I've been kind of "over" them for a while — while there's some skill involved, sure, too much of it feels like it just boils down to who gets luckiest with a gamble or choice they end up making. The tournaments haven't helped because they're just, ironically, the same thing over and over, and seeing someone lose because of a single decision sucks.

I've talked about it elsewhere, but my main problem is just that there's no interaction. In a normal race, you can watch what the other person is doing; if they're behind, you can use a safer but slower method instead of going for a faster but riskier trick, and the inverse is true — if you're behind, you have a reason to try riskier strategies that might not work out, because the alternative is having no chance at all. In Randomizer races, there's none of that. The commentators are always talking about how [Runner X] "[must] feel way behind", but there's not any reason behind that assumption other than the fact that the clock is still going and the other person hasn't finished yet.

(You also can't have any communication at all, at least for the "official" races, so you don't even get to hear what a runner might be thinking, or planning, which makes it even more boring... especially if you end up having to mute an obnoxious pair of commentators.)



One thing that I had suggested that got refined by Acmlm was having spoiler races, where you're given the ROM to race, then when the race actually starts, the spoiler file — "these items are here", not the actual suggested route — is provided, and the challenge is to figure out the fastest route to the end of the game given that knowledge. It tests one's routing and execution skill much more, while removing almost all of the luck element. I think it'd make for some more exciting races.

I'm not sure to what degree it matters, but you could likely even allow communication and stream watching, since everyone has the same information, and if you're trying to copy someone else's route, you're always going to be a little slower

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(Lv 244 with 228119749 EXP)

Originally posted by Lunaria

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Originally posted by Reimu

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Hopefully the LADX Randomizer gets some more love because it's good so far, just needs some bugs fixed. Wishing in the near future, it'll get more options to play around with, and possibly more features.

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This sounds interesting, do you have a link? :o

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Last I checked, the Z4 Randomizer was Discord-only I can try to get you a link if you'd like, though.

Link's Awakening isn't a game that's terribly well-suited to traditional randomizers that move the items around. The game is designed to be quite linear. The current randomizer tries to get around this by allowing for warp locations to be randomized, and adding a few obvious and obnoxious barriers, but I think it'd be a lot better if you just modified the overworld to allow for more exploration. Remove some pits and rocks from some places, that sort of thing.

What would really be nice is an eventual way to make fully random dungeons and caves, but I don't think anybody is going to bother doing that any time soon

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(Lv 244 with 228119804 EXP)

Somehow I'm not surprised... maybe they can put a map into Metroid when you pause, or at least show a pop-up of where on the map you are when you enter or leave it?

There was a SMB1 ROM hack called "Super Mario R", I want to say, that featured randomized levels (!) — there were a handful of "chunks" it would use to construct a level that would fit together in some way. It was really neat, but I can't find any information on it online. I wish I still had a copy of it because it was pretty neat.



I wonder, do games like Toejam & Earl count? That's another one I've seen getting played pretty often, and it has a random world option. Unfortunately, no way to pick a seed, so everyone gets a different game each time, but it's just for fun so it doesn't matter too much.

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(Lv 244 with 228120085 EXP)

I actually had "do roguelikes like..." in my post (E: before changing it to what it says now), instead of games, but my point still stands

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(Lv 244 with 228120286 EXP)