1

Gaming and Grazing / Re: What Kind of Game Genre (Franchise) are you mostly Interested in?

« on: March 17, 2015, 12:48:50 pm »

I hate to be incredibly boring but Mario and Zelda. Cliché maybe, but there's a reason why these series' are so highly regarded.

Professor Layton and Ace Attorney are two other big loves of mine.

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News and Updates / Re: TSC's birthday and submission enabling, deletion and praising

« on: November 04, 2014, 10:50:09 am »

I'm late on this as ever but glad to see submissions are fixed - I was a little worried given how long they were down for!

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Competition Central / Re: TSC Most Leaderships List

« on: March 28, 2014, 10:34:40 am »

Nice stuff - was shocked to see my name on the list for half a second then I remembered. Sonic 1 Special...

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Rules Revisions / Re: sonic 1 3d IS different you know...

« on: March 05, 2014, 10:04:47 am »

I've been meaning to bring this up. My presumption right now is that there are no charts where you can submit times from this game. That may well be the way things stay as well, because I don't know that the website is so desperate for yet another set of Sonic 1 charts.

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General Sonic / Re: Sonic Heroes: The truth about the Super Glide

« on: February 24, 2014, 07:21:58 pm »

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General Sonic / Re: Sonic Heroes: The truth about Zeup

« on: February 23, 2014, 10:03:58 am »

We all knew this about you already Zeup. Well done for finally admitting it to yourself.

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Hiya Folks / Re: Hi I am Biblet2014, the only speedrunner on TSC.

« on: February 17, 2014, 12:15:32 pm »

The only speedrunner at a site full of speedrunners? Fascinating claim. Welcome aboard, enjoy your stay.

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Beef / Re: SAnic cRaYons

« on: February 10, 2014, 10:10:48 pm »

In before people start arguing over whether it should be forum "colors" or "colours"

That would be an argument I'd lose by sheer numbers, so I'd rather not. I'll just resolutely stick to the correct spelling and pretend everyone else is doing the same.

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Beef / Re: SAnic cRaYons

« on: February 10, 2014, 06:40:28 pm »

I have mixed feelings. I think it would help if there weren't a hundred different coloured usergroups - most forums that use the coloured usernames only have a couple of different colours.

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Hiya Folks / Re: My Introduction, SLICED THINLY (if you please)~

« on: February 07, 2014, 11:18:42 am »

Welcome to TSC! Casual speedrunning is where it's at. Doesn't stop you from competing on the leaderboards, or at race nights.

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Rules Revisions / Re: Gens/BizHawk and similar emulators should be banned from competition

« on: February 05, 2014, 12:20:28 pm »

I don't want to trash the forum with continuous discussion between us here, but nevertheless, I must respond to this. With regard to your point that "the whitelist will dwindle as each emulator is shown to be TAS-able in some form or another", this is the point that I think we're getting tied up on.

Yes, it is possible to do some kind of TAS on any emulator. However, it's all about how difficult it is to do it. With Gens the tools are right there, right in front of you. Even I could do a TAS with Gens, and I'm not the most technical of people. With Fusion, maybe it is possible to TAS in some way, but you'd better believe that it's a whole lot more difficult. I'm not going to be doing a TAS with Fusion. Where do we draw the line here? We draw it wherever we feel it should go using common sense, rather than any precise rule.

We're never going to stop all cheating, so if the attitude is stop all cheating or don't bother doing anything, then we might as well not bother. However, I feel that this measure would decrease the amount of successful cheating, and not horribly inconvenience people. Now I'm definitely fed up of discussing this, so for now, this is my final word!

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Rules Revisions / Re: Gens/BizHawk and similar emulators should be banned from competition

« on: February 05, 2014, 11:30:59 am »

Yes, but we don't need to mess around with defining "TAS-able" emulators in any precise way. We make a rational decision of which specific emulators are acceptable, and create an "emulator whitelist", with all other emulators banned. That would be my proposal.

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Rules Revisions / Re: Gens/BizHawk and similar emulators should be banned from competition

« on: February 05, 2014, 10:33:53 am »

If we're limiting the scope of the conversation to ban all emulators or ban none, then the answer is ban none. I personally don't understand why we can't have a more nuanced position, but this conversation has got boring and is not advancing.

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General Sonic / Re: Rank your favorite Sonic games that you have played

« on: February 02, 2014, 08:36:48 am »

I can only meaningfully rank my top 5, which are.

1. Sonic the Hedgehog (1991 obviously!)
2. Sonic 2
3. SADX
4. SA2B
5. S3K (this would probably be higher if I didn't suck at it)

The rest I can split into like and don't like

Like: Heroes, SatSR, S1GG, S2GG, Chaos, Adv, Adv2, Adv3, Rush, RushAdv, Battle, Sonic R

Don't like: 06, Unleashed, 3D Blast, Shadow

Anything else I haven't played enough to really judge, or have just forgotten about.

