Well, be glad I can't get promoted any further, because this is the second and last time I get promoted and then immediately stress test the system.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9
- Colors a dinosaur
- Colors a dinosaur
- Colors a dinosaur
- Colors a dinosaur
- Colors a dinosaur
- Colors a dinosaur
- Colors a dinosaur
- Colors a dinosaur
- Colors a dinosaur
- Colors a dinosaur
- Colors a dinosaur
- Colors a dinosaur
- Colors a dinosaur
- Colors a dinosaur
- Colors a dinosaur
- Colors a dinosaur
Well, yeah, you're seeing this correctly. Color a Dinosaur as a submission that could be taken as "legitimate". Is it? I dunno, I'm only an administrator of this Web Site and the primary point of contact for matters regarding what is and isn't acceptable. What do I know? God, I wish that was sarcasm.
Inspired by internal discussion of
#8191: warmCabin's NES Color a Dinosaur "four color theorem" in 08:11.72, and at the incredible persistence of Samsara, we attempted to figure out a standard ruleset for the ultimate TASVideos meme. As a result of that discussion, I decided to make and submit these runs as a way of taking the discussion directly to the community in the most blunt way possible. By the way, you're damn right I copy-pasted this submission text over to the other run with only minor changes!
I'm going to try and make a case for these runs, because I don't think there's a single thing about them that isn't "controversial" in some way, meaning there's a possibility that I will be cancelled over Color a Dinosaur.
The Game
Is Color a Dinosaur a video game by our definition?
- A video game is audio/visual. It presents its content on some electronic device in audio and/or video form.
- A video game is interactive. It requires repeated user input to progress.
- A video game poses a virtual task. It requires the player to accomplish some in-game job.
- User input is transformative. Which set of suggested in-game choices you make determines optimality level of your play.
- A video game is finite. It has an objective end point, or a community vetted one.
This is definitely an audiovisual experience in that it has both audio and visuals, there's an interactive element in that it receives, process, and requires user input, the virtual task is quite literally the name of the video game, input is transformative and gameplay can be optimized since certain colors take longer to fill in than others, and even if there's technically no objective endpoint the community can always figure one out.
I think it counts, miraculously.
The categories
I've submitted an any% and a 100% run. Any% colors the fastest dinosaur, while 100% colors all 16 dinosaurs. One of our discussion points was over whether or not any% can even be achieved in a game that has no ending. Personally, I think any% serves a secondary optimization challenge in finding the fastest dinosaur to color, so I think it can stand on its own. 100% should be acceptable either way, in theory.
The, um... "Coloring"
This is where I expect things to fall apart for these runs.
Here's a sentence that, surprisingly, I am not shocked to be typing, but only because it is not the first time I have done so: How do we define coloring? If we all agree that the goal of speedrunning Color a Dinosaur is to, well, color a dinosaur as fast as possible, then we need to define coloring. There are three ways of going about this, from my testing:
- Actually coloring the dinosaur
Everything starts out white, so for the dinosaur to be considered colored, the player needs to actively add non-white to the dinosaur in order to consider it colored. This is extremely time-consuming, so...
- Coloring the dinosaur the same color it already is
This game offers 4 color palettes (8 if you count the duplicates where some colors are obnoxiously flashing), and the third color in each of those palettes is the default color that everything uses when a dinosaur is dino-selected. If you try and paint over a section that's already the color you're trying to use, the game will audibly recognize that you are trying to do so, meaning you are essentially applying a new coat of color to your dinosaur.
- Counting any change of color no matter how it's achieved
Switching off of the starting palette changes the default color off of white, essentially "coloring" everything on screen in one smooth move:
So that leaves us with the question of whether or not this actually counts as coloring the dinosaur. Color is being brought to the dinosaur, yes, but are we coloring it, actively? Or are we merely altering our perception of the dinosaur? Am I really, unironically, getting this philosophical on a tool-assisted speedrun videos dot org submission? The answer to at least one of those questions is yes!
Final thoughts
Yeah, I have no idea what's going to happen here. There's, weirdly, a lot to consider for a game that we initially thought could never be published, and I could see any decision being made at any point in the discussion because of that. Hopefully we come to a conclusive one. As a family. A family of colored dinosaurs.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
Samsara: Clearing the branch, as people in the
other submission seemed to be in favor of this one being the actual any% run.
Am I scared that my boss will demote me? Yep!
The one point, brought up by
feos, is the concern over the following rule:
- A video game poses a virtual task. It requires the player to accomplish some in-game job.
The fact that this game doesn't really provide feedback or an indication that the goal has been achieved, is a consideration that needs addressing. The object is "Color A Dinosaur", but now I'm in a position where I have doubts. When a player is done with each dinosaur, you press "Start" to end that screen. If a goal was met, the game would be able to determine that it was successfull.
I'm out.
Samsara: The more I think about it, the less sense any of it makes to me. There really can't be a goal for this game that isn't user-defined, so trying to make a standard publication for it is most likely impossible. I may have been blinded by my dream of making sure every game can be published here, when there really are just some games out there that can't be.
The meme may officially be dead, now. (EDIT:
haha oops whoops) Cancelling this run.
