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How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

arstechnica.com

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Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#21

Post by danaris »

aquova wrote: post #10
kevinventullo wrote: post #6

I would imagine most randomizations render the game impossible, since the first dungeon will require a specific item to complete, and any other item won't help you. Are players forced to leverage glitches? Or is there some way to restrict only to "viable" randomizations?

A lot of effort goes into ensuring that you don't randomize the game into an unwinnable state. Many of these games are so well known by speedrunners and fans, that they know what items are required for each part of the game. The Link to the Past randomizer, IIRC, actually gives you the option to randomize the game in a way that requires no glitches, or randomize the game so that glitches may be needed.

In fact, it has multiple categories of glitches ("No Glitches," "Minor Glitches," "Overworld Glitches," and "Major Glitches", IIRC), defined by the ALttP speedrunning community, that the randomizer logic can take into account when placing the items throughout the game.

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#22

Post by wcarss »

mxwsn wrote: post #5

Randomizer speedruns are an awesome recent innovation in speedrunning, where the aim is to beat the game as quickly as possible (in a category called "true any%" [0]). For most popular speedrunning games, randomizers reward a completely different skillset than standard speedrunning. Typically, world record speedruns are a result of a community collaboration between theorizers, glitch finders, and routers, who devise…

Described in this way, it feels like a reasonable argument that humanity is like a paperclip-optimizing AI that just maybe just chooses random things to go deep on optimizing.

We created a problem for ourselves that was fun -- games -- but once we'd beaten "games", the reward function kept running and now we're adversarially inventing new ways to "optimally" beat harder and harder versions of "games", ie new objectives, new limitations, new allowable orderings of elements within the games, etc.

I wonder what 50 years of this will yield!

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#23

Post by kbenson »

at_a_remove wrote: post #16

Ah, this is familiar. Decades ago, I had more or less topped out playing Othello against my Apple ][e. A game could be completed in under ninety seconds, with my moves being as fast as that of the computer. I took photos (with actual film) of beating the machine long before the board could be filled, but I was getting stale, essentially training myself to fight against this deterministic opponent who couldn't have be…

> I eventually settled on POKEing parts of the memory where the game was held. Typically, this resulted in an un-runnable program, or the program would place pieces on the lines rather than between them, all sorts of oddball behavior. Every so often, though, I would get a working game that would play against me using the usual rules, but differently enough that it would throw me off.

And thus the idea of the Game Genie is discovered again.

Regarding Othello (Reversi), I actually wrote a Reversi game for the Roku and released it on their store. It was a fun little one-off that I was playing around with when a friend and I were exploring the Roku, which I eventually just packaged up and released as a free version and paid version. It allowed you to set board width and height and choose if the white/black players were CPU controlled or human controlled, so you could actually have the Roku play itself if you wanted. I believe I had three different skill levels for the CPU, which really just corresponded to how deep the minmax AI would go (how many turns in the future it would look), and I think it was fairly hard at the hard level IIRC (but if you chose a large board, like 16x16, it might take 20 seconds or more for it to make a move).

I actually had plans to extend the paid version with some new features, and had a dev build that included things such as random non-color blocks on the board, "bomb" pieces that when flipped flipped the 8 surrounding pieces, angle blocks to change the line by 90 degrees, etc. I never actually bothered to get that out though.

I haven't looked in a long time, but at the time I don't think there was anything out on iOS/Android that had something like that, but it seemed like a fun take on the game. If someone hasn't gotten around to releasing something like that, they should...

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#25

Post by evo_9 »

There is a great mod for Dark Souls that randomizes enemy starting placement. I really wish this was a feature built into the main game as I tend to play DS on PlayStation or Switch; it's a surprisingly effective way to make an already challenging game even more engaging.

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#26

Post by WhompingWindows »

jdlyga wrote: post #9

I just finished a run of Link to the Past / Super Metroid crossover randomizer. And it's one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. The items for both games are randomized and distributed across both games. For example, I found the first sword in Link to the Past above Samus's ship in Crateria in a secret area.

How do they deal with the linearity of Zelda games, where you NEED a certain item to succeed in a dungeon, before you can then get access to more items later? If I need the hookshot to pass the water temple, but it gives me the floating-light-boots, how am I supposed to beat the level?

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#27

Post by at_a_remove »

kbenson wrote: post #23
at_a_remove wrote: post #16

Ah, this is familiar. Decades ago, I had more or less topped out playing Othello against my Apple ][e. A game could be completed in under ninety seconds, with my moves being as fast as that of the computer. I took photos (with actual film) of beating the machine long before the board could be filled, but I was getting stale, essentially training myself to fight against this deterministic opponent who couldn't have be…

> I eventually settled on POKEing parts of the memory where the game was held. Typically, this resulted in an un-runnable program, or the program would place pieces on the lines rather than between them, all sorts of oddball behavior. Every so often, though, I would get a working game that would play against me using the usual rules, but differently enough that it would throw me off. And thus the idea of the Game Gen…

I might just see if I can find that! That sounds like a great project.

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#28

Post by EpicEng »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #26
jdlyga wrote: post #9

I just finished a run of Link to the Past / Super Metroid crossover randomizer. And it's one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. The items for both games are randomized and distributed across both games. For example, I found the first sword in Link to the Past above Samus's ship in Crateria in a secret area.

How do they deal with the linearity of Zelda games, where you NEED a certain item to succeed in a dungeon, before you can then get access to more items later? If I need the hookshot to pass the water temple, but it gives me the floating-light-boots, how am I supposed to beat the level?

They program it to be winnable. There are various constraints which ensure the game can be beaten. None of them (that people actually play) are 100% random.

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#30

Post by _--___-___ »

kevinventullo wrote: post #6

I would imagine most randomizations render the game impossible, since the first dungeon will require a specific item to complete, and any other item won't help you. Are players forced to leverage glitches? Or is there some way to restrict only to "viable" randomizations?

The only up-to-date commonly used randomizers with meaningfully common impossible states I've seen are in Fire Emblem, which is difficult enough to begin with that unlucky changes to earlygame units and bosses can create a (near) unwinnable fight. You also have to deal with alternate loss conditions such as NPCs that cause game over on death and change to a class that is frailer than default or unable to move on the terrain type they spawn on.
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