- Pressing Up+Down or Left+Right on controllers that don't normally allow it
I think this should be allowed, because it should be possible on all controllers by switching between left and right or up and down in the middle of a controller poll. I.e. it is just a question of speed and timing.
- Pressing buttons that don't exist on normal controllers but that are still read through the controller port
I don't like this one. I think the interface to the console should be at the outside of the controller, not at the level of the wires leading into the console. Or at least that runs that stick with physical controllers should be in a different category than those that do not.
- Streaming arbitrary data through an external port
I guess from my answer to the previous question I should say no to this too, but I'm not sure. I think it depends on the external port. If that port is a network port, then streaming arbitrary data there may be the only practical way to TAS a network game. Though ideally a network game should provide input files for all the players taking part in that game, and let the network port input be generated that way. I think this question will have to be settled on a case by case basis, but the answer will mostly be no.
- Partially disconnecting a cartridge
This is a special case of the previous question. I think the answer should be no in this case. "How fast can a game corrupted through a poor cartridge connection be conmpleted" is not an interesting question. If it were allowed, it should be clearly marked in the category.
- Swapping discs when not prompted
Not sure about this one
- Swapping discs with a completely different game
Well, if this results in an interesting, novel result, then I guess it would be OK, but it should not be filed under any of the individual games, and be treated like a hack.
- Witnessing the ending without completing the normal game's objective
This should be allowed. But categories that do complete the game's oy.bjective should also be allowed to coexist for the same game.
- Getting a game beaten state in memory but without witnessing the normal ending
I think this is OK as long as at least part of the ending plays out (such as the "The End" screen in super mario world). Simply setting a "game completed" bit in memory while the game continues as normal is too obscure. But I guess a "set bit X in memory as fast as possible" could potentially be an interesting category, for which this would be OK.
- Resetting during a save operation
I think this should always be in its own category (save corruption). I like the results, and it is technically interesting. But most watchers will feel cheated when they find out how it works, and I think it feels a bit dirty myself. So I don't think it should be allowed in "any%", only in a dedicated branch.
- Starting a run with dirty memory (excluding save data)
Well, if you can start with any memory content you want, then that wouldn't be very interesting, would it? You could just start at the ending sequence and get 0 frame input for every game. It would also allow you to trivially hijack the logic of the game and do anything, including replacing the game main loop with something of your choosing. So starting with arbitrary memory should not be allowed. Starting with plausibly possible ram (as generated by a proof movie which starts from a clean state) should be OK, but would still require some judgement (again, starting the run after the final blow has been landed to the last boss would make for a boring TAS, I think).
In general, I think that much controversy can be avoided by proper labeling and use of categories.
Reset is really handled on a software level by EACH game.
The problem is, this is not true.
Technically, games are not supposed to handle reset directly, the reset interrupt should be handled by BIOS. It's just that most of old consoles (up to and including 4th generation) don't have any BIOS, instead all games implement the necessary low-level stuff on their own. Nowadays they don't have to do this, and in fact, on modern consoles/PC they even can't do this. So Warp is right about modern games.
As for old games, it's really a matter of perspective. If we were purists, then we might divide the game into "intended gameplay rules" (game designer's idea) and "technical overhead" (programmer's implementation with all the mistakes/limitations/etc), and then of course we have to play within game designer's set of rules, not abusing bugs and not abusing the fact that the game was made for a console where Reset button is handled by the game's own code.
But TASing was never about purism, it was always about the opposite - about handling games as tangible objects (phenomenons), not as something perfect and ethereal (noumenon). So it's fine to abuse the fact that old console games incorporate OS and BIOS functionality. As long as this abusing actually provides some additional entertainment.
The thing I don't like is that we keep using more and more heavy artillery for making the same level of achievements. I liked Pokemon Yellow "Arbitrary code", because the means were adequate to results. But when those heavy and debatable techniques are used for simple speedrunning (decreasing the movie length, but not improving on entertainment), this becomes much less impressive. You know, it's like if Neo was able to kill the Architect and then reprogram the whole Matrix directly just for the sake of dodging bullets. Not cool.
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AnS wrote:
The thing I don't like is that we keep using more and more heavy artillery for making the same level of achievements. I liked Pokemon Yellow "Arbitrary code", because the means were adequate to results. But when those heavy and debatable techniques are used for simple speedrunning (decreasing the movie length, but not improving on entertainment), this becomes much less impressive. You know, it's like if Neo was able to kill the Architect and then reprogram the whole Matrix directly just for the sake of dodging bullets. Not cool.
