Technically this run is even more amazing than Sniq's usual fare. For the most part it's really entertaining as well. But I have mixed feelings about it in the context of the category.
Now Sniq is going to hate me for this... well, probably not—he has known my take on this for a long while. But for those who are less aware of it, here's a very scientific illustration I slapped together. I hope it gets the point across.
Make no mistake, I was massively entertained by this run for (just about) most of its duration. The Lower Norfair entry was pushing it, but I was willing to let it slide. The latter half of the LN escape is where it started to fall apart for me, and by the time it reached Draygon I lost pretty much all engagement with it. From a SM player perspective it was still interesting to see what other tricks will be used from that point to the end, but as a viewer I lost pretty much all interest.
This raises (once again) a discussion with regards to the category itself, one that I partly touched upon in some of my earlier comments on the matter in the previous any% submission thread. In particular, the exact point of this category. Back when the first glitched completion was discovered by Kejardon, one that cut the shortest time to credits in half, just about everyone in the community strongly felt that the classic any% category must remain intact. Eventually the community came to define it as "no major glitches" and came up with a list of glitches it considered major.
Note that while the letter of the definition listed very particular types of abuse, its spirit has been to keep egregious abuse out of the category. Bigger and badder glitches are being found and abused while the accepted definition has remained the same. And so while this run indeed doesn't violate the accepted definition, it definitely contains glitches I consider major and would like to keep out of the category. Superjumps in particular are plain awful, and X-Ray tricks, while not necessarily harmful to entertainment, leave a bad taste (I mean, what it does to boss fights is just... boring). Thus, while I am glad that this run exists, I would not like it to replace the current one. Underflow is major enough in my book, but this takes it further imo. Even the fixed graphics version is too much for comfort, and it's not even the one to base one's decisions off of.
To help explaining my point further I slapped together an even lazier picture to illustrate what I call the Uncanny Glitch Valley™.
(Sorry for the low resolution—I used the TV Tropes article illustration as my template.)
What's shown here is the dip in appreciation for onscreen action that I perceive at a certain degree of glitchiness. It went the same way with e.g. Sonic runs and many others that were continually broken apart by subsequent TAS attempts. The colored areas signify the sweet spots where the amount of glitches is just right for the action to feel engaging. Seeing games played superhumanly is always fun. Seeing games broken completely is also fun, although in a different way. What lies inbetween is this weird area where the gameplay feels like it's already broken past the point of layman and even realtime player relatability but still held back by some arbitrary limitation. Unfortunately, this is exactly how the rule set suggested by this submission appears to me. I don't like the idea of burying the any% category in UGV further than it is... there's my take on it.
(Also, hi everyone! Sorry for being inactive, I'll probably post something on the matter later.)
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
If the majority of the viewers feel some number of branches has too many similarities, they can be combined, if a solid explanation can be found, that would feel right to the majority of the viewers and to the judges.
Sometimes, when there's still ambiguity after such evaluation, staff members can have a dedicated talk about it, which would involve experience of each of them, so that can become the basis for a decision if all other factors betray us.
This approach is called case-by-case basis.
Console versions of PAL games run at a lower framerate than NTSC games, running at ~50Hz compared to NTSC's ~60Hz, and the games themselves are often not modified or poorly modified to accommodate to the change in timing. Due to this, PAL versions of ROMs are generally not allowed, unless there are significant technical and/or entertainment merits to using this version. See Rygar and Blaster Master for examples of good usage of the PAL ROM.
...you will very quickly see that the two pieces of text sound nothing alike, and, in fact, even convey mildly conflicting (at least de facto) messages. Which has been my initial point all along: the rules on this aren't clear, and serve the purpose of communicating unwanted actions poorly.
No, you don't want to spell everything out precisely; that is indeed impossible and I never called for that. I called for transparency and fairness for the benefit of the site's main contributors—the players. Just because you intend to show flexibility in judging doesn't mean the initial criteria that precede a player's commitment to a project should be this vague. It's a good idea to make things less vague whenever possible, no?
