Snowflake's Feed

Intellivision dungeons and dragons track thoughts

i do enjoy these pseudo marathons i do (not real marathons, 12 hour plays sessions), its almsot like studying, i cram in so much video game knowledge/learning in one day. I feel like i'm a different peson talking about this than just 3 days ago, anywho....

the original, cloud mountin, crown of kings:
I fancy myself a good video game player, but even for my the top two difficulty levels took a while. whereas easy i pullsed off almost immediately. Therefore, for "bar to entry" i'm no longer quite so worried about finding ways to penalized partial completions, and instead i'd rather just allow all difficulties levels, with a big enough penalty that you have to play on hard to be first.

I think this works, because if someone only partially completes hard, and someone else fully completes easy, well i'd rather have submissions for full completion of easy than partial completions of hard. it also makes the math much easier for me to figure out penalites, its really tough deciding how close someone came in a partial completion due to all the strategy in the game and the valid reasons to ignore certain items. also, if you're not good enough to play on hard, but you think the person playing on easy isnt as good as you, then go beat their time on easy.

each difficulty level should take under 30 minutes to beat, and definitely under an hour. unless you're taking huge bathroom breaks or something like that, going over an hour is just crazy talk. and, even going over an hour stil wouldnt let a lower difficulty beat you, cause if the penalty is 1 hour, then 1 hour on hard could only be beaten by 0 seconds (+ hour penalty on next level down, so i propse

your score your time + the following penalty
hard (disc speed) = no penalty added
medium/hard (button 1) = add 1 hour to your time
medium (button 2) = add 2 hours to your time
easy (button 3) = add 3 hours to your time

you may enter a worse time than what you scored just not a betteer time, so be as precise (or not precise) as you like

*I'm not rushing to create this track as i'm still considering allwoing certain glitches. yes, the glitches give you options and in theory make the game easier, but they also add a level of strategy, and so make competion harder -- yiu know, if we all have the same benefit to make the game easier, then its still tough to beat each other. as long as the "cheat" adds a level of strategy and decisions making, then it actually complicates and makes more interesting how to get the best possible time



as for treasure of tarmin. ug. it COULD be points, as the game does keep track of points, but honeslty, the points are stupid. the entire goal is to kill the minotaur, getting points just means you wasted time. and heck, anyone going for points also got better weapons, and so made the game easier. yes, i get it, theres some fun in being obsessive and finding every item. but fun as that is, is it really competiive? i think it would just make for insanely easy marathons ,that are fun to watch at first but quickly get boring. i'm still pretty sure speed running is the way to go on this, but let me play a bit more before deciding.