[Pxtl]

I dislike the "half a-press" term of art because it creates the question: If I release the a-press within the level to access his non-a-pressed abilities, would that count still as half-an-a-press? It seems to me that "half" an a-press should represent an edge (going up or down), and starting out holding "a" should count as like 0.1.

[starkparker]

Or simply don't count A-button phases that aren't press events/keydowns as "half presses". That's what's always bugged me about it; if press, hold, and release are different actions, and those are meaningful to the speedrun, and you care about what a general audience thinks about it, then just count them separately. Don't use a misnomer to suggest something that doesn't exist. It's obtuse jargon for the sake of it.

It rubs up wrongly against common sense, which is why people call it out; when you press a digital button with only two states, you'd refer to that action as a button press in any other context. General game logic refers to a digital button press as a button press/keydown event or state/key press; there's no "half", it's Boolean. And it's doubly confusing if you don't know that the N64 doesn't have pressure sensitive buttons, in which the term "half-press" would make more sense.

[eredengrin]

> It's obtuse jargon for the sake of it.

Not really. The speedrun is to optimize for fewest total A-button presses. This metric is known from the controller's perspective in the sense that if you sniffed the communications between the controller and console, you could know the number of A-presses. Given this metric, the term half A-press makes total sense once it is understood. To reiterate the video, in a single level run, a half press rounds up to 1, but in a full game run it rounds down. How else would you communicate that without "obtuse jargon"?

> if press, hold, and release are different actions, and those are meaningful to the speedrun, and you care about what a general audience thinks about it, then just count them separately

If you want to distinguish between the actions taken based on the state of the a button, that is fundamentally different from tracking the number of button presses since it requires knowledge of the game state. Not only does it make much harder to define but it's also much harder to track without advanced tooling (how do you know if the game state was modified in an important way or not if someone presses the button for eg 2 frames vs 4 frames?). I'm not sure how I see this would make it easier for the general audience to understand either since now they also have to understand the game state rather than how many times a button was pressed. Also, this makes it entirely disconnected from the physical world, when presumably the idea of the challenge was to use the buttons on your controller less.

There's nothing stopping speed runners from tracking it this way I suppose but complaining about how a community plays a game is a bit odd. Although it is a nintendo game so I guess complaining about how the hardcore fans play it is pretty much expected.