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If a BIOS-level vulnerability were found in a console like the 3DO or ColecoVision (both of which make heavy use of BIOS calls), and it allowed for ACE in all games, how would it be handled under the site rules?
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Samsara wrote:
But you still get to see the run, if it's made. You frequent this site, you watch submissions as they come in. In a sense, a run that's submitted is still permanently housed on the site. It's just not put out to the public and requires a little bit more work to find.
All fair points (I tend to only watch runs with YouTube encodings, but that's me).
It's as simple as this: since the site is the leading home for TAS, I'd like to see it become the clearinghouse for the fastest tool-assisted runs for all games, regardless of their entertainment value -- a place where submitting the fastest run for a given game on the hardest difficulty is, barring obvious technical flaws, a guarantee of automatic acceptance. (I agree that timed games are problematic, BTW, though I live in hope that glitches can be found to nuke the game's clock.)
Others disagree, and that's fine. It's not my site to run, after all.
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Samsara wrote:
TASes don't fail. They will always get to the end of the game every time. This means we have to make up for that lack of danger in other ways, either by creating art or doing the impossible.
This doesn't resonate with me; I don't care about the lack of danger. I enjoy the art when it's there, but I come here to see one thing above all: perfect play against the CPU at its best. Everything else is secondary.
So you can see why exclusionary criteria based on "entertainment" are, for me, an unwelcome obstacle: I don't want anyone else deciding for me what I get to see based on their notions of "entertainment", which may (and often do) wholly differ from mine.
Again, just my opinion -- but not one I'm apologetic for having, either.
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Invariel wrote:
As to your comment about different games in the same family of a sport's games not necessarily being substantially different, tell me, did the rules of American Football change drastically between 1991 and 1992? I'm pretty sure that they didn't, so any simulation of the same is going to look similar, even if the player names and underlying stat numbers are slightly different from year to year.
Eh, I don't really buy this argument. Frankly, there are more meaningful differences between consecutive years of certain sports franchises than there are between iterations of many RPGs, e.g. Wizardry. We seem tolerant of racing games, but everything you said above applies to them.
I personally would be interested in watching some of the runs you describe. If you know the game, optimal strategies can be rewarding to see. And I like being able to decide for myself what I find entertaining, after choosing from a menu whose first and primary criterion is perfection. But, that's me.
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Samsara wrote:
entertainment value is what sets us (and TASes in general) apart from normal speedruns
I don't particularly agree: for me, what sets TAS apart is the quest for perfection, not entertainment. I've seen plenty of human-powered speedruns that also entertain me by design, i.e. by choosing the more entertaining option between two otherwise-equal alternatives. So the only thing that TAS offers beyond that, in terms of entertainment, is entertainment that requires skills not possessed by humans.
I think more people than you might suspect agree with me. And -- in case I sound like some inhuman omnivore, indifferent to fun -- I say this as someone whose single favorite run on the site is probably the famous "Own goal?!" SNES soccer TAS!
Anyway, I think the biggest thing is that no one should be claiming that different games in a series don't have substantial differences unless they've actually played those games. Experience has taught me that a lot of what's written about sports games is superficial nonsense, so I wouldn't trust Wikipedia, casual reviews, or "conventional wisdom" to offer up accurate information about the differences between series entries.
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I can't speak to Madden, but I can tell you that there would certainly be meaningful differences in execution between these games:
Bases Loaded 1, II, III, IV
Pete Sampras Tennis / Sampras Tennis '96
HardBall series
Among others.
It just seems like this restrictive policy is driven by a desire to keep the site focused on certain kinds of games and not others. But then, I'm a bit of a radical, since I personally would like to see every released game have its own TAS, and entertainment treated as a secondary, not primary concern. This isn't a physical library with limited space, and I think people here wildly overestimate the extent to which the outside world values this site for entertainment vs. superplay.
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I applaud letting more sports games in, but the language about "one game per series per platform" seems based more on distaste for the genre than anything.
Also, using PGA Tour Golf on the Genesis as an example is unfortunate, since that engine received major updates on multiple occasions. If you want roster updates with no other added content, it's team sports games that tend to be guilty of that. But I also think people who don't actually play sports games tend to overestimate how unchanged they are between releases.
Samsara wrote:
Games in the same series on the same console are pretty much all the same game/engine, just with roster/team/stat updates across the board. If they're different from each other, that means that one game has to be superior to the rest, which is the one we would want published most of all.
Kind of a funny double bind, that: if it's the same as others in the series, it gets cut; if it's different, it also gets cut (unless it's the best). I assume we'll be cutting two of the Donkey Kong Country games, then?