To elaborate:
1) the current wording does not in any way account for the difference between Vault and Moon criteria, which are, for the relevant part thereof, out of the player's control;
2) the listed criteria—the "significant" technical/entertainment merits—are vague at best, and negligible at worst, because the audience mainly gives feedback on the submission itself rather than its relative merits in comparison to the NTSC counterpart, making them moot if the amount of positive feedback satisfies the Moon criteria. In other words, the audience doesn't have to like the PAL run as much or significantly more than the NTSC run (which they don't, by the way)—they just have to like it enough on its own;
3) the wording doesn't explain what makes the two listed examples (Rygar in particular) good considering the points above. And to be honest I would greatly prefer it if the reasons were always more substantial than "it's only good if we end up liking it";
4) if the normally strict rule is circumvented too easily by picking a popular game, it discourages the players from trying niche things and invites more of the same content.
(Also refer to my previous comments in the thread.)
Making judgments on difficult and controversial submissions is all about the message you want to send to players who might want to attempt similar things in the future. In particular, what behavior you want to encourage or discourage, what you want to bring to their attention, and how you think it should influence the site and its policies going forward. Players should feel safe referring to rules and recent decisions instead of feeling like they're playing the lottery with any submission that doesn't follow exact rulesets established by the top entry in the obsoletion chain. In fact you want to encourage more experimentation!
To give you a real-world example that these things are all too real and potentially harmful for the community—and this is just because I happen to participate in the relevant community, so the info found its way to me—I remember just earlier this year a certain valued contributor approached some of the staff members with a question on whether a PAL TAS of a certain valued game that had the potential of being faster than the current NTSC TAS by tens of seconds could be considered for publishing if the feedback was good. He received a very firm "no" from at least two of them, which doesn't mesh very well with the procedure you suggest. I didn't care much about what happened to that run idea—I'm not a big fan of some of the tricks planned for use in it—but I felt bad for the player getting shot down using the same vague rule as a reference that could very well end up ignored in case with this submission. And it would feel even more disturbing if, instead of the much-deserved clarification and/or refactoring of the rule, the submission gets published just because everyone likes Mario and no precedent-setting explanation is necessary. The player in question would become even more unhappy, and rightfully so—this is not the kind of situation you want.
The reasoning for Nach's eventual decision is many times more important than the actual decision. If you first make a rule and then make exceptions, you should be confident enough, even proud, of those exceptions—they represent one's ability to identify weaknesses in the framework and protect the interests of contributors that might've been unfairly treated due to these weaknesses. If neither the judge in question nor the other staff cannot earnestly make a very convincing case for the exception, then it shouldn't've been made in the first place, or the rule itself should've been changed rather than circumvented. Like made into a guideline instead and treated as such, maybe. In any case the key is information that could help other players make decisions.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
The discussion is still going? Impressive.
I have two more points to add.
Warp wrote:
The differences in terms of TAS tricks must be substantial.
I don't disagree with this, but as much as I would love for it to be the modus operandi for judgment, submitters and/or judges actually putting forward convincing frames of reference for their opinions on the matter isn't a very common occurrence. So unless somebody can provide solid and agreeable guidelines for "substantiality", this wouldn't be any different from what we have now, and I have already argued in one of my previous posts that the current rule is extremely unsatisfactory in this exact regard. In other words, I want the judgment of this run—regardless of the verdict—to hopefully set a precedent resulting in a change in rules that would make them more fair, clear, welcoming, and providing more substantial predictive power for content creators than "it's like this because somebody said so some years ago". The concept of forward relevance doesn't seem to be popular enough; it seems we're constantly battling against the concepts and prejudices that may have been relevant in the already-distant past but are at best confusing in the present.
E.g. if the difference in tricks between PAL SMB and NTSC SMB could be considered substantial, then it wouldn't be a long shot to posit that any PAL port of an NTSC game would have differences at least as substantial at this level of optimization. Mind you, the actual difference amounts to one trick that is used in one place to beat one frame rule; the rest is just different applications of the tricks common to both versions that just happen to end up faster here due to minor timing/timescaling variations that come unavoidably with framerate conversion. If every TAS on the site had a competition and optimization history as rich as SMB—which some of them eventually will—then every PAL counterpart to a maxed-out NTSC run, no matter the conversion quality, would have this kind of differences and surrounding debate. Which indicates precisely that the version difference is NOT substantial enough; it's just the illusion brought forward by the fact that the game has been effectively maxed-out for years, so any difference at all is perceived as a godsend.
electricslide wrote:
NTSC was done first because it is higher quality than the PAL port of this game.
