Lurker > azuarc

Haste_2 posted...

Oh, so Final Fantasy Distant Worlds music is eligible? Or Final Fantasy Piano Opera? Some of those say they are published by Square Enix, so would that mean they're official? Not that I would try to include such music because I think those would go too much against the spirit of the contest, but I'm just wondering...

Distant Worlds variations wouldn't be associated with a game, even if the original was from a game. NFUN is referring to tracks that appear on OST releases, but aren't in the actual game.

Haste_2 posted...

I'm not sure what "auto-include" means? Hopefully the nominators get to decide which of their games will fill their allotted spots in snubs?

Auto-include means you get to pick without anyone else's support or rejection. If you say it's in, it's in.

NFUN posted...

If you wish to support a song

Slight inaccuracy here, if you care.

NFUN posted...

followed by the time nominated with earliest nominations taking priority.

Gonna keep that, huh. This makes guessing when to nominate things trickier.

NFUN posted...

There will also be a snubs' bracket. It will also be 64 songs, single-elimination, and it will take games on an auto-include basis, with the number of games a nominator gets to include being correlated with how many of their nominations got into the main bracket.

Negatively correlated, I assume.

NFUN posted...

In the main bracket, after round 6 until the finals, games will use their "alternate" songs.

So a game that makes a deep run in the loser's bracket will need...what? Like 4 alternates? Or do you just keep replaying the same song?

TeamRocketElite posted...

For song cutoff, I would suggest going with random selection from the games nominated on the cutoff day.

Good thought. I hadn't really even considered that.

NFUN posted...

It's a risk to have just one alt that might get chosen over and over, running the risk of voters getting sick of it.

I see. But if a game had one really awesome song and thought it could survive until the later stages otherwise, it arguably might be strategic to make that song the alt. Which is counterintuitive, but this set-up kinda promotes that possibility.

So nominations are...5 days? Or 7? And with the ability to catch up, I assume?

Are you planning a side bracket, or is that too much?

Oh, and do you have a specific format you want the nominations in? I dunno who or what is parsing them, especially if you're opening the door to more than one alternate/extended track.

Meaning everything up to Fontaine? =/

Less than a fortnight to go!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q-k7ScMs0k

I randomly bought an Amber con yesterday from the store, figuring why not? It was C4. I don't suspect I'll ever use her, either, but at least now I can plunk down two bunnies.

And suddenly, Powerwash Simulator.

What could I see appearing on this list? Tunic? Rogue Legacy 2? It Takes Two?

- Games with cute characters and colorful, fun worlds. I'm a big softy. I like my games warm and fuzzy. If it can make me cry that's worth double points!

- Anything with really bright colors and stylized visuals.

- Games that are replayable over and over again, such as roguelikes. I love to waste time playing games while also wasting time watching youtube videos - it's basically my favorite hobby.

- Anything that reminds me of something I played in the 90's. I am trapped in the 90's, both emotionally, and in terms of my gaming tastes.

- Games with novel or interesting stories.

- Games with novel strategic game mechanics that I can sink my teeth into.

- Games with really good soundtracks. Good music keeps me coming back.

- Games that are challenging, but not overly so. "Easy to learn, difficult to master" is my preference.

- Platformers, puzzle games, rhythm games, any sort of strategy/RPG things tend to be my primary genres, but I'm pretty eclectic and will play almost anything.

uh...Lenna's Inception fits most of that description, but I doubt that's the one.

Ooh ooh, easier solution: Let's just nix the loser's bracket! Then it won't matter! =p

I think it mostly depends on two things -- the structure of the loser's bracket and the method of handling the finals -- because those are the times when we have need for more than just "a extra song" for tiebreaker purposes. (And double tiebreakers, ig, which do happen at least once a contest.)

