Random Video Game Crap
- Thread starter Frank
- Start date
In the speed run community, they usually quantify the type of run, whether it's using known glitches or outside tools. So you'll have one time for people purposefully avoiding those glitches, one time for people who are using anything in the games engine as fair play, glitch or not, and a separate time for both if using tool assists.
I think it's the latter. A lot of AAA games offer mechanics that are somehow clunkier than their predecessors for reasons that aren't apparent, or just fail to execute on ideas that other games deliver very well. Mass Effect Andromeda is a great example of this - somehow the facial animations are worse than Dragon Age Inquisition, the gear customization system is awkward to use, etc. Like you can see there's a great game somewhere in there, but the way it's presented and the tools at hand somehow hinder the experience rather than benefit it.
Essentially, there's no real excuse for a modern game fucking you with the camera, or having clipping issues, or being released with game-breaking bugs, or being launched with inadequate support, and yes I'm looking at you, Ubisoft.
They're doing the computer game equivalent of Core Wars, where you are programming one computer to beat another computer.
Personally I'm somewhere between Nick and Poe on this. I agree that there's a definite line between "skill" and "abusing game mechanics," even when some game mechanics require skill to effectively abuse. It's the difference between playing a game v. treating the game (code) itself as a challenge to be conquered.
And if you want a good example of the difference, you have only to look back in history to how certain people managed to do so INCREDIBLY well on the Halforums stock market game...
--Patrick
I thought that was because they bought Netflix stock at the perfect time. >.>
figmentPez
Staff member
No, it's not playing the game, but it can be quite an art of programming in itself, and it can result in some pretty crazy looking stuff. It's like the difference between speed-cubing and building a robot that can solve a puzzle cube. For all apparent similarity, the reasons each are impressive are completely different.
Personally, I like that there are a lot of different categories to speed runs. As long as people can clearly define the rules for each category, people should be able to play the game they way they want to. I may not understand why using arbitrary code execution to prematurely show "The End" on the screen counts as completing the game to some people, but if there are people who have fun competing to do that, they can spend all the time they want cheering each other on.
Play the game the way you want to play it. As long as it's single player, or everyone agrees to the rules in multiplayer, it's all good. Warp-less Mario run? Great. Reverse boss order Metroid? Hell yeah. All white mage run of Final Fantasy? Uh... okay, if that's what floats your boat. Play it glitched, low-percent, Japanese 1.0 code, blindfolded, with your toes, one person playing both characters in co-op... Just have fun playing.
This right here is the kicker. There are too many people who keep glitches in their back pocket and use them to unbalance a competition, turning what would otherwise be a fair fight into a glorified bar bet.
--Patrick
I don't know if this game is worth getting yet, but by god, Jim was highly entertained by it. The real hilarity begins in the second battle, but everything is worth the price of admission for the video's last minute.
To come back to the "carry forward clunky stuff from a bygone era" for a second, while I doubt it's really applicable in this case, bear in mind that one man's clunkiness is another's preferred gameplay aspect. Some things that got "streamlined" out of games (series) make me sad, even if they got cheered on by thousands of others.
figmentPez
Staff member
I was about to say "Ghost Dad, Quantum Leap, or any other movie or TV show where a character is a ghost or hologram." but then I realized you were talking about the video above. Which made me think of the opening credits for "A Different World" but that's not quite the same as panning through an object, even though the camera pans from room to room past walls. Though there have been a lot of cartoons who have done the whole "pan to an underground location, past dinosaur bones and other buried objects" gag.
Now I really want to play that again.
GasBandit
Staff member
I checked if you were online that night, but you weren't. It was really a spur-of-the-moment thing.
Yeah I was out Friday night and last night I wound up dozing from about 7:30 to 11.
GasBandit
Staff member
Oh no, this was weeks ago. The "bullshittery" video format takes AGES to produce.
As I said to @Officer_Charon , say something in the l4d thread and we can make it happen.
Are you using animation paths/trackers? Or are you manually moving the stuff around the screen? It seems like creating a block of text and attaching it to a tracker would speed things up. A lot.
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
Manually. I don't think my version of premiere does that level of motion tracking, and because premiere supports tweening and keyframes, it's not ALWAYS frame-by-frame. But that's only, like, 25% of the time sink. Most of what takes so long is rewatching 4+ hours of game footage to trim it down to 10 (or in this case, 15) minutes of entertaining clips. That can be excruciatingly tedious, and I find I can't stick to it for more than an hour at a time and have to go do something else to recharge after that
figmentPez
Staff member
Nintendo, WHY?
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