As background: Jason and I were in #marp the other night, discussing technique on Puchi Carat. When he went to try the easy endurance mode, we discovered that a point exists where you can score ~2.1 million with little to no skill on a single drop.

This is equivalent to about 8 maximum drops on any other mode (@ 256K a drop) to the best of my knowledge. My prior score on Expert was 2.18 million, which took 20 minutes to achieve (and was over 3/4 complete). I think my game time for Easy was slightly over 3.

What I am proposing is to restrict competition to only Medium or Expert Difficulty on Puchi Carat. Otherwise, there's going to be a glut of recordings attempting to maximize a 2 million drop game, where the absolute maximum socre is somewhere between 2.2-2.3 million.

This falls under the same kind of grey area as TG-only games do, so I'm asking for support from the community before requesting rules to be set for this game. What's the consensus?

-- Q.T.Quazar (qan@home.com), September 09, 2001

Answers

We probably should check that there's no way to be cheesy on normal before setting rules on this.

The very first time I played Puchi Carat I tried beginner and received a score higher than QT's expert score -- this is coming from someone who can't get past level 2 in Arkanoid, remember -- so I think there's adequate reason here to disallow the beginner version.

-- jbd (jdyer41@aol.com), September 09, 2001.