Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver - December 9th, 2012

2012-12-09 03:37:37 pm

1-Up!

Game Page: http://speeddemosarchive.com/SoulReaver.html

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (Any %) (Single Segment)

Verifier Responses

Quote:

I'll be giving this one an accept. No cheating detected, A/V is good. Even with the mistakes (which the runner admits to), the run was very well executed, even with the difficult controls and annoying enemies of the game. Assuming that timing would be from when the runner gains control of Raziel in the Elder God's cavern and loses control on the final hit on Kain in the Chronoplast, I would time this run at 2:10:43. I'm not sure if the differences between the PC and PS versions of the game are drastic enough to warrant this to obsolete the current run on the site (since that one was done on the PS version), but the time is definitely much, much lower than the current run and also has better execution overall in comparison.

Quote:

No cheating and A/V is good. The first thing i would like to say is that this run would not be able to obsolete the PS1 run due to the fact that the PC version runs at a faster speed for some reason and he is able to skip cutscenes towards the end of the game that are unskippable on the PS1 version. There are numerous mistakes in this run the biggest ones being when he fell into the spectral realm by losing all his health in the material realm. Especially on the boss fights it happens during the first Kain fight, The Miniboss fight, and during the last Kain fight. he also ran into some trouble with Dumah and decided that instead of running from him that he should fight him. I have no clue what he was trying to do there. Finally during the last Kain fight it looked like his strategy was to randomly run untill he found Kain. By standing in the middle in the healing ring Kain will go to the same spot twice this would have probably saved some time on that fight. There are also tiny movement mistakes in the run. 2:10:43 is the time on the run from when he gains control to the last hit on Kain. I wouldn't know how to compare this runs time to that of a ps1 run so im gonna have to go with a reject on this one based off of the mistakes alone. I really hope the runner will try to improve this there is some fantastic potential here it just needs to be polished a little more.

Quote from Verifier 1 again:

We discussed things a bit on IRC. I'll have to change my verdict to reject. Rewatching parts of the run that were mentioned, plus a few other areas, such as the room with the pipe in Zephon's territory (I know he mentioned why he did what he did in his notes, but it seems excessively bad), shows that the run needs more polishing before it should be on SDA. If the large mistake areas are cleaned up, I can see this getting an accept. The run is very well done overall, as I mentioned, but the mistakes actually do add up a lot.

Quote from Verifier 2:

Quote:

If the large mistake areas are cleaned up, I can see this getting an accept. The run is very well done overall, as I mentioned, but the mistakes actually do add up a lot.

This exactly

Decision: Reject

Reason: Too many sloppy errors

This run will be available for a month. After that this link will no longer work.
http://queue.speeddemosarchive.com/queue/verificationfiles/210

Thread title:

Game Page: http://speeddemosarchive.com/SoulReaver.html

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (Any %) (Single Segment)

[b]Verifier Responses[/b]

[quote]I'll be giving this one an accept.  No cheating detected, A/V is good.  Even with the mistakes (which the runner admits to), the run was very well executed, even with the difficult controls and annoying enemies of the game.  Assuming that timing would be from when the runner gains control of Raziel in the Elder God's cavern and loses control on the final hit on Kain in the Chronoplast, I would time this run at 2:10:43.  I'm not sure if the differences between the PC and PS versions of the game are drastic enough to warrant this to obsolete the current run on the site (since that one was done on the PS version), but the time is definitely much, much lower than the current run and also has better execution overall in comparison.[/quote]

[quote]No cheating and A/V is good.  The first thing i would like to say is that this run would not be able to obsolete the PS1 run due to the fact that the PC version runs at a faster speed for some reason and he is able to skip cutscenes towards the end of the game that are unskippable on the PS1 version.  There are numerous mistakes in this run the biggest ones being when he fell into the spectral realm by losing all his health in the material realm.  Especially on the boss fights it happens during the first Kain fight, The Miniboss fight, and during the last Kain fight.  he also ran into some trouble with Dumah and decided that instead of running from him that he should fight him.  I have no clue what he was trying to do there.  Finally during the last Kain fight it looked like his strategy was to randomly run untill he found Kain.  By standing in the middle in the healing ring Kain will go to the same spot twice this would have probably saved some time on that fight.  There are also tiny movement mistakes in the run.  2:10:43 is the time on the run from when he gains control to the last hit on Kain.  I wouldn't know how to compare this runs time to that of a ps1 run so im gonna have to go with a reject on this one based off of the mistakes alone.  I really hope the runner will try to improve this there is some fantastic potential here it just needs to be polished a little more.
[/quote]

