I think T. Alex entertains me more than anyone else on MARP of late. His submitted recordings have been exhibiting outrageous tricks in games that I have never seen before - and I've been around a bit. His latest surprise is in the Bubble Bobble series of games, in particular boblbobl and sboblbob where he maxes the scores.

Below I have extracted an email I sent to him querying him on what tricks he is using. Basically he has found a way of getting infinite lives with player 1 and always gets the 1 Million pts and good end at level 100 even though he is playing as 1 player.

-start email-

Now I've watched your boblbobl and your sbobble recordings and I am amazed. I know a lot of things about this game but you have surprised me again. Here are my questions.

1. You seem to have infinite lives with the first player - how do you do this?

2. In the boblbobl version the 1st player is getting EXTEND's and free lives from score which doesn't normally happen - how?

3. In stage 50 did you deliberately die before going through the 20 level warp gate to stage 70? You did it in both recordings so it looks deliberate. Maybe it is part of the trick.

4. How did you get the Happy End + 1000000 points when you only had one player - again not supposed to be possible? Looks like you join the 2nd player in after bottling the last boss then you do something (some magic keypresses) while the end credits are rolling.

-end email-

I would be grateful if anyone on MARP could shed some light on T. Alex's peculiar recordings. I think both recordings need to be moved to the 'weird' section because he is definitely using some unknown cheats that give him an advantage (infinite lives). Also, unlike his solomon and pitfall2 recordings where he is clearly a master of the games, his Bubble Bobble recordings aren't in the same skill class as other MARP submissions (he loses too many lives and doesn't double up etc). What do others think.

I'd like to add that T. Alex is a very likeable person when he gets around to answering his emails. He is an extremely good gamer and is not trying to cheat anyone on MARP. Just thought I'd set the record straight just in case anyone gets the wrong idea with all my board items of late.

-- Tim Morrow (tjmorrow@bigpond.com), January 09, 2000

Answers

He is a terrific gamer, but there are rules (none of which specific banned techniques he's broken but only because they are so new no one had any idea they were possible :)

The link you should point him to is Angry's Etiquette Page (found in the depths of the MARP Help link)

http://www.primenet.com/~greggg/marp/rules.html

And anyone can also forward new possibly banned techniques (that will become law when next voted on) to goldengameboy@yahoo.com or myself. Angry is on hiatus and probably will be for life... (sorry just quoting a billy joel song, angry proly will come back sometime.)

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), January 09, 2000.

Ok. As soon as I learn how the bubble bobble trick is done I'll submit it and the solomon trick that gives astronomical scores for possible banning. The pitfall2 trick is definitely a part of the game (albeit little known and incredibly well hidden).

However I also think that we need to keep these trick recordings somewhere (in weird section maybe) because finding tricks in games is part of the fun of playing arcade games too. Of course those recordings should never be considered for leaderboard points.

-- Tim Morrow (tjmorrow@bigpond.com), January 10, 2000.