Myst. The epic puzzle game whose puzzles will take you hours to solve. Unless, of course, you know the answer and all you need to do is flip switches.
Emulator used: DeSmuME 0.9.5
Aims for fastest time
Colors a smiley
Comments
Although you'll encounter many brainmelting puzzles when normally playing trough Myst, all the game really requires you to do is flip the eight switches around the island, get the blank page and bring it to Atrus.
One of the hardest things about this is the fireplace code which must be obtained in order to get access to Atrus. However, this being a TAS, the code is known and is entered in the most entertaining fashion I could think of.
Special thanks for the SDA run for giving me the idea for this.
Suggested screenshot: frame 1417
Baxter: The amount of work one has to put into a TAS is not a reason in itself to accept of reject a TAS. Having to deal with a lot of routeplanning, lag reduction, luck manipulation and other things however does usually set the TAS apart from the speedrun. This TAS only differs from the speedrun in reaction time, which is even less of a difference than for instance minesweeper, where also the thinking time is avoided, and luck manipulation required. This is not the fault of the TASer, but the game. Rejecting due to bad game choice.
adelikat
Unrejecting this submission for consideration into the Vault tier
FractalFusion: Accepting for publication into Vault tier.
Firstly, popularity of a game is not something which should have an impact of whether a game will be published or not
That may be so in theory. However, sometimes it might be a good idea to use a more pragmatic approach: After all, we are offering a service to people, and sometimes it might be a good idea to offer what people want. Popularity of the game is one factor which can be used to determine whether people want to see a run or not.
After all, the rules have always been somewhat flexible.
(This was not an opinion on whether this particular run should have been published or not. It was just a generic opinion.)
My TAS didn't get published. Bummer, but ah well. Better luck next time.
Still, I'm glad I've submitted this. It stirred up more discussion than I had imagined and quite a few people seemed in favor of publishing.
I'm very much aware that making this TAS isn't the greatest feat ever, but I made this for it's entertainment value (hence I didn't submit after I edited it to include the smiley). And the popularity of the game, at least for me, adds somewhat to that value.
But I'll just continue working on my Layton TAS now... More puzzles, should be more impressive.
I thought this god damn site wasn't supposed to be about competition but entertainment. SDA is about competition. That's why it doesn't matter that we're cheaters.
This TAS is about seeing a great game killed quickly. I think more people would find this entertaining than a lot of the stuff we have. But whatever.
Also, yeah, big thanks Scepheo for making the definitive run as far as I'm concerned and for being less annoyed about the decision than I apparently am.
I thought this god damn site wasn't supposed to be about competition but entertainment.
It is not entertaining watching else someone play myst, though. Especially when they already know the solution to the overall puzzle.
Also, if you read carefully, that is exactly what mmbossman is saying.
To paraphrase: "There will be a winner, but this site isn't about competition so that doesn't matter. What matters is whether or not it is boring to watch."
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Joined: 11/18/2006
Posts: 2426
Location: Back where I belong
alden wrote:
mmbossman wrote:
Sure, someone will win, but who gives a shit?
I thought this god damn site wasn't supposed to be about competition but entertainment. SDA is about competition. That's why it doesn't matter that we're cheaters.
You're right, it isn't about competition. It is about entertainment. It's not entertaining to me to see tool-assisted mouse clicks, particularly since I've never played Myst and have no teary-eyed, moist feelings about it. True, maybe several million people have played it, but that doesn't mean it makes an impressive TAS. It doesn't do anything unexpected, nor "God-like". Expect me to feel the same if/when a run of Riven is submitted.
Edit: Upthorninja'd
Of course a game's popularity doesn't matter. Unless it's Ocarina of Time ;)
But seriously, why not just link the Youtube in the submission text? That way, anyone who's REALLY intent on sitting through this minute of triviality can do so simply by snooping around the site a bit. Surely that, at least, wouldn't be a big deal.