Year 1, I had some kind of LB structure that was very long. It made sense, mathematically, but it required games that entered from the beginning to go through something like 10 rounds to reach the finals...which obviously created issues from a playlist perspective. For the later contests I hosted, I worked out a slightly more ideal, well-rounded method that only used, iirc, 8. Without checking, I have no idea what deo did. But given that round LB1 basically lines up with WB2, everyone's on basically equal footing if you just insert an alternate track in for one of those places where two rounds go by in the LB before new losers get added. Thus, anyone who goes past LB5 (I think it's actually LB6 because of a double) would all have their mainlist songs used once and could reset in a manner that's fair for everyone.

Otherwise, you could end up with a situation where Chrono Cross resets into Scars, Time of the Dreamwatch, and DOTSBAW while its opponents are using the bottom songs. Yes, I saw the part about leaving out the top songs on the reroll, but that also maybe feels bad. It might be more "fair" for CC to be playing Life or one of the Dreamers, but it's also much less exciting for that stage of the bracket. (Although if you're limiting loser's brackets to ONLY the top 3 songs, which was a line in post 43 that I've mostly ignored here, I'm curious how that works.)

I noticed you specifically did not mention what happens at the very end of the bracket. How do you plan to run the LB finals and grand finals, or is it a secret? (I've kept it secret before.)

P.S. I will be always be in opposition to pure and total randemonium in the early rounds, but I've always been in the minority on this.

Isn't it still disadvantageous to have more than 7 songs, assuming you can objectively rank them? If you "use up" all 7 songs, you can potentially loop back to your best immediately, whereas if you include an 8th, that's guaranteed to go first.

There was at least once in the write-up where para cited the wrong game. That was probably it.

And MT is not really much like Spire for me. I enjoyed Monster Train. I didn't care for Slay the Spire.

When you said there was a game you had over 1000 hours in, for some reason it didn't occur to me it might be Monster Train.

Monster Train >>> Slay the Spire for me. I appreciate what Spire is doing, and it obviously came first and defined the genre, but MT is just far more interesting to me, and I think a big part of that is that Spire feels far less out of my own control. I don't generally play true roguelikes because I don't enjoy games where I'm at the whims of RNG and you gain nothing when that happens. You do technically unlock stuff in Spire, I guess, but if I ever ended up in a bad situation with MT, I was able to say "I probably could have done something about this." I also simply felt like the gameplay loop was more engaging, even when I'm doing something silly like spamming heal spells onto a single creature because that buffs it to ridiculous levels. I was surprised to find Steam only has me recorded at about 12 hours on Monster Train, because I could swear I've played more than that. (I make no bones about being one of the completionist players with hundreds of hours, but that feels really limited.)

And have you really written 70k words? Your Monster Train write-up was long, but I guess I didn't realize what wordcount totals run like on forum posts. Your first two actual write-ups were 500 and 700 words, so if that's the average, I guess this makes sense. Thank you for not just writing a single sentence about each of these games and calling it a day.

The folks in the supra server have been getting pretty excited about putting setlists together. I hope we'll have some good participation.

Is anyone else actively planning out lists that they want to share? We could plan some kind of listening events on B8cord, too, assuming merely posting the prospective list for feedback isn't sufficient.

I feel really dumb, but I can't seem to get anywhere in these pyramid areas and I feel like I'm leaving so much behind. It looked like I was supposed to advance the quest, get "clearance," and then come back, but I'm in the central area now and can't figure out what to do...which makes me think I was supposed to get this mysterious clearance somewhere else.

Can't beat the healing-shielding combo for a defensive option. Sorry, Noelle.

It said mine was Xingqiu, which feels wrong because I play Diona in virtually every team except that there was a period where I was speed-clearing one domain with taser, and that probably dominated what it was evaluating.

Props. I haven't used Noelle since like AR20.

not arguing -- and I haven't done the event yet -- but that's where I draw any sense of attachment to her

Job Job is great.

Noelle was in the first batch of hangouts and hers was so much more popular than the others that they gave her a second before it became the "new 4-stars get hangouts as their content" zone.

I've fully explored the first desert area (as best as I can pre-questing) and moved on to the western section, which ultimately led to completing the archon quest. Haven't been to the southern part yet. Desert is so much easier to explore, but it's still quest-gated in the west.

