Oh why did I have to read this page? I have work to do this evening but I can tell it isn't going to get done now...
EDIT: just watched a portion where red managed to defeat a trainer's level-20 beedrill with his level-11 rattata. Conclusive proof of how bad the AI is in this game :)
Physics masters student here!
Looking at how gravity acts on massless particles from the point of view of Newtonian gravity is not that helplful, for the following reasoning. In Newtonian mechanics, we have F=ma (force is mass times acceleration) and F=mg (force is mass times gravitaional field). Therefore in any gravitational field, a=g, the acceleration of any object is just the field strength, regardless of the object's mass. There's famous footage of an astronaut dropping a feather and a hammer on the surface of the moon, where there's no air resistance to complicate the analysis, and they fall at the same rate.
However, when m=0 (like for a photon), this conclusion breaks down, because we got a=g by dividing both sides by m, and you can't divide by zero. In other words, gravity exerts no force on photons but no force is required to deflect them because the have no mass, so considering the force will never tell us about how the photons are affected by gravity.
However, in general relativity, it is is stated that, because of the (quite amazing) a=g result, we can remove gravity altogether from the picture by taking away the gravitational field g and instead just observe the system while we are accelerating at the same rate, and it should give us the same result. This will make it look like the photons are accelerating, because they are not accelerating but we (the observer) are. Moreover, we restore the fact that every object accelerates in the same way in the same gravitational field, by the trick of removing the gravitational field, so now no objects are accelerating, and acclerating the observer, so now all the objects appear to be accelerating at the same rate from the observer's point of view.
I hope this explanation helps :)
I'll give this one a weak yes, it's too short to lose my attention. However, as a sub-second optimisation of a Vault movie, I'd be surprised if it didn't end up in the Vault too.
I won't able to watch this until an encode is made, but the submission notes have certainly piqued my interest. It sounds like a great technical achievement, and I'm hoping it will be a good watch too.
Just a small thing: this movie is not strictly an improvement since the previous version was removed from obsoletion, so shouldn't it lose the notable improvement tag?
Could you be a bit more specific about what you mean?
The fastest completion gets no branch name, and the other an appropriate name that distinguishes it from the fastest one (ie. describes in one or a few words why it's different from the fastest one.) If you want a better opinion, please give a concrete example.
Er... how is this different from what we have at the moment?
This sounds like a great idea in theory, and most people agree on this. The problem is that some of the "less glitched" runs ended up having horrible names. Perhaps just "less glitched", although it sounded bad at the time, should have remained, rather than some of the stupidly pedantic branch names that we ended up with (and yes, I take responsibility for my part in that operation, it seemed like a good idea at the time).
Ideally we need a phrase that implies "doesn't tear the game a new one, but not necessarily glitchless". The SDA phrase "no large skips" is growing on me, although the term "large skip" would have to be defined on an ad-hoc, game-by-game basis.
feos: That's as good a definition of "glitched" as we are going to get. The thing is: where do you draw the line? Here are some examples of ways a game could be completed:
Normal gameplay
Sequence-breaking the overworld to the point where very little gameplay remains (Super Mario 64)
Glitching out of bounds and just walking to the final room (ALTTP)
Warping to the final boss and defeating it (Super Metroid)
Warping to the room/cutscene after the final boss (Pokemon Yellow)
Warping to the credits (Kirby's Adventure)
Warping to the post-credits (Super Mario World)
No credits/end-game sequences at all (Japenese Super Mario Bros)
Now somewhere along the line these movies go from any% to glitched (in terms of your definition of "beating the game without beating the game"), but it is tricky to pinpoint exactly where and the dividing line is somewhat subjective.
TL;DR: "Glitched" = "makes game run ending" - all TASes do that anyway, but also "glitched" = "not actually completing game" - well then what exactly is completing the game if it isn't making it run the ending?
I normally define "glitched" as "sequence-breaks the overworld"
A nice idea, and one of the better objective definitions. However, for me, this is still a little unsatisfactory - it labels SM64 "glitched", when all it is doing is exploiting physics, while Megaman is not "glitched", despite the fact that it manipulates RAM values into forcing the game to set the "end level" trigger (but it still plays all the levels, so no overworld sequence breaking), in addition leaving the graphics horribly broken. If you watched those two runs, while they are both broken fairly hard, I reckon you would struggle to argue that SM64 was glitchier. It's also nothing like how the word was applied in practice, since if it were it would probably apply to the majority of games that featured anything more complicated than a level select screen for an overworld. What about games that are all overworld like Super Metorid? Are you suggesting they must be played - gasp - entirely as the developers intended?
Personally I feel that, if we wanted a definition for "glitched", it would be for any exploit that pertains to the game's programming itself, rather than the level design or physics. This still isn't an ideal scenario, since there are various tricks that corrupt memory (or at least abuse it) but don't entirely destroy the game with it, but it would be a start.
