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Samsara wrote:
A few issues come to mind: First, how far should we take it? A game can be translated into potentially dozens of different languages. Do we want to handle all of them, assuming the translation patch exists and that someone is willing to TAS it?
In my opinion, the point of a translation (to viewers) is to change a game from something they cannot read to something they can; thereby making the game more entertaining to watch. I'd argue, then, that any translation to English should be allowed, and any other translation should not be.
feos wrote:
It looks like the time has come... to discussboard games once again!
Most importantly, quite a number of turn-based video games are, gameplay-wise, indistinguishable from board games; so I see no good reason to disallow boardgames when we allow runs on, say, King's Bounty or Railroad Tycoon.
In my memory, the two main arguments against boardgame runs is that (a) we don't want runs on 100+ chess games, and (b) most boardgame runs consist of luck-manipping the AI to commit suicide and that's boring to watch. I feel that both of these were good arguments back when the site had a couple hundred runs on it, but with the current set of (almost 5000) runs I don't see a problem with allowing boardgames.
We might (?) want to have a "one game per platfrom rule", meaning that (e.g.) any Chess run on Windows can obsolete any other Chess run on Windows, even if it's a different chess by a different publisher. I'm not saying this is necessary, but it alleviates the "thousands of variants" issue.
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I don't think "glitchless" is the right term here, because block jumping is also a glitch (and as Scrimpeh notes, really breaks the level design in some spots). "No major skip glitch" would be more appropriate.
That said, cool run, and yes vote.
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feos wrote:
Radiant wrote:
The site only recently added the Playground, and as I understand it, this new area already allows any and all cheats.
And that's fine. It just means that allowing cheats outside the Playground doesn't seem necessary, and I'd say it's changing too many things too quickly.
The point of Playground is keeping movies with esoteric goals that are not entertaining enough for Moons. If something entertains the general audience, why is it bad to publish it?
I thought the point of Playground is to keep movies that break the rules from Moons, and that they can break the rules by (a) not being entertaining, or (b) using cheat codes, or (c) breaking some other rule.
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The site only recently added the Playground, and as I understand it, this new area already allows any and all cheats.
And that's fine. It just means that allowing cheats outside the Playground doesn't seem necessary, and I'd say it's changing too many things too quickly.
However, I like the idea of using internal cheats that add more content, so I'll vote for that onw.
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What fun, I played this a lot as a child.
While the function keys are indeed a poor choice of controls, using F1 for left, F4 for right, F6 to jump, F8 to attack is at least playable and I've seen more awkward keyboard controls.
Winning the game by jumping into the chasm is clearly a bug, but those are fair game. The version I played, at least, blocks you from completing it the intended way by another bug (as one of the required passages back loops you to the same screen instead of the previous one). Another bug is that putting down the bow will give you the shield. although if you skip the bow, this is likely slower than getting the shield the normal way. Finally, IIRC getting 100% completion (which the game counts as "100% screens visited") requires you to kill yourself in one of the pit screens (the other two don't count because you can't enter those without dying, but the third does due to a bug). Anyway a 100% run wouldn't be interesting here.
Love the pacifist approach. Yes vote.
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feos wrote:
Codes are considered secret if the game never tells them to the player: neither through official documentation nor during gameplay.
For the sake of discussion, here are some oddball corner cases.
Bio Menace contains (1) codes like level warp and infinite ammo, that are mentioned in the manual and called "cheat keys"; (2) special moves like a fireball, that are mentioned in the manual and called "battle moves"; (3) hidden moves like a bullet shield, where the existence is mentioned in the manual (also as "battle moves") but the key sequence is not. Basically, "here are four special moves and we'll give you the key sequence for two of them".
Notably, the first game of the trilogy is free and doesn't come with this manual. The 2nd and 3rd are paid and do have the manual. The same controls work in all three games.
Might & Magic IV contains magical mirrors that can teleport you, and the game has (1) teleport codes that are explicitly mentioned in-game, such as "Rivercity" taking you to, well, River City; (2) teleport codes that are hinted at in-game, such as "Lord Xeen" (the big bad who is known to have one of those mirrors); and (3) codes that are only found by opening the executable in a hex editor, such as "Count du money" that puts you in a high-level area next to a convenient huge pile of cash. The third group is generally agreed to be cheat codes, but the distinction between the second and the third group isn't clear.
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I note that forum links from the old site design no longer work under the new site design, specifically the start parameter. This likely breaks a lot of old references and would be easy to fix.
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19741&start=400
(this link takes you to the first post of that thread whereas it should take you to post 400).
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DrD2k9 wrote:
I agree that "Minimum Jumps" is more readily understandable as what to expect when watching this run.
I agree as well.
Personally speaking, I prefer branches that are about in-character actions (e.g. "no killing", "no using the sword", etc) over branches about out-of-character mechanical things (e.g. "no using the mouse wheel").
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I agree, this doesn't look meaningfully different from a non-TAS playthrough; the game is just too short and straightforward and for that.
MESHUGGAH wrote:
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Crossposting from another submission with the same principle:
Radiant wrote:
Another game with a password system that has been thoroughly examined is Metroid. Documentation here; with a password, it's straightforward to start with, say, 250 missiles and 5 energy tanks. Would a run like that be more or less interesting than a standard Metroid run?