This point is worded very awkwardly, so it is vulnerable to misinterpretation and imo has been misinterpreted already. Obviously the real reason the NTSC version was done first was that it was native to the region the game was developed in. That is always the main consideration.
The actual argument here is that NTSC version came first—so it is the original game for this platform—and the PAL version was made afterwards, which makes it a secondary creation. The port is always a copy of the original code adapted for different hardware and other conditions. The original game and its set of glitches and speedtricks takes priority simply because it is the original creation. (Language is a secondary concern at this point because the difference is cosmetic, i.e. doesn't affect gameplay on the level of meaningful player input, in the overwhelming majority of cases.) So in my opinion, it's the ports and revisions that should always prove their merit against the original release. I don't believe any newer/different version should be preferred only because it allows a shorter run; I would want a more solid argument than that, whatever that might be. Competitive community adoption would work for me.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I returned home earlier this week. Exhausted as hell; my body and mind doesn't take this concentration of experiences and associated strain very lightly anymore. /o\ By my calculations, I walked no less than 10 km per day, and at some point even managed to climb Bavarian Alps and swim to the middle of Tegernsee within the span of three days. Quite the change compared to my Moscow lifestyle.
Cardboard, Truncated, Tub <3
Tompa </3
Shinryuu wrote:
Oh! I totally missed that you were visiting at Finland. I was also attending Assembly as well. I was in the robot war section and spend around 3 days at Boozembly too. I too played on an old arcade machines there. After that I was at Turku from Sunday to Thursday. We've been in same places but we didn't meet! I looked like this during Assembly, http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=457477#457477
Well, :(
Might not be my place to say this, but maybe you should come on IRC more often. :p
All in all, despite a couple unfortunate blunders and unexpected health issues, I consider this trip a great success. I greatly enjoyed both of the demoparties as well as hanging out with you guys and just walking around and living in the moment, so to say. As to whether this could become a recurring event... Thanks to your hospitality that let me significantly cut down on living expenses, I would say it wasn't that great of a burden financially; in fact, I managed to spend just over 600 euro in total, about 2/3 of which went to traveling, urban commute, and associated expenses (visa, etc.). (But that's not counting optional purchases I took back home, obviously.) This is hella cheap for 19 days in three different countries imo.
The problem, however, is time. Technically I was unemployed at the time of being in Europe, so taking some 2.5–3 weeks off wasn't an issue. But as long as I have a regular job, the overall amount of time I can take off is very limited, and other things start competing for this time. I would say I'd certainly jump on the opportunity to go the Finland+Germany(+some nearby country or two) route any time Assembly and Evoke happen to be only one week apart rather than two weeks, as that would allow a lot more flexibility.
In any case, whenever I visit Europe again, I'll post about it here, so stay tuned I guess. :p
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
sorry to say but it doesn't look like we're going to meet. Hope you have a blast though!
Thanks. Hope everything is alright on your end.
Meanwhile my ferry is arriving in Stockholm. My stay in Finland was surprisingly eventful—I even managed to visit an arcade hall in Helsinki (yes, there is one) and pick some garden berries in Turku. :) Many thanks to Brushy and his incredible hospitality!
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
So, this is officially on. Right now I'm at Assembly, chilling out and eating a salmiakki mix. Nothing interesting going on yet, but that will change soon(-ish).
Naturally, as it is always the case with my trips abroad, I almost immediately met random Russian people at a convenience store.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
That is missing the big picture. Planned economy can work, and it can even work well, just not in the scope of a large country.
In fact it's still used to this day—one example is the ISS. The astronauts all have different tasks requiring different training, expertise, effort, skill, what have you. In an open market their ability to amass a surplus of resources (disposable income, in other words) would inevitably differ. But since they aren't in an open market, and their resources—most notably food and water—are inherently limited and not easily replenished, it is far more effective to poll them and plan their consumption. Somehow this doesn't lead to misallocation nor lack of responsibility. The same is the case for military missions, sea trips, and all similar situations.
It's when you attempt to stretch such a situational concept over millions of people and sustain it indefinitely that things quickly go awry.
We will likely see a resurgence of socialist ideas in the next decade or two, when it dawns on everyone that the pool of jobs only humans can do is shrinking far faster than new jobs can be created. The stronger the focus on capitalism, the sooner humans get replaced at their lines of work. Where the situation will go from that point is anybody's guess, but mine is UBI, because at some point it will be cheaper for the economy to pay people to stay home and not drag the GDP down by inefficient labor. Whether this would be a sustainable model, I don't know.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I don't think any rule should be totalitarian. Any rule, no matter which, ought to allow for exceptions if there are good reasons for it. When rules are applied in a completely rigid totalitarian manner, it only causes problems. Rules should be flexible and be ready to accommodate the immense amount of variation in highly subjective situations.
