Post

 Over a year since the last update! That's a first. It seems my interest in blogging has declined.
It doesn't help that I haven't played the photography games very much in the past year, and those made up the primary content here.
I should also really sit down and update some of "permanent" content like the StB and DS score lists. They're several years behind!
Well, it's just a silly unimportant blog that exists purely for selfish reasons. So if I selfishly procrastinate, it is what it is. Right?

So, There's been multiple Yolympics and Calice Cups that I've participated in since. Sometimes I put more time in than others, but I always make sure to participate.
One thing that is quite enjoyable about these tournaments is the social aspect. These guys that play all these old games are just a lot more chill and pleasant than what I'm used to from other retro-type gaming communities, like the dreaded Touhou community, which has serious issues with mob mentality and thoughtlessness in general. It is good to have a chill and no-nonsense atmosphere of just enjoying some simple videogames.
I'm going place them in order from newest tournaments to oldest. Thankfully I did these writeups before, so I can just copy and paste them into the blog. There's going to be a lot of games. All the yolympics Replays are on my Youtube, and there is a playlist for all the Calice Cup replays in the one that I won, as well.

Summer Yolympics 2022:

Bal Cube
My score: 1,024,410 vs highest score 2,181,480
Ranking 3/35
Kinda Arkanoid inspired... You don't control a paddle, but a cube, and where it bounces on the ground, a hole will appear. Each bounce on the ground will scroll the screen up by 1 tile, revealing more blocks. It's not bad, but what upsets me about it is the Big cube item. Eventually, collecting that item on accident is basically a guaranteed death, and the item is everywhere.

Calipso
My score: 105,668 vs highest score 112,523
Ranking 2/29
Shouldn't have had 2nd with so little play. Not much to say about this game. Pretty boring, but not the worst one.

Centipede (5 minute Time Attack)
My score: 60,872 vs highest score 69,339
Ranking 5/37
Quite fun. I had to play on a Keyboard or Mouse. I got slightly higher scores on my Keyboard. Would like to try Trackball if I had it. My goal was 60k/12k per minute which I reached. The precision required to score significantly higher just doesn't seem possible on Keyboard.

Chicken Shift
My score: 97,560
Ranking 1/36
The "main" levels get outrageously fun when there's 3 tubes of each colour. A total mindfuck. Unfortunately the upgraded version of that level is just too hard for me (and everybody else) so I opted to suicide all my extra lives on the easier version for more score, then game over on the harder version.

Crazy Balloon
My score: 86,750 vs highest score 102,950
Ranking 3/32
Enjoyable game about your swaying balloon to not touch any walls. Eventually faces get introduced to blow wind at you, and later your Balloon starts swaying faster. Quite a resourceful game for 1980.

Dimahoo
My score: 8,047,600 vs highest score 42,447,780
Ranking 2/32
Fun game. Didn't learn how to score. Didn't 1cc. Guy above me is the only one who knew how to score. I just did as much as I could.

Gauntlet
My score: 145,211 vs highest score 592,833
Ranking 6/29
This is horrible. This is everything I don't like about hack n slash games. The name is correct. It's a freaking gauntlet. It just takes forever. It's freaking boring!

King of Dragons
My score: 714,000 vs highest score 3,482,200
Ranking 6/29
Didn't play this long. Should've play more. Enjoyable game where you can choose either a melee attacker with a block ability, or a ranged attacker. Especially simplistic moveset and controls, but I have a soft spot for the fantasy setting. I was doing poorly until I tried Elf, and then I randomly tripled my score. Might learn to 1cc this some day...

Kingdom Grandprix
My score: 1,421,156 vs highest score 1,575,866
Ranking 2/27
The western version is easy. I opted to ignore survival on loop 1 in favor of trying to get bonus points from the spinbomb glitch. I lost a lot of lives on accident, so I played Loop 2 for survival with only 1 spare life, almost up to the end of the game! I thought it was boring as hell to play  so I didn't do another run.

Magic Sword
My score: 1,161,736 vs highest score 14,647,537
Ranking 7/26
This was in a Calice Cup before. That time, I tried quite hard, and managed to climb like halfway through the tower... Which is still nothing compared to the guys that know this game inside and out.
I wasn't in the mood to relearn that far or try to go farther, so I decided to start on floor 30 and milk the Wizard for points there, it was allowed and I think what the majority ended up doing.

Mercs
My score: 985,000 vs highest scores 999,990 (3 of them)
Ranking 4/28
1cced and almost counterstopped this game very quickly! I think it took about 2 hours (1 hour to make savestates and checking a counterstop video for strategies, and then 1 hour of attempts). It's not an easy game necessarily, but It's probably the easiest arcade counterstop I ever saw. The 3 guys above me all counterstopped. Decent game, although the gameplay is too heavy handed for my taste.

Mystic Warriors
My score: 652,610 vs highest score 734,310
Ranking 2/31
Reached my 1cc goal on this game. Japanese version so only 1 loop. It's pretty tricky and took me a few days. You have only 1 spare life but the stage 6 boss is brutal, I always lost a life there, which decreases the rank to make the game a bit easier for a while. Then on the final level there's a really tricky section. This game has cool music and art design. The gameplay is a bit of a mixed bag though. The guy above me milked bosses. I just wanted a 1cc.

Outfoxies
My score: 12,905,000
Ranking 1/23
Kinda like Smash Bros... if it had awful controls... Your only means to do damage is picking up weapons... and uhh... Yeah it's not really much like Smash bros is it?
This game has a ton of charm. The characters, the level design, the "lore"... I love that side of it! The game isn't horrible to play either, albeit not really good haha. Played it a lot, the max score is 14m which you get by never taking damage. I was just trying to get as close to that as I could. Just try to take as little damage as you can, and also beat the stages faster because the score "lost" from damage gets multiplied based on how long you took to win.

Pepper II
My score: 579,260 vs highest score 1,233,770
Ranking 3/30
Kinda like Pac-Man & Qix together... Pretty nice game. My score performance was completely random from run to run.

Rabio Lepus (Expert)
My score: 8,649,000
Ranking 1/27
Played it more than it deserved, but in the end I at least managed to keep the Ribbon item for a 2 million bonus. Sadly I never got lucky on the Mammoth score bug. If I could get lucky, I could get ~12m.

Salamander
My score: 666,100 vs highest score 1,092,900
Ranking 5/29
This fucking game... So boring! You barely do anything. I barely played it, cus it's so boring and then you eventually die and when you die you lose all your power and you immediately die again and then again and then it's game over. Not cool! I think I died near the end of the last stage and that was good enough for me! Maybe the loop gets more fun? Probably not gonna save this disaster of a game.

Space Bomber
My score: 6,352,800
Ranking 1/26
I like the scoring system in this alot. Unfortunately the game isn't as based as it could be cus of all the bosses. Those are really generic Psikyo bosses and they take up at least like half the play time. They can take up even more time if you choose to milk them!
I didn't score much, but I got a 1cc.

