This isn't helped by the more insidious factor, which leads me to believe Nintendo is being more evil than stupid, is that they rarely go after any of the big name LPers/gaming sites who are the ones making substantial money out of it.
Actually Nintendo has demanded let'splayers a big portion of their profit in exchange for them not to DMCA their videos. This was big controversy a while back.
As I have stated several times, fair use protects review and criticism (and possibly things like parody, depending on the jurisdiction), but let's play videos are on that grey area. The rule of thumb even with reviews is that the amount of material used from the work should be small, and a let's play video badly breaches this principle.
Sure, there might have not been any big lawsuit case deciding that question, but it is my understanding that Nintendo does have the legal right to shut down let's play videos of their games, for the simple reason that those videos use too much material from their IP. The only reason why most other companies (with some exceptions) don't DMCA let'splayers is because they don't mind. They would probably have the legal right to do so, but they just don't, because that's their decision. However, that shouldn't be interpreted as let's play videos not infringing copyright.
I did notice on the youtube encode for Return of the Jedi, several comments expressed disappointment that the run wasn't done on Jedi mode.
I think this reveals one... what would be a good term for it... issue with this whole thing: I think that people here are focusing too much what's "entertaining" to us (which in itself is highly subjective), rather than what's entertaining to the general public, and what they expect.
Let's face it. We are highly biased. We are not the general public. We have seen hundreds of TASes, we have made TASes, we know the ins and outs of it, we know how they are made, and some of us may have seen dozens and dozens of TASes of the same game, sometimes even the same TAS many times. This skews our perspective on things, and makes it harder to put ourselves in the shoes of the average Joe who only casually sees some TASes from time to time.
It is my understanding, and that example supports it, that the average viewer, especially if a gamer, expects and wants games to be TASed on the hardest difficulty, precisely because of the challenge factor. Even the idea of a TAS on the easiest difficulty is boring, because there is no challenge. It's not a question of whether the run becomes longer, or whether some boss fights become longer and more repetitive. It's the challenge. It's the "superhuman god-like player" beating the computer at its best.
I think this is what average casual fans expect. They don't care if something is more "boring" from our perspective, they don't care if "the only difference between difficulty levels is how long boss fights take". We are biased, and perhaps that obscures our perception of that.
Well, the discussion is still ongoing, but I would say that the (perhaps somewhat weak) consensus is still that by default you should always choose the hardest difficulty level unless you have a good reason not to. "It makes the run faster" is probably not such a good reason.
In this case it sounds to me (although I haven't seen the game) that the hardest difficulty level would actually be the more interesting, because there's more to do, and more to see, and more room for tricks (rather than it being solely a question of enemy HP).
That might be so.
When I was comparing sqrt(x)/log(x) to x1/3, at first it looked like they don't intersect, but it turns out they do indeed intersect somewhere in the vicinity of x = 24 million, where x1/3 becomes smaller.
I was examining the function sqrt(x)/log(x) (because I was comparing the growth rate of those two functions), and I noticed something interesting.
For the sake of this examination, let's forget about the big jump around x=1, and only consider values of x significantly greater than 1.
Rather obviously sqrt(x) grows faster than sqrt(x)/log(x). However, the latter grows faster than x1/4. (The two functions intersect somewhere in the vicinity of x=5500, where the fourth root becomes smaller than sqrt(x)/log(x).)
I wonder what the limit of n is so that of xn never becomes smaller than sqrt(x)/log(x) (for values of x much larger than 1.)
I'd say that if the only reason for choosing the easiest difficulty is that it makes the run faster, that's not good enough of a reason.
Again, we want to see the god-like perfect player mop the floor with the computer at its best, not at its weakest. There is no challenge in beating the game at the easiest difficulty level.
I would even go so far as to say that even if the only difference between difficulty levels is boss HP, so what? Deal with it.
An easy-difficulty run could exist alongside the default hardest-difficulty run (if there is enough difference between the two), but I don't think the former should replace the latter.
It's intuitively clear that √n > log(n) (which is why an O(√n) algorithm is slower than an O(log(n)) algorithm.)
