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SS Easy run
Verifier Responses
Quote says it all. Other verifiers said the rest. Accept.
Decision: Accept
Congratulations to Mike Uyama!
SS Easy run
Verifier Responses
Quote:
This is a really good run.
There are a lot of little fraction-of-a-second mistakes all over the place. Any one of the elite few who've played the game, however, can tell you that no run is ever going to look perfect. That's not to decry the importance of optimization -- there is, after all, a reason Mike's submitting this run instead of an 11:3x -- but yeah. Blame the controls.
Mike's comments are pretty in-depth and are very representative of the run, and , so I'll just go level-by-level and note a few things.
Stage 1: When flying backwards straight down to pick up the POWs on the right, he hits and incline and then bounces to a stop immediately after. I don't know whether this is easy or hard, but it at least looks lucky as hell. Flying's precise, while heading back to the left from the right he even only needs to adjust his angle once or twice before angling sharply down to reach the elevator. I swear the times he hit the wall while going around the elevators should have been instant invisible death pixel though.
Stage 2: Fair fight, fair pow pickup (looks kinda screwy, but that's mostly just looks).
Stage 3: Gets the second laser reflection on the first real shot, i.e. the first shot where getting a good reflection wouldn't be a fluke because he hadn't had a chance to properly decelerate and position himself yet. That's harder than it sounds. The deflectors bounce him around a bit in the end, but they suck. Glad Mike finally decided to take my advice and skip the last fuel canister/suicide at the end, even if that's incredibly marginal.
Stage 4: goes well, nothing to say.
Stage 5: good nuke core drop. It's not at all surprising that this is his personal best split for the stage.
Stage 6: sucks about the gate wall fragment thingies getting in his way and the slow death, but both were pretty much out of his control. They cost a little more than one second combined, so I'm only talking about them because otherwise I'd have nothing to say for this stage.
Stages 7/8: Again, not at all surprised these are his personal best stage splits.
Stage 9: If someone got through the underwater labyrinth without getting bounced around a lot I'd call hax. Svin luck isn't the best but he handled it fairly well. Obviously he should've reset until he got his marathon luck !!
Possible improvements are all just improved optimization, which is... well, asking for a lot, and much of it isn't really even in his control. There are a few theoretical improvements along the lines of the stage 7 pipe bomb zip. That's covered pretty well in Mike's comments though, and would save very little time besides. Aside from that, there's hitting the barrier from the wrong side in stage 8. Both Mike and I have done that, but once or twice each, and it's one of those things where you will randomly fluke into it once and then you won't get it again for another hour's worth of trying. Nobody (including tasers) know how it works, so it's just "shoot up and hope you get it". And nobody deserves having to play this game, of all things, for years to get such an incredibly unlikely and random trick, and then only save maybe 5-10 seconds because you still have to go get the mirror lazer in the opposite direction (and then either fly back or suicide).
There's also theoretical stage 3 zips or breaks. Mostly going to list these in the hopes that whoever decides to TAS the game next, if anyone ever does, tries them. But nobody's ever even gotten close, and we honestly have no reason to believe this stuff is even possible, so whatever. Theorycrafting ahead, grain of salt, etc.
First, reflector trolling. When you have the second reflector, the game doesn't fire the laser unless you're at or above such and such height from the ground. Tried playing around with getting the laser to fire and then boosting down hard to get the reflector lower, but that didn't work out. Either missed entirely, got killed, or both. Not sure what it would even accomplish, but there seem to be countermeasures so I guess something might be possible?
Second, deflector trolling. Those things can bounce you around fast. Fast enough that zips might theoretically be possible. Ideally you would just zip past the laser to the sub tank/pow area and then suicide, but even assuming you could get bounced by the deflectors semi-consistently that's a really shitty angle, and I can't see it being more consistent than the stage 7 zip. Another (slower) option would be to zip past the wall that you destroy with the laser to the area with the fuel/shield canisters and the laser-barrier-deactivator thing. Checkpoints are screwy enough on this stage (you can get copies of the reflector pickups to spawn under certain conditions, but you can't pick them up a second time) that maybe if you destroyed the barrier and then suicided it would let you skip the second reflector? Maybe? I'm just making stuff up, to be honest. But at least the angle for that zip isn't nestled in between solid rock walls. Instead, the only solid rock wall is the wall you'd hit on the other side!!
All things considered, this is a very easy accept. It's got no bad mistakes and a lot of personal best times for stages. But, you know, Mike spent a long time proving that VorpalEdge is always wrong. In deference to his elaborate proof thereof, my above verdict is incorrect. Therefore, I will reject this run, on the grounds that he obviously cheated to avoid invisible death pixels. We do not accept SADRECORDs at SDA.
Better luck next time!
[note: i'll time/get some shots in a couple days. video goes on perhaps two minutes longer than it needs to at the end (score entry is done at ~14:50), but the music's good so who cares]
There are a lot of little fraction-of-a-second mistakes all over the place. Any one of the elite few who've played the game, however, can tell you that no run is ever going to look perfect. That's not to decry the importance of optimization -- there is, after all, a reason Mike's submitting this run instead of an 11:3x -- but yeah. Blame the controls.
Mike's comments are pretty in-depth and are very representative of the run, and , so I'll just go level-by-level and note a few things.