Super Cobra
My score: 47,370 vs highest score 54,440
Ranking 4/31
Was in a Calice Cup. Got a 1cc then. Just played a few runs this time and game overed on the final level.

Warriors of Fate
My score: 1,463,150 vs highest score 3,023,200
Ranking 2/28
Game overed on stage 8 using Portor. Pretty much ignored score. This is a tough beatemup. Almost as hard as Final Fight imo! It doesn't require much in the way of memorization though. It's more that it's hard on a fundamental level. Really fun though. Good meat and potatoes game. Stick to the fundamentals. Cool setting and story too.

Wild West C.O.W. Boys of Moo Mesa
My score: 25,930 vs highest score 47,440
Ranking 6/29
Somehow I didn't even realize this was a licensed game. It was based on a kids show!
So, like Mystic Warriors, this is basically just Sunset Riders with another coat of paint. While Mystic Warriors is harder, this game is significantly easier. In fact, I think this game is inferior to those, cus it's just too empty. It does have some charm though.
Apparently the game has score problems, which wasn't known by the community until near the end, when it's just too late to ban the game. I just played "normally" and 1cced.

La Calice Cup 6 - Arcade Edition:

Air Gallet
My score: 7,277,780 vs highest score 8,380,000
Ranking 2/46
This game is much like Classic raiden, it's a gameplay formula that I've always enjoyed because fast bullets are fun, because shmup fundamentals in this type of game is fun. The stage design is solid all around in this game and the final boss art design will always be awesome. I pretty much ignored score as the game is more of a survival experience where score can get worked in organically by memorizing the levels better. Not the most inventive or interesting shmup ever, but it's going to be fun to people that enjoy the Raiden game style. You get 1 million per life upon clearing, so surviving better is the main goal.

Dangerous Seed
My score: 3,827,450 vs highest score 4,014,600
Ranking: 3/47
Dangerous Seed ended up being more orthodox than I expected. The gameplay just consists of moving around and shooting what's directly in front of you, it's as basic as it gets really. I always assumed this game was a bit quirkier.
Nonetheless, there's nothing particularly bad about the game. The music's stellar, the art design is an experience, the shooting and dodging is nothing special but is still decent shmup fun, and overall it was fun to play the game. You can choose to time out or defeat bosses to change what route you get, and I picked a pretty safe, easy to clear route.

Dangun Feveron - Time Attack
My score: 2,112,504 vs highest score 2,190,745
Ranking: 2/40
I'm actually not a fan of the time attack. Uncovering and shooting the hidden poles is obnoxious. After getting the hang of this level, I got to the point where 2 million came effortlessly over and over, but after a few 2.1 million runs, I was stuck. It's possible to score 2.5 million points somehow!

Gaplus
My score: 578,300 vs highest score 1,401,00
Ranking: 3/43
I only played this a couple of times and I think it was only on my last run that I even knew what one of the "beams" you use even does.
The reason I played this so little is because I just found it boring, honestly.
The game has a few things going for it, so It's not terrible or anything, but I just find it kinda boring and unremarkable. The bonus stages take up wayyyyyy too much time and are very very boring to play. The devs must've been proud of them for having them take up half of the game time, and I really wonder why?
If you can score more by letting the enemies form before you start shooting them, why would you do that when you can just speedkill everything and get a million score from trivial bonus levels?
Also, the game seems kinda broken and glitchy? I've straight up gone through a bullet at one point.

Go! Go! Mile Smile
My score: 2,357,760 vs highest score 3,281,300
Ranking: 2/46
The controls are straight up just anteater, which we just played in Yolympics. Anteater was a flawed, but interesting game experience to me. This game, is also flawed, but for completely different reasons.
Anteaters flaw was mainly the heavy luck dependance which sometimes resulted in gameplay that had no rewards, only boredom or frustration, as the game plays you instead of you play the game. Only in some situations.
Go Go's flaw is the opposite. In this game, the player is in complete control of everything, as the game is all about AI manipulation. To me, this is a game flaw in and of itself, as there is nothing enjoyable about playing the game without practicing or copying strategies first. I still don't understand the AI even 50%, I think. Make no mistake, this game is all about following strict, complex routes to manipulate the AI. I spent many hours savestate practicing on this game.

Naname de Magic!
My score: 634,204 vs highest score 640,965
Ranking: 2/40
I played this game for months already during the past year or so.
It's one of my favourite games of all time, just like Money Puzzle Exchanger which was also in the votes. It's brilliant and hectic. The tactics are fun, especially in PVP when you have to use your entire arsenal of tactics, but scoring/speedrunning (same thing) is also very funny, although RNG is severe at high levels. Although you can memorize things to help with the initial setup of an X, the game is mostly a matter of reactive gameplay. I liken it to a bullet Chess game where you can memorize different sequences of opening moves, but then have to play on reaction. The 640k is the WR if I'm not mistaken?

Prop Cycle
My score: 19,890
Ranking: 1/38
This is a wonderful game that just oozes 90s soul. At first I was captivated by the world and didn't think the time attack would be as fun as it is. As I got better at time attack, the game grew on me even more. It's interesting to get faster times in this game, very interesting, but the RNG is pretty severe. Playing on a machine must be a novel experience.
This was surely my most played game and in order to score this much, it's important to play the correct stage order and to play quite optimally and understanding the different RNG seeds and having strats for those.
I created strats for every different Industarn RNG seed and most of these strats make you do completely different things, so it was tough.
Well, there's a lot to say about this game, and in fact, surely much that I don't quite understand about it.

Saboten Bombers
My score: 11,244,700 vs highest score 25,807,600
Ranking: 4/44
I'm going to describe with two words why I protested against this game: ONE. LIFE.
You died? May as well quit on the spot. You've lost all your multipliers (including the 2 you get at the very start of the game) and star chain. There is no recovery. It's over. You might be able to scrounge up some chump change, but that's it.
Other than this massive game flaw, It's one of those mixed bag type of games. A game that has some charm, some fun ideas, as well as heaps of flaws.
To me, the flaws are what mostly define this game, because we played for score and you get only 1 life, but there are tons and tons of other game flaws, too. This game is also absurdly difficult to clear and nobody even got halfway through the 100 levels of this sadistic game.

Shock Troopers
My score: 19,569,800 vs highest score 28,644,800
Ranking: 2/42
At first I struggled a bit with enjoying the melee scoring for reasons like badly telegraphed AI behaviour or wonky melee hitting. I was also a bit disappointed that the game reuses content so much (like the tank boss).
However I have to admit that the scoring system is really addicting, which is what makes the game stand out over other run n guns. Once you get used to it and you begin to solve enemy behaviour, it becomes a really fun experience. Also, another thing I like, is that the game is very generous in terms of health items, encouraging you to start scoring right away even if you aren't good at the game yet. Definitely a very good tournament choice. The WR holder for this game participated and schooled the rest of us!