Personally, I feel it would be less entertaining, because it no longer shows the superhuman skills I'd expect from a TAS; with high enough stats/life/missiles, almost any player can get through the game with ease. So I suggest that such passwords should only be allowed in the playground area.
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This is an interesting topic.
Another game with a password system that has been thoroughly examined is Metroid. Documentation here; with a password, it's straightforward to start with, say, 250 missiles and 5 energy tanks. Would a run like that be more or less interesting than a standard Metroid run?
Personally, I feel it would be less entertaining, because it no longer shows the superhuman skills I'd expect from a TAS; with high enough stats/life/missiles, almost any player can get through the game with ease. So I suggest that such passwords should only be allowed in the playground area.
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CoolHandMike wrote:
Another person and I are working on a tas and we have been wondering about how to get a better community response to our tas. Specifically whether to use a death to skip a large portion of a level or to go through it deathless. Typically which is looked upon more favorably?
Well, if deathless means dodging large amounts of bullets and/or enemies on-screen, then I personally would consider that more entertaining. But I can't speak for "typically" or for "community response". It probably highly depends on the game.
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feos wrote:
Good rom hacks should just get properly published imo. If we're too strict, we should be less strict as long as the hack and the run are great.
But feos, that's precisely my point: should hacks be allowed in the playground if "the hack and the run are great", or should ALL hacks be allowed in the playground?
I do not think the site has been too strict in 2020-2021 about which romhacks were allowed.
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feos wrote:
Radiant wrote:
I don't want the playground to become unusable because of a flood of runs on poor quality romhacks, and so I believe that "no romhacks except in moons/stars" is a hard rule worth sticking to.
It's meant to be a part of game based navigation. Why would it become unusable? We'd just link hacks of a game as separate game pages.
Well, suppose I'm interested in NES Legend of Zelda; then it's likely I'm also interested in good romhacks of TLOZ. I'd expect good romhacks to be visible or linked from the TLOZ main page (or maybe from a "category:TLOZ" superpage), but this doesn't work if there's a ton of bad romhacks also linked.
For example, it's already the case that if I search the site for "Super Mario", the result is a list of ten romhacks but none of the SMB/SMW games are listed. So I'd say it's a valid concern that realistically, allowing any and all romhacks in playground will make it hard for people to find what they're actually looking for.
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feos wrote:
Radiant wrote:
This is a tricky one. Is it valid for the Playground to use a non-approved emulator, or a bad dump of a ROM, or any arbitrary ROMhack? What about Chess runs? Heck, what about submitting a movie on someone else's behalv (with proper accreditation) but without permission of the author?
As I mentioned above, we want authorship to be managed properly so nobody if affected in a bad way. About the rest, I don't see why not.
An issue I have is that the overwhelming majority of romhacks are of really poor quality, and that on sites like romhacking.net it's hard to find anything good because the quality romhacks are drowned out by the bad ones. I don't want the playground to become unusable because of a flood of runs on poor quality romhacks, and so I believe that "no romhacks except in moons/stars" is a hard rule worth sticking to.
The same applies to indie self-published Windows games.
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fsvgm777 wrote:
Radiant wrote:
Windows games don't run on Linux.
Windows games can run on Linux via Wine or Proton, though.
And Gameboy games can run on Linux via VisualBoy Advance; that's the same principle. According to WineHQ, roughly one-third of windows applications (including games) don't actually work on Wine, and 20% more have serious issues. It seems that it's actually easier to run Gameboy games on Linux, than to run Windows games on Linux.
Same deal with systems running Linux where Windows can't run on. For all I know,
For instance, you can run Linux on a Nintendo Wii. You cannot run Windows on a Nintendo Wii.
I mean, I've seen the opinion sometimes (mostly with console gamers) that "a computer is a computer and all computers are the same" but this is SUCH an oversimplification...
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feos wrote:
[*]Must break some Wiki: MovieRules (otherwise it just gets published)
This is a tricky one. Is it valid for the Playground to use a non-approved emulator, or a bad dump of a ROM, or any arbitrary ROMhack? What about Chess runs? Heck, what about submitting a movie on someone else's behalv (with proper accreditation) but without permission of the author?
Since "must reproduce" and "must have a goal" and "do not plagiarize" are also Movie Rules, it seems to me that Playground needs a division between "hard movie rules" that you cannot break, and "soft movie rules" that can be broken for the playground.
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Fortranm wrote:
I would say the most important reason is that a significant number of games have versions on both systems that are supposedly identical and this makes them overlap a lot.
Almost every modern game is released on multiple platforms. For instance, metroidvania game Ori And The Blind Forest runs on a Switch, an XBox, or Windows (incidentally, it deosn't run on Linux). These versions are purportedly identical. But I don't see anybody claiming we should merge the Switch and XBox consoles.
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Fortranm wrote:
The reasons should be self-explanatory so I'll skip this part :D
Windows games don't run on Linux.
Linux games don't run on Windows.
Windows runs on numerous types of hardware that Linux doesn't run on.
Linux runs on a whole lot of different types of hardware that Windows cannot run on.
...so they're clearly two very different systems, so how about we don't merge the two? You might as well propose to merge the Gamecube and Wii platforms, that makes about as much sense as your proposal.
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I understand from the publication notes that there are now three branches, but if I look at https://tasvideos.org/2159G then I see only two. Am I missing something?
