already. It's cool that there are at least *some* videos which are completely different and surprising.
If you don't find extreme glitch abuse fun, then go watch all those 300+ other videos which do not have such glitch abuse (because the game doesn't have such bugs or they have not been found). I bet you'll get bored at the 200th such video or so.
However runs that break the game to this extent should not "obsolete" runs that play the game perfectly, flawlessly and ARTISTICALLY.
If a run is slower than another run, then it's certainly not perfect. And who are you to tell that the glitched run is not perfect, flawless nor artistical?
One example of what I feel is the lessening artistry in TASes is the motto of "if it's faster to just ram into the enemy and take the damage than it is to skillfully dodge it, then do that" It's fast yes, but it looks bad.
"Looks bad" is a question of opinion. If the main character passes right through the enemy (ab)using damage, that may look cool. It's a question of opinion.
Another is this "zip through walls" nonsense. I'll admit when the first mega man 1 glitch run came out I thought it was pretty cool...but the novelty has run out. Now all I see is a game that's so broken that it's almost unrecognizable as a person playing mega man.
Well, you can go watch the 300+ videos which do not have any zipping in them. Don't bore yourself to death, though.
Since I can see thsi problem is much worse than I thought, I'm no longer abstaining. I'm voting no.
That sentence tempts me to use namecalling, but I'll skip.
The problems we were discussing here were:
1) the ambiguity of "concept demos" as a category (especially when it comes to voting: "I vote yes, but this should be published as a concept demo", etc.);
There was a problem related to that? I thought the voting was simply "should this movie be published or not?" Whether it's categorized as a TAS or a concept demo is up to the admins or whoever.
2) the necessity of publishing some of the runs in a separate category;
This is a problem? Why is it a problem? I don't think it's a question of "necessity" but a question of categorization: Instead of just having a big bunch of funny videos, we have several videos of different categories. It helps people to navigate and browse.
3) the arbitrary restriction on the number of the movies made for each game to prevent the movie list clutter — a problem that was successfully solved (at least ideologically) by Tub.
I didn't know there was such a limitation. If there is, then I agree: I don't understand why there should be such a limitation.
(I do understand a limitation on *starred* movies of the same game, and in fact I oppose having so many "super mario" starred movies, but that's a different issue.)
Tub wrote:
so, you'd eradicate the nice and entertaining AlttP-run in favour of the glitched 2-minute-wtf that's only interesting once, just because it's faster?
Uh? Is it really hard to understand what I write?
Let me spell it out for you: CATEGORY. Do you comprende what that word means? If not, try looking in a dictionary, it might help.
The 2-minute glitched run is clearly a different category of run for the AlttP game than the non-glitched run. They have different goals/limitations. Runs with different categories can perfectly coexist.
However, if someone makes a 1.9-minute glitched run which improves the 2-minute one, then - quite naturally - it should obsolete the 2-minutes one.
I don't think that was done continuosly, the video cuts a lot.
Just because it's cut doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't continuous. It's certainly possible to do all that continuously. Of course if it was continuous he would have needed at least two cameras, but that's not even difficult.
If Tub's idea is implemented some day (I realize it would be a good amount of work), I believe the site would benefit greatly from it. Then we would be back to the original site vision of "any entertaining run goes", instead of worrying about existing movies of the same game, or other similar situations. It could increase the amount of worthwhile content and morale of those thinking outside the (tool-assisted) speedrunning box.
Usually a run has a specific goal ("completing the game as fast as possible" being by far the most usual one). If a new video achieves the exact same goal but better, I see no reason to keep the old one. The new one is better and thus the old one is obsolete.
A run can have a *different* goal than another run, even though they both are done with the same game. I see no problem in these runs coexisting in the site, as they currently do. In fact, I don't actually really understand what is the problem being discussed here.
BisqBot...I'm sorry but I don't like the idea of that tool. 6 Million...you know how long it would take a human to do that?
If you want to watch games played by humans, go to SDA. There are plenty of those there.
The whole point in TAS runs is to try to find the most optimal way of completing the game using *any* available tools. What those tools are is irrelevant: The goal is to find the optimal list of keypresses to complete the game in the minimum number of frames.
We always assure everyone that we're not cheating, I think having a program doing for you is just as bad as using a game genie. You put in the code and you get a desired result. TASing is suppose to be fun, and done by a person who is playing the game....
What is the difference between using savestates+frame advance, and coding a program which searches for a short optimal path? How is the latter more "cheating" than the former?
It isn't. Both are tools, both tools have been created by someone, and both produce the exact same legit result: A series of timed keypresses. I don't understand why using a program would be any less "acceptable" than using savestates.
We have never claimed that the videos have been "played by a human", because they aren't. They are actually played by an emulator, which is provided with a file containing precalculated keypresses. How that file is generated, however, is another story. Why should there be any limitation on how that file is generated?
I am not sure if this is considered a full run with all the debate going on about concept demos and stuff.
Since when has a "full run" been a requirement for a speedrun (tool-assisted or not)? Regular speedruns skip *a lot*, usually by abusing some design mistakes in the game, if not even bugs (just look at QdQwav, and especially the HL2 speedrun), yet they are still speedruns.
I don't see any problem with a run skipping the route that the game designers intended being considered a normal and regular TAS.
