It's my understanding from Deca2000 that there are actually 2 different TG settings for Q*bert. The default settings are TG for marathon games and the 5 man TG setting is for tournament games. The entire reason that there's a 5 man TG setting in Q*bert and some other games for tournaments is so that the people who can marathon the game will have to play more skillfully with the limited lives and thus truly use their skill to achieve a good score. It basically levels the playing field for everyone involved in the tournament.(posted 9226 days ago)I know that I got better at Q*bert while playing my 7 million+ marathon game and then rethought my strategy again to improve my Q*bert score when I was restricted to only 5 men.
One thing I'm not sure about is whether the qbert TG settings should apply to qbertjp or not. It's been a quite a while since I've played qbertjp, but I remember it being harder than qbert. Qbert doesn't seem to get any harder after about level 6, but I believe qbertjp continues to get harder after level 6. I think that everything continues to speed up, but I don't think I've ever made it to level 9 on qbertjp.
I know that there are other games with clones where I can tell little if any difference between the clones, frogger being an example. Donkey Kong Jr. is another example where there are some differences: screen order, enemy movement slightly different, etc. However, the differences in Donkey Kong Jr. don't make the game more difficult, just a bit different. So the same TG settings for the clones make sense.
I don't think it would be nearly as easy to do a marathon game of qbertjp as it is on qbert, so the same settings may not make sense in this case. However, since I did improve on qbert during Deca2000, I'd have to take a look at qbertjp again to see if I can get farther than I did 1 1/2 years ago when I last played it. If anyone has managed to get to level 9 and hold their own on qbertjp for even a short marathon session, I'd like to see the inp.
Kenneth Thomas (kft)