Improved Tetris run that beats nico's by 14 seconds. This was actually started in January, but I put it off for a long time until recently ...
Most of the improvement came from keeping the blocks as high as possible before each tetris, often high enough that no more can fit ... which was also harder to do, because I had to manipulate luck a lot more for this, as shown by the heavily boosted amount of straight bars. Since I also found a way to manipulate luck by holding Down in certain ways, that minimized the pausing needed.
You might notice that I hit 999998 from the last tetris, then get the last point while getting Game Over ... this wasn't purely by coincidence. I actually ended up with 999891 and had to go back and hex edit more Down button presses in to gain the missing points, and then thought about doing just enough for this interesting effect.
Sure, why not, I'll give it a shot. Someone please correct me if I'm way offbase here, but it seems intuitive enough...
Videogames and the systems they run on are, in essence, a computer. Computers cannot be random, they're simply not capable of it. What they CAN do is use hash functions. They determine random events in the game such as drops from enemies, or in this case the block sequence, by measuring things that shouldn't be easily manipulated like the exact amount of time elapsed or the button sequence, then use it as the input for a random-number generator. With tool-enhanced runs, these not-maniuplatable things suddenly become not only possible, but quite easy to manipulate and it's suddenly not out of the question to have the enemy that happens to be right in your way drop exactly what you need at the time....or in this case, to get exactly the block to keep from topping out. Changing which frame you fire the shot to hit that enemy at, or randomly adding buttons, or even pausing, changes the input to the random generator and comes up with a different effect - trial and error eventually yields the one you're looking for.
YtterbiJum, on SMB3:
I've tried 20+ times and it always desyncs there. Unless, of course, Genisto meant to die, use a star on the map screen, go in a pipe, and jump around till time runs out.
I didn't watch the earlier versions of this run because I assumed it would be boring, and it was. My initial objection to the idea was because there is no "end" to Tetris in Mode A, so the object of the run was to reach a certain arbitrary score, and then lose on purpose. Having seen it, I quickly realized that you really only need to watch for a minute to have seen everything worth seeing, and then you just have to wait out the clock until the score reaches 999,999. Mode B, on the other hand, has a definitive ending. My personal suggestion is to use the "hold A" trick to add 10 levels and beat Mode B at 19-5, and let that be the Tetris run for this site, obsoleting the Mode A run. It's a game that has an end, played at the highest difficulty, and it won't last long enough to get repetitive.
TASing or playing back a DOS game? Make sure your files match the archive at RGB Classic Games.
Joined: 4/16/2004
Posts: 1276
Location: Uppsala, Sweden
I voted yes.
I think it's a cool idea and it's sort of relaxing watching a Tetris movie such as this. I would wish though that the movie was longer actually. It takes quite some time to get to level 20, and that is when I think it's starting to get cool. How far can one go like this? And also the colors changes ;)
Mode B would be cool also.
That was awesome! Unlike the previous versions of this movie, I actually watched this all the way through without fastforward. Very entertaining.
I also liked how the music stays fast for almost the entire session, instead of switching back and forth a lot.
Amazing, exciting at all times, although could be a stressful watch too, seeing all them blocks RIGHT at the top almost all the time and still being able to continue...just too much excitement. Also liked the music-stuff CtrlAltDestroy pointed out...umm...yes vote from me. :)
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2161
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
Voted YES.
I think that the movie was entertaining, fast, and very well executed. It looked like there was a lot of planning behind this movie too. Excellent job.
Bisqwit (or whoever wrote the blurb with the Grand Master 3 video), how exactly do you access the videos on that site? The site map doesn't seem like there are videos anywhere. I just get a game publisher's site for releases. I got all excited too, thinking I was going to see an Espgaluda video. =p
nicely done acmlm. the main advantage is putting off the tetris as long as possible before clearing for highest stacking. i gave the game another crack today. this time i played it a row higher-- it isn't much more difficult than before; but even with that advantage, i was still behind some frames after the 80th clear. i suppose improvement could be done by playing off the 11th row while procrastinating the tetrises even farther. unfortunately i'm way too burnt out for that right now. so good job (for now).
edit:
for the post above me, go to www.arika.co.jp and click on the left bar where there will be movies.
Watch the video carefully, there's a part where a piece should end this game but doesn't; leaving a 3 block piece in play.
Score is 240195 when this happens at the top of the screen. Does that invalidate the run?
> Watch the video carefully,
Easier said than done :)
> there's a part where a piece should end this game but doesn't; leaving a 3 block piece in play.
While waiting for the author of the movie to explain why what you perceived, happens, please be reconfirmed that this is actually how the game reacted to the input the player submitted.
The submission from the player is not a multimedia video file, but a recording which describes the input to feed to the game.
The AVI you probably watched, is the result of the game reacting to that input, with no possible video editing taking place.
All of this is of course explained at our Why And How page, which you undoubtedly have already read as prompted by the movies page, haven't you?