[quote="Verifier 1 again"]We discussed things a bit on IRC.  I'll have to change my verdict to reject.  Rewatching parts of the run that were mentioned, plus a few other areas, such as the room with the pipe in Zephon's territory (I know he mentioned why he did what he did in his notes, but it seems excessively bad), shows that the run needs more polishing before it should be on SDA.  If the large mistake areas are cleaned up, I can see this getting an accept.  The run is very well done overall, as I mentioned, but the mistakes actually do add up a lot.[/quote]

[quote="Verifier 2"][quote] If the large mistake areas are cleaned up, I can see this getting an accept.  The run is very well done overall, as I mentioned, but the mistakes actually do add up a lot.[/quote]
This exactly
[/quote]

[b]Decision:[/b] Reject

[b]Reason:[/b] Too many sloppy errors

This run will be available for a month. After that this link will no longer work.
http://queue.speeddemosarchive.com/queue/verificationfiles/210

Greenalink

Edit history:

Greenalink: 2012-12-09 04:50:11 pm

2012-12-09 04:49:35 pm

DS Dictator

My reaction to this verification:

I haven't played this game since forever, so I didn't verify the run. But I hope the runner is encouraged for an even better run, missed these kind of games.

Fed981

2012-12-10 01:35:50 am

This reminds me that SDA has no run of Blood Omen... So sad...

Trigbits

Edit history:

Trigbits: 2013-02-17 04:32:10 pm

2013-02-17 04:29:28 pm

http://www.youtube.com/user/Trigbits

Even if a PC run would not replace a PS run (given the speed difference), the current run on SDA (for PS1) is pretty aweful so I'll definitely get around to cleaning up this run sometime so that a less sloppy representation of the game can be shown. Possibly not until the summer, since there are a few more games I'd like learn first. In the end a lot more polishing could be done. Goal is sub 2. I think it can be done.

As for Blood Omen, I'll just say this.... there's [probably] a really good reason no one ever speed runs that game (other than it's lack of popularity) =P

Fed981

2013-02-18 01:12:52 am

What could be this reason? I don't see.

Toothache

2013-02-18 04:16:10 am

Let the music play!

Guess I need to pull my finger out on SR2. We needs more Kain on SDA!

honorableJay

2013-02-18 08:01:53 am

The Dork Knight himself.

Quote from Fed981:

What could be this reason? I don't see.

"Fae Victus!!!!!!!!!!" (spelling is probably off but you get the idea)

Fed981

2013-02-18 09:05:33 am

"Vae victis" ?

Cranson

2013-10-13 04:55:09 pm

I know this is waaay out of date, and nobody will probably ever see this, but this has been one of the single largest examples of abuse of power I've ever seen within the speedrunning community, and you should all be ashamed of yourselves. The point of a verifier is to determine A: Whether the runner in question cheated at any point, and B: Whether the video quality is high enough to be acceptable. In this situation, both of these passed. The reason for rejecting a run should NOT be something as subjective as "Too many sloppy errors", ESPECIALLY when the run in question is over an hour improvement over the prior record. This kind of behavior is exactly why I got out of the speedrunning community, and the reason the community hasn't expanded beyond the borders it currently holds.

honorableJay

2013-10-14 12:56:14 am

The Dork Knight himself.

Simply because a run is an improvement over an existing run isn't necessarily the sole reason a run is accepted. For example, the latest run of Jedi Outcast (of which I was a verifier). Before recon submitted his run, another person made a run of that game which was at least a 10 minute improvement over LLCoolDave's old run. Simply going by timing, it was an easy accept. However, by looking at the actual footage, there were too many errors made that showed more polish was needed before acceptance. And when I say errors, I mean a run with just over 60 segments (when the older run had about 24) where most of the segments included bumping into walls/enemies and most segments did not have any tricks that required a new segment to be made.

