There was discussion in early August of last year in regards to trapping balls in stage 5 to earn big points. I don't know if we voted on this technique, but if we didn't, let's do so now.

I saw that recording(in dos mame 36 beta 1), and the scoring in stage 5 was ridiculous, and should be banned if possible - but that's my opinion...

Thanks for reading. GB9

-- Gameboy9 (goldengameboy@yahoo.com), April 19, 2000

Answers

Wow. Haven`t heard of that. Can you send me an INP of this, or is it available here for downloading? ( no, I`m not too lazy to look, but my machine is giving me a hard time with regards downloads...)

ALEX

-- Alex Weir (alexweir@indigo.ie), April 19, 2000.

I may have the world record for the original Arkanoid game, but unfortunately I never had access to a revenge of Doh. I did play it off and on, but never beat the game with 1 credit. I didn't know about the big points stage untill I saw a inp from German Krool. I don't think this method should be banned because even know you get alot of points on this stage, it's a situation where you can't stay there forever and it not in harms way. The records on this game back in the late 80's made the Twin Galaxies Scoreboard using this technique. That would be like saying in Arkanoid, a player cannot use all his extra men he earned throughout the game on the last boss to gain 15k for each one he has in reserve. I have gotten over 500k from doing this and it is perfectly legal. If a player like German Krol could use the technique and pull off millions and millions of points, well then that's a different story. I figured a really good game will be somewhere between 1.5M ~ 1.8M. Maybe 2M, but not 15M and 10 hours later.

Just my $.02 Steve Krogman ~ Arkanoid: 1,466,640 ~

-- stephen krogman (skrogman@bellsouth.net), April 19, 2000.

I've seen this technique used in Clay's ark2us inp using Mame 36b1. I have a couple of questions before I vote as I don't know the game.

1. To do this trick requires you to get one of the powerups (N I think) that somehow always keeps 3 balls bouncing around by splitting if necessary. Is this powerup always available in this stage or is it random?

2. Is it sustainable forever or for a long time?

The technique does not require a lot of skill to perform and there is little risk in doing it which goes against the technique. However, it seems to be a natural part of the game so as long as you can't do it indefinitely and it is available in every game (not random) then those are two points in favour of allowing the technique.

In the case of Clay's inp he got 800k, 700k by this technique alone, i.e. more than 80% of his points were obtained using a low risk leech technique. To me this is too much so I'd be inclined to ban that inp but not necessarily the technique in general. If Clay could have gone on after stage 5 leeching and get much further into the game then it would have been perfectly acceptable. Basically I attach what I refer to as a leech factor to each inp - refer to the formula I use in "A question on the definition of points leeching".

-- Tim Morrow (tjmorrow@bigpond.com), April 21, 2000.

Answers to Tim's questions : 10)it's random (like all the powerups) 20)it's not unlimited (see Clay's input)

This trick is very hard to obtain as you need the good powerup AND at the good moment (when you 've just manage to send the ball in the narrow passage) ... I think that as there is a very small probability to obtain that it should be allowed

-- phil (plamat@club-internet.fr), April 21, 2000.

I remember having troubles getting the scores on Ark2 to play back to the proper levels across different MAME platforms. Seemes some vers. gave more points for leeching. I wonder if this has been fixed yet.

Anyways, N comes with alarming frequency on that level (I would get it around 80% of the time) but it takes forever to leech a lot of points, and the balls will eventually exit. So I don't see the point in banning the technique. It also seems silly to me to force a player to dodge a powerup--that's totally counterproductive in Ark2.

-- Q.T.Quazar (qan@home.com), April 25, 2000.