Also, since it was brought up: I personally adore the Lolo run. To see the complex puzzles that once baffled me for hours not only torn through at maximum efficiency (a nontrivial task) but executed with frame perfect precision has an incomparable charm to it, something not unlike watching complex engineering projects completed watching time lapse photography. There's just something so elegant about seeing complex problems managed with timeliness and efficiency. My guess is that if someone were to do a speedrun of that game they'd have to work backwards from the TAS, and even then they'd come up short.
The Myst run amounted to little more than a click-through sideshow. There was no depth to it. While it might be a small fascination to the fans of the game, you could say the same for any game that any game that has any kind of fan base whatsoever.[/i]
Joined: 7/29/2004
Posts: 136
Location: Temple City, CA
Ok, I'm too lazy to go back and quote all of the things I've read in here that really need replying to, so I'm just going to do a general reply.
First of all, this movie had over 60% of the votes on it for yes, with a larger meh % than no. Very few were against the publication of this movie. That means that a large majority of the user base of this site, which should be the primary source of opinion on what the site wants to see, either wanted to see this published or at the very least was not against the publication of it. So the will of a few who didn't enjoy it overrides the joy of the many who really did enjoy it. Didn't we go through this a while back with runs like the Crystalis TAS, which enjoyed a very long tenure unpublished for this very same reason. I thought this site had gotten past the point where games were rejected for these odd reasons.
The run was obviously technically well done. It was done faster than a human has been able to do it. It was highly entertaining to me, and many others on the site as well. These are the goals the site should strive for. I do not personally believe any game should be rejected because "It's just not a good game to TAS". Someone puts the time into it, others enjoy watching it, that's enough. You don't like it, don't watch it. No one will ever leave this site because it publishes a run of a game you don't enjoy watching, but people can and will be attracted to the site when that one off-the-wall game they happen to love is here.
Sad day at this site, sad day indeed.
"How can you prove you exist? Maybe we don't exist..."
-Vivi Ornitier (Final Fantasy IX)
The run was obviously technically well done. It was done faster than a human has been able to do it.
I'm not sure how well this sentiment stands up on a site where even such feats as getting through extremely difficult action games without taking any damage is deemed too "trivial" to warrant any consideration by runners.
Joined: 7/29/2004
Posts: 136
Location: Temple City, CA
Someone considered this movie worth running, so obviously not all runners share the same opinions about what is and is not trivial. Nor is this site only about the actual runners. There are a great number of people around here, like myself, who enjoy watching the runs, but do not have the time to make them.
Look, I'm all for rejecting a movie because it fails to entertain a majority of the user base. Reject it if it's sloppy and has obvious areas of improvement (even though there are times when runs with obvious improvements have been published before). Reject it if it's using a bad dump or switching versions without any reason for doing so. I just hate to see good runs rejected because a minority finds the movie uninteresting.
"How can you prove you exist? Maybe we don't exist..."
-Vivi Ornitier (Final Fantasy IX)
I find it hard to believe that anyone could deny the triviality of this run. That a certain niche might find it entertaining, I accept, but the fact remains that even if it was accepted it's technical rating would be abysmal:
Note that not all games are suitable for a TAS with perfect technical rating, similarly to how not all games are suitable for a perfect entertainment rating. Some games simply don't lend themselves for extensive technical achievements (eg. if they are too simple or straightforward, with no route planning, exploitable bugs, etc.)
In that sense, I don't see a game's being trivial as any different than a game's being sloppy. A lot of people might enjoy a sloppy run, but what's the point of publishing it if it does nothing to show off what TASing is capable of? TASing is TASing, not creating some sort of nostalgic rose-tinted video game museum.
Joined: 7/29/2004
Posts: 136
Location: Temple City, CA
I don't deny this run may be trivial compared to say a 100% run of Super Metroid. By the same standard, so are several other games on the site. That has nothing to do with being sloppy. The time it takes to do something and the quality put into that time is not the same thing. Get off your elitist high horse.
"How can you prove you exist? Maybe we don't exist..."