I've no idea how you've managed to construe that paragraph as if I was arguing in favor of making a rule more totalitarian. I was arguing in favor of clarifying it because right now it's anything but clear. Which ironically makes it more totalitarian as both the relevant exclusion criteria and the final say are relegated strictly to the nontransparent minority without a feasible opportunity to argue back. You should probably choose your words better if you want to avoid shooting your own argument in the foot.
Warp wrote:
Secondly, the current rule, even as currently written, already does allow for exceptions. That's what the word "generally" above means.
Any regulatory framework, be it TASVideos's submission rules or international traffic laws, relies on its predictability. If one intends to make an input into the system, they have to be able to infer the outcome by the wording of the rule. It doesn't have to be exact, but it has to be predictable at the if-then level to assess potential risks and rewards (if I increase my speed above the limit, I will be breaking the law; if a cop catches me doing so, I'll get a speeding ticket). If a rule contains a leeway for exceptions, the reasons and conditions for providing the exceptions, as well as feasible outcomes, should be reasonably clear before the submission is even made.
This would be both fair and respectful to the content creators: it's them who spend time on something that's supposed to be our entertainment. TASVideos is a content platform, not the ultimate enabler for this activity. TASes could still be published and distributed via YouTube, Twitch and various speedrunning sites if TASVideos wasn't there; yet it's TASVideos that would be nothing without TASes. So we need to treat all of our authors with respect and give them level playing field and a clear competition and regulation framework if we don't want to alienate the main driving force behind the site.
Now, here's why the discussion around this submission rubs me the wrong way and goes against the principles outlined in the previous paragraph in my opinion. Right now the rule in question reads as follows:
Console versions of PAL games run at a lower framerate than NTSC games, running at ~50Hz compared to NTSC's ~60Hz, and the games themselves are often not modified or poorly modified to accommodate to the change in timing. Due to this, PAL versions of ROMs are generally not allowed, unless there are significant technical and/or entertainment merits to using this version.
Let's discuss that wording and try applying it to PAL SMB to see if it makes sense to even consider making an exception for this run.
Poorly modified: what are the criteria of this? Any attempt to compensate for a lower framerate will inevitably result in a different game code: logic, variables, or both. You cannot possibly expect identical physics due to the low complexity of game engines and low processing capabilities of host systems, which force developers into taking game logic shortcuts with consequences exacerbated by less frequent polling of game state. Most—if not all—PAL ports will have extra glitches because of this.
Thus I see these possible definitions of "poorly modified":
1) the game doesn't work exactly the same way as the original;
2) the game has instances of obviously incorrect behavior/presentation introduced by PAL conversion (e.g. incorrect pitch and aspect ratio, game logic bugs/exploits...);
3) somebody (e.g. a judge) decided so based on a non-transparent, intuitive understanding of the semblance of a given port to a hypothetical ideal conversion (that may or may not take game complexity or other in-depth knowledge into account);
4) something else I'm missing.
By #1 and #2 PAL SMB is "poorly modified" because it has an extra glitch that wasn't there in the original. #3 isn't even a definition because it doesn't result in anything definite. #4 is the wildcard that could salvage this discussion, but it remains to be mentioned.
Significant merits: what defines significance? From the technical standpoint, using PAL barely allows cutting 1% off the NTSC run's time. The new glitch is barely used, a typical "blink and you'll miss it" situation. The PAL version hasn't been as ridiculously overTASed as the NTSC one so improvement in the order of tens of frames isn't out of the ordinary. Any game perfected to the level of NTSC SMB—of which there are only a handful on the entire site—would consider any improvement (just the fact thereof) "significant" by this point, but in the context of version change it is anything but.
From the entertainment standpoint, the run isn't noticeably better—it's just slightly different. And most of the stylistic difference isn't exclusive to the PAL version—it's just there because the PAL run could afford it without losing time. Again, at the level of similarity expectations SMB runs are at, even these tiny variations can be considered a marvel by some, but at the end of the day it's still Mario running to the right and jumping from time to time without any new complex interactions with the level environment barring one instance where Mario enters a block from above rather than from the left. Would that change alone compel me to watch the other five minutes? Hardly.