Snap Jack
My score: 189,930
Ranking: 1/43
A lot of games from this era are totally unenjoyable to me. Sometimes there are exceptions though and Snap Jack is one of them. The idea behind the gameplay is a funny one, and it is executed very well considering the age of the game. The cracks only really begin to show on level 6, which couldve been playtested further (for example, enemies can clip into you on hills at random on that level). Although level 6 is total bullshit, and repeats forever, the first 4 levels are actually really easy once you get into the game, so in the long run I guess I don't think it's that interesting to play this game for more than few days. I managed to loop stage 6 a few times, and also, I managed to get the "forbidden" 4th extra life. Normally, the game only allows you to collect 3 extra lives, as after that, the last "bonus letter" you need for a life will always be too far away. However, if you can manage to collect 2 or more bonus letters on the same wave and gain a life from that, then that will result in another life! Of course, you only get 1 chance at this, and it requires a lot of luck to pull off, but that really set the tone for this awesome run I pulled off!

Special Criminal Investigation
My score: 10,127,580
Ranking: 1/37
It's like Chase HQ but funnier. The gameplay is easy and simple, which means you can focus on getting more score right away.
While the scoring system is nothing great, there's enough there to interest the player.
You don't need to be good at driving to get a good score; it has little to do with that. It's just routing boosts and not shooting friendly cars.
I've figured out how to get pretty close to the WR of 10.4 million but not quite there. I also thought more people would score over 10 million since it's not very hard to do and tons of people cleared the (easy) game, but I guess people didn't feel like it.

Spin Master
My score: 716,300 vs highest score 799,100
Ranking: 3/41
At first I was really into this game because of its compact, action packed design. I quickly realized however that the game is missing something to be truly great. Difficulty, maybe? Still a fun sidescroller with a fun jump scoring system, I would've liked to have played it more, but ran out of time.

Super Cobra
My score: 59,440 vs highest score 95,430
Ranking: 4/44
I'm a bit on the fence on this one, but I found it kinda relaxing and enjoyable to be honest. It's the kinda game that on the surface seems like I shouldn't enjoy it, but I kinda did.
Compared to Gradius, I think this game is a little better in a few ways, but in most ways I think I prefer playing Gradius games.
What's better about this game, is that it mostly revolves around aiming missiles, which I think is fun. In Gradius, aiming missiles is more of a side thing that is more automated. In this game, you have to pay close attention, all the time, to your missiles, or else you will run out of fuel or miss crucial enemies, and lose score too.
Another thing that is quite good in this game considering its age, is the stage variety. While most of the stages aren't exactly great individually, It's stil true that the developers had many ideas, and put those ideas into the game successfully.
The endgame is a bit annoying, but the rest of the game is enjoyable enough.
The common rom for this game is missing the hardest level in the game. We played on the rom that has that level included, and clearing the first loop is not an easy task as there's quite a bit of tricky randomness in the game. One player got pretty far into the second loop, which is much harder. Impressive!

Undercover Cops
My score: 11,052,940 vs highest score 13,185,160
Ranking: 4/40
A decent but overrated Beatemup that has many flaws, but I have a soft spot for games like this that follow gameplay fundamentals of the genre, which is why I still enjoy the game a bit. Thankfully, we played the Japanese rom, which is much better than the World rom (which has deleted moves from the movelist!)
The flaws includes, a bloated final level clocking in at almost 20 minutes most of which is filler you've already done before, Moves and movements that are too sluggish to be fun to use, Cheesy moves that are too effective and easy to use well (Dash attacks, dash jump attacks) and can clear the game with just these moves 99% of the time, Enemy AI that is boring, konami-esque, very simple track the player behaviour that is easy and uninteresting to interact with, terrible stage design on level 3, and bosses that are almost entirely badly designed.
The fact that I can still call the game decent despite all of that, is because of my own personal taste.
My clear had the lowest score of all the clears done on the game, but I don't mind.

Waku Waku 7
My score: 18,241,800 vs highest score 25,588,700
Ranking: 6/42
And the fighting game we played was this one. Seems like a pretty decent fighter to score run actually. First of all, you have to beat the game without losing a round, for the 10 million bonus. Then, finish enemies with only highest scoring moves (Harahara being the best). Then, take no damage. Then, do it as fast as you can.
There's also different bios for this that completely changes the mechanics; some of the bios makes the game totally unbalanced by giving you way more super meter.
We played on Japan MVS ver 3 bios which plays much more normally and sensibly. If you take no damage and almost kill the opponent, you'll have enough meter for ONE harahara move.


Winter Yolympics 2022:

Anteater
My score: 212,550
Ranking: 1/50
Anteater is creative game of logic and luck. The logic and gameplay of it is quite enjoyable, but the luck element is so severe that you have no choice but to accept it if you want to get a high score. The skill lies in using all of the logic you can to try create the best possible scenarios for you to not get screwed over. The longer you play, the harder the levels get, until you are forced to lose whatever remaining lives you have. For this reason, point pressing is paramount, as despite the game being "endless", there's a limit to how long you can play.

Armored Car
My score: 138,530 vs highest score 146,060
Ranking: 3/53
The early game is rather slow, but once you get deeper into it, it gets quite hectic and fun. There's even a game-long resource management built into the game. When you have played deep into the game, the run is over when you've run out of sawhorses. All the more reason to try to use as few of them as you can earlier on, even though you get so many that you're meant to use them constantly, there's a difference between using, say, 10 sawhorses in the first 5 levels, compared to using 25.

Bank Panic
My score: 1,919,200 vs highest score 9,999,999
Ranking 4/48
I really enjoyed this game from the moment I first played it. Although I had a lot of trouble with this one, I somehow fluked a run that got to the endless repeating level, after something like an hour of playing. The game gets very difficult to play on reaction once your level is in the double digits or around there. However, the game is "solved" in the endless level by memorizing a specific sequence of actions, as the game is actually not random at all, despite what it looks like! if you do everything the same way every time, the baddies will also be the same every time. It's by learning this endless pattern that you can quite easily counterstop the game, provided you have the stamina to not lose focus for such a long run duration. Sadly I only learned the pattern after my run, and I didn't come back when prepared

Bubble Memories
My score: 7,594,080 vs highest score 17,009,160
Ranking 8/47
This is a really cute game with an interesting scoring system. Unfortunately I never quite grasped the full nuance of the scoring as some of it is based on doing math on the fly and I didn't know what was or wasn't included into that math, as well as some other obstacles.
The game itself is also sadistic as you can only really score on your first life. Not only that, but surviving after a death is also incredibly hard in the 2nd half of the game. Although the early game is easy, the difficulty snowballs and the game becomes brutal later. As far as I know, nobody cleared it.