-Vivi Ornitier (Final Fantasy IX)
I don't deny this run may be trivial compared to say a 100% run of Super Metroid
There's an understatement if I ever heard one...
. By the same standard, so are several other games on the site.
Name one other run that consists of under a minute of pushing through a straightforward, linear path of input every 6 frames.
That has nothing to do with being sloppy. The time it takes to do something and the quality put into that time is not the same thing.
A stickman, no matter how well drawn, is still just a stickman. Sloppiness and triviality are just two sides of the same coin we call "dearth of technical accomplishment."
Joined: 7/29/2004
Posts: 136
Location: Temple City, CA
Name one run? Okay. Genesis King's Bounty (USA/Europe) in 00:09.93 by Giancarlo Rivas (aka. gia) & Jaakko Järviniemi (aka. Aqfaq). Not only does this run showcase NOTHING, but it is a STARRED movie. Yes, there's luck manipulation going on, but we're talking about an extremely trivial game here. In total the TAS pushes a button on the controller 17 times. That's pretty darn trivial.
To be sloppy is to do something with poor ability to do so. To be trivial is to be so simple as to be unremarkable in any way. These traits do not share anything in common.
This run is not trivial in that sense nor is it sloppy, so it would appear to me your coin needs to go flip somewhere else.
"How can you prove you exist? Maybe we don't exist..."
-Vivi Ornitier (Final Fantasy IX)
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
Hamm wrote:
Yes, there's luck manipulation going on[...]
Understatement of the century. That run is arguably one of the pinnacles of luck manipulation on the site, requiring (so claims the submission text) millions of rerecords in order to get the most optimal result (that could be found at the time - there have been arguments made that even that run is not completely optimal). The net result is to win the game instantaneously without satisfying any of the normal quests that would need to be undertaken in order to do so.
This is impossible without the extreme luck manipulation that went into the making of that run. No unassisted player could reproduce what you see there - it is superplay.
What here satisfies that criteria? As far as I can tell, there is nothing. The player simply runs through and solves the most critical puzzles as quickly as their clicking allows them to. Anyone could reproduce that input and achieve the same result. There is no benefit to tool assistance here other than the speed of that input.
By that token, there is absolutely no technical merit in this run.
Hi, sgrunt. It seems you're very convinced that we should have a TAS of King's Bounty over one of Myst.
You talk as if everyone is here just because of the competition aspect of TASing. You forget that most people are here because they like entertaining movies, they don't give a shit about most of the stuff you're talking about.
You (and your friends) have said that adventure games are just "inputting the solution as quickly as possible" and that can't be entertaining, period. Well, guess what: most people thought this movie was entertaining.
It might be surprising to you to know that there are some people who don't come here just to masturbate to a 4-frame faster Mario 64 movie, but rather they come here to see games they have played before, beaten as fast as possible and without any human mistakes.
sgrunt wrote:
That run is arguably one of the pinnacles of luck manipulation on the site
Who gives a fuck. If you didn't know there was any luck manipulation, it would bore you to death, which says something about a run which doesn't even lasts 10 seconds.
sgrunt wrote:
requiring millions of rerecords in order to get the most optimal result
Who gives a fuck. It could require billions of billions of rerecords; you're still totally missing the point of TASes.
sgrunt wrote:
The net result is to win the game instantaneously without satisfying any of the normal quests that would need to be undertaken in order to do so.
Who gives a fuck. Is it entertaining? No. The only people I see on that list who rated high the entertaining of that movie is the people who normally faps after looking at a rerecord count or after comparing the frame count of two runs and noticing a difference of one frame.
sgrunt wrote:
This is impossible without the extreme luck manipulation that went into the making of that run.
See answer above (hint: no one gives a fuck.)
sgrunt wrote:
No unassisted player could reproduce what you see there - it is superplay.
See answer above (hint: no one gives a fuck.)
sgrunt wrote:
What here satisfies that criteria? As far as I can tell, there is nothing.
