This topic is for the purpose of discussing #6833: XTREMAL93's NES Mickey Mania 7 in 08:04.97

Why did you duck under the bird at 0:55 in the video? Couldn’t you have hopped on it earlier instead of having to duck under it?

Why did you duck under the bird at 0:55 in the video? Couldn’t you have hopped on it earlier instead of having to duck under it?

I still need to wait bird come to the left so i can jump from it to other platform. It is the fastest possible variant

Well, my side-by-side with the WR speedrun shows some impressive cuts. At first glance, I thought it was easy enough to keep up with the speedrun...but you demonstrate great execution that edges out the human run. There is not much to point out, in terms of optimization, as every thing looks well done. The run is well paced and has the ability to keep an audience engaged. Being the first submission for this game, I recommend any% branch and set for moons.

Fortunately the site has TASes of the Genesis and SNES versions of Mickey Mania for comparison. From the original 6 levels, the NES port retains some elements of all of them except for Lonesome Ghosts. It looks like the developer of the port put a good effort into the first level (Steamboat Willie) but then made significant chops to the rest of the game. The TAS beats the real-time speedrun by about 31 seconds. It looks like the TAS does significantly better at destroying the ‘wacky contraption’ at the end of Steamboat Willie (by about 10 seconds), but it’s still the slowest part of the movie. The movie doesn’t stand out too much from a real-time attempt in terms of doing nearly impossible actions. It mainly gives the appearance of a mistake-free playthrough. As stated above, Miki can’t jump far enough to land on the bird at 0:55, and so he needs to wait for the bird to come back far enough to the left so that Miki can jump to the horizontal pole. It’s well-played. The Genesis and SNES Mickey Mania movies are in Moons, but the quality of those games is vastly superior to the NES port. Compare the final battle against Pete from The Prince and the Pauper. The Genesis and SNES versions look almost the same visually, and the audio difference is the standard Genesis ‘twang’ vs ‘clean’ SNES sound. Whereas in the NES version, the wrecking ball and Pete (sorry, I mean ‘Dong’) are much smaller and grayscale. The background is an ugly pure green. And the music is almost unrecognizable noise rather than a genuine track. The white-on-white graphics in the Moose Hunter section are also a massive reduction in quality. But the visual of the spinning tower section is reasonably interesting considering NES limitations. Perhaps it is not as smooth as The Revolution from Battletoads, but it looks more advanced than in Castelian. Also the NES version accepts input only every other frame. Overall, it’s ok by NES standards, but it came out after every official NES game, and the bootleg quality is obvious. Super Donkey Kong 2 is a similar pirate port from SNES to NES that ended up in the Vault. ‘Miki’ is a beloved character around the world, but based on everything previously stated, my opinion is that this one belongs in the Vault as well.

Optimization looks fine. Nothing jumped out at me as being noticeably subpar. There still is a question though for how this shall be judged. The Movie Rules page seems to lump unlicensed games into the same category as hacks, though maybe slightly less stringent.

Unlicensed and homebrew games are eligible but may be judged on a game-by-game basis based on the quality of the game.

Based off of that, this movie may need to be judged by Moon standards, so the question is: does the game hold up? Votes aren't really that helpful yet. As of now, the run only has one vote in the poll. It's a yes vote, which is nice, but that's not enough feedback to be able to use the votes as justification, so we have to look at the game and run itself. Personally, I find this game fascinating. It's an interesting challenge taking a game that was designed for 16-bit systems and trying to make it into something recognizable on the 8-bit NES. While the people who did this game didn't necessarily to a great job, they didn't do a horrible job either. This is definitely recognizable as a port of Mickey Mania, and it's fairly easy to see what part of the original game inspired each of the areas in this NES bootleg. This could play in the game's favor, then again, it could not. Part of the fun of bootlegs is appreciating the awfulness of the product, a sort of so bad it's good effect. A game that's merely okay isn't really able to take advantage of the effect, so the run can't use that as a source of entertainment. As Arc said, the gameplay in this run looks like normal play, just incredibly clean. There aren't any TAS only stunts or entertaining glitches to look at. Most of the time, Mickey is just heading right and jumping over enemies and knocking them out of the way. The boss fights have a lot of built in waiting time, and Miki for the most part uses this waiting time to, well, wait. The only movement that happens during lulls is Miki positioning himself so he can act quickly the next time he needs to do something. That said, while the game is not good, it's not grating and some animations are nice to look at. This might barely qualify for Moons.

That a rule for vaultable games, and if we agree that this game's quality is worthwhile, it's acceptable for Vault.

It's not a hack, it's an unofficial port.

...Tbh the whole unofficial games sections of the rules should probably be rewritten. They're extremely confusing. I personally know how we actually handle bootlegs but it's not well written in the rules at all.

Agreed. The fact that there are two distinct sections related to the same topic is already confusing enough, but the wording needs to be updated as well. For example, do we even need extra rules for unlicensed/homebrew games if we've been accepting some of them to Vault? Especially with all the recent changes to what's allowed in Vault, it's feeling more and more like game choice doesn't matter nearly as much, so I don't really see why we need to specify that there's a difference there. I fully understand extra scrutiny for hacks (easier to make, much more prevalent, et cetera), but implying that everything else unofficial is subject to the same process doesn't feel quite right. And don't get me started on how I feel about "notability".

I mean we do have restrictions in that a bootleg etc can't just be a small modification of an official game, but otherwise yeah.

That's really just the same sort of rule we have for ports of licensed games... Wherever that rule is. Is that even a listed rule, or just something we've enforced on principle?

Yeah, I did interpret the section to mean that bootlegs and homebrews were judged with a scrutiny similar to hacks. I guess that's not the case. Sorry.

I repositioned them a bit, see if the current wording is still confusing.

This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [4276] NES Mickey Mania 7 by XTREMAL93 in 08:04.97

Updated the rules. http://tasvideos.org/MovieRules.html#NonOfficialGamesHacksHomebrewsEtcAndPrototypes