But when I started thinking how I could prove that's the case, it didn't seem so trivial after all.
(Also, I think that proving that O(√n) > O(log(n)) is a separate issue from proving that √n > log(n). That's another problem.)
So what MUGG is saying seems every movie that is well optimized deserves a rating like 9/10.
As the guidelines say, "note that not all games are suitable for a TAS with perfect technical rating, similarly to how not all games are suitable for a perfect entertainment rating. Some games simply don't lend themselves for extensive technical achievements."
If a game is such that not many technical feats can be performed on it, then it ought to get a lower technical rating. Sure, that might feel a bit "unfair" from the author's perspective, but it's no different from the entertainment value: If you chose a boring game, don't expect a high entertainment score. Likewise if you chose a straightforward game that doesn't lend itself to awesome technical feats, don't expect a high technical rating.
But yeah, both rating categories are highly subjective. The technical one ought to be more objective, but it's unrealistic to expect everybody to be so objective about it. (And also there will always be cross-contamination of the entertainment rating into the technical rating.)
Anyway, if you don't know what to rate for technical, you can leave it without value.
Why is it so hard to understand the fact that difficulty is chosen for an advantage over a game if there is no difference except the amount of hits you deal or get?
It has been explained several times already, by several people. Thus there's no need to repeat what has already been said.
I keep imagining something farfetched, such as me imagining a thing means entropy out near Neptune is affected.
I think you are thinking it too complicated.
Increasing order requires spending usable energy to do it. Thus usable energy was consumed to make that thing happen, and thus there is less of it available.
Increasing order -> Entropy decreased.
Usable energy was used for this -> entropy increased.
Because no process has 100% efficiency, it means that more usable energy will be used (ie. entropy will increase more) than was put into that construction (ie. entropy was decreased). That extra energy will be essentially wasted (which is why total entropy almost always increases.)
You can consider the entire universe a closed system.
How would we know though, that it's closed or open?
A reasonable question deserves a reasonable answer.
I'm not an astrophysicist so I don't know these things in detail, but it is my understanding that the current model of the universe is that it's completely closed. In this model there is no "outside" of the universe (that concept doesn't even make sense), so there is nothing to feed energy from the "outside", or for the energy inside this universe to leak out. (In some hypotheses there are other universes, but whether they interact with this one in these models, eg. via gravity, I don't know.)
AFAIK for all intents and purposes the universe can be considered a closed system. The amount of energy within it can be considered a constant. So far this seems to be the case.
While I voted yes, I must agree that the loops mar the run. The very fact that the temporary encode needed to speed up the emulation at those loops is very telling.
Case in point, assume that in Megaman there were an easy difficulty mode where the only difference is that bosses have significantly less HP, and thus it takes only a couple of shots to kill them. Would you consider a TAS in that mode more interesting, less interesting, or completely equal than the current TASes? Personally I'd argue it would be less interesting.
The same is true of many other games, like Super Metroid, for instance. I'm sure you can think of many others.
It's interesting how different the attitudes of different companies are.
Take Valve, for example. When someone made a really popular tool to mod their best-selling games, what did Valve do? Did they issue cease&desist demands and shut down the entire project? No, the embraced it and published it on Steam.
Oh, you like editing and creating new content for our games? Here, take the full level editor as a bonus with any of our games. Heck, take the entire SDK. Knock yourself out; go bananas. We are thrilled to see what you'll come up with.
I disagree. Knowledge has increased, but intelligence has not. People are as intelligent as they were thousands of years ago, if not even dumber.
That doesn't make much sense. You have no way of measuring the intelligence of people in the past. Even today measuring intelligence is a subjective matter, and that's for living people. How exactly do you measure the average intelligence of people in the past?
What you are doing here is that you are pick&choosing a few of the smartest people from history, and contrasting it to the average person today. In other words, you are engaging in selection bias. That's not a very fair comparison.
I'm convinced that if you had a time machine and could travel to the distant past (like a thousand or two thousand years), and you measured the average intelligence of people using some metric and a very large sample size, you will probably find out that people were not, on average, any more intelligent then than they are today; perhaps even less.