In my opinion, if this run is given an exception and either published alongside the NTSC run or replacing it, you'd have to:
a) do your darnedest to justify that decision with anything but the love for SMB, considering how many runs (would) have been rejected just because they were PAL;
b) allow far more (or even all) PAL runs to be submitted and published under the same procedure as their NTSC counterparts, and change the rule wording accordingly.
Personally I find the second option far less shitty for every possible reason. Every single time the TASVideos rules became more relaxed and inclusive, it would do far more good than it would harm the site. Something to think about.
Then again, there's always the option of not accepting this run because it's PAL either, and link it from the NTSC run description, which would merely be par for the course.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Just the other day I read an article pinning all the blame for the current tragedy in Venezuela on the west, which had been supposedly working to undermine Venezuela's sovereignty and bring down the Chavista revolution - all the usual tropes of the far-left conspiracy theorist were there, at one point it even called one of the Venezuelan opposition leaders a Zionist. It was all a pretty disgusting denial of the inconvenient truth.
Curiously, that's exactly how the state-controlled Russian mass media (read: the vast majority of it, even counting internet outlets) has been explaining the downward spiral of Russian economy and foreign relations. Except the ruling party in Russia is nowhere far-left. In fact, it's been steadily going far right like there's no tomorrow, civil rights be damned.
The dominant rhetoric is that, apparently, the depraved and resource-hungry West wants to bring the sacred sovereign nation of Russia and its strong-spirited people down. They attack it by oppressing Russians living in other countries, instituting harmful sanctions, dropping the price of oil, and sabotaging democratic elections by finding and sponsoring traitorous stooges who would instantly sell the country and its people out to the West the moment they come to power. Nearby countries have all gone through incredibly harmful revolutions, by which greedy, good-for-nothing, pro-Western politicians have taken power and ruined whatever remained good in their homelands. Russia, on the other hand, remains the unyielding stronghold of spirituality and traditional values, and its noble, strong, smart, and generous leaders will surely return prosperity to people as soon as the rotten West stops interfering with Russian affairs. All hail President Putin—the only true political leader currently in the world, etc.
I mean, a modicum of factual knowledge about the situation and its circumstances would destroy this rhetoric completely, but who wants knowledge, right? It's so much easier to believe in what's convenient. At this point history of propaganda should become a legitimate branch of history as a scientific discipline. Almost feels like history is only being kept to be perverted later.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
If anything, I hope the judging process on this submission helps clarify the rules on PAL vs. NTSC and not complicate them further by creating yet another exception (because Nach loves SMB or w/e other reason). If exceptions come easy, or requested often, it typically indicates there might be something wrong with the rule; maybe it should be changed into a guideline or formulated differently.
Also consider that the author has said he's fine with either outcome, and that linking the submission from the publication text of the NTSC run (which will remain the more referred-to run of the two—even if you obsolete it by the PAL run) is always an option, so technically this submission could stay visible without having to create another branch. You have a unique opportunity to avoid offending both the submitter and all the potential TASers who would like to run a PAL version of their game of choice but wouldn't be granted an exception because the rule would filter them out (this is basically why exceptions are a shitty thing to have in general).
In my personal opinion, one small extra glitch doesn't justify a new branch, let alone a set of branches. There are plenty of other games where PAL would result in far more significant changes to game logic/physics. If you decide insignificant changes like this justify a new branch, then please apply this decision to runs where using PAL ports cut the time down by more than 1%.
That's all I have to say on the matter.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Link to video
Furi's soundtrack is pretty phenomenal, done mostly in the same style (and mostly by the same hands) as Hotline Miami 1 & especially 2. Highly recommended if synthwave is something you enjoy.
Link to video
I've waited for Thumper for years, and it delivered on all fronts. It's the first rhythm game where BGM doesn't just fit but actually feels like it's a core part of the game's world in earnest, and any other musical score just wouldn't do. Which makes sense because, unlike other rhythm games, the music is highly procedural here.
Link to video
AM2R's sountrack is what makes you realize, among other things, that some of Metroid II's original compositions were actually pretty damn good, considering how well they lent themselves to reinterpretation. This is also true for the rest of the game, which AM2R paid an amazing tribute to. (HQ version of the track here.)