I had this stupid thought earlier that the finals, where we've classically picked 3 out of the 6 songs and the winner had to take a best of 3 match, should be chosen randomly from the entire soundtrack.

Yeah, I can just imagine how badly that could go.

That's some serious commitment, even if you're only estimating your playtime and could be way off. I was obscenely addicted to a game that I started playing back in February, and I was averaging over 50 hrs/week for a while -- which is like 7 hours a day! -- and I'm at a total of around 900 now while still playing it actively.

Anyway, Slice and Dice doesn't look like anything special, and I'm usually not big on rogue-likes, especially non -lites, but maybe I'll force myself to give this a shot.

Thank you for the write-up on Unsighted. That's a game that's lingering on the edge for me, and the idea of being time-restricted is one of the major things that's keeping me from pulling the trigger. There are genres where being time-gated is fine. A game that heavily features exploration isn't one of them. Plus, I think you lose a bunch of time when you die? I don't play games slowly, but I don't go pure speedrunner on them during my first run. I think my first Hollow Knight run took 20-25 hours to get the basic ending. (I did get lost a bunch.) So I doubt I'll have the same experience, but maybe it won't be as bad as I fear.

Any of those ideas would inevitably lead to difficulty late in the bracket when one finalist's only song left is their #1 and the other's is their #6. Which is why I suggested that everyone ranks them in order, but the communal sequence they get played in will be revealed only after the bracket is revealed.

swordz9 posted...

So I got the Cyno and then 1 pull after Candace right?

I pulled Cyno on literally the first pull, with Candace on literally the second. And then got to watch eight 3-stars pile up behind them.

swordz9 posted...

Well 1 pull after that was Tighnari

But I definitely can't say that. My first five 50/50s were all lost to different characters, but I have a feeling Tighnari will evade me for quite a while.

swordz9 posted...

I do not have enough bows for all the archers I pull though >_>

Join the club. I remember the days of paying for my first battle pass just to get Viridescent Hunt so I would have a weapon for Ganyu. (What do you mean, a crit rate main stat is bad with blizzard strayer?)

I can't wait to see EXSPHERE at a final score of precisely 8.50 after everyone either rated it 1st or 16th with equal likelihood.

Mario

My entire knowledge of Stadia was periodically seeing commercials for it pop up on YouTube that just went "Sta-dee-uh!" and ended after 5 seconds.

andylt posted...

i will watch the video

lmk if anything I said was unclear. I noticed I did say VGMC at one point when I meant to say BOST.

1) Thank you for hosting. If you need any help, please ask.

2) I'm not in favor of the split tiering, but I don't know if my opinion carries a lot of weight because I personally prefer everyone fixing their tracks to the same order. My ideal version of how this would go is that everyone nominates strongest first, weakest last, but that after the nominations are locked, ALL games would play (for example) song #4 in round 1. This way there aren't any blatant mismatches, but nobody's going to purposefully try to game the system because they might very well just screw themselves. How you determine the "true order" is up to you. I like this better than pure random, but I think true random is better than partial random.

3. Album-only songs are fine as long as that's the understood rule. As someone who has hosted both VGM contests, eligibility questions and people trying to tweak stuff just for the sake of tweaking them is always a pain, so anything you can lay out in concrete terms beforehand is obviously better. But NFUN in 2022 is going to be a lot better at evaluating these things than azuarc in 2011 or whatever year BOST1 was.

4. SaoriKobayashi posted...

You still can't nominate BOST champion soundtracks, but if you nominate a game that's been in, try to make most of your tracks unique. At least aim for the songs that weren't used in BOST 5. Probably won't make this a concrete rule, but hey! If it really is a contender for the best soundtrack, it should have a good bench of backups.

Did you typo this, or did you mean to say that any game in the last contest should try to come up with a completely unique set of tracks? Guess we won't be nominating VVVVVV, then. (I know you're not framing this as a hard rule, but I still want to try to obey the spirit of the contest.)