This is the natural development we are going through here. Somewhere people will get tired of technical overweight and start doing something that's completely natural by all means and showcase the very gameplay. I had the vision of that direction actually. But I'll never stop loving how insane things can go if you abuse the technical side.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
I think this should be allowed, because it should be possible on all controllers by switching between left and right or up and down in the middle of a controller poll.
Stop repeating this nonsense. This is not how joypad controllers work.
http://www.ni.com/white-paper/11965/en
Once the latch signal is sent, the data about the state of buttons is freezed untill the whole data about all buttons is read by the game (the voltage from the parallel lines d0-d7 simply does not reach the register anymore, immediately after the register is latched, i.e. switched from parallel input mode to serial output mode).
So either you were holding Left at the moment of sampling, or you were holding Right at the moment of sampling. There's no way to register Left+Right by quickly switching between them.(well, of course in the asynchronous circuits there's always a race condition of propagation delays, so the signal about releasing Left may somehow arrive later than the signal about pressing Right, and the sampling may just happen at this very moment, but it's too improbable and unreliable, definitely not something with which you should justify L+R)
BTW, I entirely support L+R, since I personally had a couple of NES (well, pirate famiclone) pads that allow pressing L+R+U+D by pushing the center of D-Pad.
Gameboy games can be reset by pressing A+B+Start+Select. And actually, games don't need to adhere to that. Mega Man II for example disables (or perhaps doesn't implement) this restart sequence.
On Gameboy games, one can't claim it's some hardware action the game has no control over. How do you feel about abusing resets here?
I may have given the impression that I want to make the distinction based on the technical aspects of resetting (and other things like pulling the plug.) However, that's not what I meant. I have been trying to explain what it means (at least to me) to want to see the game played by a perfect being, and what constitutes (in my opinion) gameplay and what doesn't.
Let my try to explain it in a slightly different manner.
Putting myself in the position of a viewer, there really isn't much practical difference between eg. the reset button, the power button and pulling the plug: None of them are (usually) input to the game, part of the gameplay, and instead all of them interrupt the execution of the program via outside influence, via the hardware. While there may be big technical differences eg. between the reset and the power buttons, from the spectator's point of view, there's little practical difference: Both interrupt the execution of the game, possibly messing up the save data it was writing, and neither is part of playing the game itself.
When I watch a TAS, I want to see how it would look like if a perfect being were to play the game, and I just don't see interrupting the execution of the game program via outside influence as part of that. I fully acknowledge that not everybody agrees with that, but that's just how I see it.
I am fully aware that there's at least one game where resetting is actually a gimmicky part of the game. As I already said, I would be fully ready to make a special exception for that particular game. You can reset the game all day long if you want. (Personally I would prefer if it was reset only when required, but I wouldn't lose any sleep if the restriction were completely lifted in this case.) That particular exception doesn't change my view that resetting is just not part of playing all other games.
Also, it doesn't really matter how the game is reset. Doesn't make much of a practical difference either, from a viewer's point of view.
feos wrote:
I still can't see the border you draw here that isn't based on your feelings/beliefs.
You are correct. It's based on feelings. As said, I want to see the game played by a hypothetical perfect being, and there are certain things I feel are not part of gameplay (such as interrupting the game program's execution via hardware.)
If you want to make it technical, something that could be put into practice, then that's easy: No resets, no power cycling, no pulling the plug, no ejecting the CD unprompted, no removing the game cartridge, no external cheating devices. Yes, I know not everybody agrees with that, but it would be a simple rule. (And yes, a special exception can be done for the one or two games where resetting is mandatory. I don't have any problem with that.)
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It's not some obsession that makes me post in this thread. As I said, the rules can develop, and it's always useful to discover a new aspect of common sense that was ignored by the current rules, getting the possibility to improve them constructively.
Hence, when I read Warp, I imagine his ruleset is applied to all the community and... I'm scared. Sure there will always be people that want to see the game beaten the gameplay way. No one prevents from making a movie with no save glitch. No one prevents from enjoying the existing ones that avoid it. This means, if someone WANTS to make a full use of some programming hole in the point where hardware connects the software, no one must be able to stop him. Because if such a border existed, it:
1) would make no constructive and logical sense,
2) it would distract very skilled specialists from contributing.