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
To give everyone concerned a head's up: I'm currently waiting for my visa to be approved, which should (hopefully) happen within the next few days. I have the route and accomodations secured for the most part (will be keeping a small leeway just in case), so once the formal things are out of the way, I'll be doing another round of confirmations and stuff, so if anyone else has anything to ask me in person, now's as good a time as any to speak up. I'll update the opening post in a moment.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Masterjun's demo is quite funny, btw. It cuts a lot of time and it looks unexpected and has that nice "all according to the plan" TAS feel to it. Since you don't care for the lowest ingame time anyway, you might as well go with this strategy and cut the input time further by several seconds. If anything, this would be the most compelling argument to go for realtime timing in my book.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
This is a good TAS.
I'm not sure I agree with aiming for realtime here. As far as I'm aware, the F-Zero community still uses the in-game timer to compare their performance, and instead of going with the "more precise" realtime timer (which is incredibly cumbersome to monitor on the real hardware down to a frame), they just disqualify glitches that tamper with the ingame timer without making the car actually go faster. Which I believe is the way to go. Thus, although this particular run should absolutely be published, the authors of future improvements might want to switch to ingame-oriented timing keeping the restrictions in mind.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Hey Mugg, that would be nice! If you don't mind losing a bit of sleep, you can catch both Tub (probably) and the better part of Evoke while in Cologne.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Getting to know me in exchange for the couch? A great deal, I assure you! Satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back!*
In all seriousness, I would gladly take your offer. The opening ceremony seems enticing, but I don't really know anyone there personally, and it's likely that most conversations would be held in German which I know very little of, so chances are I wouldn't enjoy it as much as your company. (Besides, we'll probably have a chance to see it streamed.) As for the Saturday events, we don't actually have to get there in time for the first compo or two, so we can travel at a comfortable pace.
By the way, can anyone confirm whether I would be able to get e.g. a prepaid Tele2 sim card in Finland and use it in Sweden, Germany, etc., without (significant) roaming surcharges? Because talking and texting via my Russian number wouldn't be the most frugal thing to do; our operators' fees are downright enormous even on the best tariffs/options.
* A text in tiny font.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Hello, everyone. I'm currently planning a ~3-week-long trip to Europe.
One of the original goals was to visit two demoparties, namely Assembly and Evoke. They will take place in Helsinki, Finland (August 03–06), and Cologne, Germany (August 18–20), respectively.
I'm not super keen on tourist attractions—most of all I would like to meet up with some of you wonderful people whom I have oppressed with long-winded posts during the past twelve years. If this history of unimpeded loquaciousness didn't deter you from the idea of meeting me IRL, we could definitely talk life, hobbies, recent events, Trump and Putin memes, etc., take walks in the park, have a beer or two, take selfies with lamp posts, go to an arcade, watch a game of water polo, pet stray cats, scorch ants with a magnifying glass, get mugged, or whatever else you have in mind.
EDIT 07/22: Travel route has been finalized. The countries are Finland, Sweden, and Germany, in that order.
Tentative schedule (last update: 2017/07/27):
03–06 Helsinki, Finland (Assembly, probably won't have a lot of time off until the 6th)
07–08 Turku, Finland (free to roam around the greater area)
09 Stockholm, Sweden (hanging out during the day, leaving for Arboga in the evening)
10–12 Arboga, Sweden (free to roam around the greater area)
13 Stockholm, Sweden (mostly commuting to and fro, leaving for Munich in the evening)
14–17 Pasing (Munich), Germany (free to roam around the greater area)
18 Marburg, Germany (staying there for a day, leaving for Cologne next morning)
19–21 Cologne, Germany (Evoke + hanging out in the city until the flight home)
The schedule has ended up a little bit more cramped than I initially envisioned, but it's workable.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Without going out-of-bounds, no. You need a total of 4 missile/super missile packs for Mother Brain's first form (it works on a per-hit basis), a Varia Suit and 3 e-tanks to survive her rainbow beam, Morphball, bombs, and powerbombs for accessing various areas of the game, Charge to damage bosses, either Ice or Speed Booster to skip Zebetites. Neither of them is skippable by clipping through the floor.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
- I didn't work on the 1-5 full chain (see my previous post); but I'm rather optimistic FBA-rr will help me to get a solution. Frame advance + save/load states should be sufficient.