Stage 1: When flying backwards straight down to pick up the POWs on the right, he hits and incline and then bounces to a stop immediately after. I don't know whether this is easy or hard, but it at least looks lucky as hell. Flying's precise, while heading back to the left from the right he even only needs to adjust his angle once or twice before angling sharply down to reach the elevator. I swear the times he hit the wall while going around the elevators should have been instant invisible death pixel though.
Stage 2: Fair fight, fair pow pickup (looks kinda screwy, but that's mostly just looks).
Stage 3: Gets the second laser reflection on the first real shot, i.e. the first shot where getting a good reflection wouldn't be a fluke because he hadn't had a chance to properly decelerate and position himself yet. That's harder than it sounds. The deflectors bounce him around a bit in the end, but they suck. Glad Mike finally decided to take my advice and skip the last fuel canister/suicide at the end, even if that's incredibly marginal.
Stage 4: goes well, nothing to say.
Stage 5: good nuke core drop. It's not at all surprising that this is his personal best split for the stage.
Stage 6: sucks about the gate wall fragment thingies getting in his way and the slow death, but both were pretty much out of his control. They cost a little more than one second combined, so I'm only talking about them because otherwise I'd have nothing to say for this stage.
Stages 7/8: Again, not at all surprised these are his personal best stage splits.
Stage 9: If someone got through the underwater labyrinth without getting bounced around a lot I'd call hax. Svin luck isn't the best but he handled it fairly well. Obviously he should've reset until he got his marathon luck !!
Possible improvements are all just improved optimization, which is... well, asking for a lot, and much of it isn't really even in his control. There are a few theoretical improvements along the lines of the stage 7 pipe bomb zip. That's covered pretty well in Mike's comments though, and would save very little time besides. Aside from that, there's hitting the barrier from the wrong side in stage 8. Both Mike and I have done that, but once or twice each, and it's one of those things where you will randomly fluke into it once and then you won't get it again for another hour's worth of trying. Nobody (including tasers) know how it works, so it's just "shoot up and hope you get it". And nobody deserves having to play this game, of all things, for years to get such an incredibly unlikely and random trick, and then only save maybe 5-10 seconds because you still have to go get the mirror lazer in the opposite direction (and then either fly back or suicide).
There's also theoretical stage 3 zips or breaks. Mostly going to list these in the hopes that whoever decides to TAS the game next, if anyone ever does, tries them. But nobody's ever even gotten close, and we honestly have no reason to believe this stuff is even possible, so whatever. Theorycrafting ahead, grain of salt, etc.
First, reflector trolling. When you have the second reflector, the game doesn't fire the laser unless you're at or above such and such height from the ground. Tried playing around with getting the laser to fire and then boosting down hard to get the reflector lower, but that didn't work out. Either missed entirely, got killed, or both. Not sure what it would even accomplish, but there seem to be countermeasures so I guess something might be possible?
Second, deflector trolling. Those things can bounce you around fast. Fast enough that zips might theoretically be possible. Ideally you would just zip past the laser to the sub tank/pow area and then suicide, but even assuming you could get bounced by the deflectors semi-consistently that's a really shitty angle, and I can't see it being more consistent than the stage 7 zip. Another (slower) option would be to zip past the wall that you destroy with the laser to the area with the fuel/shield canisters and the laser-barrier-deactivator thing. Checkpoints are screwy enough on this stage (you can get copies of the reflector pickups to spawn under certain conditions, but you can't pick them up a second time) that maybe if you destroyed the barrier and then suicided it would let you skip the second reflector? Maybe? I'm just making stuff up, to be honest. But at least the angle for that zip isn't nestled in between solid rock walls. Instead, the only solid rock wall is the wall you'd hit on the other side!!
All things considered, this is a very easy accept. It's got no bad mistakes and a lot of personal best times for stages. But, you know, Mike spent a long time proving that VorpalEdge is always wrong. In deference to his elaborate proof thereof, my above verdict is incorrect. Therefore, I will reject this run, on the grounds that he obviously cheated to avoid invisible death pixels. We do not accept SADRECORDs at SDA.
Better luck next time!
[note: i'll time/get some shots in a couple days. video goes on perhaps two minutes longer than it needs to at the end (score entry is done at ~14:50), but the music's good so who cares]
Quote:
This is a nice run. The only mistake in planning I can see is picking up the extra life in stage 6, which you should not need. Glad to see that the runner used death to save time. On harder difficulties, you can save time on stage 1 by doing this as well, but on easy it takes too long to die. Easy mode does kind of make me sad. Yes, I can beat this on Hard despite Mike's skepticism. :-p
The game really does take finesse, and even though the TAS is like twice as fast, what you see here is pretty incredible for a human in real time in terms of ship control. Totally accept.
Fun fact: Jesper Kyd also went on to do Batman and Robin for Genesis!
I am curious: Why doesn't the runner use the low pressure ability in stage 9? This makes the underwater segments a lot easier.
The game really does take finesse, and even though the TAS is like twice as fast, what you see here is pretty incredible for a human in real time in terms of ship control. Totally accept.
Fun fact: Jesper Kyd also went on to do Batman and Robin for Genesis!
I am curious: Why doesn't the runner use the low pressure ability in stage 9? This makes the underwater segments a lot easier.
Quote:
Quote from namechangedtoprotectinnocent:
Hey I Love genesis sub terrania! great site by the way
Quote says it all. Other verifiers said the rest. Accept.
Quote:
I'm just going to mirror everyone's else's statements too. Accept.
Decision: Accept
Congratulations to Mike Uyama!
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