That's why I see no point in voicing the opinion that is NOT INFRINGED UPON ALREADY. This opinion is given a free road to contribute. Why act like it isn't? If a country has officially allowed religion A, this doesn't mean officially allowed religion B is automatically hurt by that fact.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
That's why I see no point in voicing the opinion that is NOT INFRINGED UPON ALREADY. This opinion is given a free road to contribute. Why act like it isn't? If a country has officially allowed religion A, this doesn't mean officially allowed religion B is automatically hurt by that fact.
I must admit I don't fully understand what you are trying to say above. Nevertheless, please take into account that I have been answering exactly what SmashManiac was asking:
SmashManiac wrote:
In any case, I was wondering what your various personal opinions are about whether the following should be allowed in a TAS:
...
- Resetting during a save operation
He asks for personal opinions, and I offered mine.
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I see, but it's not the first time you argue about reset+save concept validity. Also, if you want to contribute at least through discussion, you must be able to develop your own system to reflect reality we are trying to discover here. Otherwise you're talking to no one; voicing opinions has a goal in mind, it's not done for the sake of itself. The goal is to discover reality and improve personal vision of it.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
To chip in on resetting during saving, games can defend against it and most of them do have measures to prevent rampant save corruption antics. In the Chrono Trigger save corruption run, the corrupted save file after resetting is identified to be corrupt, and the game won't let you load it at the title screen (the corrupted save slot behaves like a blank save; the cursor hops over it and you aren't supposed to be able to load it). Howewer, loading a corrupted save file is still possible due to a curious bug on the title screen where pressing Down+A on the same frame allows you to load a save in a slot you can't normally select.
For another example, Pokémon series games after the 3rd generation have much more secure saving, and there are no major exploits aside from cloning, which is quite minor and causes no critical problems. RBY's and GSC's much less secure saving can be construed as a bug in the game in contrast, which you can exploit by hitting the power switch during saving. On Game Boy, it's also very possible to unintentionally cut power during saving - the console runs on batteries, and quite a few unlucky users must have ran out of power at the worst possible time and experienced unfortunate data loss with RBY and GSC, which in latter Pokémon games should never happen since a failsafe copy of the previous save file is always kept and loaded in case the main one gets corrupted. Unexpected power outage is also very possible for home consoles, and a plausible worst-case scenario every game should prepare for.
Save corruption's not a free lunch, and it's very possible for games to prevent it - if they don't, or if there are bugs in their code that allow you to wreak havoc with corrupted saves anyway, intentionally causing save corruption with a timely reset is exploiting flaws in the game code, not illegit and unexpected usage of hardware quirks.
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Regarding saving, a common implementation is as follows:
X bytes Save Area 1
Y bytes Cecksum 1
X bytes Save Area 2
Y bytes Checksum 2
X bytes Save Area 3
Y bytes Checksum 3
X bytes Save Area 4
Y bytes Checksum 4
1 byte Save Index
The Save Index is composed of 8 bits, 2 bits per save, for a total of 4, each representing what is contained in each Save Area. The 2 bits allow for 4 possible states 0, 1, 2, 3.
0 Indicates there is no save there.
1 indicates the associated save is for Save Game 1.
2 indicates the associated save is for Save Game 2.
3 indicates the associated save is for Save Game 3.
A game out of the factory has the save index set to [0, 0, 0, 0]. Once Save Game 1 is saved the first time, it is written to Save Area 1 with its checksum. Upon completion, the Save Index receives [1, 0, 0, 0]. If power is interrupted in the process of writing to Save Area 1, or prior to the Save Index being written, the Save Index still contains [0, 0, 0, 0] and thus there is no save.
A save later of Save Game 1 will now look for the first free Save Area, being Save Area 2, and write there. Then it will update the index to: [0, 1, 0, 0]. If power is interrupted in the process of writing to Save Area 2, or prior to the Save Index being written, the Save Index still contains [1, 0, 0, 0] and thus the save did not occur, but the previous save is still there untouched.
If now one wanted to save Save Game 2, the index would be set to [2, 1, 0, 0], and subsequently [0, 1, 2, 0], and so on.
This system allows for exactly 3 Save Games, interruptions will not leave a Save Game in an invalid state, and the last successful Save Game is still accessible. The Checksum prevents other errors. A scan on the save selection screen will modify the Save Index to erase saves that have a Checksum mismatch.