I understand the frustration of a run getting rejected, but if we accepted every single run that was put up for verification then the amount of mediocre runs (ones that don't show mastery over a game) that get posted would far outweigh the quality runs we try to host. Simply using a glitch or programming error to get a lower time does not necessarily make one run better or more entertaining than another. If that were the case, a lot of runs would be obsoleted by a sloppy run that uses some glitch just to drop a few seconds from the final time while being slower in at least 80% of everything else.

Simply because a run is an improvement over an existing run isn't necessarily the sole reason a run is accepted. For example, the latest run of Jedi Outcast (of which I was a verifier). Before recon submitted his run, another person made a run of that game which was at least a 10 minute improvement over LLCoolDave's old run. Simply going by timing, it was an easy accept. However, by looking at the actual footage, there were too many errors made that showed more polish was needed before acceptance. And when I say errors, I mean a run with just over 60 segments (when the older run had about 24) where most of the segments included bumping into walls/enemies and most segments did not have any tricks that required a new segment to be made.

I understand the frustration of a run getting rejected, but if we accepted every single run that was put up for verification then the amount of mediocre runs (ones that don't show mastery over a game) that get posted would far outweigh the quality runs we try to host. Simply using a glitch or programming error to get a lower time does not necessarily make one run better or more entertaining than another. If that were the case, a lot of runs would be obsoleted by a sloppy run that uses some glitch just to drop a few seconds from the final time while being slower in at least 80% of everything else.

zastbat

2013-10-14 03:07:28 am

Lord Of The Beards

I was one of the versifiers for this and I will say this run had some bad mistakes that really should not have been made. He spent over a minute trying to jump up onto a ledge which wasted a ton of time and he also for whatever reason tried to fist fight a boss that is a puzzle and the fighting did nothing but waste time. Also don't say that because this is an hour improvement over the prior run which is on a different version it would obsolete it. The PS1 version run afaik would still have been on the site since the PC version saves massive amounts of time from the game running something like 10-15% faster. Even the runner admits that the run could use a ton of polish and he could probably get sub 2 hours.

tldr we treated this run as completely separate from the PS1 run as they are completely different and this run was sloppy needed polish (even the runner admits this) and would not have obsoleted the current PS1 run due to the massive speed increase on the PC version.

Cranson

Edit history:

Cranson: 2013-10-14 08:27:03 am

Cranson: 2013-10-14 08:26:24 am

2013-10-14 08:24:52 am

If we're talking percentages, even assuming the high end (15%), the old record was 3:16. This run was around 2:10. That is almost a 33% change in run time, making the version difference account for less than half of the time saved. Even without version differences, the run in question would have been 17-18% (something around 35 minutes) faster. As far as polish is concerned, just watching the first 10 minutes of the old record is painful, because the runner spends so much time fighting enemies he could have just walked right passed. If every run that made sloppy mistakes were denied, then no run would ever overtake records set when standards were lower. Not to mention the controls are some of the worst I've ever played, so I wouldn't really call platforming mistakes as "sloppy".

Regardless, I just needed to vent some frustration at the way SDA (and the speedrunning community in general) does things, because it straight up doesn't make sense to me a lot of the time. Sorry you guys ended up being the target for my frustration. I know the runner in question personally, and it's frustrating to watch his hard work denied, after waiting for a REALLY long time just to get the damn thing verified in the first place. I'll stop spamming you guys with criticism now, but I just wanted to put in my two cents.

If we're talking percentages, even assuming the high end (15%), the old record was 3:16.  This run was around 2:10.  That is almost a 33% change in run time, making the version difference account for less than half of the time saved.  Even without version differences, the run in question would have been 17-18% (something around 35 minutes) faster.  As far as polish is concerned, just watching the first 10 minutes of the old record is painful, because the runner spends so much time fighting enemies he could have just walked right passed.  If every run that made sloppy mistakes were denied, then no run would ever overtake records set when standards were lower.  Not to mention the controls are some of the worst I've ever played, so I wouldn't really call platforming mistakes as "sloppy".

Regardless, I just needed to vent some frustration at the way SDA (and the speedrunning community in general) does things, because it straight up doesn't make sense to me a lot of the time.  Sorry you guys ended up being the target for my frustration.  I know the runner in question personally, and it's frustrating to watch his hard work denied, after waiting for a REALLY long time just to get the damn thing verified in the first place.  I'll stop spamming you guys with criticism now, but I just wanted to put in my two cents.