I'm usually not very interested in speedruns or other similar video game challenges, but this is one of my favorite videos on the Internet.
Super Mario 64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x a Presses [video]
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Re: Super Mario 64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x a Presses [video]
#82Is this the perfect youtube video? Amazing Mario soundtrack in the background and gameplay visuals. Home made charts that VISUALLY show what's going on. AUDIO voice commentary explaining what you see. References to other youtube videos and commenters. Detailed, insanely knowledgeable, not selling me anything, created for love not for viewers. IDK this is peak youtube for me.
well, be thankful you're not hypersensitive to background music. i can't deal with it
Re: Super Mario 64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x a Presses [video]
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since you sound dismissive, do you have a better term? Lots of bugs have specific names. It would be crazy not to name any. Changing your position so that you're in the same spot but you're also in a completely different location, all at once. I think the term fits pretty well.
Not dismissive at all? Maybe 'funny' was the wrong word but interesting at the least. The PU term fits very well. It makes sense. It just is also funny knowing what is going on behind the scenes and seeing their explanations and rationaliations. It reminds me of outsider art. Someone comes along and documents what they find with no exposure to the community or its conventions.
It's less about outsider-ness than about these things being a permanent feature of the game and the details becoming important.
I'd bet that almost anyone that has ever managed to make this trick work could have told you the coordinate is wrapping. What rationalizations are happening?
Re: Super Mario 64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x a Presses [video]
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not dismissive at all? Maybe 'funny' was the wrong word but interesting at the least. The PU term fits very well. It makes sense. It just is also funny knowing what is going on behind the scenes and seeing their explanations and rationaliations. It reminds me of outsider art. Someone comes along and documents what they find with no exposure to the community or its conventions.
It's less about outsider-ness than about these things being a permanent feature of the game and the details becoming important. I'd bet that almost anyone that has ever managed to make this trick work could have told you the coordinate is wrapping. What rationalizations are happening?
Why are you being so combative in this thread? I pointed out a simple "huh thats interesting" observation and you just want to debate me.
I think if they weren't rationalizing they would explain the concept as is - its a wrapping coordinate. I do agree they understand what is happening low-level and that it is a wrapping coordinate. They still choose to use this parallel universe explaination for ease of understanding and explainability to outsiders. A rationalization is just "the action of attempting to explain or justify behavior or an attitude with logical reasons, even if these are not appropriate" which sounds exactly what the PU explaination is. There is no derogatory insinuation or anything involved here.
Re: Super Mario 64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x a Presses [video]
#85Is this the perfect youtube video? Amazing Mario soundtrack in the background and gameplay visuals. Home made charts that VISUALLY show what's going on. AUDIO voice commentary explaining what you see. References to other youtube videos and commenters. Detailed, insanely knowledgeable, not selling me anything, created for love not for viewers. IDK this is peak youtube for me.
>eferences to other youtube videos and commenters. Detailed, insanely knowledgeable, not selling me anything, created for love not for viewers I feel the same about HealthyGamerGG's videos: detailed, insanely knowledgeable, references across neurochemistry/biochemistry, psychology, gaming, human behavior, culture and religion (and how they've changed over time), etc. That's peak YT for me
I feel like HealthyGamerGG is trying to make it sound like every mental health issue is somehow trivial to solve if you just do his one silly trick; he doesn't say it like that explicitly, but after watching a pile of his videos the pattern started becoming evident. I also feel like his definitions of key terms don't really align all that well with other people who do video content on mental health, which made me quite skeptical.
Re: Super Mario 64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x a Presses [video]
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's less about outsider-ness than about these things being a permanent feature of the game and the details becoming important. I'd bet that almost anyone that has ever managed to make this trick work could have told you the coordinate is wrapping. What rationalizations are happening?
Why are you being so combative in this thread? I pointed out a simple "huh thats interesting" observation and you just want to debate me. I think if they weren't rationalizing they would explain the concept as is - its a wrapping coordinate. I do agree they understand what is happening low-level and that it is a wrapping coordinate. They still choose to use this parallel universe explaination for ease of understandin…
I'm not trying to be combative. I'm not sure what you think is combative about my second post? (or the first post other than maybe the first line)
But I do disagree about rationalization. If something is a deliberately oversimplified explanatory tool, that's not a rationalization by my understanding of the word.
Re: Super Mario 64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x a Presses [video]
#87I kind of lost it at the point where he "builds up speed for 12 hours". AHAHA https://youtu.be/kpk2tdsPh0A?t=640 His mind is so clear. I love how there's so many super super smart people on the internet! :)
On the other hand... I mean, doesn't it feel like a bit of a waste? I mean his mind is free to use however he likes but it seems absolutely crazy to dedicate yourself to this extreme level of obscure bugs in a 30ish-year-old game in order to prove some crazy feat is technically possible although not actually possible to execute in a tool-unassisted fashion. The explaining video is great, but the underlying goal just…
You could say that about any form of entertainment.
