This topic is for the purpose of discussing #6092: ThunderAxe31's GB Rolan's Curse "hardest password, game end glitch" in 04:36.89

Don't know what happened or how happened xd but is interesing to investigate it

I would like to note that the Guidelines state the following:

In cases where the difficulty does not matter at all, such as in glitched runs that skip straight to the credits, then you do not need to change the difficulty at all.

Whether this run is actually acceptable or not, the Guidelines were not followed here.

That guideline is clearly referring to runs that don't encounter difficulty-affected gameplay at all, due to the game being skipped in its entirety. Instead this run is facing some gameplay affected by the "difficulty" before skipping to the credits.

Even then, if all this "difficulty" does is lowering your HP, for such cases it's advised to use easiest:

Good reasons to use easier difficulties are:

• More health for damage boosts

And indeed, the current publication Takes damage to save time.

In my opinion, having more health doesn't necessarily make a run more impressive; it entirely depends on how trivial the damage abuse technique is. When I read the term "damage boost" I usually think of games in which getting damage can be abused and optimized for gaining some temporary speed boosts, or even performing zips. But in Rolan's Curse, there is nothing notable in taking damage, as it simply allows to pass through the enemy; instead, it's true the opposite: if you have less health, you have to put more work in the routing of health power-ups and health refills. Otherwise I could have simply used a password that maximizes the player's health to 16 hearts, which would result in a plain run that simply walks through every single enemy because it wouldn't need item drops at all (except for the pickaxe).

If there was an easier in-game difficulty that would maximize your health, it would also be a valid option to choose that. However this is just a guideline anyway. The actual problem is the very fact that you basically hard-code your HP to minimum through a password. Since the game stores progress in passwords, rather than unlocks special features, it can't count as unlocking this pre-existing difficulty mode which doesn't seem to exist.

I understand that. Still, I wanted to make and submit this movie, since this wasn't clear to me and I wanted to test this TAS idea, since there aren't precedents for the sort.

Right, which is why I want to actually ensure this is just an arbitrary password option, rather than proper internal mode.

In my opinion, having more health doesn't necessarily make a run more impressive; it entirely depends on how trivial the damage abuse technique is.

I agree with this, ThunderAxe31, and with your decision to improve your existing publication in this manner.

When I read the term "damage boost" I usually think of games in which getting damage can be abused and optimized for gaining some temporary speed boosts, or even performing zips.

I agree this.

if you have less health, you have to put more work in the routing of health power-ups and health refills.

To create a powerful run, for me it's more interesting to watch this with RNG manipulation ( power, health...) and if it's an only possibility to unlock max difficulty, then... I say yes!

From a viewer's perspective, I could see this password having merit in a full game run. But "game end glitch" already screams "use any means necessary to go faster", and this password does the polar opposite of that.

From a viewer's perspective, I could see this password having merit in a full game run. But "game end glitch" already screams "use any means necessary to go faster", and this password does the polar opposite of that.

Then, would for this branch be more appropriate to use a password that makes the game easier, in your opinion? If not, why?

After having read the manual, I don't even think we need to look for any hidden difficulty only consisting of a single downgraded stat that this movie might've accidentally unlocked. The whole point of the password system in this game is to save player's progress, and the password is updated very frequently. It's a simplified way to save your game state at almost any time. So the password is basically poking memory as well, setting everything to desired values, even unrelated to what you had previously. It's not a set of combinations that trigger certain events, it's 4 bytes storing encoded game state.

Thanks £e Nécroyeur and zoboner, I didn't expect to receive so much support for this TAS idea. My reason for submitting this movie was to test the rules and see how such submission could be handled. The text for the relative rule was soon improved in order to make it clear that the password usage is permitted only for unlocking a hard-coded difficulty, which does not apply for the situation in this submission. As feos mentioned, the password in this game is used for storing and resuming game progress, which is different from unlocking game contents. Another important thing to note is that the rule can be objectively enforced by doing some basic reverse-engineering. I did it myself before making this movie, as I used trace logging in order to see how the password system works. As feos mentioned, the password is merely storing 4 bytes of data, which are used by the game for determining the game data. I couldn't spot any function that looks for a specific password, so there is really nothing hard-coded to unlock here. I also understand the reason for this rule now. For games that use a password for storing game data, it's basically impossible to figure out how to make the game objectively harder. The data used by Rolan's Curse is very simple, however I had to put some thought in order to decide if using the Sword or the Wand. Let's look closer at the problem:

• The Sword can only hit from point blank, while the Wand can hit from some distance but does half damage.
• The Sword is the initial weapon when starting a new game from scratch, while the Wand needs to be found in a chest in order to be obtained.
• Sword and Wand replace each other when one of them is picked up from a chest.
• The Sword is always faster for killing bosses, which is the biggest time save in the whole game, however the Wand makes casual play much easier.

So, which one to choose? For my TAS I decided to stick with the Sword, just because it's the stock weapon. However, making a password that makes you start with the Wand would inevitably result in a slower movie, and thus it could feel harder. In any case, we would enter in an endless argument about which one is more appropriate for a truly hardest play. And this is just Rolan's Curse, which stores very little data in the game password. Now just imagine how messed it could get if we had more settable data to debate of. This doesn't allow for any kind of clear cut, so it shouldn't be allowed as main branch for publication. And the other hand, this submission isn't providing enough differing movie contents for warranting a separate branch, nor meeting the entertainment requirements of the Moons tier.

For my TAS I decided to stick with the Sword, just because it's the stock weapon. However, making a password that makes you start with the Wand would inevitably result in a slower movie, and thus it could feel harder. In any case, we would enter in an endless argument about which one is more appropriate for a truly hardest play. And this is just Rolan's Curse, which stores very little data in the game password. Now just imagine how messed it could get if we had more settable data to debate of. This doesn't allow for any kind of clear cut, so it shouldn't be allowed as main branch for publication. And the other hand, this submission isn't providing enough differing movie contents for warranting a separate branch, nor meeting the entertainment requirements of the Moons tier.

When we're talking about hardest in-game difficulty, we have guidelines that provide tips on which to pick. While a movie using unjustified difficulty can theoretically be rejected, in general it's still just a guideline, not a strict rule. So stick to whatever makes the movie faster or more impressive, depending on the factors the guideline addresses. But if we allowed arbitrary tweaks that affect difficulty, but don't represent any sensible in-game mode, it indeed drowns in all sorts of ambiguity and unvaultability. But on top of that, using codes to hack these tweaks in is not justified by the spirit of the rules. They talk about codes used to unlock things, so things have to be actual entities defined in the game. If the code allows you to set arbitrary ammo, you don't unlock 20 bullets if you normally have 10, neither do you unlock 21 - you just program them in directly. The only difference in the case of this movie is that it programs unfair disadvantage through the codes. And that disadvantage is also (and still) arbitrary. You're right that in some cases arbitrary tweaks through in-game codes might be entertaining and unique enough for Moons. But that's still unreliable, since it has to represent some sensible goal. Clearly none of that is the case with this submission.

om, nom, nom... juicy!