Thinking about it, it'd be amusing to have a world that actually WAS on a torus, i.e. shorter on one side of the map than the other to indicate that it's on the inner side of the torus.
That's what I figured given the v0.6. So I'll keep an eye on it
EDIT: Actually, I didn't realize the side/top arrows were actually changing gravity and let you jump off walls/the ceiling. That's cool, haha.
Here, have some ideas for tiles:
Cannon - Jumps off this surface have double the velocity, and perhaps a flame trail effect.
Rubber block - If you impact with it your velocity on that axis is reversed.
Glue block - when you hit its surface you get stuck fast to it - if the gravity is pointing the right way you can jump off, else you can move along it very slowly.
Toggle blocks - Either depressed into the background or repressed into the foreground. There is also a toggle switch block - whenever anyone hits a toggle switch block, all the toggle blocks flip. Possibly comes in multiple colours. Possibly also have a toggle proximity sensor block, which toggles the blocks whenever someone's close, and untoggles when no one is. Teamwork!
Conveyor belts - Vertical or horizontal with arrows indicating the directions of their two sides. When touching the appropriate side a slight velocity in that direction is added to your velocity.
Water - When passing through it velocity and the effects of gravity are halved.
Mist/Ice - Like zero g dots except you can't change your direction while inside of it UNLESS you have completely stopped. Think of it as zero g ice, perhaps. Any directional movement will accelerate you on your current path (in case you enter it at to low a speed) and presumably there's no friction.
One way wall - Lies on one side of a block with a direction indicating it - you can pass in the direction of the arrow but not the other way. Think N's one way walls.
Spikeball - Doesn't hurt you, just forces you to jump (irregardless of gravity) whenever you touch its sides. Ouch!
Save point - Set it as your active save point by entering it, use a 'teleport' command to reappear on its spot.
Assuming input is polled for at a finite number of times, you could just have a list of inputs as per normal, only it would read a line from the file once per input polling not once per frame.
If DOS shell commands are permitted, any game can be beaten trivially; simply edit the game's code until it sends you to a winning position fast.
There might be some entertaining uses to editing a game's structure before starting it, however - such exclusions would be arbitrary, but sometimes entertainment triumphs over all.
Isn't there a special kind of file that describes the difference between one kind of a file? If your hack is expressed as one of these files, anyone could confirm that you do nothing except what you say you do.
Even if it is still arbitrary.
Or you could go with a cylinder by having the top of the map link to the closest point on a separate, circle-shaped (or square shaped!) map, and similar for the bottom. Translations between the two areas would be inexact.
Nethack has already been speedrunned, anyway - by including a 'stuffed' bones file with everything you'd want in a run anyway, you can blaze through the game. The only limitation is that you have to wait until turn 2000 to do the quest - you can get the game over with not much after that.
Since this basically corresponds to the luck manipulation a TASer might do to, say, get many many wands of wishing, it practically already is a TAS.
I assume the low rerecord count is because of how easy it is to optimize gameplay once you have perfect control of everything.
I liked the little 'daredevil' stunts - dangerous jumps that you'd never see in a normal speedrun purely because there's no advantage to doing so. In fact, given how easy the game is otherwise to TAS, it seems like there ought to be as many such stunts as is possible to fit in.
I guess the implication is that it would be a bit weird to have a whole category on the site with one or two runs in it, compared say to the huge array of nes runs available.
But it's silly, because then you'd have to reject this run, and there's nothing wrong with the run.
Creating a spherical map that doesn't have distortion or awkward patchwork seems mathematically cumbersome, not easy enough to be worth the benefits it would give.
EDIT: Then again, Populous The Beginning does it, and that's only a PSX game. To be honest...I'm not sure -how- it does it.
I was actually surprised to see that the game was good - or looked good, at least - having never really looked into the virtual boy before.
The problem with making a monochrome encode is, of course, that neither the left nor right version is particularly special - which do you decide to use?
I can tell this was made because it was short and you already knew what route to take. ;)
Regardless, nothing to complain about!
