I think the goal needs to be nailed down a bit. Even if not, it would be grounds to be obsoleted by any run of similar quality that has a more clear defined set of goals.
The question of if this should be published is based on notability.
Is this "the" snakes game for TI-83? How old is it?
If the answer is "Yes" and predates this site, it is probably ok to publish.
Yes vote. Even though the previous one is more entertaining, this one is good enough on its own for moons category. With it being around 5 minutes it doesn't have much chance to get too repetitive.
At least in the actual arcade version, you can't play forever (although over an hour is possible) as you will eventually run out of customers to pick up since they don't respawn.
I approve of this over one that beats the other non-wiley bosses. When you can execute arbitrary code, it is no longer clear what constitutes the game as being beaten.
This is short and proves what it set out to prove as quickly as possible. Just like with SDA, each game should have it's own definition of what is allowed for which categories.
The poll is to determine if you enjoyed the movie, not if you think it should get published. That decision is up to the judges. A run with 100% no votes can still be published if it meets the criteria for the vault. This run doesn't meet vault criteria, so it either gets published under moons (or less likely stars) or not at all.
In a real one, the payload would have to be significantly less than 690kb, as the system only has 32kb of RAM.
Not 100% true. If you could rewrite the ram as the ending was being played out you would need more space. Also I don't think there is a 1:1 of record file size to ram. I'm not sure of the internal format, and how the game but I assume that the annotations take up space in some way (seeing as there are 8 gb buttons).
Wouldn't this be a copyright violation? You are effectively encoding a good portion of game code into your submission file. Might fall under fair use, but I'm no lawyer.
Yes, it's cute that you start out in one game, and beat another, but I think the whole we can do anything once we can input code onto the stack is getting a tad old.
I wonder how many iterations it would take for score/lives/position to sync up such that the exact memory state of the game was identical to a previous one. Once you can show this, you know it will go on forever.
I guess I didn't notice this thread until the system got deployed...
From my understanding, any game that doesn't have "beats the game as fast as possible" as a goal can only be considered for moon and star, but not vault? While any run that beats the game using the clear and obvious way of "beating" the game can be put in the vault if it is optimized sufficiently? And there are still "games" that don't have any clear way of "beating it" that can be rejected for bad game choice?
Having not played the game, I can't make any firm judgement, but the run looks good and entertaining. Seems to have borrowed a lot of elements from Super Mario 64 (and later ones).
As far as the "broken levels", I think the Sonic team has usually taken the stance that players can have fun with their game any way they want and don't try to hard to railroad what the player does (as an example, they licensed the game geni for their system, fully supporting it, while Nintendo forbid it).
I hesitated to do so at first because this is a game you can't lose, but the TAS was fast and I liked seeing where you would pick up each piece of fruit while avoiding all the other ones.
This is a good example of a easy to play hard to master game. The game is flexible enough you can make it hard if you put enough self imposed challenges (which in this case is simply fast as possible). This game would probably make a decent one to SDA too.
Please don't let this die simply because some people want to keep this site "pure".
It has well defined goals and although speed is secondary, it still tries to complete the game as fast as possible while minimizing the button presses.
If this category is implemented, I would say that any run that uses the same number of button presses, but does it in less time is enough to obsolete the previous run.
I think that any trick allowed by SDA should also be allowed here.
I still hold that only penalizing a reset 1 frame is unreasonable, as real game systems have startup screens, which most emulators simply skip.
Neither is a crooked cartridge or a scratched game disc. Where do we put a line on hardware abuse?
The primary issue is that for some games (including this one) you need to open the tray to swap out discs in order to beat the game.
There is no denfinitive rule about where the line is drawn. The community simply decides what is allowed and what isn't on a case-by-case basis, and those cases are used to help decide on new ones.
Another good example of this situation is the "one coin rule" for arcade games. You are only allowed "1 coin", which can be 2 coins for 2 players, but not a 2 coins for 1 player. The community would have to probably vote on iffy situations where the second player joins part way into the game.
It's a gray area. It is something you can do with hardware. Reset buttons are not only allowed, but on emulators they only count for 1 frame, and we don't include any bios startup in the frame count. Pressing left and right at the same time on real hardware requires abusing your controller. Reseting the game while the game is saving, while on an emulator, can only be done on a frame, while you are quite likely to do it off the frame if you try it on real hardware. The main issue I see is simply that the emulator doesn't officially have a function for having the lid open (at least I don't think so).
If the author decides to redo this run, I prefer using the hard mode(a five-star save is needed) because the enemies have more HP.
A 5 star run would be rather iffy since you can't create a verification video for it (baring a massive bug) since it requires netplay to do. A 100% run would mostly involve using the chip trade. A WWW run would amount to using the same strategy used for the last 1/2 of the video (varsword + prisim).
You did a nice job with this, Randil, but honestly as someone who's never played the game, I'm not sure I really get the appeal.
It looked to me, at first, like you could pretty much just spam the drill button to get down to the bottom fast (sure, it's more efficient to go through bigger blocks of the same color, but it didn't look necessary if you wanted to merely beat the game). Looking at GameFAQs told me that there's also the challenge of having enough air and not letting falling blocks land on you. With that in mind, the run looks more impressive, but I'm still not sure I see the main challenge.
I'll hold off from voting for now. I'm inclined to say Yes since the play is fast and colorful.
Game rules:
Blocks of the same color stick together.
Drilling a block removes all blocks in that group.
You can climb up a block 1 higher than your current position.
When a group of 4 or more blocks form, they are removed. If blocks of 4 or more are generated together they are removed when they fall.
Blocks that are destroyed have a small animation. Meaning it is better to walk off a cliff (if it is close) than to drill and wait.
If you drill Brown X blocks you are penalized.
In normal mode air decreases over time. Air capsols restore air and are often guarded by X block. Puzzle mode air is replaced with time bonuses.
This air is often guarded with X blocks requiring you make part of the X block blow it fall to offset it.
As you get deeper the game speed increases (fall speed, drill speed, air depletion).
In puzzle mode, silver blocks cannot be destroyed. Start blocks are automatically destroyed after a short time, and there are flip and rotate blocks.
In short, puzzle mode challenges you to determine/memorize a path and execute it as quickly as possible. The tas makes some decisions whether getting certain time bonuses are worth their value. After you beat all of these, reverse mode is available where all the stages are mirrored and the time requirements are much stricter, as this would basically be the same thing twice for a tas, it is not included.
I guess the question is how much penalty is there in a game that has excessive non-gameplay content.
Also, I don't see how speeding things up is cheating. The frame count is the same no matter how fast you play it.