- I am nowhere close to finding the "100 million" magic trick that the world-record holder, WTN, found (and kept secret) in 2015.
I recall that his world record is now 862 millions (was 755 millions before). With the knowledge we have; a very good TAS would yield around 800 millions. Knowledge of the game is missing here :(
Hey there, thanks for taking interest in TASing the game. Please keep me informed of your progress (via PMs or otherwise); I'll likely be of use. Also refer to my earlier post in the thread, esp. points 5, 6, and 11. Most of what I said in 2011 remains valid. I'd also suggest keeping in touch with xy2_ (especially since you're both French, unless I'm misremembering something)—he has been working on a DDP DOJ TAS which has some similar tricks, like those related to laser wobbling. Cross-pollination of techniques is possible and would be nice.
As for the 100 million trick, there are several theories. One is that there is a bonus for carrying the max bomb bonus from the start of the game all the way through Hibachi (I haven't checked it myself). Another is that there is a glitch/exploit, which, if true, you're very unlikely to discover on your own. Yet another theory is that WTN and the others who have updated their scores recently are playing all stages up to 2-3 (?) underpowered which lets them chain sections previously thought unchainable (most notably 2-3, but possibly 1-3 as well!). Keep in mind that the previous record was by no means perfect, and with 1-5 full-chain in mind the potential score for A-L had been considered to be in the whereabouts of 780–790 million, which means that only 70–80 million at most are actually "new" assuming the rest of the execution is better than in the previous record.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
No need to be so caustic. :v
Reset button on home consoles is not a circuit breaker; its signal is processed in software. So it's still just a button. Now power switch would be a different issue, but we don't abuse that.
If you wanted to make a hardware abuse argument, you could direct it to e.g. closing the lid on DS games, which is actual hardware abuse. And I'd even be inclined to agree with you there. However, this is a topic about Metal Slug in particular.
EDIT: I've been told that closing the lid is also an input signal processed in software. So that can be scratched off the list as well.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Make no mistake, I was massively entertained by this run for (just about) most of its duration. The Lower Norfair entry was pushing it, but I was willing to let it slide. The latter half of the LN escape is where it started to fall apart for me, and by the time it reached Draygon I lost pretty much all engagement with it. From a SM player perspective it was still interesting to see what other tricks will be used from that point to the end, but as a viewer I lost pretty much all interest.
This raises (once again) a discussion with regards to the category itself, one that I partly touched upon in some of my earlier comments on the matter in the previous any% submission thread. In particular, the exact point of this category. Back when the first glitched completion was discovered by Kejardon, one that cut the shortest time to credits in half, just about everyone in the community strongly felt that the classic any% category must remain intact. Eventually the community came to define it as "no major glitches" and came up with a list of glitches it considered major.
Note that while the letter of the definition listed very particular types of abuse, its spirit has been to keep egregious abuse out of the category. Bigger and badder glitches are being found and abused while the accepted definition has remained the same. And so while this run indeed doesn't violate the accepted definition, it definitely contains glitches I consider major and would like to keep out of the category. Superjumps in particular are plain awful, and X-Ray tricks, while not necessarily harmful to entertainment, leave a bad taste (I mean, what it does to boss fights is just... boring). Thus, while I am glad that this run exists, I would not like it to replace the current one. Underflow is major enough in my book, but this takes it further imo. Even the fixed graphics version is too much for comfort, and it's not even the one to base one's decisions off of.
To help explaining my point further I slapped together an even lazier picture to illustrate what I call the Uncanny Glitch Valley™.
(Sorry for the low resolution—I used the TV Tropes article illustration as my template.)
What's shown here is the dip in appreciation for onscreen action that I perceive at a certain degree of glitchiness. It went the same way with e.g. Sonic runs and many others that were continually broken apart by subsequent TAS attempts. The colored areas signify the sweet spots where the amount of glitches is just right for the action to feel engaging. Seeing games played superhumanly is always fun. Seeing games broken completely is also fun, although in a different way. What lies inbetween is this weird area where the gameplay feels like it's already broken past the point of layman and even realtime player relatability but still held back by some arbitrary limitation. Unfortunately, this is exactly how the rule set suggested by this submission appears to me. I don't like the idea of burying the any% category in UGV further than it is... there's my take on it.
(Also, hi everyone! Sorry for being inactive, I'll probably post something on the matter later.)