Chase H.Q.
My score 11,325,540 vs highest score 18,653,840
Ranking: 8/47
I didn't enjoy this game, but I managed to get a basic clear with no scoring. Although I occasionally managed to get a huge chunk of bonus score from abusing a bug (and a lot of players were using this bug, such as most players scoring higher than me) I didn't actually pull off the bug in my clear. Hence the low score. I never fully grasped exactly how the bug works and as such it rarely happened for me.

Darius Gaiden
My score: 11,193,200 vs highest score 11,765,290
Ranking 3/51
I did really poorly on this game. I actually tried, and got a dozen runs with better pace onto the final boss, but died/bombed/couldnt kill the tail on the final boss every time. Did the same tried and true route that I did in a Calice Cup ~2 years back, except I scored a bit lower this time. I could've taken the opportunity to learn a higher scoring route but whatever...

Dig Dug (Special rules: 5 Lives, Difficulty: Hardest, Bonus Life: None)
My score: 91,870 vs highest score 2,372,000
Ranking 22/44
I just couldn't do well on this at all. The reason is that the game is actually a memorizer, but I refused to memorize anything because I didn't enjoy the game. Instead, I tried playing the game based on logic, and kept losing my runs before I could even hit the 100k barrier. The problem with my approach is that you cannot play based on logic unless you have ALSO memorized the game. That is because if you go into a new level, and you don't know in which orders enemies "activate", all of your logic goes out the window as the game will just immediately kill you if you don't follow a good pattern.

Fantasy
My score: 127,950 vs highest score 225,340
Ranking: 6/47
I think I completed 3 loops? Can't remember for sure.
Fantasy is an early 80s meme game which is actually quite bad to play no matter how you slice it, yet I can't deny there is a kind of charm to it, too. Hence why it became a meme. One stage seemed impossible in the loops until I randomly started doing something that just worked.
A couple of other stages are problematic.

Gemini Wing (Easy)
My score: 1,773,490 vs highest Score 1,960,100
Ranking: 2/48
The scoring system for Gemini Wing is great. Well, pretty much everything about it is great. It's one of the most underrated arcade shmups that exists.
I played this for Trap-STGT back in the day but that was on Normal, which scores slightly more. I'm pretty surprised someone got close to 2 million on Easy.
To be honest even though I love this game, I barely played it for Yolympics. I should've, I really should've, but there was a lot that never happened this Yolympics...

Green Beret
My score: 198,990 vs highest score 987,840
Ranking: 21/46
Green Beret is not an awful game if you play it like a normal person, but here at Yolympics we do not play games in such a manner! No, we need to point press above all else, and doing that in this game entails inching forward 1 centimeter at a time so as to kill as many enemies per life and per timer as possible. It's as boring and monotonous as it gets so I did not do further learning/attempts.

Kung-Fu Master
My score: 312,620 vs highest score 596,240
Ranking: 16/44
Not a fan. The game is jank and unsatisfying. Thankfully you can score over 300k by spending all your lives on stage 2. Tons of people did this. Only a few masos are multilooping this crap.

Mortal Kombat
My score: 5,882,500 vs highest score 13,171,000
Ranking: 12/43
I fucking hate this game. It plays like shit, it looks like shit, and it's probably the worst fighter I've ever played. I think a lot of people feel similarly given how weak the leaderboard for this was compared to other Fighters in tournaments like this. I didn't even 1cc it.

Power Drift
My score: 5,673,034
Ranking: 1/39
I played this game a lot. I just got really addicted and had to push my time. In the end I got a time of 6:58 (including extra stage). Before that, I had a lot of 7:00s and 7:01s. And it took many days of playing until I could start getting the low 7s.
This game is sick as hell. It looks incredible, there's tons of course variety, and while the gameplay is floaty, once you get the hang of it it feels awesome to play. Huge thumbs up for Power Drift! It's a masterpiece of its era!

Pu-Li-Ru-La
My score: 479,940 vs highest score 486,680
Ranking: 2/45
I played this game a lot too. Puli is one of my favorite beatemups, so I was stoked to learn it. Going in, I already had a rough idea of what to do; you need to collect animals after they have travelled a certain distance for more points, and you can plan your magic use to kill bosses to multiply their kill value.
What I didn't expect is that the game is glitchy as fuck and that magic drop luck is quite important at a high level. Despite my performance on score being quite consistent, with most runs having almost the same score at any given point, In the end most of these runs would end to a glitch or not enough luck for drops. In the end though, while it was a bit irritating to play this for score, I did manage to get a run I was happy with that performed reasonably well, got the necessary magic, and didn't lose to glitches.

Twin Cobra II
My score: 7,895,880
Ranking: 16/46
This game is boring as fuck. I did one clear and didn't come back to it. There's just no reason to waste your time on cookie cutter boring shmup like this. One run, and done.

Vs. Super Mario Bros. (Special rules: Your run is over after your 5th death. Staircase leech not allowed)
My score: 1,505,750 vs highest score 1,988,850
Ranking: 3/37
The leaderboard for this is surprising. The original Mario Bros was on the previous Yolympics, and there were a few real masters playing, and it was basically impossible to catch up to them. Even competing with other "aspiring experts" was tough.
Vs. Super Mario Bros is just NES Super Mario bros modified to be a bit harder (faster timers, tougher levels) and having some SMB2J levels inserted.
As far I know, It's a much more familiar game to most gamers than the first Mario Bros. So I'm surprised that I could get 3rd place (!) with just a basic clear!
I didn't even do a warpless clear. In this game the furthest you can warp is to world 6. I warped from 4-2 to 6-1, because world 5 has a level with a ridiculously hard recovery if you die, and I didn't wanna deal with it. This lost me some points, but I think I cleared using up 4 of my allowed deaths. So Maybe it was the right choice.
With a few proper rules, Super Mario Bros is actually a legitimate game to play for score. Something I was pleased to find out, and I have to say, that I have come around to this game. I loved Mario 1 and Lost Levels back in the day as a kid, but I started thinking less of them as an adult. Now I can confidently say, that I really like them again, and the arcade version is my favourite to play.

Zippy Race
My score: 150,700 vs highest score 1,506,900
Ranking: 10/44
Terrible tournament game. It ain't no Rally Bike. Zippy Race is really much of a Zippy race. There's 2 courses, and a few mildly different variations of them. The game is fully patternable and endless, and I'm willing to bet that the guy who got 1.5 million just got tired after hours of playing and voluntarily ended the run!
Now I personally don't think the game itself is terrible, just a bad choice for a score competition.

Didn't submit for: Donkey Kong JR, Elevator Action Returns, Snow Bros, Time Pilot 84.


