Kind of the opposite of a basal group.

Cirists,

One cool thing about computer Go vs computer chess is that in go you can easily parametrize the game difficulty by board size!

First major one: Magic: The Gathering.

Ciro thinks this is idiotic, and that Wizards should sell all cards individually with unlimited supply and all with the same prices, especially online where there are no printing costs. But because Wizards made the silly promise never to reprint certain cards with the reserved list in 1994, they can't even correct this mistake legally! (TODO maybe, see further discussion at: www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/contract-from-below-promissory-estoppel-and-the-reserved-list). There is however one simple solution: create and promote a new no reserve list format, and let reserve list formats rot away:One interesting outcome of this would be to have card cost limited formats. Penny Dreadful puts a super low limit, on individual cards, but it would be cool to have a max cost per deck version of it.

A cool thing is when they printed Garth One-Eye, which allows you to make imaginary copies of some of those restricted list cards during play. This is the type of "flirting with the rules", that Ciro Santilli admires. The introduction of online-only cards such as XXX has pushed that even further as of 2021.

This was especially insane when Ciro was young and the Internet was not very widely available in Brazil yet, and Ciro did not know how to check the values of cards on online markets, and would trade cards with older much more knowledgable teenagers, based solely on his appraisal of a card's strength! Can you imagine how many young Timmys got ripped off in this manner, trading useless one million mana spells for ultra expensive black lotuses?

Another option we could pursue would be to make governments consider TCG pack opening a form of gambling, which it obviously is:

There is however one good solution to Magic's insane cost: watch people who have nothing better to do in their lives play on YouTube.

And as Internet formats dominate more and more, if they have any brains at will they will migrate to a subscription model where you pay to play for a given period of time, and have immediate access to all cards. It could even be a tiered access, with older formats being more expensive (more bugs to fix on different cards), but you must get access to all cards of a format at once.

Paraprasing a friend of Ciro Santilli:

Luckily, early teens Ciro Santilli was partly protected from this by Ciro Santilli's cheapness.

But Ciro distinctly remembers one day in his early teens that he couldn't sleep very well, and he got up, and the was decided that he would become the greatest Magic: The Gathering player who ever lived. Can you imagine the incredible loss that this would have been to humankind? And talk about the incredible lack of development opportunity present in poor countries, related:

The meta of a game is the currently dominating know strategy or set of strategies, see also Section "Nash equilibrium".

Ciro once commented that the best game is an infinitely hard one, where you can progress infinitely. To which his great friend J. replied:Or more broadly, one may argue that the perfect video game is life itself, or difficult life goals like making money, becoming famous or changing the world.

Thinking about it, "infinitely hard" is perhaps not a very precise term, as it could be interpreted as impossible. And if you have mathematical proof that something is impossible, it would be "pointless" to try, trying would be equivalent to pure meditation.

Maybe a better way to put it would be in terms of a difficulty curve. Real life also involves a lot of waiting, either for some experiment to finish running, of for you mental energy to restore a bit.

But so be it, you get the idea.

But this is basically what Ciro feels on every video game. It happens too often on PVE games that things are is either:

Not to mention the incredible breach of suspension of disbelief of most PvE games where enemies are unbelievably stupid. E.g., why doesn't Bowser just build one fucking wall 15 tiles high to prevent Mario from coming through to his castle? And then put a gate and a hundred guards in front of it? TODO there was a YouTube video of this, I think it was Toad pointing it out to Mario that it is quite weird that Bowser is so stupid, it almost feels like he wants to be beaten.

To some extent, the ultimate achievement of a TAS is to achieve arbitrary code execution (ACE) on a game, although this has been becoming rarer and rarer in newer consoles. The Nintendo 64 is the current interesting ACE discovery frontier as of 2020.

Post ACE, you then get into more subtle categories which tend to be more geometric clipping through wall glitches, but those can still be fun.

The most beautiful TAS content ever made are:

It is also amusing to see console verification of emulations, e.g.: Video 1. "Super Mario 64 '120 Stars' in 1:20:41.52 Console Verified by Soul Umbreon (2012)".