5. One thing that I think needs to be recodified is how tiebreakers are selected at the end of the nomination period. When I created BOST, I invented a really stupid rule just so it wouldn't be randomized, and I didn't even remember that rule existed when Deo enforced it for 5, where it bit me in the ass. FIFO is not a good policy. If anything, LIFO is probably better, but there's got to be a better system...even if that means having a brief run-off period or something like that.

6. NFUN posted...

to clarify, I like how we do tiebreakers but i'm not enamored to the point where i'm opposed allowing alternate matches and such to break ties instead. it's more that i'm not inclined to bend the rules because a game doesn't have enough songs, since that makes calling it a contender for "best ost" kinda silly. if we got rid of the alt song then fine ig

In a perfect world, we'd use more than seven songs. The overwhelming majority of games that should be in the discussion should be able to field at least 10. If not 10 good songs, then at least 10 songs total. Otherwise, go Monty on the Run!

Anyway, there's definitely some weird stuff that happens with use of the alternate. It gets played for first tiebreakers, which was the primary use, but then because loser's brackets inherently have more rounds than winner's brackets, it pulled double duty in the later parts of the LB. You may want to look at how the late rounds of the LB could play out, because there's room at that stage of the bracket for wanting multiple alternates. I know I pulled some weird bullshit for how to pick songs in those matches, like whichever song had the most decisive win earlier in the contest, or randomly making it a 3v3, etc.

There were also people who, as greater proponents of the pure random setlist than I, wanted the tracklist to be a random selection out of 8-10 songs. There's an argument for this as well as an extension of what I just mentioned. I'm vomiting all of this up in one bullet point because it basically runs directly at odds to Haste's request for the 6-song soundtrack.

.

Other than that, as long as I can infer that there is not a total redesign of the contest, I can begin preparing nominations and telling folks what to expect. I had held off until now for fear there might be some major overhaul -- which I would be totally okay with, by the way.

rwlh posted...

Thank you!

More like Reset ("Thank You"), amirite?

Satan (South Park)
The Devil (Bedazzled)
Diablo (Diablo)
Lou (Guitar Hero 3)

I'll have to pass on this review. I am slowly, periodically playing the cases in AAI. I've finished 3 so far, when I can find the time and energy to finish an entire case with a friend.

BlueCrystalTear posted...

Maybe I should have done "before 2005" since more people got their first long-term mobile number earlier than I thought.

I'm honestly not sure when I got my current phone number. My first cell phone was in 2003. It was almost impossible to take phones with you to other carriers back then, though. I migrated at least twice or I'd still have a phone number in my college's area code.

I suspect some people are overestimating. I picked the '05 or earlier option, but it's probably not correct.

Hu Tao doesn't work with overloaded -- no melee character does -- but I do run her with cryo sometimes. That's kind of beside the point, though, isn't it? A character working in multiple teams makes them flexible, not necessarily best.

That was my thought, too, but it's important to know that NASA can do this in case it ever matters.

subjectively, perhaps. I can run over stuff plenty quick with Hu Tao, but Yoimiya has the advantage of being ranged and auto targeting.

How's your progress? Gonna be quite a large project.

fft

Underleveled posted...

2004 and I still get calls/texts for people who had it before me (so I assume, because it's always either Russell or Mary, it's not like I'm getting a variety of names)

Ever since I bought my house, I've been getting messages from people trying to buy some other house owned by a mysterious individual known as Hosvep. I can't tell if someone gave my number instead of theirs to a telemarketing group or what.

more votes

Nice private server, lol. But okay, so it's a hilichurl shield.

Paratroopa1 posted...

