• Manipulates luck
  • Teaches English to Japanese salarymen
Like Donkey Kong Jr. Math this is an educational NES game using a Nintendo arcade port as the basis of its gameplay.
RNG is manipulated just by pushing the A button. I make sure to only get 3 letter words. I chose the OTHER category because it has the highest ratio of 3 letter words.

Noxxa: The Vault rules state that educational games are ineligible for the Vault, and that rule is in place exactly for runs like this. Tiers beyond Vault are entirely out of reach as well. Rejecting.

CasualPokePlayer: This is a rather complicated judgement, and a precedent setting one at that. I'll break the factors down here:

1. Is this game trivial?

This game involves solving words by guessing the letters. The amount of letters is dependent on RNG, with a minimum of 3 letters. The amount of letters also defines how long it takes until the letters can be guessed, since each letter has a "petal" which needs to fall down before letters can be guessed. There is a predefined list of possible words for the game to choose from, which word out of this list chosen is also just RNG. Even with the same amount of letters, some words are faster than others, especially words which have multiple of the same letter (e.g. "EYE", "ZOO", etc.), or have letters close to each other in the letter chooser. To further complicate things, this game has multiple word categories to choose from, with Animal and Others being the only ones which have enough 3-letter words to use the entire game (with other categories forced to use 4-letter words eventually). To add even more complication, this game has a forfeit mechanic for words (select the "?"), and you can use this up to 2 times and still maintain the best ending.
Considering all these factors, this game is certainly non-trivial.

2. What is this game's completion point?

Remember how I mentioned "best ending"? Well, the game has 3 different ending cutscenes, depending on how many of the 10 words are correctly solved. 0-3 words solved have the worst ending, with Brutus ("bad guy") getting Olive Oyl ("the girl"). 4-7 words have Popeye ("good guy") getting Olive Oyl, but Brutus "ruins the moment". 8-10 words solved has the best ending, with Popeye getting with Olive Oyl with no interruption by Brutus.
The worst ending seems to be effective to a game over, with the "bad guy" getting the reward instead of the "good guy", and is arguably trivial to obtain optimally as all it needs is 10 3-letter words manipulated, with each forfeited right away (which is just hitting the "?" once each time), so it is unacceptable. The middle ending could arguably be acceptable, but it is moot due to the best ending overlapping in gameplay, with the difference just being one forfeits more than the other (which just reduces complexity anyways), so the best ending would obsolete this middle ending in any case. So a proper completion point would be with the best ending, and optimally only 8 words would be completed with 2 forfeited, which brings me to my next point...

3. Does this submission have proper optimization?

This submission does not use the forfeit mechanic. Given the simplicity of the game, this is fairly similar to not taking time saving damage, which seems to be a fairly major blunder. Outside of this, the movie seems fairly optimized. The 3-letter words manipulated have some potential for further strategic optimization, but nothing overtly sloppy here.
While not using the forfeit mechanic seems rejection worthy in itself, there is a silver lining in this. As I said, this is similar to not taking time saving damage. This can reasonably be extended as a general speed/entertainment tradeoff, as solving the words is arguably more entertaining than just hitting the forfeit button. Now, future submissions are highly recommended to NOT do this, but for this submission, this seems fine.
Given this, I would say the movie is properly optimized with a speed/entertainment tradeoff mixed in.
As I've alluded to within my judgement, there is no way for this movie to meet the Moons tier, if not just due to the fact it was already rejected from the Moons tier 6 years ago, but also due to this simply being a boring educational game. Given this...
Accepting to Vault
Zinfidel: Processing...

