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I just uploaded a recording of Nam-1975... as some of you know, the default settings for Neo-Geo games in MAME are messed up. Most of the games only give you one life, and this can make getting a good recording much tougher. Nam-1975 is no exception, but you do get your bonus lives at 10,000 and 20,000 points (on real default settings you get them at 100,000 and 200,000), plus a bonus life if you destroy a big ship in the last stage. Ordinarily it'd still be fairly tough to go through the game on one credit with less lives like that, but it seems that the game is on the easiest difficulty setting. I had never played it like this, and was both amazed and appalled with the ease it was to get through the game... it was like target practice! Enemies take forever to fire, and when they do fire the bullets are slower. This makes finishing the game really easy, although I did screw up in a couple areas... I need a new pad :)

Anyway, this brings me to my point. I'm pretty sure that in the near future, the dipswitch settings will be correct for Neo-Geo games, and you'll get three lives and play at the default difficulty (which is usually Level 4). But then, why would you want to make a recording on settings that are harder, when you can use 0.34 Beta 1 or 2 or whatever to play through and have a much easier time at getting a higher score? Of course, I'm not saying that getting only one life but an easier difficulty level on all games is easier, but it is in Nam's case.

Any thoughts on this?

-- BBH (lordbbh@aol.com), September 15, 1998

Answers

Don't accept by now

In my opinion, we shouldn't accept no more recordings until the dipswitch settings will be correct for Neo-Geo games.

-- German Castagnasso (German_Castagnsso@rocketmail.com), September 16, 1998.

Neo recordings with faulty dip-switches

If we do accept recordings for m34b2 then they should be removed from the database once the dip switch problem has been fixed.

-- Dith (dith@europress.co.uk), September 16, 1998.

Excluding the earlier betas

I agree, if there was some way for the script to block recordings submitted for certain versions that would work. For now, I don't think that banning ALL Neo-Geo games from being uploaded is the answer... of course, I'm saying that because I was planning on increasing my Leaderboard score a little more by playing some of those ;) (plus I don't think Zwaxy wants to lose his Puzzle Bobble score, hehe)

Seriously though, some games only give you one "chance" or life anyway. (Puzzle Bobble, Puzzle de Pon, Wind Jammers, Mutation Nation, Ninja Commando, all fighters) But then again, it seems that Level 1 is the default, unchangable setting for almost all of the games. For most of the rest of the games, they ARE harder when you only have one life... like Last Resort. I had a pretty good run on my recording, but there's no doubt that I'd do better if I had five lives (three at start and two bonuses awarded) instead of just one. I plan on re-recording whenever the dip switches are fixed. But Nam-1975 is one of the exceptions since having fewer lives but a much easier game difficulty still makes getting through it easier. Not all the games are like that, and sometimes the difficulty hardly even makes a difference.

-BBH

-- BBH (lordbbh@aol.com), September 16, 1998.


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