> Watch the video carefully,
Easier said than done :)
> there's a part where a piece should end this game but doesn't; leaving a 3 block piece in play.
While waiting for the author of the movie to explain why what you perceived, happens, please be reconfirmed that this is actually how the game reacted to the input the player submitted.
The submission from the player is not a multimedia video file, but a recording which describes the input to feed to the game.
The AVI you probably watched, is the result of the game reacting to that input, with no possible video editing taking place.
All of this is of course explained at our Why And How page, which you undoubtedly have already read as prompted by the movies page, haven't you?
I'm certainly well aware of encoding issues and how watching the movie on incompatible software might cause ghosting. That's not the case. I'm also not even sure if your submission rules allow for such a thing, it might be a game glitch and perfectly acceptable. It still however, is a piece that goes above play and play continues (the 3 block piece is seen until removed by a tetris), not an encoding error in the movie. You can easily step through frame by frame when the score nears 240195 to see this. Since I cannot (for the LIFE of me) get the fceu movie files to playback correctly, I do watch the movies hosted here. Most of them are amazing, including this one, but the one flaw happened to catch my eye and I thought I'd sign up here and ask about it.
Nowhere in my post I said anything about "encoding issues."
Perhaps, please read my post again and this time try to understand what I wrote, instead of seeing me write "AVI" and you guessing the rest.
Nowhere in my post I said anything about "encoding issues."
Perhaps, please read my post again and this time try to understand what I wrote, instead of seeing me write "AVI" and you guessing the rest.
...yes, it sends controller commands to the emulator. I get it. I always got it. Thank you for pointing me to that information until I repeat it back to you.
Now that you know, for *sure*, that I understand what the submission was, how it worked, and that it was in fact due to either a flaw in the game or in the emulator, is comment on if that affects the submission. Lots of game glitches I see accepted, but in the case of Tetris, if you play above the line limit, and continue, it's not *really* tetris anymore...
On a personal note, not every lurker to put up a first post is ignorant of everything you guys do here, has failed to read the many informational pages you've made prior to posting, and deserves to have their question overlooked because of an assumption of ignorance. I really thought maybe I was offering something here because it seems to have been missed. I sure didn't want to get defensive over my post, or be patronized for it.
All that aside, what the speedrunners do is exceptional, and I think they deserve immense credit for the runs they make. They have a lot more patience than I do, and I enjoy watching many of my old favourites here.
I'm sorry to have offended you. What your first post made me believe is that you're saying "I see something happening that can't happen in this game, is this movie fraud?"
Upon that interpretation of your post, I replied.
And I still can't interpret that post in any other way...
Ps: Flaws are part of the games.
From a PM, to clarify myself as I've not been succinct with my previous posts:
It's easy to mean one thing and have it read as another. For that I apologize and "fraud" was clearly a mistake to use. I also do not wish to start off here coming off offensive and I may have done so. I'm sorry if so.
I'm not thinking of fraud in an intentional sense, but more of a corrupted rom, perhaps? The only reason I ask is that this glitch seems to go against the "movie should look like it could have been played with an authentic hardware" and "We do not accept hacked games" rules.
It may very well not break either of those, but it seems to and I'm not experienced enough to know for sure.
I'm not thinking of fraud in an intentional sense, but more of a corrupted rom, perhaps? The only reason I ask is that this glitch seems to go against the "movie should look like it could have been played with an authentic hardware" and "We do not accept hacked games" rules.
It may very well not break either of those, but it seems to and I'm not experienced enough to know for sure.
A video game like Tetris is nothing but a complicated list of commands which must be executed on a player's input. Emulator itself can't add any new commands or severely corrupt the old ones. It's just the game itself that was designed to fit human's ability to play. There are no games that could need, for example, 30 Hz input (that is, mashing one or more buttons 30 times a second) to continue. That's just impossible.
Sometimes games don't know what to do in such a case (that is, an inhuman ability), and they may go a little bit insane, which is the case you're seeing here. :)
So, there's nothing wrong with it. If you watch some other videos with the "abuses programming errors" tag, you'll see much more crazy examples of that.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
In most versions of tetris (and any other falling block style puzzle games) you only lose if the space your next piece appears is blocked off. You're allowed to go off the top of the visible field as long as you don't block the piece entrance.
So, there's nothing wrong with it. If you watch some other videos with the "abuses programming errors" tag, you'll see much more crazy examples of that.
In most versions of tetris (and any other falling block style puzzle games) you only lose if the space your next piece appears is blocked off. You're allowed to go off the top of the visible field as long as you don't block the piece entrance.
If the only problem you have with th emovie is that one of the pieces goes above the playfield and play continues... well, like the previous post, that's perfectly allowed as long as there is a space exists under the block spawn. I have the cart and a real NES, and I used to do it all the time -- I even got it to, at one point, put blocks through another one (perhaps I should demonstrate this!)...
The NES tetris is just silly overall anyway. =P