The vast majority of videos published here complete the game by running through the intended route, simply because there are no glitches to exploit. It's refreshing to see at least *some* runs where things can be skipped in a cool way. It would be a bit boring if there would be no such runs.
If we start thinking about run categories, we can create a rather large list. However, it would not be feasible to create a category for each one of them. However, having just two main categories, "TAS" and "concept demo", makes it sometimes difficult to say for a certain video which category it should be put into.
For fun, I devised this list of categories:
- Completes the game as fast as possible by any means, without restrictions.
- Completes the game as fast as possible, but using some small restriction on using a specific glitch (such as "no warps").
- Completes the game as fast as possible, but using a major restriction not related to abusing glitches (such as using an alternative route, collects 100% items, doesn't kill any enemy or such).
- Completes the game in a way that the completion speed is only a small secondary and very "relaxed" objective (ie. not very strongly enforced), but instead aims for another major goal (the dual megamanX/X2 run is a perfect example of this).
- Showing superhuman "playing" capabilities is the main point in the video, completing the game only a secondary objective (autoscrolling games usually fall into this category).
- Complete as fast as possible, using any means, but starting from a previous situation of the game, ie. not from scratch (this is for games where it is possible to start a new game which is enhanced somehow, or uses some alternative features, because of previous playing).
- Completion of the game (fast or at all) is not an objective at all in the video, but the video is just to demonstrate something cool.
Couldn't find the original announcement of the search functionality of the site, so I started a new topic.
A small note: The search page still uses the old "nesvideos" name.
Anyways, my complaint is still that the search results are not ordered by relevancy. When someone makes a search, by far the most probable thing he is searching is a movie for a game.
Currently, if you search eg. for "super mario", the first search result which is a movie is the 19th result, which is the "SNES Super Mario RPG" movie. The first 5 results are trick pages (more unlikely to be a searched thing), and the next 13 results are submission pages (very unlikely to be what the user wanted). After the first movie hit, 25 submission hits follow before a second movie hit is given (SNES Super Mario World). If what I was searching was the SMB1 movie, it would be on page 3, result number 49.
The search results would be *much* improved with a simple sorting: Show published movies first, then articles (such as trick pages), then submissions. That's it.
With that change, the SMB1 movie would have been the third result in the first page, very easy to spot.
Given that all published movie page names start with a "[", all submissions with a "#" and the articles with something else, I wouldn't think it would be so hard to sort according to those.
My first thought was: "What? A speedrun which is 14 minutes faster than the current best TAS? How is that possible?" Than I read that the 32 minutes is not the actual length of the speedrun, but just the value of a counter (which has little to do with real time) in the game.
I wish they used standardized timing for all videos, not a per-game one, especially since in Super Metroid that counter doesn't run constantly, and a longer video can actually have a smaller counter at the end, which doesn't make too much sense.
I'm honestly not trying to insult Swedish here, but when I went to Sweden some years ago and saw some tough-looking guys and heard them speaking Swedish, it just sounded so mismatched that it felt almost surreal. No offence, but Swedish sounds (to someone like me who doesn't understand it) very much unlike one would expect a big tough man to speak. I don't know, it almost sounds womanly or something. I can't describe it any better than that. And please don't take it as an offence.
Of course I'm not saying Finnish sounds any better. In fact, I don't know how it sounds. When you understand a language it starts sounding completely different. It's really difficult to "hear" a language you understand in the same way as someone who doesn't understand it hears it. If you adamantly concentrate on only listening to the sounds and not understanding the words, you might achieve a couple of seconds of that feeling, but it's really difficult.
To a newcomer? I was certainly not a newcomer when I saw the Supermetroid run with the murder beam glitch used, and it was really confusing and ugly. It was only after I saw the version where the glitch was not used when I got to understand what was really supposed to happen.
Moreover, even *after* seeing the original ending I still find the glitched one ugly, boring and totally not cool. This feeling is certainly not diminished by the fact that the glitch doesn't make the run faster.
IMO a glitch being "cool" can and should be logically argumented. I don't think it's too much to ask what the reason is for it being considered "cool". "It looks cool precisely because it looks ugly and confusing" just doesn't make any sense.
People are entitled to their opinion, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with it nor that I can't present my arguments why I disagree.
Btw, it is interesting that Tolkien, an expert linguistic, was quite fascinated about the Finnish language. He based his two best developed fantasy languages, Quenya and Sindarin, on Latin, Greek and Finnish. I read somewhere an article about Tolkien's fascination about Finnish, but I don't remember where it is anymore. I can only assume that he thought Finnish to be close to what he thought Elves would talk.
Here's an interesting article I found on the subject: http://www.fingerlakesfinns.org/articles/influence.htm
Sorry, I don't understand it. Cool glitches are cool because they look awesome. For example, in rockman1 when the main character enters the ceiling and zips superfast all the way to the right end of the ceiling, it looks cool. It doesn't cause annoying visual glitches nor disrupts the story. While it might be confusing for the first time, it quickly stops being that and becomes cool instead. However, the murder beam glitch looks confusing no matter how many times you watch it. There's no way to understand what's going on. It's just boring.
I think that's the keyword here: It's not cool, it's boring to watch.