Re: Super Mario 64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x a Presses [video]
#88I dislike the "half a-press" term of art because it creates the question: If I release the a-press within the level to access his non-a-pressed abilities, would that count still as half-an-a-press? It seems to me that "half" an a-press should represent an edge (going up or down), and starting out holding "a" should count as like 0.1.
Or simply don't count A-button phases that aren't press events/keydowns as "half presses". That's what's always bugged me about it; if press, hold, and release are different actions, and those are meaningful to the speedrun, and you care about what a general audience thinks about it, then just count them separately. Don't use a misnomer to suggest something that doesn't exist. It's obtuse jargon for the sake of it. I…
> It's obtuse jargon for the sake of it.
Not really. The speedrun is to optimize for fewest total A-button presses. This metric is known from the controller's perspective in the sense that if you sniffed the communications between the controller and console, you could know the number of A-presses. Given this metric, the term half A-press makes total sense once it is understood. To reiterate the video, in a single level run, a half press rounds up to 1, but in a full game run it rounds down. How else would you communicate that without "obtuse jargon"?
> if press, hold, and release are different actions, and those are meaningful to the speedrun, and you care about what a general audience thinks about it, then just count them separately
If you want to distinguish between the actions taken based on the state of the a button, that is fundamentally different from tracking the number of button presses since it requires knowledge of the game state. Not only does it make much harder to define but it's also much harder to track without advanced tooling (how do you know if the game state was modified in an important way or not if someone presses the button for eg 2 frames vs 4 frames?). I'm not sure how I see this would make it easier for the general audience to understand either since now they also have to understand the game state rather than how many times a button was pressed. Also, this makes it entirely disconnected from the physical world, when presumably the idea of the challenge was to use the buttons on your controller less.
There's nothing stopping speed runners from tracking it this way I suppose but complaining about how a community plays a game is a bit odd. Although it is a nintendo game so I guess complaining about how the hardcore fans play it is pretty much expected.
Re: Super Mario 64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x a Presses [video]
#89Going to go on a semi-related rant. The youtuber does a bit of complaining about how people keep asking something he's ostensibly answered. Even does that "well, akshyually, I said that right here in the man page (comments section) if only you would RTFM". This is important: if the user (customer, patron, etc.) is repeatedly doing something "wrong", then it's not they who are wrong, it's you , your design, your inade…
To be fair to the author (and I know this is by no means obvious context coming into the video), his channel blew up shortly before this video. His previous audience consisted of people in the Super Mario 64 speedrun/challenge community who would need less explanation. The thoroughness of this video seems to me to be proof that he wanted to get these newer viewers up to speed. In fact it's basically a love letter to…
> In fact it's basically a love letter to the uninformed viewer
Absolutely, and it shows in how many people I've recommended this video to who know nothing about sm64 who absolutely love it. (I also know nothing about sm64 and absolutely love it.)
> The thoroughness of this video seems to me to be proof that he wanted to get these newer viewers up to speed
Yep and he literally says it right in the video, "but maybe what you guys need isn't a paragraph, maybe you guys need an example". He admits his previous attempts were maybe not getting across and adapted. Teaching at its finest. The TJ Henry Yoshi callout was clearly for comedic effect, and if I were TJ I'd be pretty happy to get an answer this thorough, understandable, and entertaining.
edit: listening to it again, even calling it a callout as I did above is kind of incorrect. "Well TJ Henry Yoshi, hear me out." He didn't say "Well TJ Henry Yoshi, this is where you're wrong" or "Well TJ Henry Yoshi, what didn't you understand about the paragraph?", he just asked for a listening ear for another chance to explain his perspective in a different way.
Re: Super Mario 64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x a Presses [video]
#90I kind of lost it at the point where he "builds up speed for 12 hours". AHAHA https://youtu.be/kpk2tdsPh0A?t=640 His mind is so clear. I love how there's so many super super smart people on the internet! :)
On the other hand... I mean, doesn't it feel like a bit of a waste? I mean his mind is free to use however he likes but it seems absolutely crazy to dedicate yourself to this extreme level of obscure bugs in a 30ish-year-old game in order to prove some crazy feat is technically possible although not actually possible to execute in a tool-unassisted fashion. The explaining video is great, but the underlying goal just…
Indeed,
as i said in the first version of my comment, “ This is what happens when you have the mind of a von Neumann and no great national project to work on. Give this guy a UFO . he could figure it out, at least how to use it!”
But I removed that because I thought it was too reductive and dismissive of peoples individual enjoyment, and it took a too utilitarian approach towards our daily activities. I don’t think we should reduce everything to a utilitarian collective good view point.
At the same time I have that perspective too, but I definitely think there’s value in the pursuit of these things like this person has done.
I hope to be able to share nuance and multiple perspectives on HN without angering, or having to engage with anyone particular zealot of any one particular side.