You'll note from the classic games that have 3 Save Games, there's generally no way to break the Save Game in crazy ways. The most you can normally do is abuse what is in memory upon reset from actions that were taken while writing the save.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Putting myself in the position of a viewer, there really isn't much practical difference between eg. the reset button, the power button and pulling the plug: None of them are (usually) input to the game, part of the gameplay, and instead all of them interrupt the execution of the program via outside influence, via the hardware.
I find there to be a significant practical difference between cutting the power supply and resetting, especially in the case of handheld consoles: left, right, B, A and whatever other buttons are simply buttons on the device. So is the reset button. They're pretty much next to each other. On what (subjective) basis do you make the distinction between e.g. the Start button and the reset button?
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Scepheo wrote:
the Start button and the reset button?
On a side point, the Reset button may actually be programmable by the game. Link's Awakening uses Reset to Save.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
On a side point, the Reset button may actually be programmable by the game. Link's Awakening uses Reset to Save.
It's kind of silly to call it that though. There's no physical button on the GameBoy labeled "reset", nor is there a particular hardware functionality being used to implement the key combination resets. It's pure software.
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natt wrote:
Nach wrote:
Scepheo wrote:
the Start button and the reset button?
On a side point, the Reset button may actually be programmable by the game. Link's Awakening uses Reset to Save.
It's kind of silly to call it that though. There's no physical button on the GameBoy labeled "reset", nor is there a particular hardware functionality being used to implement the key combination resets. It's pure software.
The key sequence is known as Reset in the Gameboy manual.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Oh rry? That suggests that implementing it in your game was highly desired or required for official Nintendo certification.
I was thinking more on the lines of something like the Atari 2600, where there is a specific "Reset" button on the console, but all it does is provide its status to an IO port, where the game can do whatever it does\doesn't want to do.
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natt wrote:
Oh rry? That suggests that implementing it in your game was highly desired
Yes.
natt wrote:
or required for official Nintendo certification.
No.
The official DMG, SGB, and CGB devkits however all included some libraries for developers to use, and default code which specifically had reset handling.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
It's not some obsession that makes me post in this thread.
feos wrote:
I imagine his ruleset is applied to all the community and... I'm scared.
All the needless pathos makes me feel that exactly the opposite is true. Are you quoting a movie character or something? Is this how you avoid basing something off of feelings?
feos, you seem to have this delusion that this site, and TASing in general, has adopted an "anything goes" policy at some point, which Warp (in this case) is trying to oppose. But neither has been the case. We've had a lot of rules against cheating that can be seen by someone as "limiting the creativity" and "infringing upon opinions". Warp is merely stating his, and fully maintains a solid composure in doing so. Kindly don't infringe upon it.
feos wrote:
This means, if someone WANTS to make a full use of some programming hole in the point where hardware connects the software, no one must be able to stop him. Because if such a border existed, it:
1) would make no constructive and logical sense,
2) it would distract very skilled specialists from contributing.
No-one is stopping anyone. Specialists can do whatever they want. Whether the result remains a speedrun (or a superplay), eligible for the site that hosts speedruns and superplays, is the question. Again, last I checked we had rules in place that made sense to (most of) us, but could be argued that they didn't.
In fact, the rules—any rules, anywhere—are merely an attempt to legalize what is ultimately based on feelings. Is killing people wrong? People seem to say so, but is afterlife perhaps a better place to be? I don't know, and can't provide infallible logic or evidence for either choice, but there is a rule that we shouldn't kill people, and I obey for the lack of a better option.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
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Sophists moved in. The only thing that can be answered in your post it this:
moozooh wrote:
In fact, the rules—any rules, anywhere—are merely an attempt to legalize what is ultimately based on feelings. Is killing people wrong? People seem to say so, but is afterlife perhaps a better place to be? I don't know, and can't provide infallible logic or evidence for either choice, but there is a rule that we shouldn't kill people, and I obey for the lack of a better option.
feos wrote:
Feelings can't go well without any clear logical base, otherwise each time you express them you're gonna cause an argument about whose feelings are more true. Also, for such a huge community, rules must be lead by fairness and common sense.
You claim all existing rules are based only on feelings, you throw the common sense part away.
and I obey for the lack of a better option.
You do nothing to help developing one.
Now please no more sophism.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Why are you arguing? You don't even seem to know what sophistry and common sense are, but still feel the need to defend your opinion even though I neither attack it nor really care about it.