Who gives a fuck. Only 5 people out of 35 voted "No" for this movie. I would say, except for the "TASVideos team", no one else gives a fuck about your criteria of a good run.
sgrunt wrote:
Anyone could reproduce that input and achieve the same result.
See answer above (hint: no one gives a fuck.)
sgrunt wrote:
There is no benefit to tool assistance here other than the speed of that input.
See answer above (hint: no one gives a fuck.)
sgrunt wrote:
By that token, there is absolutely no technical merit in this run.
See answer above (hint: no one gives a fuck.)
I hope you get the point.
You're just fucking stupid, everyone hates you, sorry to tell you the truth. no one likes you, you're someone pretentious and TASes only to be on speed game, but don't have any hope, you won't get there.
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
mz wrote:
sgrunt wrote:
The net result is to win the game instantaneously without satisfying any of the normal quests that would need to be undertaken in order to do so.
Who gives a fuck. Is it entertaining? No. The only people I see on that list who rated high the entertaining of that movie is the people who normally faps after looking at a rerecord count or after comparing the frame count of two runs and noticing a difference of one frame.
I disagree.
I'd have given it a reasonably high entertainment rating (7 to 8) simply because it was very obvious that the game should not have been beaten so fast. Essentially, it gets high entertainment ratings due to the WTF factor.
Myst lacks much of the similar WTF factor, apart from the fact that the answer for the puzzle is known without even finding any clues.
Joined: 4/8/2005
Posts: 1573
Location: Gone for a year, just for varietyyyyyyyyy!!
sgrunt wrote:
No unassisted player could reproduce what you see there - it is superplay.
To be honest, the King's Bounty feat is doable on a console. Trying it few thousand times would probably result in a successful game completion. If the speedrunner used 15 seconds per attempt, it might take him about 4-8 hours to achieve. The only difference would be few frames of human error in menu handling. The hardest part in King's Bounty was not getting the sceptre to the starting location, but doing it as fast as possible. Basically, the fast manipulation and fast menu handling are the only things that make the King's Bounty run inhuman. You could say the same thing about Myst: No unassisted player would ever be able to lose 0 frames and meanwhile draw a smiley. Anyway, the technical details are not relevant here.
I like the "average TAS stuff", but I also think that having more of these "short and funny" publications would do no harm.
I've watched the Myst run many times now and I still can't see anything not worth publishing in it. First the guy runs about two kilometers in twenty seconds, flipping a dozen of switches, then draws a smiley into a wall and meets a bad actor who says "Have you found the missing page? Come! Come!"
I think it's hilarious. Maybe I have a bad sense of humor.
Offtopic: Somebody should run King's Bounty unassisted!
To mz:
So who gives a fuck about this run? I don't and probably most of the visitors here don't, so who does? Listing you or Hamm as ones who do doesn't count, because who gives a fuck?</rant>
You can't just ignore opinions and views of the people running this site. If we would accept every single game for TASing, the site would be cluttered with meaningless and plain boring runs. This run might not be boring (I haven't seen it), but from the discussion I can see that it's pretty meaningless, as it doesn't offer anything that TASes usually do, except for the fast input, but that's not much.
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
Believe it or not, votes aren't everything around here. Just because a handful of people bothered to click a little radio button saying "yes" without bothering to back up their apparently weak opinions with some relevant commentary is no reason to publish a run - as I keep saying, justifying your opinion is far more important. As any person can tell by spending a couple of seconds working through the thread, just as many people that bothered to post an opinion said they were bored by the run as those that enjoyed it.
And despite what people seem to have come away from another recent controversial publication thinking, ENTERTAINMENT IS NOT THE BE-ALL END-ALL OF PUBLICATION OF A RUN; there are technical considerations as well. Allow me to quote from the guidelines:
Guidelines wrote:
Select your game well
Not all games have potential for entertaining TASes from a viewer standpoint. Select those games which give you a chance to make a TAS that entertains viewers. Just because a game is popular, difficult, or is entertaining to play or run or TAS, does not necessarily mean that it is entertaining to watch.
