Gold Medal - TheBSM (Italy)
Silver Medal - Potante (Spain)
Bronze Medal - El_Fumador (Spain)
Sportsmanship award - I'm awarding joint winners to Innuendo (Brazil) and CrazyKongFan (USA).
Congratulations to all of our winners!
And now... my postmortem entry. My personal feelings about this is that this was a good tournament. This being said, nobody needs to tell me that this was perfect. This was a totally new format for everybody and there surely were some bumps along the way. Let me address each topic:
GAME SELECTION: I personally think the game selection was strong. I picked two games that are very well known in Joust and Galaxian, two games that were sorta known in Joy Joy Kid and Knights Of The Round, and one game that really wasn't known at all in Vs. Slalom. I think that's a perfect mesh of games. As far as Giro-X's two game "Golden Era" discussion, I will raise a point that nobody complained when I pulled a 1991 game in "Knights" and a 1990 game in "Joy Joy". This being said, I wouldn't pick more than two games in one era, that much is certain.
DIFFICULTY: Something Giro-X pointed out is that a lot of games were too difficult. I think he's got a very solid point. Four of the five games were very difficult indeed... Knights Of The Round was finished by 2 / 16 (12.5%), Joy Joy Kid was finished by 11 / 16 (68.75%), Joust was completed by 3 / 15 (20.0%), Vs. Slalom's Mt. Nasty was completed by 4 / 15 (26.67%). Quite a lot of people got game over's in Galaxian before time expired too. Part of this is me picking difficult games... but another part of this was that I made the games too long. There would have been a lot more completions had I ended "Knights" after 2 stages, Joust after 12 stages, and Vs. Slalom after 6 stages. I probably was making them this difficult thinking of how terrible of a player I am... and that wound up being a bad assumption on my part. This is something I will need to work on for the next time trial.
FORMAT: I think the format worked well, but there can be some improvements. In reflection of what Sawys said, instead of a maximum bonus of 150% greater than the base time when all four games are combined, I probably should aim more toward 100%. This will give more people an opportunity to win. (although this, granted, could have been an effect of the final game) Additionally, I think I might remove the qualification requirement. However, those that participate in all four games would get far greater opportunity to win than those who participate in less. It's something I'll have to think about. Additionally, I should improve my scoring systems. They're basically there so everybody knows where everybody stands at the current point in time. But I easily could have done xxffffff, where x is the stages completed and f is the frames the stages was completed in. Then nobody has to do any converting.
So, again, it was a good time trial. Not perfect, but good. And so, after answering final comments/questions in this thread, which are fully welcome, especially if I missed something, it's time to say goodbye for now. I will return in early August to set up the Olympiad... of course... you could hop over to the Home Action Replay Page in May and June for the HARP championships...
Take care everybody.
As a fan of classic games, I was definitely happy with the selection of Joust and Galaxian...didn't really expect to come in first on any round, so winning Joust was a surprise 
Anyway, congrats to the top 3, and especially to TheBSM for winning! 
) while the last 3 were really tough (for me especially Vs Slalom), probably because i'm not more used to play old classics. However, it remains that it is virtually impossible to agree all the players. 
, after the first round only 16 
. I would say a few! Perhaps with more players there would be a "distribution" of the time bonus more balanced, maybe .. 