To get these things out of the way, common sense is a system of beliefs and judgments that can, on a very basic level, attribute sensations to certain phenomena. On a higher level, it is essentially a preconception that things you deem familiar should work as you expect them to. No logic is truly involved at any step, and sometimes no reasoning is required at all; eg. most animals are afraid of heights even though they can't understand nor justify the danger—this is what common sense is. So yes, it is essentially a feeling that is easy to relate to. And there's nothing wrong with that, because logic itself only provides a limited set of instruments to learn truth, but doesn't guarantee that results will be true. And if I were to ask you to point me to sophisms in my previous post, you'd have a hard time not falling flat on your face. You're welcome to try though. Please use logic while you're at it. :)
Really, all I'm asking is to stop dismissing other people's opinions using extreme amounts of grandiloquence to justify your own. Perhaps in your dreams you are a freedom fighter who opens the world of mythical TASland to everyone under the sun. I wouldn't know. It does look that way though.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
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Another post not having to do ANYTHING with how the games are supposed to be TASed. All my posts in this thread were about that matter. Why derail the thread?
Because you are being obtuse and irresponsible in your posts "on the matter", which has been explained to you several times over the course of the last three pages. You have already derailed this thread by repeatedly stating your opinion, and continually pushing Warp's (as if his was any worse), and arguing where there was neither interest nor need to, and not even being able to do so properly. You fail to comprehend this in your usual self-apologetic excitement. And I am here to give you a wake-up call because I'm also a moderator, and I don't think an actually important topic (these things do happen once in a while) sorely needed to turn into this. I really don't want the thread to go to waste any further, and even less do I want to turn it into feos vs. the world, so I'll just leave this note here. You can direct the rest to PMs if you want. — moozooh
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
This thread is already long enough, so not many people will read this. I didn't think the post would be that long, but I still took some time to write it, so I'll post anyway.
[Numbers mine]
1- Pressing Up+Down or Left+Right on controllers that don't normally allow it
2- Pressing buttons that don't exist on normal controllers but that are still read through the controller port
3- Streaming arbitrary data through an external port
4- Partially disconnecting a cartridge
5- Swapping discs when not prompted
6- Swapping discs with a completely different game
7- Witnessing the ending without completing the normal game's objective
8- Getting a game beaten state in memory but without witnessing the normal ending
9- Resetting during a save operation
10- Starting a run with dirty memory (excluding save data)
1) Valid, just because normal controllers don't allow it doesn't mean it's impossible, it's all possible user input anyway, and some other controllers provide that functionality.
2) Valid, it's possible user input. If the programmers failed to catch all the cases where it could interfere with the game, it's a programming error, like any other.
3) Valid, for the same reason as 2). External ports expect input, and the game should take care of it, if it doesn't, it's a programming error.
4) Valid, the game should be prepared for the absence of external data and should handle that error appropriately. It's a horrible programming practice to assume that external resources will always be there. If the game doesn't abort or handle the error when it's without such resources, it's (again) a programming error.
5) Valid, see (4).
6) Has this ever been useful? I'm not familiar with multi-disc runs. Anyway, it's valid, see (4).
7) and 8) These points are different from the others, because they deal with what the run does, and not how it does it. We have to consider case by case, no magical hardware criterion exists to convince people that a game ended. Obviously, for different games, different criteria will be considered more important. We have an excellent way of deciding if what a run has done merits publication, it's called judging. No clear line needs to be drawn here.
9) Valid, it's the game responsibility to make sure that save operations are atomic, and signal that the save has been corrupted if they fail to complete. If for some reason, that doesn't happen, it's an oversight in the game's code.
10) There's common dirty memory, which is just data generated by random noise, and another with reasonable amount of information, the second is not totally unrealistic because there could be other things executing in RAM. I'm inclined to accept both. If the game behaves unexpectedly because of uninitialized data, it's the code's problem, not the user's.
Frankly, arguments as "the game should be played like X" are useless for TASing. It's just not how things work here, we already play games at extremely unrealistic conditions. We're definitely not interested in how things were intended to be, we're interested in how they are.
There's a saying I like when I teach people the C programming language. When the specification says that accessing arrays out of bounds is "unpredictable behavior", it means that doing so might erase your HDD. That's not merely a theoretical example, if someone exploited a buffer overflow, he could seize control of your program and with some privilege escalation, run an "rm -rf /" and your files will be deleted. Nearly all security vulnerabilities exist because the computer has the nasty habit of behaving how you told it to, not how you meant to tell it.
