Hacker News Reader

Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

When the original Ecco came out on the Megadrive (Genesis), I spent all my hard-earned money to buy it. That game is obscenely hard. I got frustrated, so I sat down for the afternoon with a pen and paper and somehow managed to decode the password system. I teleported to the final level and completed it the next day.

Then I was wracked with guilt about spending all my money on a game I completed in two days.

View on HN

> I sat down for the afternoon with a pen and paper and somehow managed to decode the password system

Would love to hear more about this, if you have any recollection :)

I'd love to know how I did it. There must have been a certain element of luck. I actually found the decompiled routine for the password code a couple of years ago and, IIRC, it was surprisingly more sophisticated than my teenage brain would have suspected.

https://eccothedolphin.online/ecco-password-generator/

Philosophically, I would argue that you did not complete the game.

You skipped several levels and saw only some percentage of the intended content, gameplay, story, etc. Games in general, and Ecco the Dolphin is no exception, are very much about the journey and not just the destination. You missed out on themes & experiences like isolation, making friends with those outside of your in-group, conservation, time travel, communing with dinosaurs and, of course, space travel.

So, you really shouldn't have felt so guilty.

I wonder if this will make him feel guilty for feeling guilty

And maybe @dfxm12 will feel guilty about that - it's gonna be a tough for everyone

There are plenty of people who would argue that getting to end credits means beating the game.

You can however say that skipping levels also skips the story, so they did not finish the story.

OP didn't say they "beat" the game. If you want to argue that, it's a different discussion.

Ecco the Dolphin (video game) > Plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_the_Dolphin_(video_game)

Does that mean that taking warp zones in Mario doesn't count as beating the game?

Not in this context.

If you told me you beat Mario on NES but you didn't even play 24 out of the 32 levels, and you never beat them otherwise, I don't think I'd give you the same credit as someone who beat each level.

This is why Any% speedruns (get to end credits any way possible) are their own category.

In speedrunning circles there are categories like 100%, any% (get to the end in any way), minimum percent (get to the end doing the least possible), glitchless, no major glitches, etc.

People have different interests and finish in their own way.

If you’re really into a game you’re missing out if you don’t try to beat it in different ways.

If you’re really into one particular way you’re really kind of being a bad sport if you insist others enjoy a game in your preferred way.

IMO it depends, did you find the warp zones yourself or were you told about them? They're hidden. Finding them by luck doesn't feel like cheating to me, but getting outside knowledge to bypass big parts of the game kind of does.

What a final level, though! Having skipped a large chunk of the game, were you surprised by it?

LOL. I can't remember my reaction at the time. I'd only played through the first few "normal" levels before I got frustrated with the difficulty. I'm sure I was very confused :D

You must be the only Person in the world that Beat this Game, cheating or otherwise.

https://youtu.be/OGVUuVjXMTA ecco the dolphin any% speedrun world record [17:54]

which is actually faster than the 20:44 TAS! (https://tasvideos.org/228G)

Usually, speedruns aren't actually faster than the TAS, unless the speedrun used some new technique was developed after the TAS was made. Normally the biggest different is that TASes and regular speedruns use different methods of timing.

TASes are pretty much always measured from power on to last button input required to trigger the credits. With normal speedrun, timing various from game to game, but a common method is timing from selecting new game to the last hit on the final boss. So games with long openings or with interactive post-final boss sequences that have to be played before the credits start would have inflated times on the TAS.

The TAS counts about an extra 15 seconds before the game starts. The TAS reaches the point the speed run stops counting at 18:52, and continues to play out the ending. So the TAS would be measured as about 18:37 using speed run timing, so the speed run is still genuinely faster than the TAS, but less than the official numbers indicate.

It seems like the speed run uses a glitch that the TAS deliberately avoided. From the TAS description:

> At the same time, a major new glitch allowing Ecco to go through nearly any wall was not used because the frequency of its use would make the run very repetitive.

>which is actually faster than the 20:44 TAS!

I had no idea what this was.

For people like me, after clicking through the link and some googling:

TAS = "Tool-assisted speedrun" or "tool-assisted superplay", and they are "generally created with the goal of creating theoretically perfect playthroughs".

That any% run was fun to skim through though. I had no idea what was happening.

Is that just because no one cares to create a TAS for the game? I don't know anyway a RTA would be faster than TAS other than no good TAS exists.

I’d say more like the TAS is outdated, a person can discover something new that the person doing the TAS didn’t.

Both are a decade old. Looks to be posted within weeks of each other. If this is the best TAS there is for the game, it means that no one cares about the TAS.

Usually the timing rules aren't the same for TAS and RTA, as TAS timing always starts at console power-on while RTA usually when 'new game' is selected from the menu.

You mean "usually" in sense that for this game in particular or "usually" as in "most of the time regardless of the game"? Because I have never heard about TAS being timed differently than RTA in any other game, that doesn't even make any sense. Game is the same, why would you time TAS from different point than RTA?

Whole point of a TAS is to show what "perfect" speed run would look like.

Usually as in "most of the time regardless of the game", yes.

Seems like a sibling comment explained this already in much more detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42082420

Reply on news.ycombinator.com