If a game is a good game to TAS, it should be possible to adhere to the guidelines:
* The game should give an impression of complexity; it should not be overly easy or straightforward.
* There should be enough variety to entertain. It should not have, say, 10% of it entertaining and 90% boring.
* It should not be too long.
* A TAS of the game can be distinguished enough from a non-assisted run.
* It should be impressive (for example, a chess TAS is often unimpressive).
* It should be able to have clear goals such as completion.
* It should not be a bad game in the first place, such that it distracts the viewers.
As an example of a bad game choice, see Front Line (this example is not an intention to mock anyone, as the author not only acknowledges how bad it is, but enjoys such fact).
If the submission can be watched at a greatly increased speed without missing anything, do think about the gamechoice.
Explain to me how a run of this nature satisfies those guidelines. Can't do it? Too bad. Guess there's not enough technical depth to meet those criteria. Oh, wait, haven't I been saying that since nearly the beginning of the thread?
On a personal level, let me get one last thing straight: I care nothing for competitive and/or ego-driven TASing. The point is to create something not only entertaining to watch, but also technically motivating. So as much as you would like to see something with zero technical merit published, the site has spoken that that will not happen.
(I will not post any more comments here, as I am getting excessively worked up over this. Can you tell?)
If you trust more a page that says it has all the answers "to make a TAS that is appealing to the audience" than a page which shows what the audience actually found appealing, then I think your problem is right there.
By the way, I know how the judging system works in this website. I still don't like it.
You're just fucking stupid, everyone hates you, sorry to tell you the truth. no one likes you, you're someone pretentious and TASes only to be on speed game, but don't have any hope, you won't get there.
To be sloppy is to do something with poor ability to do so. To be trivial is to be so simple as to be unremarkable in any way. These traits do not share anything in common.
I do find it ironic that your definition of triviality simply restates such near synonyms as "simple" and "unremarkable." Perpetually responding to these issues with banal tautologies does nothing to further the debate on what criteria ought to be considered in the selection of runs for publication.
Triviality is not a function of how many frames of input are necessary to complete a game; a game of chess lasts for fewer turns than any TAS but remains the crown jewel of combinatorial problem solving in computer mathematics. Tick Tack Toe on the other hand is trivially solvable by any astute grade schooler. Yet, the triviality of game is not merely a function of its game-tree complexity, but the complexity of the algorithm necessary for enacting perfect play; if the solution to a game is self-evident, easily memorable or easily reproducible then it is trivial.
If a live player can already play a game nigh to perfection and achieve everything worth seeing there's no point in excising that element of raw human skill in favor of pointlessly sending a TASer to waste their time in the frame-perfection meat grinder for the sake of churning out miniscule, invisible improvements. I mean, honestly, is there any reason to break out the cheats just to show that a game can be beaten the exact same way a couple of seconds faster?
I don't understand how folks like mz can get so livid over people's focus on frame perfection and then insist that a run like this, that distinguishes itself in no way way whatsoever besides doing what the speedrun already did to frame perfection, be published. I mean, honestly, if you're that serious about these games start a fan page or something.
To be honest, I liked this movie. As it was said, it feels like a video at a low frame-rate and it also feels fastpaced. Even though it's probably not the best run ever made I think it was a nice watch.
About the system being used (NDS): I think a run should be done on the system which the game first appeared on (PC). If that is not doable I would be in favor of a system which is very close or does feel very close to the original system, like maybe PSX or Genesis (I don't know which systems the game appeared on)... The NDS having two screens kind of bugs me. I just wanted to bring this up but as this wasn't published, this point isn't of much importance anyway.
Maybe I should come down in the middle and say that I wasn't exactly overwhelmed by this TAS, but I wasn't exactly underwhelmed either. I wouldn't have minded (?) if it was accepted instead, and I do not mind that it was rejected. I guess that means Meh.
I do mind that people seem to be getting very worked up about it. :/