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Rules Revisions / Re: Gens/BizHawk and similar emulators should be banned from competition

« on: February 01, 2014, 01:18:50 pm »

Dunno about anyone else but knowing most people use emulators in the older games really put me off ever bothering to compete in them on TSC.

Why? That's simply absurd. I have a Mega Drive and all the Sonics on it, but for reasons of convenience I would usually choose to compete via an emulator. I don't get the issue - you can still get all the same times on a console. Some of my times were in fact set on console. It's unimportant.

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Rules Revisions / Re: Gens/BizHawk and similar emulators should be banned from competition

« on: January 30, 2014, 02:50:00 pm »

No doubt, there's ways to go about the system and find ways to cheat, and make it look spotless on a recording. No matter how many rules and edicts we put in place, it's always going to happen.

Just because we will never be able to stop cheating does not mean that we shouldn't make rules that make it harder to cheat. Perhaps this is a fair argument to not ban Gens+ because it would seem to be fairly difficult (or at least require a fair amount of technical knowledge) to cheat using it. However, cheating using the TAS features on Gens right now seems to be downright easy to me. Certainly easy enough for myself to do it, and easy enough that people have been caught cheating this way from time to time.

Also, yes, TSC does operate using the honour system. However, when video proof is requested, it seems to me that the honour system has stopped there because the person's integrity has been questioned (if only in a small way). When you have suspicions of someone, and then the proof given is a video that could very easily have been TASed, I can see why it might be hard to shake those suspicions off.

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Rules Revisions / Re: Gens/BizHawk and similar emulators should be banned from competition

« on: January 29, 2014, 08:13:19 am »

Something I brought up on IRC a while ago that might bear repeating here - if we're going to ban Gens/Bizhawk, why stop at that? Why not ban Dolphin, DeSmuME, Visual Boy Advance, and any other emulators that have TASing features for other systems? The Genesis and Gamegear aren't the only systems that you can TAS on.

To be honest, I kind of thought this was a given if we went through with this. With regards to finding alternatives, yes, you're right when you say that the actual console is an alternative, but as a random example, let's just guess that about 50% of the stats submitted for the GBA games are on VBA. If there wasn't an alternative to VBA after it had been banned, that would risk stifling competition on the GBA games quite a lot. Perhaps that's the price you pay for legitimacy, but it seems to be against the general ethos of the website.

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Rules Revisions / Re: Gens/BizHawk and similar emulators should be banned from competition

« on: January 28, 2014, 06:53:45 pm »

One of the attractions of this website is the openness of the rules compared to other similar websites, the so-called "honour system" or what have you. Lose that and this website loses one of its USP's. However, with things the way they are, I've always felt an undercurrent of mistrust throughout the community that from time to time, gets proved right when people are caught out.

For this reason, if it can help give this site's records a bit of authenticity, and give people more peace of mind, then I would say that I'm for this move of banning emulators with TAS features, as long as there are enough emulators out there that people are still able to use them to compete in all the games they are currently commonly used to compete (Genesis, Game Gear, GBA I would think being the crucial ones) on the main OS's. Make the rules too restrictive and we risk sucking the life out of the competition on these games, but I would have thought the necessary emulators do exist (With Fusion being given as the example that works for Genesis and Game Gear).

Obviously I'm against the retrospective removal of stats using the banned emulators - that would be total chaos and would also involve the removal of pretty much all of my Sonic 1 stats, done using Gens (though if I TASed those stats I did a pretty horrible job of TASing). SonicBoom mentions another TAS rule that says "Note that if a new rule is enacted, anything already submitted in violation of that rule is void.". What this proves is that to every rule there should be an exception, and this is it.

So my opinion is, make sure that enough viable emualators exist such that we're not essentially banning emulators here, and then go for it. This is a small (and obvious) point, but I would say it would be far better to have a whitelist of legal emulators rather than a banlist if this is the way we choose to go, for practical reasons.

19

TSC Race Night / Re: Race Night 16: Sonic Advance 2

« on: January 19, 2013, 07:47:55 am »

Times are settled enough for me to race again. So Cream. Because Cream.

20

Gaming and Grazing / Re: Lavender Town Myths

« on: December 03, 2012, 07:01:25 pm »

My opinion on Lavender Town is that it is the most overhyped thing in the whole Pokémon series. My childhood was not deeply affected by it, the tune was nice and atmospheric - I didn't find it scary at all. The whole Pokémon graveyard thing was like, yeah whatever.

Honestly, the two biggest ways this place affected me were:

1) I was joyous to see it because thank goodness the Rock Tunnel was over
2) I hated it 10 seconds later when I realised I needed the Silph Scope which meaned doing the really irritating Silph Co. section. If only I'd have known the Pokédoll trick. Climbing the tower itself was irritating as well.