Anyway, even if average intelligence (however you may want to measure it) has dropped, so what? We are talking only about written history of humanity, which is an extremely small period of time. You are extrapolating a small section of time indefinitely into the past. It doesn't work that way. Just because some aspect of some species has become degraded in recent history doesn't mean that it has always been degrading. Features fluctuate, and go up and down over long periods of time.
Um, what? We're talking about just enemy HP being changed. If nothing else was changed, it wouldn't be any more difficulty unassisted.
I don't even understand anymore what's going on. Of course a game becomes more difficult to play if it's harder to kill enemies. It takes more hits to kill enemies, prolonging fights, making it more likely that you will be hit by enemies.
Just to take an extreme example for illustrative purposes: Suppose your max HP is 1, the enemy's HP is 1, and each hit causes 1 HP of damage. In this scenario you just have to make sure you hit the enemy before it hits you, and that's it. Now change that to the enemy having 100 HP instead. Now you have to hit the enemy 100 times, without getting hit yourself even once. Obviously this is a lot more difficult (regardless of how simplistic the enemy AI might be.) There are significantly more chances for you to get hit.
=
But the thing is, even if the difficulty level only affects enemy HP and nothing else, it still makes the game more difficult to play, and thus a perfect TAS more impressive.
What, no it wouldn't. It just gives them more HP. That just makes it longer, not more difficult.
You don't understand. The game is more difficult to play unassisted. That makes it more impressive to see it beaten by perfect gameplay.
(How long before you start rambling about spirit science?)
Well, I already rambled about spiritual or occult science, which was a feminine competing science in the 1800s until the path of materialistic science was chosen. But no, I haven't stumbled on anything particular. Like I said, that's just something I've read some time ago, and sometimes still study.
So you don't know what it is. Good. Please don't look it up. We don't need any of that BS here.
Amaraticando: Closed system? Please, do confirm for me where the local information/intelligence had been decreased to allow for our local bursts of information/intelligence. My understanding is that because we can't confirm this, we can't say one way or another if Open System or Closed System is fact.
It's about entropy. When information increases locally in one part of the system, entropy likewise increases by at least that much in another.
This "closed system"/"open system" thing is mostly a red herring at this point. You can consider the entire universe a closed system.
I think that statement is generally good, but it falls apart for games like ssw that took the lazy way and just gave the enemies more health for hard mode and nothing else
But the thing is, even if the difficulty level only affects enemy HP and nothing else, it still makes the game more difficult to play, and thus a perfect TAS more impressive.
There is much less challenge in playing a game in the easiest difficulty, and thus it's not as impressive.
Many people talk like all that matters is what it looks like, perhaps from the perspective of somebody who has never played the game and knows nothing about it. I don't think this is a principle that should be followed too religiously. I think there is great value in assuming that the viewer knows the game, and can thus enjoy seeing it being beaten at its hardest difficulty.
It's not like this is unique. For example, a casual viewer who knows nothing about a particular game may not realize how unlikely it is to get an item drop with each kill. However, somebody who knows the game will appreciate it.
I didn't believe it possible for your ramblings to become even crazier, but once again you prove my assumptions wrong and surpass yourself.
Let me guess, you recently stumbled across a new pseudoscientific website or video, and are consuming its contents with passion.
(How long before you start rambling about spirit science?)
And btw, if someone is wondering where all that "excess heat" I'm talking about comes from in the first place, the ultimate answer is the Sun. The Sun ultimately fuels all the electrochemical activity on Earth in the long run.
(This would work even if we considered the solar system a closed system. Sure, it would not, and will not work forever, but it has been working and will be working for a pretty long time. Enough for all of this to happen.)
Warp: In other words, it's a zero-sum game and the information I use has to come from somewhere within the system. Is that a close enough approximation, or did I make a bad assumption about the argument?
More like a "negative-sum" game, given that total entropy almost always increases, but yeah, nothing stops some of the numbers from becoming positive, as long as they are counterbalanced by other numbers becoming negative by at least that much.
