First of all, congratulations to Team 2 for making a worthy winning submission! You guys did great. :)
A clarification: Team 2 technically won by walk-over, since team 1 did not submit on time. The final submission time was then delayed 24 hours. This information was previously in the first post.
Another clarification, FatRatKnight and pirate_sepiroth were in the winning team DTC3, but the rest of the team was different. Last time NitroGenesis and micro500 were in their team, this year Tompa and MESHUGGAH were in it.
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Some thoughts on the game and selection process:
I think the rules have been different every single DTC so far. Letting the public choose a game was new for this contest. I am neither particularly for or against this method.
Improvement of an existing movie was also new. The rule in previous competitions has been to only select largely unexplored games without any published movies or submissions. This ensures several things: It decreases the chance that someone in a team has a lot of experience with a game already. It means there are more tricks yet to find, which makes the competition more about exploring. It ensures movies look will look varied and not be frame wars.
Improving an existing movie or one where there has been significant attempts before also means that the bar is set higher. The best wip, that of Aglar, had probably (I'm guessing) significantly more work than three weeks put in it.
For these reasons I think there is a good reason to keep the rule of only new games for future competitions.
In the case of Rockin' Kats, the game is fun to watch and play, but as can be seen in the topic for the game, notoriously aggravating and boring to tas. The primary reason for this is lag management. Aglar, Randil, Sonikkustar and AnS have all tried and given up on this game. Like Baxter said, there are many people who want to see an improved version, but not that many people willing to do it.
The game is very lag-heavy. Lag is the least fun aspect of tasing for me (and for several others too, I guess). Managing lag is almost like anti-tasing. When tasing, you try to explore a game and figure out, through logic and innovation, how the game works and what the best solution to a given situation is. When managing lag, you do mostly random actions until the lag decreases.
Enough talking from me now. I would be very interested to hear how the other contest participants feel and what your experiences were. Also technical details about the game and any scripts you wrote would probably be of interest.
Brandon posted our lua script in the Rockin' Kats topic, guess it doesn't hurt to have it here as well:
linky
