Hey, I was recently made mod, and I wanted to provide some transparency on some rules changes, and provide you the opportunity to voice any concerns or suggestions you might have.
I'm not looking to rock the boat, I just want to provide consistency and clarity to make it as EASY AS POSSIBLE to time, especially as this game is starting to see some more activity lately.
It's clear that the old mods were timing the top NES runs with a starting frame of when an opponent's face is visible in character select, and an ending frame of the first frame the "3" is visible on a successful pin, OR the first frame your character's arms are raised after a count-out or steel cage escape.
This seems perfectly fair to me, especially for runs that might not provide input capture, as it provides a nice visual cue, so I've codified that into the rules for NES runs.
At the time of this post, the SMS version has 2 verified runs, and there are 3 SMS runs in the queue for me to time and verify - and I have to figure out what the rules are.
I've never played the SMS version, so I might not be aware of some version differences, so here is where if anyone thinks these rules are bad or unfair, I welcome any feedback and we can make a change as long as it's fair and consistent for everybody.
Here's where I'm at.
- the SMS version looks remarkably similar to the NES version, and it seems like we could just choose to use the NES frame counting rules and it'd be just as fair
- the current 1st place run is currently timed 99 milliseconds SLOWER than the NES timing method
- the current 2nd place run is currently timed either 167 milliseconds SLOWER than the NES timing method, or 100 milliseconds FASTER than it (*)
- (*) I noticed that in the SMS version, if you escape the steel cage, your character does a little "double-pump" of their arms. It's unclear whether the original intention of the mods was that we should time to the first arm raise or the second. I'm inclined to just go with the first.
- in the (apparent) absence of consistent timing methods, it seems like either one or both runs should be retimed, and since I haven't been able to reverse engineer what the "old" timing method was supposed to be, I'm just going to use the same timing as NES, and allow people to yell at me if this is unfair in some way due to some nuance to the SMS version that I'm missing
I've never even seen a run of the Game Gear version. Let's just say that I hope it works the same way and that the same frame timing rules will work there. If anyone ever submits a run for that version and you feel it needs to use some other timing, please just explain your reasoning and maybe we'll go for it.
Thanks everybody!