I get into this kind of awkward situation sometimes where I like a game - like, really really like a game - and yet everyone else seems just a little more obsessed with it than me, which creates this almost weird, completely undeserved sense of scorn towards it. Link to the Past is a huge example of this, for me. I love Link to the Past, it was one of my favorite games as a kid, but it is also my least favorite of the classic Zeldas, which puts me in an awkward spot when it's everyone else's preferred classic Zelda; LttP randomizer was the Zelda randomizer that took off big, when I was never really into it, and the fact that liking LttP doesn't feel personal to me sort of puts a damper on it. I know this sounds totally unnecessary and petty, and it surely is, but I can't help it, I'm a weird emotional being who struggles with classifying something that I like, but that I also like slightly less than everyone else around me. The fact that I can't muster an equal level of enthusiasm makes it hard to muster enthusiasm at all. It's stupid, but it is what it is.

I understand where this is coming from, don't worry. There are other games I appreciate, but don't love quite as much as the mainstream. LttP (rando) is weird because I actively didn't play LttP as a kid, beyond getting bullied by green guards and giving up, declaring the game to be stupid. Then I saw a rando race in a GDQ event and thought it was the most awesome thing and learned the game just so I could play randomizer. I would definitely not have done that for other Zelda games. Z1 never interested me in any regard and OoT is too freaking long.

However, to piggyback on what you were saying about Hades...

Paratroopa1 posted...

The characters are great! Zagreus is great, Hades is great, all of the supporting characters are great. The story is engaging and the way it incorporates the roguelike elements as diagetic concepts is genius. But you already know that! Everyone already knows that.

My initial consideration for guru pick (assuming a general character contest) was Lilith from Borderlands, but that was before I played BL3 and saw what an absolute mess they made of her character, and she got kicked to the curb. Without an obvious replacement, for a while, if you had asked me, Zagreus might have been my answer, under the guise that he's a likeable character that could make a dent, and that he's from an indie game but high-profile enough that this wouldn't cost him as much as it would most indie characters.

At this point, I think it's pretty likely he'll make the field without any help, and my appeal to Hades is much the same as yours -- I like it, but not enough to think that giving him a bump in seeding is worth the guru nom to me. I enjoyed Hades, and Zag would be a very respectable and solid pick that I think most people could feel good about, but the game doesn't have enough personal clout for the return on investment.

Who knows. Maybe I'll rediscover the game in a few months and have a Renaissance. I have a very temporary answer for who my current selection is, but my reasons for it will likely be invalidated before a contest gets announced, and I'll be back to searching for an answer...which could be Zagreus. /shrug

swordz9 posted...

This is probably the most fascinating the story has been in this game not that Ive disliked any of it. Cyno, Candace & Nilou coming pretty soon now. Candace can seemingly shield literally anything as long as you hold her ability (until the duration runs out anyways)? Its at the expense of being able to attack, but damn thats some awesome defensive skill

Is it different from Beidou or Yun Jin?

Re: Layla -- looks to me like she just has exceptionally long hair that splits in the back. Think Kokomi.

I'm sure you could crowdsource them to the folks here.

:sus:

Apparently the magic number for everyone is seven. Which is fair. The running joke when this game debuted was how Lara went from one scene of being tortured or captured to the next, and that her VA probably had to spend entire weeks doing nothing but making screams of pain. While that is kinda true, I didn't really feel like it was noticeable so much as it pushed the stakes. For a "nobody," Lara is ridiculous forward about stepping up as a hero, performing all kinds of acts of athleticism and bravery that someone in her position probably wouldn't do individually, let alone collectively, and I think that's my bigger beef. At some point, someone would say "I'm done, someone else's turn already."

I also have to work to separate the story in this game from the collectathon exploration, which is what I remember most. And while I'm not sure how I'd rate the gameplay, I'm going to give the story an 8/10 for strong characterization and a number of really strong moments, even if it was certainly not flawless.

Skater

NFUN posted...

they're not by the same artist

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/9/2/AAUC3iAADtOs.png

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/9/3/AAUC3iAADtOt.png < this refers to ar nosurge's EXSPHERE

Looks the same to me!

Mega_Mana posted...

16. . Ar nosurge: Ode to an Unborn Star | Class::EXSPHERE_NOSURGE;
...
1. Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica | EXEC_SPHILIA/.

There's something hilarious about this.