So I tried writing up the 2013 awards wiki page since I notice nobody has done that yet but it has turned out to be far beyond my noob editing abilities/rights. At the moment there's a link in the awards page to a blank 2013 page. I couldn't get any further, I don't understand this module stuff yet.
Sorry for meddling in things I should have left well enough alone...
Boy, things got a bit heated around here didn't they?
I think one thing that the camp in favour of restoring the "glitched" label hasn't done yet is define what should and should not count as "glitched". In many cases, "glitched" was associated with memory corruption, but this was not always the case. Many "glitched" movies did not corrupt memory and some "any%" runs did.
At the moment the only decent definition of "glitched" seems to be "this movie was judged not to obsolete the previous any% movie". This then makes the "glitched" branch different to every other branch in that the branch name is not determined by the gameplay itself.
I'm suggesting a compromise: go back to "normal" runs having no label, while their "glitched" counterparts have a "uses [X]"-style branch name (instead of just "glitched"), which has these advantages:
Advantages over having "no [X] glitch" branch names
- People looking for "normal" TASes, particularly newcomers who are often put off by glitched runs, do not find themselves watching a glitched run.
- Non-gamebreaking runs do not have distractingly esoteric names. I agree that stuff like "No L+R, no null egg glitch" is horrible, whereas calling the shorter run "L+R, null egg glitch" is less bad.
Advantages over having "glitched" branch names
- We avoid the vagueness of the term "glitched".
- We can still have multiple glitched runs if a game has multiple possibilities for a glitched-type run (they have the names "Uses [X]", "Uses [Y]", etc).
Once you have the key it's just straight to the items in each dungeon and then the boss, no deviating at all which is kinda meh. It would've been way more interesting if the Magic Key was collected last or never collected at all as it would've involved doing the dungeons in more interesting ways as well as showing off the complete dungeon design better.
This seems like an unnecessary category to me. There already exists the "swordless challenge" branch, which has the same idea of completing as much of the game as possible without a specific item.
I agree that an exception should be made here. I know the rule that all games are played at the highest difficulty by default, but we have never had a difficulty level like this before.
Hmm. It seems that there are multiple reasons a run could get in here. The runs featured in Golden Oldies seem to be mostly interesting from a historical standpoint. While, as Alden points out, Morimoto's SMB3 is a phenomenal achievement given the neolithic tools he was working with, when you take off the nostlagia spectacles it is just a slightly sloppy version of the current run, so why would you watch it if you've already seen that one?
It may be worth splitting this into categories, like Gruefood Delight, although it would be tricky because, for example, Chrono Trigger and Pokemon: MLP Version are both very different from their successors, and also huge historical milestones, so where do you put them?
I also don't want this page to become "my page", if you know what I mean, so feel free to add your own stuff! I just got it started because nobody else was and it was too good an idea to drop.
Keep the nominations coming people!
It's surprising what gems you can find if you look through obsolete movies. For example, I'm thinking of adding [1437] DS Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin by arukAdo & gocha in 10:14.85 to this list - it's probably the only TAS where switching between characters constantly is used for basic movement.
Thanks CoolKirby! I'm a total noob at formatting markup stuff, so I just tried to copy what was on Gruefood Delight by clicking the edit button on that page and then copying what I saw. I must have copied it slightly wrong.
As for the name, I went with it because it was Alden's choice and, if I'm not mistaken, Alden was the one behind Gruefood Delight, without which this page wouldn't exist.
Also on the name, there is an accidental inconsistency between the URLs of this page and Gruefood Delight: GD has "Movies" in the URL while OF doesn't. Is this a problem from the point of view of site structure?
Because TAS'ing is all about precision; if we can play a game with superhuman precision, then surely we can have precise branch names as well.
The thing is, by a similar analogy, that for many people TASes should be elegant too, so we should come up with elegant AND precise names. Sometimes a compromise must be reached: personally I think that for Super Mario World "11 exits" is a perfect name for the branch.
Ah. I have realised that renaming pages can only be done by vested editors and above. If I had realised this sooner, I would have waited until we could agree on a name. Sorry.
If people really want the name to be changed, I could ask CoolKirby or someone...
PS: link so people can give feedback on how the page is coming along. Do the descriptions need to be shorter or less spoiler-y?
Let's not forget what Stars are for. They are there to give the best possible impression to first-time visitors to the site of what TASing is all about, and of how great TASes are. Earlier in this thread, miseiler said "This is what I imagine when someone says TAS", and that about sums it up for me. If you wanted to show someone who had never seen a TAS before what TASes look like, this movie would be an excellent choice.
It is a little repetitive, but I was never bored watching it. And probably it would be even more entertaining to somebody who hasn't watched a hundred TASes already.
There are people in America who know what Ab Fab is. It aired on Comedy Central , I think.
So that makes it two countries out of about 200 whose inhabitants would get the joke. That doesn't make it bad though - not everyone has to get the joke.
alden wrote:
Is it obvious that Gruefood Delight is a reference to Turkish delight?
I always thought of the instant dessert Angel Delight, but that's probably just because it formed an unhealthy proportion of my childhood.