Shock Troopers Mathematics 301
Posted: Mon Sep 10, 2007 4:20 am
Well, it's that time again for me to make one of these threads. Although it's not so much a math tutorial as it is a sort of forum blog to track my progress on a game that is very near and dear to me. But it's also necessary to post this because I have something important to say that's been eating me for a while, so I need to just come out and say it.
My "world record" on Shock Troopers is a fraud.
Not a fraud in the sense of cheating, but in the sense that it should not be compared to the Japanese Gamest/Arcadia world record of 31,356,100. The reason for this is that I truly believe that that score was achieved with the "violence" soft dip set to On, as that is what it defaults to when you run Shock Troopers in MAME with a Japanese bios. When you run it with the default European bios, "violence" is turned off.
If you don't know why this is significant, I will explain it again - with the violence switch set to On, it makes it a lot harder to maximize points. Enemies will randomly go into a new death animation after a few shots, meaning it's no longer possible to get up to 13 shots in on every enemy before they die. With enemies that are worth up to 7000 points per shot, not being able to fully take advantage of this means huge losses in points, and it's often not worth shooting them when you can just do the close-range attack and go for a 30k gem instead.
I did stumble upon something interesting though that I never realized way back when - there are no alternate death animations for enemies that are standing in water. This means that it's still possible to shoot enemies up to 13 times (or 12 times + close-range attack, which is also the preferred method when possible). This is a HUGE deal, and may be just the thing that could help me close the gap and break the world record legitimately now. The latter half of Jungle 2 and all of Valley 4 is in the water, which means that almost the same potential scores that I was getting on those levels with violence off can also be done with violence on (I say almost because there are some enemies on Valley 4 standing outside of the water, and will still randomly go into the alternate death animations after taking a few shots).
So... can I manage to break the Japanese record with violence on? I'm trying to stay positive about this (since there are certain people that take much delight in incessantly quoting me when I mention something to be "impossible"). But I have a lot of work to do in terms of re-learning my patterns on where to most effectively "stall" in each level so as to maximize points. I'm not sure how much time I'm going to spend working on this in the near future, but I imagine I'll be playing it a little bit every now and then to see if I can make any progress (and maybe start re-charting scores to figure out the theoretical max to see if I'm on the right track)
My old high score with violence on is 29,594,600 (dated March 19th 2000 apparently). I'd only ever broken 29 million twice too. This was back before I had any knowledge of the multi-shot kills that would be possible on Jungle 2 and Valley 4. Would it have been possible to squeeze out an extra 1.8 million during that run? I don't know what kind of scores I was getting on those stages without the multi-shot bonuses, but I kind of assume so...... anyway, if I can beat this score then it will definitely renew my urge to go after this record.
I don't think the old MAME recordings should be deleted, nor updated special rules - we always tend to adhere to MAME's default settings here on MARP so I think they should stand. As such there is no way for me to ever beat those old scores since I am not going to be playing this game with violence off any more. I suppose if anyone's interested I'll upload recordings to this thread if they want to see them. Actually I'll probably do that anyway if I can get up to 30 million.
As for what inspired me to finally take this game up again? Well, good ol' Ground Kontrol here in Portland recently got a Neo-Geo 4-slot cabinet that just happens to have Shock Troopers in it. How could I not resist tossing a couple quarters into it? First game was pretty abysmal, second game was just over 28 million, which was pretty good considering how rusty I am at remembering the stalling patterns (and was trying to readjust to NOT going for multi-shot kills a lot of the time)
(the old threads: here and here)
My "world record" on Shock Troopers is a fraud.
Not a fraud in the sense of cheating, but in the sense that it should not be compared to the Japanese Gamest/Arcadia world record of 31,356,100. The reason for this is that I truly believe that that score was achieved with the "violence" soft dip set to On, as that is what it defaults to when you run Shock Troopers in MAME with a Japanese bios. When you run it with the default European bios, "violence" is turned off.
If you don't know why this is significant, I will explain it again - with the violence switch set to On, it makes it a lot harder to maximize points. Enemies will randomly go into a new death animation after a few shots, meaning it's no longer possible to get up to 13 shots in on every enemy before they die. With enemies that are worth up to 7000 points per shot, not being able to fully take advantage of this means huge losses in points, and it's often not worth shooting them when you can just do the close-range attack and go for a 30k gem instead.
I did stumble upon something interesting though that I never realized way back when - there are no alternate death animations for enemies that are standing in water. This means that it's still possible to shoot enemies up to 13 times (or 12 times + close-range attack, which is also the preferred method when possible). This is a HUGE deal, and may be just the thing that could help me close the gap and break the world record legitimately now. The latter half of Jungle 2 and all of Valley 4 is in the water, which means that almost the same potential scores that I was getting on those levels with violence off can also be done with violence on (I say almost because there are some enemies on Valley 4 standing outside of the water, and will still randomly go into the alternate death animations after taking a few shots).
So... can I manage to break the Japanese record with violence on? I'm trying to stay positive about this (since there are certain people that take much delight in incessantly quoting me when I mention something to be "impossible"). But I have a lot of work to do in terms of re-learning my patterns on where to most effectively "stall" in each level so as to maximize points. I'm not sure how much time I'm going to spend working on this in the near future, but I imagine I'll be playing it a little bit every now and then to see if I can make any progress (and maybe start re-charting scores to figure out the theoretical max to see if I'm on the right track)
My old high score with violence on is 29,594,600 (dated March 19th 2000 apparently). I'd only ever broken 29 million twice too. This was back before I had any knowledge of the multi-shot kills that would be possible on Jungle 2 and Valley 4. Would it have been possible to squeeze out an extra 1.8 million during that run? I don't know what kind of scores I was getting on those stages without the multi-shot bonuses, but I kind of assume so...... anyway, if I can beat this score then it will definitely renew my urge to go after this record.
I don't think the old MAME recordings should be deleted, nor updated special rules - we always tend to adhere to MAME's default settings here on MARP so I think they should stand. As such there is no way for me to ever beat those old scores since I am not going to be playing this game with violence off any more. I suppose if anyone's interested I'll upload recordings to this thread if they want to see them. Actually I'll probably do that anyway if I can get up to 30 million.
As for what inspired me to finally take this game up again? Well, good ol' Ground Kontrol here in Portland recently got a Neo-Geo 4-slot cabinet that just happens to have Shock Troopers in it. How could I not resist tossing a couple quarters into it? First game was pretty abysmal, second game was just over 28 million, which was pretty good considering how rusty I am at remembering the stalling patterns (and was trying to readjust to NOT going for multi-shot kills a lot of the time)
(the old threads: here and here)