Ciro Santilli used to play video games when he was young. But after he reached 18 he got bored of them.

The problem is that no matter how you look at, the how to become famous in the real world game is just always more interesting and fulfilling.

Therefore adult Ciro enjoys only the following types of video game content in video form, so that other people waste their lives playing the games while you only see the highlights:

The aspect Ciro enjoys about non-PvP games is atmosphere. Not as conveyed by useless story telling, but as conveyed by music and graphics, and the context deep idea. Legend of Zelda and Metroid come to mind.

And too many games commit the sins of dependency of dexterity, no save states, how do I skip this boring part, or jump straight to the beautiful one?

Another important point is; the perfect video game is an infinitely hard one.

It also doesn't help if you are already typing on a computer all day long on your job. Hands get tired. Eyes have an infinite capacity to consume useless YouTube videos however. Medically proved.

As a result, Ciro just watches videos about video games. Notably games he played when he was a teenager and already understand the rules for.

And things got even worse as after Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment, and he started to feel bad about playing any game that is not open source.

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.

TODO there was one which was relly good, can't find it anymore. One day.

This is true. The level of competition in university entry exams in Asia in insane in the early 21st century compared to the West.

This is actually both good and bad. Good because it selects some very good exam passers. And bad because it selects some very good exam passers.

30 year old Ciro Santilli preferred video game genre is survival games

This is a list of video games that are good to watch other people playing, even if you don't play yourself. And often they are better to watch than to play as you don't have to waste your time as much!

A meta breaking glitch of a video game is a glitch that when discovered significantly breaks the meta.

In non-video game-game, it does sometimes happen that a meta is broken as well, but these events tend to be rarer and less dramatic than meta-breaking due to computer program glitches.

In PvP games, those glitches are generally forbidden by existing rules, and quickly patched after discovered.

In speedrunning however, they are either incorporated in the existing strategy, or may lead to the creation of a new run category for particularly significant glitches.

A non-tool-assisted speedrun.

Ciro Santilli views humans as biological robots, and therefore RTA videos can be thought of as probabilistic TAS with human achievable reflex constraints.

This aspect is especially highlighted in "speed run record evolution videos", which can be quite fun, e.g. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmS9e7kzgS4 Ocarina of Time - World Record History and Progression (Any% Speedrun, 1990s-2017) by retro (2017)

From a similar point of view, Ciro also sometimes watches/learns a bit about competitive PvP games from a "could a computer play this better than a human" point of view.

Ciro also likes to watch commented manual speedruns of games as a way of experiencing the game at a high level without spending too much time on it, often from Games Done Quick. Their format is good because it generally showcases one player focusing more on the gameplay, and three couch commentators to give context, that's a good setup.

It is a

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)".

Ciro Santilli's TODO there:

Lists:

Why would anyone ever waste time playing a closed source game, when this will inevitably lead to endless hours of decompilation down the line when you want to:

Those who devote their time to the useless development of open source video games, before we even have decent open source development tooling, will, without a doubt, have their place in Heaven.

YouTube review channels:

This is a really good project. So fun to play around with. Low level IO part only like drawing to screen and handling keyboard inputs.

Ciro Santilli has: