I'm not too familiar with the original game in the first place and it doesn't help that this hack just looks visually unappealing, along with some adolescent language. It also kind of rubs me the wrong way to see fights against women in this particular style of game. It works in regular fighting games, where everything just comes off as more of a fantasy setting, but not here. I can't say much about the quality of the gameplay and how it compares to the original, but for the reasons stated above, I will have to vote "no". I don't like this hack and 16 minutes of it is a long time, even if the gameplay is optimal.

I'm not too familiar with the original game in the first place and it doesn't help that this hack just looks visually unappealing, along with some adolescent language. It also kind of rubs me the wrong way to see fights against women in this particular style of game. It works in regular fighting games, where everything just comes off as more of a fantasy setting, but not here.

I completely agree with all of this, but... As adelikat said, this is a good opportunity to improve our rules and possibly set a new precedent on how we handle ROM hacks going forward. We had some staff discussion about this submission, namely the nature of MTPO as a game and how it relates to hacks. Entertainment in a hack is often derived from noticeable and unique differences from the base game, and MTPO as a concept does not allow for that unless you're deep enough into the game to know what could have changed. If you're unfamiliar with MTPO fight patterns, you'd have no idea they were different in Phred's. There's almost no way to find an MTPO hack unique as a casual viewer, and that can and probably already does apply to a lot of other games as well. I did end up voting No because of the hack's presentation, but I'm also left wondering if even a perfectly-presented MTPO hack would be able to be published under our current rules. We're essentially requiring universal appeal for projects that are explicitly niche, and not everything is capable of breaking into the mainstream, and looking at it from a Judge's perspective, that doesn't seem fair at all. It's almost like we're rejecting for game choice again, and that's absolutely something we want to get away from. We're already making a lot of major updates to the rules, perhaps this is a good opportunity to figure out what the overall site wants out of ROM hack submissions and how we can better accommodate them.

It's almost like we're rejecting for game choice again, and that's absolutely something we want to get away from.

Indeed. When we want majority of regular viewers to have enjoyed the movie, we need game mechanics to be clearly comprehensible and fun, or we need the game to be popular enough so more people could relate to it. That is essentially our Moons requirement. But when it comes to hacks, anything that's less known or less obvious risks to get ignored or disliked by general audience. This situation feels very similar to how the site worked before tiers. Moons requirement was kinda universal, and games that couldn't meet it were rejected, even not hacks. Vault was meant to provide room for technical achievements that have speedrun record value, because the demand was kinda high: for every Vault-ish game there was some niche audience that would watch and enjoy even the least obvious and the most monotonous gameplay, as long as they have personal relation with that game, or the genre, or anything else objective or subjective. The tier system teaches us that niche audience should not be ignored. We want people to make high quality movies, to push games to their limits. The more productive people we have around, the more creative freedom they have, the better the net gain is. If you're only into some insanely popular franchise and hate all the rest, people who used to TAS Vault-ish games may contribute to something very entertaining within your favorite franchise some day! And technical expertise is a great thing in and of itself. Sharing experience and ideas, generating something unique on variety of levels. So no, we do not want niche audiences to feel outcast. We don't want them to have to split away. If we want to be future-proof as a site, we want to embrace variety of tastes.

I think that even if things don't look different to the casual viewer who doesn't know much about the regular patterns of the opponents, they should be published IF they are known by the TASers and speedrunners to be different. Here are some examples of hacks that should and should not be publishable in my opinion: should be publishable: All Night Nippon: Super Mario Bros. (not really a hack, but it changes 8-4 and adds additional worlds and SMB2J mechanics, so I'm counting it as such) Difficult? Punch-Out!! (changes every opponents pattern and makes it so one hit sends you down, all in all more difficult than MTPO. People who don't know the original patterns may or may not recognize the patterns are different in that hack) should not be published: Drag Race Autoshift (Dragster hack, only makes it so the game shifts for you. Can do some interesting stuff, but it doesn't change really anything.) Super Mario Fantasy Adventure (Final Fantasy hack, only adds Mario elements while keeping everything mostly the same)

If you're unfamiliar with MTPO fight patterns, you'd have no idea they were different in Phred's. There's almost no way to find an MTPO hack unique as a casual viewer, and that can and probably already does apply to a lot of other games as well.

Maybe I don't understand what you mean by fight patterns, but most, if not all, of the enemy moves that I saw in this run were already present in the original MTPO. The fights that stood out to me were the King Hippo and Mike Tyson variants, which may have been because Little Mac took damage. For me to find an MTPO hack entertaining, it will probably have to make significant changes to the base game that do not allow you to defeat each enemy in 30 seconds. Possible examples:

• Get rid of the star mechanic.
• Give the enemies new moves that the player cannot manipulate away.
• Allow Little Mac to move around the ring, like people do in actual boxing.

Well, for the moving around the ring, there's Power Punch 2, which is a separate game on its own. I'm not sure how I'd take away the star mechanics or anything like that, but that would be interesting. It seems less fun to me, though. I like to see fights over quickly, and removing that would make each fight significantly longer, even going as far as the third round for Bald Bull 2.

Interesting

Well... With only the knowledge of SummoningSalt videos and watching adelikat's old TAS back in the day, I started the video and than started skipping content and watch the fighters. Never played the game so the only thing I saw was custom fighters while the game being the same. I went to google to find a website straight from 2001 with worse than Space Jam webdesign, so I'm just going to say: - I think this hack has very little changes to offer alongside the original game - I don't see any technique being different, it's like the same TAS with differently looking enemies I get a feeling this hack is mostly cosmetic with very little if any other changes made. Obvious no vote. Side note: I've also read the submission text albeit don't know what did it said about NTSC or PAL.

I thought about a suggestion during a discussion on Discord a while back and forgot to post about it here so there it is : A solution (atleast for the moment) for this movie would be to accept (a) TAS(es) of the most popular hack of each official game into Standard without taking into account its entertainement. Would matter as well its differences from the original game if it's a problem. Then, we would accept any TAS of other hacks of the same game into Moons like we do now.

I actually like that solution.

A solution (atleast for the moment) for this movie would be to accept (a) TAS(es) of the most popular hack of each official game into Standard without taking into account its entertainement.

By what standard are you going to choose the "most popular hack"? And what if popularity changes, and some other hack becomes the most popular? What if popularity changes often? This is not hypothetical, by the way. Romhacking.net lists about 450 romhacks of SMB, and about 60 for each Mega Man game and the NES/SNES Zelda games; the site for VVVVVV lists about 1000 homemade levelsets for that game. Which one of these is the most popular?

A solution (atleast for the moment) for this movie would be to accept (a) TAS(es) of the most popular hack of each official game into Standard without taking into account its entertainement.

By what standard are you going to choose the "most popular hack"? And what if popularity changes, and some other hack becomes the most popular? What if popularity changes often? This is not hypothetical, by the way. Romhacking.net lists about 450 romhacks of SMB, and about 60 for each Mega Man game and the NES/SNES Zelda games; the site for VVVVVV lists about 1000 homemade levelsets for that game. Which one of these is the most popular?

This is a good point, we could choose what standard we take and then the most popular by this standard at the time of the submission should be accepted into Standard but I see that even then, it can leads to problems... I can't think about a proper definition of such hack that could fit here and wouldn't contradict the Standard definition, so it's only a WIP.