La Calice Cup 5:

Blazing Star
My score: 16,361,090 vs highest score 47,692,700
Ranking: 14/89
A flashy game which I do quite enjoy, but it can't be denied that it has serious issues in terms of balancing and playability. Certain stages, even pretty late into the game, have nothing going on. One boss is randomly completely ridiculous and idiotic. The scoring system, I just can't make up my mind if it's good or not. But it least the game has one! The game should've had a bit more thought put into it and been playtested properly.

Cabal
My score: 4,015,600 vs highest score 4,152,770
Ranking: 3/90
Cabal is a third person view gallery shooter type thing. It's military themed, but has some really jolly stage transitions with your mass murderer dancing all over the screen to a silly tune. The game itself is fun to me, but the scoring system made it turn into boring work, sadly. Thankfully the game is so easy with autofire that I could get this score quickly. Autofire breaks Cabal completely, and I do remember there was a bit of a debate if it should be allowed for that reason.

Daioh
My score: 5,131,840 vs highest score 15,716,790
Ranking: 6/89
Daioh is a pretty fun little game with fast bullets and fantastic music. It's not the best, but it grew on me in the past when I played for a 2-loop clear. Given that I had already done that before I saw little reason to put in the work in Calice cup, and ended up barely playing it.

Dragon Blaze
My score: 1,212,700 vs highest score 2,111,100
Ranking: 3/88
One of my favourite shmups, and one of my favourite games in general. However, I never really got very good at Dragon Blaze for some reason. It's just never really happened. It's just one of those games that I know is a masterpiece already. I trust my judgement despite my limited skill!
Nonetheless, I did get a little bit of scoring done and at least cleared loop 1. Only one guy beat both loops, and it seems like most people struggled quite a bit with scoring on loop 1. I didn't beat my old PB of 1.5m, as I felt like learning to do that wouldn't be worth it if I'm not planning to learn the entire game properly, which I have no plans to do.

Eight Forces
My score: 13,391,320 vs highest score 47,553,110
Ranking: 13/85
Very confusing game, because it's clearly really bad, and it's in that strange sphere where it's simultaneously a bit "weird" while playing so... "ordinary". Like, it doesn't feel like it has any clear gimmicks or a real gameplay vision. It's just a standard shmup that feels strange and alien. The scoring system is an idiotic medal "chaining" system, where the chain is only broken by dying. The game also has 2 loops but the second loop is identical to the first. Didn't like it so didn't play it much. It could've been "so bad it's good" if it was a bit more interesting.
"What did i had done?"

Mad Planets
My score: 214,880 vs highest score 302,963
Ranking: 7/85
I did proclaim this to be my least favourite game in the tournament, but for some reason I actually put in some effort. Perhaps it's because the game is about reaction, not memorization, making it more grindable and feel less like a chore.
Still, the game is a damn pain in the ass. I honestly can see positive things in it but my instinct when I'm playing it is just that it's a pain! Damn!

Mars Matrix
My score: 118,809,790,610 vs highest score 1,000,005,002,296
Ranking: 15/87
Man, I actually tried! I didn't realize the west has so many competent Mars Matrix players! I'm impressed! Mars Matrix is a great game, and the scoring system is good as well. My main issue is that the game still has quite a bit of delay in MAME, so I have a hard time making the moves I want to make. I'd really like to play the same game without that delay for once, because it is a damn solid game.

Mr Driller (1000m JP/5000 ft US)
My score: 950,350 vs highest score 964,770
Ranking: 2/90
Awesome speedrun game. Scoring is all about being quick, doing the tasks that need to be done on the way. Those tasks includes collecting every Air capsule and the possibility of using a frame perfect trick to get double the air capsules in stage transitions. I managed 1 frame perfect trick, got every air capsule, had no deaths, and finished the game in 5 minutes 25 seconds. Definitely one of the best scores I've submitted in one of these tournaments. As you might expect, I grinded this game quite hard, I'd say about half of my tournament playtime was just Mr Driller. Mr Driller's just a baller game!

RayForce
My score: 1,531,700 vs highest score 6,339,300
Ranking: 17/85
I'm ashamed I barely played it. I dunno why. RayForce ROCKS but I just never felt like learning it :(

Space Bomber
My score: 3,265,700 vs highest score 10,221,100
Ranking: 21/85
Barely touched it. It's one of the Psikyo shmups that I actually never played before. Turns out the game's pretty good! It has a good score mechanic and core gameplay idea, which is generally well implemented on its stages. The issue is that only about half the game is stages, the rest of the game is bosses, and the bosses are super generic psikyo bosses that just aren't interesting at all. I was pretty excited about learning to score more than I did, but the bosses would've sucked all the fun out of the game.

Super Spacefortress Macross II (Expert Course)
My score: 4,006,500 vs highest score 4,488,740
Ranking: 4/89
Decent game, but I think the reason I chose to spend time on this over something like RayForce is simply because it's so short. I learned most of what I needed to know to score 4 million in like a day or two. Then it was just grinding, which is easier to do when the game is short. I got a lot of 3.9 million runs so I ended up playing the game quite obstinately until I finally got my 4 mil run!

Tatsujin Ou
My score: 586,790 vs highest score 1,972,260
Ranking: 15/90
The Japanese version of Truxton II is notoriously difficult. It is considered one of the hardest arcade shmups out there to clear. I want to stress, that I have a lot of optimism about the game's feeling. The way it feels to traverse stages, with the music and the backgrounds and the stunning pixel artworks. It feels like an epic space adventure, and I'll never put that side of the game down. The problem is that the game is a SHMUP, which needs to be exciting. This game just isn't exciting to play because of its glacial pacing and endless repetition. Stages go on for an eternity repeating the same enemy formations over, and over, and over again. Another issue I have with this game is that it's really unsatisfying to shoot things, because everything has really inflated HP. In fact, I'd argue this is the biggest part of the game's difficulty. It's not really about the difficulty of dodging bullets, and more about your ships inability to kill enemies. For the vast majority of the game, there's only really one weapon type you can use that can actually kill things and even then, even then, your attack still feels too weak at times. This isn't just a balancing problem I have but also an enjoyment one. When everything feels like a bullet sponge, it sucks the enjoyment out of shooting enemies.

Thunder Dragon 2
My score: 3,045,550 vs highest score 5,118,270
Ranking: 10/88
Thunder Dragon 2 is a borderline great game. It is considered a true classic in the community these days. I didn't really get close to my old score as I didn't feel like I had time to knock out a 1cc, when there's so much Mr Driller to play. However, I did play this a fair bit, mostly with savestates to relearn old things. It's too bad I didn't get to make use of this practice to 1cc again.