Regarding how you said the enemy appeared in the worst possible spot, though, is it possibly because of some randomness seeded differently before the game began?
This was actually nice to watch - it helps that I have pseudo-nostalgic feelings for it, having seen a machine for it frequently but never played. So I guess for educational purposes, but seeing stuff done at blinding speeds is always good - and I actually think the little human element of having no rerecords might be a plus.
Typically deleting a file just removes the pointer in the directory to the block(s) where the data is stored, and marks those blocks as being free for writing, which is why it's so fast - the data is still there, just overwritable. This means that deleted data can sometimes be salvaged.
If the file is overwritten, which I'm pretty sure a full format does, then there's not much you can do to get it back.
I personally haven't played the game, but I've been reading about it lately - supposedly it has a rank system built into it, that makes the game harder the more advantages you give yourself, and the only way to drop it again is to die (and the less lives you have left when you die, the greater the drop). Why this is important is because the highest rank is supposed to be nigh impossible to survive on, so learning to manage your rank is part of the game. You can read all about it, and in particular the mechanics of the rank system in post 5, here: http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=351
What I want to suggest is that this would make a great TASing opportunity - playing around with bullet spreads that are supposed to be impossible. The goal would be one of two things: 'uses dirty RAM to play on max rank' (1) or 'achieves max rank as fast as possible on v.hard difficulty'.
(1) Note that the game also slightly boosts the initial rank with each successive game, lowering it only towards its base value with every uninterrupted cycle of attract screens - so it's possible without cheating to play starting at the max rank, but recording the whole process of starting games and suiciding would be boring.
Here's how the game looks on the max rank: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=battle+garegga+max+rank&aq=f
I'm not sure if it's the max rank of the v.hard difficulty or of a lower difficulty, though.
EDIT: Apparently, in addition to setting difficulty to v.hard and somehow achieving the max rank, you should also activate the 'harder' mode by pressing B, Start on the title screen. I'm not sure what this changes specifically.
Ages ago, I had a demo of this game on the PSX - even though it only went up to the end of the seven dwarves quest, I played it over and over. I'm not sure why I didn't ask for the full game. Kids are kids.
More recently then that, I've played through it on a playstation emulator, and it was a blast - I didn't quite get to the end, though, and I still left lots of side stuff uncompleted. Not sure what stopped me from finishing, but I do know that everything I found hard you blazed through - math beads in record time, every evil pig dispatched very quickly, the irritatingly easy to fall in lava caves, etc. So, yes for sure.
For the video comments - those two bulky paragraphs describe what you do in the early game could probably be trimmed down a lot. Just talk about things you needed to do for these parts, explain anything that look suspect and explain anything that you'd like to be able to do to make it faster, but couldn't. Just don't say anything you could infer by watching.
EDIT: Actually, after reading an faq, I have a question.
Now, when both flowers are open, jump on the blue one and throw it in
to the red one. If you've got it right, both mushrooms will fall off
the screen and a starred mushroom will be left behind. Pick it up.
*Event cleared: Red + Blue = ?*
Tombi will have turned black and white. This lasts until you lose your
next life, and makes him move a lot faster.
Would this save time, or does it not, say, boost animal dash?
While this doesn't apply to EBA, I thought of a way that a rhythm game playaround TAS could be made, but it first requires a game that does keysounding - e.g. when you hit the note determines when the sound is played, and you can hit notes while nothing is there to create sounds. So, something like DJ MAX, IIDX and Pop'n music.
What the TAS would do is deliberately mistime, omit and add in notes to create a new song. You'd have to work with what samples you can access at any moment (hitting a column when no note is in it hits the last note that played in it, so you can gain/lose access to samples), so it would be an interesting technical feat.
I'd love to hear how the heck they managed to screw up like this. What exactly is happening? Full details please!
I recall a similar glitch in Super Mario World where grouping three wrigglers in a way such that you can keep respawning them and bouncing on them pushed the 'reward you get for a jump' counter to ridiculous heights, reading random locations of memory and popping up absurd graphics/absurd coin/score rewards.
Perhaps this is similar?
