[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwXfvvN2QsE[/youtube]
In a game where you only need two buttons, right and jump, it shouldn’t be too hard for people to play at once, right?
Right?
Inspired by Twitch Plays Pokemon. If you haven’t seen this amazing social and gaming experiment, go check them out here:
http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon
It’s funny because they are playing the horrendous Game Boy Advance port instead of original version of the game.
Unfortunately the twitch plays pokemon thing was totally destroyed when they added democracy and anarchy mode.
Since when does “destroyed” mean “made better”?
Sonic Genesis? Really?
I guess they didn’t know which port was the definitive version? – Unless they were not even trying? 😛
So…wait…is this “Twitch Plays” thing where hundreds of people play the game at the same time? Or just one person and they keep switching?
From what I understood from reading the CNET article about it, there is a server program which takes in all the commands. These are averaged together and the most popular of all the requested button actions among the users is queued as the next input. The very frustrating and impractical part about all this is that the messages have a 30 to 40 second delay in being processed as input. So what you input to tell what the character to do will take about 30 seconds to happen from the time of seeing what is currently going on on the screen. Trendy? Yes. Fun? For most like me, no. It’s just a chaotic mess of confusion.
Here is the more correct information from the website itself:
Description
TwitchPlaysPokemon is stream that lets you play Pokemon with a lot of other people by typing commands into chat.
It was created as an experiment to test the viability of this format, the way people interact with the input system and the way they interact socially with each other.
Anarchy mode and Democracy mode
TwitchPlaysPokemon now has two modes for determining the input to make in the game, they are called anarchy mode and democracy mode.
Anarchy mode is the “classic” mode, where everyone’s inputs are applied immediately.
Democracy mode chooses the most popular input provided during a 20 second voting period.
In order to switch from one mode to the other a certain number of votes must be for the opposing mode.
To get from anarchy mode to democracy mode 80% of the votes must be for democracy mode.
To get from democracy mode to anarchy mode 50% of the votes must be for anarchy mode.
The reason for this asymmetry is that with the equal 75% it took a smaller majority to disrupt democracy mode then it did to reinstate anarchy mode.
In democracy mode you can compile a sequence of inputs. left2 will move left twice, left2down2 will move left twice and down twice.
Why is it so delayed (laggy)?
Twitch’s servers introduce a lot of delay in order to support streaming to many people simultaneously.
The amount of delay is approximately 20~40 seconds depending on connection quality. After watching the stream for awhile the delay may increase a tiny amount (enough for chat spoilers), refreshing may help in this case.
They obviously failed because they were playing Sonic Genesis. Sonic 1 Twitch chat could handle a no-damage, all-chaos emerald speedrun of the game. Sonic 1 fo lauif!
I hate Sonic 1 on game boy advance I like original Sonic The Hedgehog on Sega Genesis. Also have you heard Sonic Adventure 7 on game boy?
In all seriousness, this couldn’t possibly work because you need to be able to hold the button for higher jumps. Twitch probably only registers each “A” as the jump button being pressed for one frame. So even if they COULD somehow coordinate for a game as fast as Sonic (I was legit surprised that they weren’t constantly dying to the first enemy) plenty of things would just be straight up impossible.
In my day, when you took spike damage, then landed on spikes, you lost a life. Kids these days have it so easy!