Here's a few ideas that have been posted by various sources.

a. TG Tournament Mode - 5 lives + no extras - REGARDLESS of possible settings!

b. Mark Longridge has suggested 10 screens and take the score from there at the Twin Galaxies board.

c. The movie "The Wizard" does 10 minutes and the game is over - it's a possibility - but whoever judges the recording would have to do some timing - maybe not the best idea.

This isn't a vote - I'm gathering ideas - but we have to do something after I saw a couple marathons myself...

-- Gameboy9 (goldengameboy@yahoo.com), April 12, 2000

Answers

here's another thought:

d. People mentioned do the hardest settings of the game.

Maybe we should combine a & d?

-- Gameboy9 (goldengameboy@yahoo.com), April 13, 2000.

I'm not a very big fan of TG settings, except when they actually make the DIFFICULTY of the game harder. I'm really not sure what the motivation is behind giving players more lives instead of fewer; 3 generally seems like an ideal number, or even 3+1. But 5? Maybe one of our TG judges can explain this to me. Who decides what TG settings should be for games?

-- Q.T.Quazar (qan@home.com), April 13, 2000.

Setting games to the hardest will only make a favour to those already know the games, and discourage all others.

A moderate difficulty setting will give the chance to people to have the time to learn a game, and also make a decent score.

That's, of course, IMHO.

Cicca

-- Cicca (cicca@writeme.com), April 14, 2000.

Cicca, I don't think you quite grasp the issue. We're not talking about regular games, we're talking about marathoned games. The scores are going to be astronomical no matter what settings. Inexperienced players can still play and post at default settings if they want. We're only deciding what the best players should play at--TG or max difficulty-- because they will control the Top 3 no matter what. Bombjack is proof enough of that. I said I didn't see a 10 mil score happening anytime soon at TG settings, and it took 2 whole days to prove me wrong. I couldn't even score a mil at Bombjack after 2-3 weeks of practice.

Sincerely, Q.T.Quazar (who is still patiently waiting for his cable, because he is damn tired of posting from Macs or work)

-- Q.T.Quazar (qan@home.com), April 14, 2000.

I really like b) and c). c) would be easier than you think because you can just trim the input file to however many seconds the frames add up to.... This is ONLY for marathoned games though and games that have less than 10 different screens...

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), April 14, 2000.