Showing posts with label High Score. Show all posts
Showing posts with label High Score. Show all posts

Monday, September 5, 2011

New World Famicom Galaxian Record!!!

As I mentioned in an earlier post a couple months ago, I've been trying for ages to crack the Famicom Galaxian record. Well, at least I've been trying to break the only Famicom Galaxian record that I've been able to find, which was set in 1985 by someone named Hitoki from Gunma prefecture and reported in my Hishousakusen Mecha Guide.

That record was 85,030 points. It pales in comparison to the arcade record listed at Twin Galaxies, which is somewhere over 1,000,000 points but its still a pretty good score. I've never gotten within 20,000 points of it. Until today. Today I finally did it: 97,720 points! Yes!
I had the game of my life. I didn't even loose my first life until just after hitting 70,000.

The best part of breaking the record is that I can finally stop playing Galaxian!! Galaga is way better.

Anyway, short post but I couldn't wait to tell everyone - no point in setting a new high score otherwise:)

Oh and to end this on a petty note: IN YOUR FACE, Hitoki from Gunma in 1985! Oh yeah!

Saturday, August 6, 2011

An Afternoon Trying to Break the Famicom Galaxian Record

I finally got around to watching the documentary "King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" the other day. If you haven't seen it yet, I recommend it. A very entertaining yarn about one modest man's quest to wrest the world record for Donkey Kong away from the incumbent, Billy Mitchell.

I've read that the filmmaker's took a lot of liberties with the facts, which is kind of unfortunate, but I nonetheless found it to be a worthwhile way of spending two hours, if for no other reason than to simply see a movie with a lot of retro video game stuff in it.

Watching the film has inspired me to see if there are any video game records that I might be able to challenge on the Famicom. The records at stake in the film are those kept by Twin Galaxies, which in the movie is show to be the official scorekeeper relied on by Guinness. So I thought I might start there.

In order to break a record of course the first thing you have to do is choose a game. I have chosen "Galaxian", which I have played a lot of and pride myself on being reasonably good at. Not world-record setting good, mind you, but still pretty good.

So I wandered over to Twin Galaxies' website to see what the world record for Galaxian on the Famicom is. I was greatly disappointed to discover that despite billing themselves as "Twin Galaxies International" they don't list high scores for Famicom games.

As a second best solution I looked for the NES record, but unfortunately Galaxian was never released on that one.

So I am left with a couple of options. One is ironically this blog, in which I posted a list of Famicom high scores from 1985 a couple months ago which included Galaxian. The high score there was 85,030.

The second option is to use the Arcade score from Twin Galaxies which is....hold on a second I have to look this up.....

1,653,270

OK, option one it is!

Being a rainy weekend afternoon and with the wife out for a couple hours I thought I'd give the 85,030 point record a run for its money.

My first effort yielded this:
39,200. That is almost half-way there. Not too bad actually. This is about an average Galaxian score for me, if I get over 40,000 I'm usually quite happy with myself.

Take two, however, yielded this:
Ouch. Not a good game at all. I lost my first life on the third level and it was downhill from there.

I thought about the need to alter my strategy in some way. After about 10 good hard minutes of thinking I came up with this:
Absolutely brilliant. On my next try I exceeded the half-way mark:
In my fourth and final try I had my best game of all. I was doing it all right. 20,000.....30,000....40,000....50,000...I was racking up points like a man possessed.

Then this happened:
My dog just got fixed a couple days ago so he is wearing this conical thing to prevent him from scratching the stitches. The whole experience has made him rather needy, emotionally speaking. He wanted some attention, which he lets me know by jumping up and scratching me until I give him some. I paused the game and spent a few minutes playing with him. That broke my concentration and within 1,000 points of starting up again the game was over:
55,080 is a pretty good score. Not my all time high (63,000) but pretty good and within 30,000 of the 1985 record I am going by. Looking at Twin Galaxies Arcade score ranking that would have been enough to put me at #15 there had this been on an arcade machine.

A bit more practice and I should be able to make it. When I do, I'll post something about it here.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

1985 Famicom High Scores

I picked up a rather interesting book at Mandarake the other day. Everybody, meet the Hishousakusen Mecha Guide.

This was an interesting guide book, one of many released for the Famicom in the 1980s. This was the third in this series and was published in 1985, 2 years after the Famicom's release and at the height of the Famicom boom.

It has strategy guides for 13 Famicom games - see if you can guess which ones by looking at the artwork on the cover.

Back in the day these guidebooks probably weren't worth the cover price (580 yen). Unless you had all 13 games you would be getting a lot of useless information. Plus for the most part the mini strategy guides just contain info that can be found in the manuals the games came with.

As a repository of Famicom history though this thing is fantastic. Most of its value lies not in the guides to the games, but in the added bonus features that crop up here and there. Today I thought I would do a post about one of these: High scores.

On page 158 this book has a list of high scores which readers of the series have achieved on some of the more popular Famicom games of the time:
I find this sort of thing very interesting, so I've translated the list below. The only difference between this and the Japanese original is that I've omitted the names of the hi-scorers to respect their privacy and I've also omitted the Hyper Series scores at the bottom which would have been a pain in the ass to fit into the table. Here they are:

Game

Hi Score

Prefecture

Clu Clu Land

139,230

Chiba

Star Force

9,999,900

Saitama

Spartan X

1,243,120

Tokyo

Nuts and Milk

900,000

Hokkaido

Balloon Fight

324,000

Tochigi

Xevious

99,999,990

Kanagawa

City Connection

1,150,000

Tokyo

Mario Brothers

999,970

Chiba

Donkey Kong Jr.

1,109,900

Tokyo

Galaxian

85,030

Gunma

Pu Yan

3,900,321

Ehime

Yie Ar Kung Fu

999,999

Osaka

Galaga

780,000

Tokyo

Pinball

523,540

Hiroshima

Wrecking Crew

99,999,999

Tokyo

Challenger

527,500

Nigata

Route 16 Turbo

822,600

Nagano

Ninja Kun

5,385,200

Tokyo

Golf

-21

Hyogo


Ever gotten scores better than these? These look pretty good to me. The scores for Star Force, Xevious, Yie Ar Kung Fu and Wrecking Crew obviously represent the highest scores possible. The only one I've come close to besting is Galaxian, all the others are way out of my league. But then I suck at video games.

Anyway, I really like this because it reminds me of an earlier age of video games. You ever notice how the high score feature was slowly eliminated from most video games in a process that began during the Famicom's generation? It seemed that by the time the Nintendo 64 rolled by score keeping had been eliminated from all but a handful of games.

In the old days though, pretty much all games revolved around racking up high scores. The purpose was just to get as many points as you could. This was a really brilliant feature of them. The high score provided the perfect measure of one's skill when compared with other players. It gave you something to focus on while playing the game and provided an added level of intensity as it made everything in the game important. Miss shooting down a single space ship and that represented points lost.

Even in games where the main purpose wasn't getting a high score per se the presence of the score feature provided another element of interest. Like in Super Mario Brothers the purpose wasn't really to get points, it was to get to the end of level 8-4. But once you had finished every stage, instead of tossing the game aside you could start again from the beginning with a new mission: using score rather than levels completed as the measure of success. To a certain extent the fact that you could rack up huge points by just endlessly bouncing turtles off of walls limited the enjoyment of this but you get the point.

High scores: I salute you!

Related Posts:
- Famicom History
- Famicom Releases by the Numbers
- Amada Family Computer Mini Cards: The Coolest Famicom Thing You Never Knew Existed
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