Yolympics 2021:

1943: The Battle of Midway
My score: 3,016,050 vs highest score 3,232,760
Ranking: 2/45
Turns out this isn't a very good shmup, and I never realized it until now. It's pretty boring and badly designed. This game has a trick where you put 9 credits to get a few more score items, which was allowed. The weapon codes were also allowed (starting each stage with a set weapon). There's not much to say about this game other than complain a bit about its boring nonsense design. The game is easy until the very final boss where you have to do a really tight specific route to make it work.

Alpine Ski
My score: 132,553 vs highest sacore 168,599
Ranking: 4/54
The controls in this are totally ridiculous, but the game isn't quite as terrible as it might initially appear... it's sort of endearingly kuso. You get score by going faster, and also by collecting the point items. You lose score by going slower and by crashing. Crashing eats up 10 seconds, and every 2 minutes, your timer is like 2x faster. You get a new timer every 10k, but after the first couple of timers, the timers will end up disappearing very fast. After your 10th timer or so, the timers disappear pretty much instantly. The game is only part random, there's a finite number of maps, one randomly gets picked each loop. Not sure how random the enemies really are (they do get more numerous the more loops you do though).

Batsugun Special Version
My score: 70,647,950
Ranking 1/50
Good, casual friendly tournament game. My run was terrible since I didn't practice much, I could easily get much more score, but I don't see the point. Many people have counterstopped this game and I already understand how that's done and know I could do it. Fun game though with great music.

Bomb Jack (game ends after 5th death)
My score: 888,600 vs highest score 2,049,780
Ranking 5/49
Was looking forward to learning this great game. The scoring system is excellent with the rules used; we played with only 5 lives (If you're good enough at the game, you can play it forever, since you occasionally get new lives, and the game is endless. Hence, capping it at 5 lives was good). One player was able to use his 5 lives far better than anyone else.

Bump n Jump
My score: 461,264 vs highest score 1,179,736
Ranking 4/51
This is a very bad game. The stages are long and boring and the optimal way to play is to avoid bumping anything as killing 0 enemies gives you 50k score at the end of the stage. every 30k, you get a new life. You can suicide lives in order to avoid killing enemies in situations where you might be forced to otherwise. The game is just not a good experience. Everyone just tried getting as many 50k bonuses as possible.

Circus Charlie
My score: 607,220 vs highest score 727,840
Ranking 3/46
I didn't like this at first, but it grew on me somewhat. There's 6 minigames you can pick between, and every time you repeat one, it gets harder. After 5, you can't play it anymore. The only exception is the rope swings, which you can do forever. One of the minigames is legit interesting to play (horses). The rest is more whatever, but generally decent. My strategy was to optimize the minigames as best I could with the strats I had, and then game over once I only have rope swings left because I hate that game.

Commando
My score: 388,600 vs highest score 1,155,100
Ranking 2/57
Commando is a good game, but playing it without autofire made it much worse. That's why I practiced with autofire on for an hour or two until I felt I was ready to record a INP for the competition without autofire. I did need to play several credits before I got this run which wasn't great for my hand, but it could've gone worse. The top player gets much more score because the game is endless, does not get harder in future loops (after stage 8) and gives out frequent lives, allowing a good player to snowball quite heavily. Even if I was capable of that, I would've just killed the run to secure 2nd place in order to save myself from the mashing...

Food Fight
My score: 381,700 vs highest score 458,400
Ranking: 2/44
Difficult controls on MAME on a keyboard, but after many hours of playing the game, I finally figured out the perfect analog settings in MAME to give myself the most amount smooth movement I can have while also being able to shoot in more than 8 directions.
The RNG in this game is nice. Immediately when you see the board, everything is random, and you get about 2 seconds to make up a plan for how to proceed before the level starts. The strategy aspect isn't particularly deep, but you need to be clever and think quick to deal with harder rng. I got pretty good RNG in my run. Sometimes when I get bad RNG, I can hardly even get 100k. I didn't like grinding this really, since we start from level 1, and the early levels are painfully slow and boring. You can start from a later level, but doing so wasn't allowed. The game isn't truly awful, but playing from level 1 every time soured me on it.

Mario Bros (3 lives)
My score: 288,170 vs highest score 1,292,760
Ranking: 10/48
The controls in Mario are so fucked up. This is a game with 0 freedom, you have to visualize what the boards will look like 5 seconds from now, to make the correct moves. The game feels more like a real time strategy game than a platformer. it really makes you appreciate the controls in future mario games for consoles. Anyway, I learned a lot of strats in this game, but I just couldn't quite execute consistently, and also would've likely done better with a deeper understanding of the game and a stronger ability to read everything on the board at once. A couple of players are just absolute masters at the game (the MAME world record holder participated, for instance). This was a difficult leaderboard to climb. Once you're at max difficulty (2 red fireballs can be on screen at once, and the maximum number of icicles are spawning) the game is really a nightmare, and if you make any mistakes at all, you can find yourself losing all your lives because there's no respite if you respawn with 6 enemies on screen + slipice + fireballs + icicles everywhere.

Ninja Baseball Batman
My score: 618,080
Ranking: 1/42
Arguably the easiest leaderboard in the tournament. I don't really get it to be honest. Everyone knew about the power move with the green guy. Everyone used that. But why didn't other people milk the dynamite with it much? A couple of people did some dynamite things seemingly, but not many. At least I pushed for it in my team. I suicided all my lives but one (which I lost on accident early in the run) to milk dynamite and then 1cced the game.

Pole Position
My score: 63,170 vs highest score 65,760
Ranking: 6/45
Annoying game that controls terribly in MAME on a keyboard. Nonetheless I stuck with it (probably my most played game) and managed to finish like, 7 or 8 no-crash runs. I just never finished one that was really fast; my fastest pace got 1 crash and might've reached 64k if it avoided that crash...

Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon
My score: 1,607,300
Ranking: 1/39
This is a great game with a great scoring system for a beatemup. I got this score almost immediately after the tournament started, but make no mistake, it's by far my best accomplishment this tournament, and probably one of my strongest tournament scores in these things (along with like, Pig Newton). The prep beforehand was key.
In order to score in this game, you have to take significant risks by soloing enemies one by one (even though there's multiple on screen) and also optimize your time in order to get in as many high scoring moves as you can without running out of it. The reason I got the score so fast is because I had been preparing my score strategies for the last several days a couple of hour each day, and before I started doing that, I had already 1cced the game earlier this year (which is notoriously a difficult game). It would be a different story if I learned the game from scratch. This is the one beatemup where scoring has really grabbed me so far, so I may push it further in the future. The WR is like 2.1 million.

Puzzle Bobble 2
My score: 128,437,340 vs highest score 129,108,950
Ranking: 2/46
This game requires a lot of patience. In terms of puzzle solving, it's 90% about luck. Figuring out scoring strategies is not very difficult. Most of the puzzle solving just involves trying to gauge what actions you can take with specific bubble placements that gives you the highest chance of success in the future. The game can kill you or screw you at any time.
The gameplay is also not very satisfying as it's all about playing slow and making sure you nail all the pixel perfect shots.
The scoring system works, and for some reason I was patient and didn't hate playing this, but the game is fundamentally bad objectively. Many levels can't be scored on at all and must nonetheless be played through carefully for highest chance at survival as the bubble luck can screw you whenever it feels like it.