So yeah, I guess Lavender was just a minor inconvenience to me. So many more memorable things from Red/Blue.

21

TSC Race Night / Re: Race Night 12: Sonic 2

« on: December 03, 2012, 06:52:00 pm »

Sorry I haven't been about lately, been busy with life. Hope the 06 race went ok...lol.

I may or may not be able to make the race on Saturday - I'm on the move that day, however in an ideal world I should still be able to race, we'll see. On the presumption I can make it, I'll vote for 1 or 2. Knuckles is cool, but collecting emeralds is not! I really don't have time to practice special stages this week!

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TSC Race Night / Re: Race Night 10: Sonic 4 Episode 1

« on: November 20, 2012, 01:04:18 pm »

Aww, I'd have raced if iOS was allowed...then again, I hate this game, so perhaps this is for the best! Good luck guys!

EDIT: Good luck playing a game with no physics that is.

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TSC Race Night / Re: SA2 race

« on: November 20, 2012, 01:02:03 pm »

No streaming required unless of course you emulate it is my understanding. NG+ or bust

New Game+ seems a bit out of the spirit of celebrating the release of the new PC version of the game. I don't know if anyone will actually be racing on that version though!

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TSC Race Night / Re: SA2 race

« on: November 17, 2012, 11:56:52 am »

You're going to really struggle to get as many racers in an impromptu race as a planned one. I think having this planned race is definitely worth it - also having a planned race doesn't mean you can't also do impromptu races, it's not like they're mutually exclusive.

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News and Updates / Re: Possible Xmas Mini-Marathon?

« on: November 16, 2012, 10:48:38 pm »

My opinion is to choose the best we have available for everything unless there is good reason not to. I think it would be missing the point of the marathon if we didn't showcase the best quality we have at our disposal, unless I'm missing the point of the marathon!

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TSC Race Night / Re: SA2 race

« on: November 16, 2012, 09:52:21 pm »

All stories

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Hiya Folks / Re: n00b here

« on: November 16, 2012, 06:24:07 pm »

Hi. Welcome to TSC. Don't worry about being a n00b. All of us are at certain games.

Some of us are noobs at all games! What I can guarantee is that by competing here you will see yourself improve dramatically, and you should have great fun in the process (if you don't, you're doing it wrong). Welcome to TSC!

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Information Kiosk / Re: Sonic The Hedgehog SMS Leaderboard

« on: November 16, 2012, 11:41:03 am »

My opinion is that the layouts are not different enough to warrant separate games. In many levels the layouts are exactly the same.

I find it funny your initial post uses GH2 as an example, there are levels with more significant differences between the two versions than this. In GH2 the only important difference is the positioning of 2 badniks, which probably costs SMS around a second. There are a couple of errors in your SMS run which to me look enough to account for the other second between the two runs you linked.

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TSC Race Night / Re: Unofficial Race Night 1

« on: November 15, 2012, 03:32:15 pm »

Also, to my knowledge, the initial concept was that each hack was going to be raced separately. That was certainly my understanding.

Since we have two weeks till hack night, might as get started since I think it might take a while to organise. So I was thinking maybe up to three games. So let me know what hacks you want to race in.

At the moment I'm doing the same thing with hack night as I did with race nights doing a 'lets try this and see if it works and if not we'll make it better' or something like that. If people don't like the more than one game being raced we'll just race one game then.

When I said "raced separately", I meant "on the same night, but with gaps in between" as opposed to back to back in the same race. That was what my understanding was.

I remember when TSCers raced multiple, different games in a row and didn't afraid of anything.

S1, S2, and S3K is a totally different kettle of fish because there isn't one that is 10+ times longer than the others (not to mention that all 3 are very popular games, and generally popular with among same people). EDIT: Also, S1, S2 and S3K makes perfect sense to race back to back.

On a related unrelated note, an S1, S2 and S3K race totally needs to happen for race night sometime!

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TSC Race Night / Re: Unofficial Race Night 1

« on: November 15, 2012, 01:29:42 pm »

Bilan / flying fox: Anybody who can't finish Robotnik's Revenge in a timely manner probably won't finish Sonic 2 Retro Remix. Therefore, we could set the S2RR race for a half-hour after the RR race, and anybody who hasn't finished Robotnik's Revenge and misses S2RR would be in the "likely to forfeit S2RR" crowd anyway. In this respect, I think a Multiple Game Race may be silly considering the likely length disparity; S2RR even has its own game designation on SRL because werster raced it before.

I agree with this. The length disparity would make Robotnik's Revenge worthless in a multiple game race.

Also, to my knowledge, the initial concept was that each hack was going to be raced separately. That was certainly my understanding. The idea of them being raced in a multiple game race has only developed since. I'm racing both games either way, but my vote would definitely be to race these two games separately, even if it does mean (shock horror) having to wait a few minutes between races.