Posted: 12/5/2010 11:59 AM
Post subject: Bejeweled Blitz
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PoochyEXE
He/Him
Active player (273)
Joined: 12/5/2010
Posts: 32
First of all, hey everyone. I've been browsing the site for a long time, but I've never registered until today 'cause I didn't have anything which I thought was worth contributing until now. Anyway, not too long ago, I made a Facebook account for the express purpose of fiddling around with the games, and then I discovered a way to TAS Bejeweled Blitz: Slow it down to 1/10th speed, play in slow motion, then post the replay at the end, which will play back at full speed. I've also discovered two truly marvelous "glitches": First, if a match is made while one or more of the jewels in the match is still in a movement animation, the match isn't cleared until all jewels involved are done animating, giving the player the opportunity to add more to the match. Second, if you use a Hypercube on another adjacent Hypercube, it obliterates the entire board. A bit of investigation shows that the replay link simply encodes something like an emulator movie in base 64, which is then passed to the replay player as a parameter in the URL. For example, this link should lead to my best TAS effort thus far. My question is, would this be an acceptable way to submit a TAS to the site? (And if so, would the above link be an acceptable video?)
Posted: 12/5/2010 2:37 PM
Post subject: Re: Bejeweled Blitz
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Warp
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
PoochyEXE wrote:
Anyway, not too long ago, I made a Facebook account for the express purpose of fiddling around with the games, and then I discovered a way to TAS Bejeweled Blitz: Slow it down to 1/10th speed, play in slow motion, then post the replay at the end, which will play back at full speed.
The random number generator on such a flash game is most probably not tied to user input (as is the case with most games in the old consoles), and possibly not even to any timer (in other words, the RNG is probably just seeded once when the game is started and then values pulled from it as needed). However, even in such a situation it would still be possible to "abuse" the RNG to give more favorable tiles by choosing some moves instead of the most obvious ones (even if the colors of the new tiles are always the same, their placement can be affected by how you destroy existing tiles). However, this kind of optimization would require savestates, which doesn't seem to be possible, according to your description. This would reduce the optimization possibilities. As for whether such a run would nevertheless be accepted, that's up to discussion. (Personally I don't find it objectionable. It's a replay file played on an "unmodified" game, so at least on that regard it seems acceptable; unless, of course, there's a way to cheat by hex-editing the replay file to do things which are impossible.)
Posted: 12/5/2010 5:38 PM
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Derakon
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
If the replay file is indeed a replay file, you should in theory be able to do everything that a traditional emulator can do by editing that file. It'd just be horrendously tedious because you'd have to play back the entire movie to see what effect your edits had. Generally, my opinion on this kind of thing is that it does meet the standards for "tool-assisted"; the only remaining question is if it meets the standards for entertainment.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 12/6/2010 6:54 AM
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Patashu
He/Him
Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 4043
It's enough of a staple of casual gaming that it would be amusing enough to see it obliterated.
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Posted: 12/13/2010 8:57 PM
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criticaluser
Former player
Joined: 11/6/2010
Posts: 88
Location: Argentina
Wait a minute, you can just slowdown the game's speed to 0% and you can move all the jewels at the same time (as long as you can form a row with one movement you can add another jewels).