R-Type Leo
My score: 5,423,200 vs highest score 5,690,810
Ranking: 3/47
Pretty decent game. Compared to the first R-Type, the core mechanic has been dumbed down, but the level design is far better. Some of the levels are quite boring (and with repeat playthroughs, almost the entire game will be pretty dull; it's on the easier side) but I do think the game is pretty chill. The level design gets legitimately awesome towards the end (the final level is great).
Scoring is done like this: Don't die, ever (1 million per life on clear), and then use a single scoring trick right before the final boss, for a maximum of 750,000 points extra (but I couldn't figure out how to get more than 600,000~).
Other than this, there are only small optimizations which gives very little. I did a deathless run and decided to do an easier version of the score trick for about 400,000 or so

Rainbow Islands
My score: 1,929,730 vs highest score 6,553,490
Ranking: 9/41
Hate the controls in this. The game also gets unreasonably difficult before long. The game mechanics are absurdly convoluted, It's clear a lot of thought went into this game, but I think the designers were misguided as they put so much effort into basically forcing you to play the game in such a ridiculous way... as you will otherwise not gain permanent powerups that are so necessary on later levels. The game sounds good in theory, but because it plays like shit, all that effort went to waste IMO. The core gameplay needs to be tighter before the designers starts going crazy with the insane item system.
I can't be alone on this either because nobody even gets close to being great this game. Only one guy was signifcantly better than the rest. Very, very sadistic game.

Rally-X
My score: 109,360 vs highest score 138,510
Ranking: 4/54
The first Rally-X is balls hard and unfair. Call me crazy but I kinda enjoy it...

Rygar
My score: 2,013,790 vs highest score 8,309,560
Ranking: 11/43
Fuck Rygar. It's a dysfunctinal shitty game and it was painful to try to perform on it while getting fucked by all the bugs. Terrible hitboxes, controls and full of bugs. You can fall through platforms and enemies at any time. My goal was just to get the hidden 1 million item on stage 13. Why so many people are so sick at this game is beyond me.

Street Fighter Alpha 3
My score: 2,755,700 vs highest score 3,985,500
Ranking: 11/38
It's a fighting game against the computer, but still, I thought it was fun. At first I couldn't get anywhere, I was using Sakura and couldn't get any score. Eventually I searched for another character to use, and after much trial and error, found myself using Rose and abusing her Crouch mid punch. This started netting me 1ccs with little effort. The problem was score, however. Playing Rose this way and only using other moves when necessary required little effort, but it was still a bit inconsistent and led to me often losing rounds, and rarely getting perfects. So I needed to change something. That something ended up being switching to Chun-Li. By using Chun-Li, I could start doing no-loss attempts while occasionally getting perfects along the way. If you never lose a round, the "winning chain" keeps increasing. Getting a perfect round gives a lot of score, too. Other than this, the main thing I paid attention to was the time vs HP left multiplier. Being fast and taking little damage, essentially.
My run had 1 loss on Bison, but since it's at the very end, it doesn't detract much from the score.

Super Hang-On (Beginner Course)
My score: 28,727,250 vs highest score 35,111,9750
Ranking: 4/45
Really fun game. I managed a run through that didnt collide with a single enemy or object. However, I could've been faster, clearly, as I still only got 4th. The top score is kinda mindboggling, being like 5? seconds faster. Plus, you get even more score the more you manage to use the Supercharger. I cleared Junior Course after Yolympics and the remaining two courses also interest me.

Super Pac-Man
My score: 173,410 vs highest score 308,120
Ranking: 9/45
It's OK. I got around the same score several times. That's because the memorization required is pretty high after that point. You need a different route for every level! I memorized a good deal but going into the mid 200s would've been too much effort.

Super Pang (Panic Mode)
My Score: 1,543,200 vs highest score 2,721,450
Ranking: 3/51
I do like the Pang games, bute Panic mode was pretty bad. The problem is that you need to play very patiently and carefully and only break specific bubbles at specific times in order to survive. Another problem, which is even worse, is the scoring system. The main mechanic is that you get 100k points if you shoot nothing for 30 seconds. But, the difficulty reaches max so everything gets super fast. So then, to abuse this, you wanna get to the end of the game, when the game stops spawning bubbles anymore. And then use the last few bubbles to shoot, wait 30 secs, shoot, wait 30 secs etc as much as you can. It's not easy, since everything gets super fast, but that's the strat. Before you win, you want to suicide your life, and try again. I got there and managed to get like a million from this trick, but I was too sloppy and got a game over.

The Simpsons
My Score: 161,500 vs highest score 163,200
Ranking: 2/47
This was a pretty easy score to pull off. I got a 1cc pretty much immediately after practicing a bit, but it only scored like 140k. So later in the tournament I decided to work on my scoring routes, and on my first try after practicing I got this 161k!
Game is very easy, because we played the Japanese version, which is actually decent. The American version is a godawful version which is not designed for 1cc at all (senseless quartermuncher on bosses) and has been stripped of some of the few things that makes the japanese version actually feel like a game.
Scoring is simple. Enemies are worth a fixed value. So killing every enemy possible is step 1. Next is health. You can gain up to 3 healthbars from food items. There are many, many hidden food items in the game, collecting as many as you can, and taking as few hits as you can, gives more score. Lastly, bonus stages. Mashing very quickly gives you more score on these.
Not a great game by any means, but it's simple, easy and has that oldschool Simpsons charm.

With about 2 weeks remaining, Suddenly 5 bonus games were added. These were generally not played quite as much as the previous 22, as a lot of players are burned out at this point and not willing to learn the new games to the same degree, so the leaderboards were weaker.

ESP Ra.De.
My score: 20,843,580
Ranking: 1/35
Classic CAVE game. Always thought this one was like an unpolished gem. The game has serious issues with playability; the controls are bad even by CAVE standards (movement speed switching) and the slowdown is seriously insane and sucks. However, if you can get past these problems, you've got a real classic on your hands here. The stage design, boss patterns, scoring system, art design and presentation is all solid. 20 million isn't much of a score, but I at least figured some things out along the way. Although, the scoring system also has a massive flaw... to most people anyway. That is, the boss timers coupled with the nuance of the bubble mechanic, which allows you to milk bosses for an eternity by trying to hit them only with the 16th bubble! Madness!