Anyway, on a more positive note, I'd love to see someone clear 18 holes in one of these high-profile golf games with 18 glitchy hole-in-one shots. It must be possible!
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Today I read about an Ikari Warriors trick I'd never heard of -- the Flying glitch:
https://kb.speeddemosarchive.com/Ikari_Warriors/Game_Mechanics
Basically, you can get in a helicopter, hop out in mid-air with the right set of inputs, and fly like Superman through the rest of the stage, invincible and untouchable. It works well for Area 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1v4W9Ka3bA
There's no helicopter in Area 2, so using it there is out. According to the SDA link, using the trick causes massive graphical glitches when you land; that seems surmountable for a TAS, but you also can't use your weapons, so fighting the end-level boss (or otherwise doing things that need doing) at the end of Areas 3 & 4 is out.
Still, maybe there's a way to leverage this, especially if memory corruption tricks can be found? The SDA link also says you can spawn all kinds of items in Area 4, and that sounds like a potential vulnerability to me.
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goofydylan8 wrote:
Finally, even though it does not affect the run at all I would like to point out another two errors LJN made in creating this game. First is that the last level is actually a secret bonus level that you must enter a code to get to after you beat the other four levels. The only indication in the game or in the game manual is a cryptic message when you finish a level that says "Seek the advice of the leader of the X-Men, Professor X, if you are not abel to make it to the final mission." Yes the typo is displayed in game. It turns out this message and some others are part of a secret message telling you to find the code on the back of the NES cartridge, but when you look they printed the wrong code. They say that the code is "+B+Up together with Start" when in fact the required combination is "Select+B+Up together with Start" so even if you did finish the game they make it impossible to beat the game.
I enjoyed this TAS, but I wanted to note that the above is incorrect (or at least misleading), and the "abel" typo and omitting Select from the label are both intentional. This will help explain why:
http://tcrf.net/X-Men_(NES)
In a nutshell, if you fulfill the right gameplay conditions, the end-level messages are partly highlighted in red. Put all the red text together, and you get the following secret message:
"The last mission can be reached from the mission screen by pushing SELECT and seek the advice of the label to make it to the final mission."
If the full code were on the label (hence "abel" -- it's used to spell "label"), there'd be no need to unlock the red text.
The problem is that the condition to trigger the red text is stupid, in a 1980s Famicom sort of way: you have to defeat 30 "special" enemies whose color is different from regular enemies. It would have made a million times more sense if the red text were triggered by defeating the bosses and picking up the floppy disks they leave behind.
Still, I was able to figure most of this out as a kid in the early 1990s, so it's not nearly as cryptic as some people would have you believe. If you manage to complete a level and happen to have defeated 30 special enemies, then you'll get the red text and you'll know something's up.
(Could it be that X-Men -- which was never released in Japan -- was adapted from an unreleased Famicom game or something? This kind of thing is so typical of 1987-1988 vintage Famicom games, it makes me wonder...)
BTW interesting that X-Men games seem to like to break the fourth wall, in terms of weird inputs -- or, at least, the Genesis game also throws a curveball at the end.
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Alyosha wrote:
So while I don't know the exact behaviour of what happens if the game is legitimately played up to that point, there doesn't seem to be a kill screen.
According to AdamL, the level counter rolls over after Stage 256, and you go back to Stage 1.
The enemy fire rate gets totally nuts starting in Stage 4, and I have to assume the game becomes unplayable shortly thereafter. But there's a neat trick you can use, as long as you can survive the initial 10 floors: get all four enemies on the other side of a wall, ideally on the 18th floor, and let them fire at you endlessly, until the shots are so constant they sound like rain on a tin roof.
After a certain amount of time, the enemy aggression counter will suddenly roll over to zero (or at least one assumes this is the underlying functionality), the hail of bullets will stop, and the enemies will behave as mildly as they do in Stage 1.
WashYourFace discovered this trick at NintendoAge. It only lasts until the end of each level, or until your character gets killed.
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Mothrayas wrote:
I can't myself really think of any example game where runs of separate difficulty modes are sufficiently different (and where one does not completely obsolete the other in terms of content) to consider them distinct categories.
Goofy's Hysterical History Tour and Gain Ground immediately come to mind. Both have different level sequences and, in the case of Gain Ground, different stage goals on different difficulty levels. Goofy's is actually shorter on Hard vs. Medium, and Gain Ground's gameplay dynamic changes completely since you're no longer rescuing anybody.
Mothrayas wrote:
So I'm inclined to say that difficulty settings would in most (if not all) cases not be considered separate categories, and the preferred difficulty run would obsolete the other difficulty run, regardless of which one is faster.