This is completely different from interfering with hardware. If a programmer puts a JMP instruction and it doesn't jump because you dropped your console on the floor or the CPU got different data because of a cheat engine, then hardware behaved incorrectly in an artificial way that just can't be anticipated. No programmer can write code that's safe against transistors burning or devices that make the code itself behave differently.
There are some arguments against my position, but I find them unconvincing because they make at least one of the following mistakes:
a) Ignore the fact that we treat runs with light or no glitch abuse differently, almost always in separate categories. The obvious consequence is that people who have a preference for such movies won't see them obsoleted by heavy glitches they don't like.
b) Imply that low-level exploits are against some "spirit" of TASing, which only makes sense in very competitive environments that emphasize skill. Most people would agree that making TASes is much more about insights and thinking about corner cases to the gameplay than skill and competition. Rules intended to make runs challenging and competitive don't have much place here.
c) Assert, with little evidence, that such movies might give bad impression to viewers. At first glance, this point is laughably wrong, given the surge of interest when a game is broken for the first time.
d) Shoehorn stuff to make glitch abuse equivalent to cheating. Usually it goes like: glitching => heavy low level glitches => punching hardware so that it works differently => gameshark => rom hacks => making your own architecture and run game data on it. Of course, I can start with white and iteratively shoehorn it into darker tones of grey until I reach black, and claim that white is black. That's an obvious mistake, and not even a very creative one.
I think this should be allowed, because it should be possible on all controllers by switching between left and right or up and down in the middle of a controller poll.
About resets: Speedrunners reset all the time, for savewarping but also for so called "heavy glitching". It's even possible to do the 0:00 run of Pokémon on a real Gameboy!
And what about Skyward Sword runners, who use the internal reset function to screw with the game? They may not press the physical reset button on the console, but I don't think this makes much of a difference to the average viewer.
So my opinion: Resets are a part of gameplay and if it happens that they change the gameplay significantly, it'll be always possible to make it a separate category.
This discussion reminds me of the debate about RTAs, that SDA had some years ago.
Current project: Gex 3 any%
Paused: Gex 64 any%
There are no N64 emulators. Just SM64 emulators with hacky support for all the other games.
I find there to be a significant practical difference between cutting the power supply and resetting, especially in the case of handheld consoles: left, right, B, A and whatever other buttons are simply buttons on the device. So is the reset button. They're pretty much next to each other. On what (subjective) basis do you make the distinction between e.g. the Start button and the reset button?
Perhaps I didn't explain clearly enough what I mean by "from the viewer's point of view" and "it doesn't matter how you reset." Which exact buttons are pressed may make a difference from the player's perspective, but not from the perspective of a person watching the TAS, and the exact combination of buttons is completely inconsequential with respect to what resetting does.
andypanther wrote:
About resets: Speedrunners reset all the time, for savewarping but also for so called "heavy glitching".
And many speedrunners eject CDs in PlayStation games to skip cutscenes, and whatnot. Such things being tool-assisted or not makes little difference to me. I still feel like it's not gameplay, but interfering with the execution of the game via outside influence.
Everything that p4wn3r said: exactly.
So.....
1. Everyone who says [random technique] abuses [platform] not the game: it's part of the gameplay, deal with it.
2. Anyone who says it's not the part of the gameplay: it's part of the gameplay, carry on.
3. Resetting the game with various buttons, using "unexpected" ( there's no such thing the game thinks unexpected, there are "checks" and there are "routines" that do things depending on the conditions), buttons (famicom keyboard), the reset button, the power on/off button, resetting mid-frame, corrupting memory, corrupting save games, using 4 players for 1 player games, disc swapping, remove batteries/power supply, it's part of the gameplay, move on.
If you have any questions, feel free to read step 1 or 2 or 3.
If you think you are a genius and you think I'm wrong:
Video games are programs. These programs runs on a platform. You have controllers (the buttons on the platform, which made for the purpose to use them to control the gameplay, joystick, mouse, multitap, famicom keyboard, microphone, light gun etc) to control the game. It's all about control. You play video games by controlling the game. You are controlling the gameplay. Controlling. Part of the gameplay.
Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesuuuuus.
it's part of the gameplay.
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