Ponpoko
My score: 203,010 vs highest score 289,600
Ranking: 3/37
Early 80s platformer... Not bad honestly. The jumping controls are a bit esoteric, but the game is very responsive. The hitboxes though, are awful. The level design is nice, although I don't like that the ? items have hidden snakes. Feels like it would be more honest if ? items were instead just trophies/Snakes. As it is, you just have to hardcore memorize every level to learn. Triggering snakes can kill all of your score for that level, as you need to be fast to get score, if you're too slow, you lose everything. At the end of the game, you get the Beer level. The beer level seems to repeat forever. I did a lot of beer levels. The top 2 scorers must've played a fuckload of Beer levels!

Popeye
My score: 110,470 vs highest score 379,510
Ranking: 5/35
Popeye Arcade game has charm, but I don't like it because of the movement delay. For whatever reason, they programmed in something in the ballpark of 15-20 frames of delay for moving left or right? Why? who knows. I also don't like the Boat level.

Roc n Rope
My Score: 169,350 vs highest score 175,490
Ranking: 3/31
Garbage game.

Side Arms
My Score: 1,744,500
Ranking: 1/34
I don't see why we needed a 3rd Capcom shooter, but that's what we got. The fact that I'm the only one who cleared it says it all. People weren't buying it.
Game is not that bad, but nothing special. On the plus side, it gets quite twitchy a few levels in and keeps you on your toes throughout afterwards. The minus, though, is that everything is very samey. I can't tell any stage apart, the same boss repeats over and over, etc. The music is way too loud for some reason so you cant hear any sound effects. Also if you die, you have no invulnerability frames so you can lose all your lives in a few seconds if you're careless.


...And that's it. These Yolympics have started appearing a bit too often actually. I think I'm not the only one who feels that way. So I played not much in the most recent one.
Best game out of all of those would be Naname de Magic or Dragon Blaze, I think. Those are fantastic.

I also really loved Sailor Moon, and next I'm going to mention my Sailor Moon adventures. Sailor moon is an excellent arcade belt scroller, that like many others is influenced by Final Fight.
So what have I been doing for so long in this game? Scoring points. My goal was 2 million. after reaching 2 million, I wanted to press a bit further while ignoring if I get good or bad luck. My goal was to get a run that would have 2.1 million with 4 bonus crystals luck (each gives 30k). I got a run with 2 bonus crystals that got 2.04 million, so regardless of the score being lower, in terms of execution, my goal was met with that run. At this point I had gotten a bit tired of the game, so I promptly quit after. It was really fun for a couple of weeks or a month to score, though, and after that, it was more "I know what to do, I need to do it" while still enjoying the game of course, it had gotten a bit tedious to restart for the luck.
In beat em up Circles, Sailor Moon is known to be brutally difficult, but I don't think it should have that reputation. It is difficult, but I think there are harder games in the genre, and I don't think it's as hard, neither for score or for survival, as most of the big bad shmups are like Touhou series, Cave games, Raizing games etc.
I also cleared it on Hard mode which I think doubles all the enemies health. That's like a decent warm up for proper score runs, I suppose.
You can watch both my 2.04 million run and hard mode run on Replayburners, a channel that is full of learning resources for various games, that I was happy to contribute to. Scoring in arcade beat em ups seem to be super niché though, even though the scoring system for this game is quite good.
You can watch the high score here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaRbqPTU9go
I have since improved the scoring route slightly, but most of the improvements to make would still come from more lucky item drops. I don't want to grind for that, which is why I went ahead with a goal of simulation "if the score would be 2.1 mil with 4 lucky drops, I'm satisfied".

Another game I've scored in quite a lot, and that coincidentally I actually PBed in during Calice Cup, was Naname de Magic. Apparently, I even beat the arcade WR! But the MAME WR is still higher than my run.

I mentioned previously that I haven't played the photography games much recently. But, I did set a few new scores since my previous blog entry, so I'll just quickly go over them.

StB 1-1: 89,870
DS 4-2 Aya: 372,221
DS 5-6 Hatate: 584,042
DS 7-5 Hatate: 726,783
DS 10-3 Aya: 979,839
Now, I wouldn't say any of those scores are particularly outstanding, but evidently they're the best I've got.
I used to think 1-1 had a maxed score at 90k-something. turns out the maxed score is roughly 2k higher because the last photo can in the freakiest fashionI've ever seen actually get another 2k from the most mindblowing of details. Grinding for that in addition to perfect first 2 photos is just painful though, no thanks.
4-2 is just blatantly unfinished and I simply could never get the hang of it the way t1100 does.
5-6 is okay. 7-5 is really difficult to get a great score in but at least it was an improvement. on 10-3 though, I figured out a better strategy, which improved my score considerably. I'd say this scene in particular is currently a work in progress, because it can go way higher. Yet, it is a bit painful to play over a longer period of time, because of the heavy amount of stalling necessary and restarting while waiting for the boss to go up.

I've been playing Warcraft 3 on W3champions on and off still, playing 4vs4 on the ladder. It's incredibly enjoyable. 4vs4 has never had a ladder as competitive as this before, leading to frequently good games.

I also started playing Genshin impact last year. It was my first Gacha and still my only one. At first, I thought i'd only give it a shot, and I had expected to have quit it by now. Well in the past half year or so, I havent really progressed much in the game, and mostly doing the bare minimum of participating in temporary events, spending resin, and doing the dailys... Perhaps it's a waste of time, as 10+ minutes per day of this does add up over the course of months, but I'm still a bit curious what's next around the corner, so I might not quit just yet. The game had the potential to be a fantastic casual side game that you play little bits of at a time to relax, but I personally think the game takes an unattractive direction on that front, foregoing the focus on combat and exploration, and instead making you do meaningless little tasks and read meaningless text for too long. I don't enjoy that about it, and personally wouldn't really recommend the game despite the enjoyment I've gotten out of its good sides. It's been an interesting experience to play one of these gacha games and I think I understand how they are modeled now. One nice thing about Genshin in this genre is how little incentive there is to spend money. You can choose the cheapest options to get the most bang for your buck, which can cost anywhere from $5 a month, $5 a month + $10 every 40 days. But you can also choose to F2P, you will just be a bit poorer on resources.
I still don't really understand the people that put in more money into the game because of how blatantly overpriced it is, and because the game is so easy that you don't really need to spend money. The reason to spend money on Genshin is to make the game more "fun", since the game is still easy if you're F2P. However, spending $3000 on maxing a character, does that really make the character more fun to use? I don't see why it would, in most cases at least. And even if it did, it's obviously not worth that type of money.
Still, I do think putting absurd amounts of money into a Gacha game, and putting absurd amounts of money into arcade game credits in an arcade setting, is actually quite comparable at its core. Funny, isn't it? I'm not saying it's identical, just surprisingly comparable.

Perhaps this blog has also run its course soon. New entries are more and more infrequent, as I do not find the same enjoyment in selfish writeups as I used to. I guess we'll see. Nonetheless, all the best to you all.