I'm strongly opposed to any situation where a run on a lower difficulty would obsolete one on the hardest difficulty. But then I'm opposed to the whole idea of "entertainment" (an incredibly subjective notion) being a primary evaluative criterion for the site, rather than a secondary bonus (important, maybe, but still secondary). So this argument --
Samsara wrote:
Like I said in an earlier post, if you're so head-up about the difficulty choice being wrong, prove it yourself. Prove that Hardest is so much more entertaining that it justifies your No vote.
-- begs the question, at least for me and my priorities. I don't really care about proving that Hardest is entertaining; I care about whether a run overcomes the best that the CPU has to offer. If I know corners are being cut, it takes away my biggest reason for watching a TAS in the first place. Hardest is, definitionally, what I want, to the extent that difficulty trumps speed.
I'm not, however, opposed to all runs on lower difficulties, especially ones that allow for playaround, glitches that can't be executed on higher difficulties, etc. I have no problem with a funny, interesting, flashy run on a lower difficulty coexisting with a run on Hardest.
For that matter, I don't remember ever voting No on a run -- I usually just abstain. Nor have I ever harangued a contributor for their difficulty choice, though I certainly don't see why questions about difficulty choice should be forbidden, which some folks seem to imply they'd like to implement as a policy.
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It just seems like there's a divide between people who think this site's primary value is as a source of entertainment*, and people who think this site's primary value is as a place to demonstrate total mastery over games in a structured environment.
If you're in the second category, as I am, then -- with occasional exceptions -- these runs on lower difficulties just don't have much resonance. I don't have a problem with a multiplicity of runs on different difficulties, but when it comes down to it, the run on the hardest difficulty is the one that has what I want, and what I come to this site for.
*(though it's not clear to me who's being entertained, since I think there's ample evidence that casual viewers, i.e. the semi-mythical "general public", strongly prefer runs on Hard -- or, at the very least, not Easy -- and care more about the mastery angle than the entertainment angle. In other words, they find mastery more entertaining than, er, "entertainment". So whose tastes are we really catering to here?)
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mklip2001 wrote:
By the way, around the 6:40 mark on the video, it seems like you jump on top of a tree but briefly lose some speed doing so. (It's the first tree you encounter in that room.) Could you teleport on top of the tree to save any time?
IIRC the teleporter has a pretty fixed algorithm. I'm not sure how it works, but suffice it to say you have no real power to choose between destinations -- within a range of starting positions, you'll always end up at the same spot.
It might be worth noting that this run (and the previous one) manages to skip two full areas -- including the one where you get the Lantern, which I guess you simply don't need (I don't remember what item opens the door to the final stage). I like this game, BTW!
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How much of this can be boiled down to "filesystem manipulation is aesthetically unappealing and/or violates the spirit of TASing?"
Because, hey, I can sympathize with that. It actually seems more salient in the case of non-console games, since an exploitable issue could well be the fault of the OS, not the game.
Whether or not they're "valid" (a term I've never liked since it always loads the dice in favor of the more permissive side), I think it's legitimate to have a problem with runs that focus on exploiting the filesystem, OS, or hardware, rather than the game engine itself (including menus, BTW). It's sort of like the difference between hacking a system remotely vs. with physical access to the machine.
That doesn't you can expect the world to do anything to accommodate your objection, of course. But it's not some kind of crazy, old-man-yells-at-clouds POV either. I personally wouldn't bother watching a run that involves power cycling the console, for example, let alone relying on a specific voltage state to preload the RAM chips just so. It's just not an approach that appeals to me, and while I don't object to the fact that it exists, I do want it clearly labeled so I can skip it.
Filesystem manipulation is more borderline; I'll watch runs that depend on corrupting savegames to cut 1-2 corners, but eh, it doesn't give me the same "Wow!" response as the death warps in Rygar.
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Just to be clear, completing any mission in this game has no bearing on completing the others -- the different missions are essentially difficulty settings in all but name, and the stage layouts, etc. are unchanged between them. So completing mission JUPITER is the right way to go; there's no reason to even touch the others.
I think this is a perfect example of a game that should have two branches, one for absolute shortest time (i.e. this any% run) and the other for no deaths/best ending.
Oh, and: great work! :)
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TASVideoAgent wrote:
I wanted to do an SG-1000 TAS.
Awesome! It gets my vote, both for SG-1000 and for brevity. Do Chack'n Pop next! -- maybe even a pacifist run, since you get massive bonus points for that?
mklip2001 wrote:
I've never heard of this system before
The hardware is almost identical to a ColecoVision, though the library has a somewhat different flavor. It's got a bunch of games I enjoy, and the Chack'n Pop port is the best on any home console. Ninja Princess is good too.