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #4575: Jigwally's NES Popeye no Eigo Asobi in 02:43.56
Spikestuff
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Not entertaining one bit, No Vote. Should this be published? Ugh, Fine.
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Samsara
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This is getting ridiculous.
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Dimon12321
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As I understand, The Great Waldo Search was published just because it has speedruns. This game has no gameplay, no speedruns, no point for publication. No vote!
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mklip2001
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I'm not sure I actually understand the point here. Is this just Hangman, and you're luck-manipulating what the word is?
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
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I thought it was short enough to be entertaining. It helps that I could read the Japanese. Non-Japanese speakers may not get as much out of it. Definite yes from me, though I could see this making its way to the vault.
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Not gonna lie, there's not much to this really. It was short thankfully, technically sound I guess but... honestly it's just fairly entry-level, simple luck manipulation for the most part. Voted meh.
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I can enjoy vaulty (I love that term) TASes, but this had no entertainment value for me. Sorry, had to vote no. As far as optimization goes, I just assume that it is fine, since this is such a simple game. But I don't know anything about the game.
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I feel like somebody is trying too hard to have a bazillion boring runs submitted just to get a record. Meh, rules are the rules… Vault Overflow.
Guga
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Samsara wrote:
This is getting ridiculous.
I agree completely.
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mklip2001 wrote:
I'm not sure I actually understand the point here. Is this just Hangman, and you're luck-manipulating what the word is?
It puts a word up in Japanese (in kana). You then have to pick the letters for the English translation of that word. There are additional gameplay modes as well. They are all terrible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0owWiEp804
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Zarmakuizz wrote:
I feel like somebody is trying too hard to have a bazillion boring runs submitted just to get a record. Meh, rules are the rules… Vault Overflow.
What seems odd to me is that in the time it takes to make 20 board game Vault (if that) TASes, one could put in the time to make a nicely optimized, entertaining TAS. It's not like every other good game has been done before.
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TehBerral wrote:
Zarmakuizz wrote:
I feel like somebody is trying too hard to have a bazillion boring runs submitted just to get a record. Meh, rules are the rules… Vault Overflow.
What seems odd to me is that in the time it takes to make 20 board game Vault (if that) TASes, one could put in the time to make a nicely optimized, entertaining TAS. It's not like every other good game has been done before.
Probably not actually since there's so little going on in all of these. I can't imagine any took more than an hour or two at the absolute most.
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You are three months early.
ars4326
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Haha, I could have totally used this in my Japanese 101 class. I'm biased here, but I found this one entertaining. I am curious though, why they used the katakana alphabet instead of the hiragana. As I understand it, katakana is reserved for phonetically transcribing foreign words, not native Japanese ones (kaban, kuruma, etc.).
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ars4326 wrote:
Haha, I could have totally used this in my Japanese 101 class. I'm biased here, but I found this one entertaining. I am curious though, why they used the katakana alphabet instead of the hiragana. As I understand it, katakana is reserved for phonetically transcribing foreign words, not native Japanese ones (kaban, kuruma, etc.).
It's due to memory limitations. Basically, early Japanese Famicom (NES) games didn't have large enough character sets to accommodate both of the kana syllabaries, as well as the English/Roman alphabet. A good example of this can be seen in Rockman 2, where all the cutscene text is in katakana. Also, whatever Jigwally is doing with all these board-game type runs... it's getting old pretty fast. Jigwally, if you're reading this, please don't take it the wrong way, but it's not really what our community wants.
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ars4326
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EgxHB wrote:
It's due to memory limitations. Basically, early Japanese Famicom (NES) games didn't have large enough character sets to accommodate both of the kana syllabaries, as well as the English/Roman alphabet. A good example of this can be seen in Rockman 2, where all the cutscene text is in katakana. Also, whatever Jigwally is doing with all these board-game type runs... it's getting old pretty fast. Jigwally, if you're reading this, please don't take it the wrong way, but it's not really what our community wants.
Ah, that makes sense. I could definitely see where memory limitations would be an issue in coding in both of the kana alphabets along with the English/Roman. Also, I'm of a slightly different opinion on the number of Jigwally's runs recently submitted. Basically, I think it would be most effective if Jigwally spaced out the amount of submissions to the Workbench. Instead of clustering in so many within a week or two, how about submitting one every 3-4 weeks, instead? That way, with a steadier flow of submissions people would be less prone to experiencing oversaturation (and may also create less of a backlog in the Workbench). For the most part, I've enjoyed your submissions Jigwally; I would only recommend that you space them out a bit further :)
"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." - 1 Corinthians 2:9
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Nothing terrible. I mean, there are worse TASes of games around. (That awful Elmo game comes to mind.) Still, it just wasn't very interesting. Meh vote.
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Samsara
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arandomgameTASer wrote:
I mean, there are worse TASes of games around. (That awful Elmo game comes to mind.)
Was that reference intentional?
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y'all are being mean, and for no reason. you aren't being harmed by the existence of these TASes. no one is forcing you to watch them. I personally really enjoy seeing them, and I also enjoy the existence of the vault, and would like it to be as complete as possible. every game TASed and added is progress, and there is no reason whatsoever to dissuade people from contributing -- and CERTAINLY no reason to shame people for how they choose to spend their time. Jigwally doesn't owe us a "better" TAS of a "real" game -- but I promise e's a lot more likely to deliver one in the future if we give em a warm reception now! Anyway, this run was delightful, and the final word sums things up with a nice bit of sarcasm. I can't decide if that should be the screenshot, or if that would be spoiling the punchline :P
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Samsara
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I don't understand how you can find so many no-effort runs submitted within a week of each other to be any entertaining or indicative of what this site is about, but to each their own, I suppose. Literally anyone can just pick a horrible, boring game, knock out a complete run within an hour (most likely less), and submit it with really no consequences. Assuming it gets published, no one's going to bother improving it since there's really no good reason to when you could be working on something people will actually somewhat enjoy. This is either the definition of getting what you want through the least amount of work possible, or the definition of how to exploit the system in your favor. This would be much more tolerable if the submissions were spaced out and it felt like any amount of effort was put into them, and if there were some actually entertaining games to break up the monotony, but as it stands right now people are starting to get sick of it.
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This movie was rejected for being an educational game lacking entertainment value. The rules have recently changed. The movie is non-trivial because it manipulates getting only three-letter words (the shortest possible length). It is significantly faster than the RTA record (3:48). I believe the movie should be unrejected and rejudged.
Post subject: Movie published
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [4494] NES Popeye no Eigo Asobi by Jigwally in 02:43.56