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^Awesome! Thanks so much for looking into that. I'll let the folks at Sega-16 know; perhaps they can adopt some of your strategies. Do you think you'll go ahead with a full-scale TAS, then?
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Archanfel wrote:
Meh, it's just mean that they all were not enough skillful to do it. Ok, i intrigued.
I will try to beat this game by my own. *At expert mode with 1P difficulty without cheats obviously.
Note: It will be not optimised movie, just simply attempt to verify - is possible or not.
^Nice one. Very grateful for any work you do on this. :)
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Archanfel wrote:
goldenband wrote:
Just wanted to renew my request for this. It remains unproven that the game can be beaten in Expert mode with 1P difficulty, and a TAS would be the way to answer that conclusively.
Just out curiosity why you suddenly decided that exist a chance that this game can NOT be beaten 1P on expert mode? There are absolutely no fundamental obstacles to do it. It not even seems to be somehow difficult.
Multiple people have tried over on Sega-16, including some very skilled players, and no one has yet succeeded -- the time limits are just too strict. The only playthroughs I know of on YouTube use cheats.
If you can find a winning playthrough of The Punisher on Expert that doesn't use cheats, I'd welcome a link to the video!
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goldenband wrote:
It'd be really nice to see someone take on The Punisher on Expert, the highest difficulty mode, which is required for a good ending. There's some question about whether it's even possible to beat the game at all in 1P on Expert (there's a playthrough on Youtube but it apparently uses cheats).
Just wanted to renew my request for this. It remains unproven that the game can be beaten in Expert mode with 1P difficulty, and a TAS would be the way to answer that conclusively.
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I'm in support of those arguing that "entertainment" is both too nebulous and too subjective to be a primary organizing principle for the site. (I don't think entertainment is why most people seek out TAS to begin with; it certainly isn't for me.)
The #1 criterion should always be speed, paired with total domination of the game through whatever means. Categorization should flow from that.
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Jungon wrote:
Private Eye ... how could we forget? One of the most hellish mazes ever,.. not sure if only hardest case, or all 5 cases, though =P
EDIT: http://www.electricfrankfurter.com/2009/07/closer-look-3.html
The maps are there, experienced players say it to be IMPOSSIBLE to beat the fifth case, but all of them say they'll try again in the future .... impossible smells like an interesting TAS project.. 8D
EDIT2: I could beat the first case with 0:51 remaining on the clock, and making mistakes, I would even open a topic for discussion but I wouldn't start another WIP for now, too much things going on in life >.>
Yes, do it! This is exactly what TAS is best at -- taking on the impossible and showing how it can be done. :)
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There's something incredibly funny about the endless succession of Bicycle Kicks. Doesn't hurt that it reminds me of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9zvgcOrTtw
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moozooh wrote:
It's because TASVideos's purpose is not that of a catalogue or a sports authority. We're an entertainment site first and foremost.
That's not the site's main value to me, or even its main contribution to the world IMHO. I'm much more interested in absolute achievement -- beating the game at its most challenging in the shortest time possible -- than entertainment. I want runs that reveal the truth of the game, above all; entertainment is 100% secondary.
Don't get me wrong, I love to be entertained, and I quite enjoy playaround runs -- SNES Family Feud and "Own Goal!" are two of my favorite runs. But I'm irritated when I learn that a TAS is entertaining me at the expense of demonstrating total mastery over the game. I'd be annoyed at best if someone submitted a TAS of The Punisher (Genesis) on anything lower than the highest difficulty, because that's the game's unanswered question -- no one's even sure if it can be beaten on Expert, at least in 1P mode.
(This is also why chess runs on Beginner difficulty are such a silly idea: they don't rise to the challenge of the game, which is dominating the engine, not just picking an option where the CPU is playing with its brain tied behind its back. And I'm saying that as someone who wants to see chess runs featured on the site.)
I'm not even sure most outsiders (so to speak) see TASVideos as a site whose main goal is entertainment. I don't remember ever seeing someone post a TASVideos link on a message board saying "This run is hilarious" or "This run is so stylish". If the site gets invoked, the trope is mastery: this is how to dominate this game completely, this is an optimal route, etc. Using a low difficulty just to look slick, well, we players can do that already.
That said, I 100% agree with Personman. All this can be solved trivially by treating difficulty as a branch; that way everyone gets what they want. Above all, a run on easier difficulty should never replace or supersede a run on the hardest difficulty.
