OK, as far as the argument about McCallisters 1.2 million Robotron score. I have my doubts. Here are my reasons why.
1) The game in Arcade is easier than MAME. For instance, I hit over 200k probably over 20 times on Arcade practice. On MAME with keyboard, I never hit 200k. I never hit 170k on keyboard to be honest. What does this mean?
It means that a person needs to get the machine or somehow get a two stick set up to make up for the handicap that is found on MAME. So McCallister's numbers are sort of skewed because not everyone can legitimately play the game the way it was meant to be played.
Yes, I've said before that Robotron is a game that is easier on arcade than MAME. Not just because of control issues, but I also feel that there are still very tiny differences in the way the blitter spawns the Enforcers and Tanks, and that they spawn sooner in MAME... but that could just be a placebo effect. Yes, people that have access to a cabinet are at an advantage. There's a lot of games like this where having access to the original cabinet + control scheme puts you at an advantage over whatever you'd be trying to do in MAME (like Sinistar), unless you somehow have the original control panel wired up to your computer (which some people have done). That's just the nature of some arcade games. But it's not as if Robotron is an impossible game to find - sure it goes for high prices now (like everything else in this hobby lately), but the high production count means there were tons of cabinets out there, and it's a common fixture in home arcades and barcades today.
But anyway. Is the point you're making here that because the arcade version is a little easier, people just never have the opportunity to beat his score like they would in MAME? I mean, the game's been in three BOTA's. We had four groups of people throughout the US playing it a few weeks ago. Granted it was in a tournament with 11 other games, but it's been in several BOTA's where people have had the opportunity to play it on a cabinet. Of course, not every cabinet has sticks that feels as responsive as Ken House's cabinet (sorry to hear about the RK cab), but people had the chance to play it. And in not one of those three BOTA's has anyone broken 900k.
2) Your 875k score. You are someone who is known for putting up great scores on many, many games. Because of that, you move from one game to the next. You are not someone who is playing this game 3 hours a day, day in, and day out. I remember when this game came out on Roulette a few months ago, and you said how it had been awhile since you played the game. I don't believe you spent the time on this game like you did Shock Troopers. In fact, your Shock Troopers score might be a harder score to beat than McCallister's 1.2 million 5 man Robotron. My guess is that given that you are already at 875k, that if you were to play this game 3 hours a day that you would be able to break the record within a two month time period. Sides, without much practice leading up to BOTA you have been able to hit 800k twice on Robotron, and the other time was over 725k. If you play this game 3 hours a day on Arcade, you are bound to have a breakout game.
Ok a lot to take in here, I'll address the Shock Troopers thing at the bottom of this post, lol.
No, I don't play Robotron regularly, because of my distaste for playing it in MAME (I was dying way too much when it came up in Roulette, but maybe I can partially blame that for having to do it under a distracting streaming environment and that is a game that does not give you much time at all between waves to read stream chat). But it's not as if I've never played the game before. I mean, I was too young for it when the game was new in the arcades but I sort of found respect for it on some PC port of Williams games in the mid-90's, even though the control scheme wasn't that good. Wasn't until sometime in the early 2000's that I saw a cabinet of it again at an arcade that decided to put in a few classic cabs and then discovered I had the skillset to be able to marathon the game on the default settings. As for those 800k scores on 5 lives, I've actually broken 800k a total of 4 times - twice during BOTA's, once during a pre-BOTA practice stream (I put the clip on youtube), and once on Chris Manfield's machine. And ya know, it takes a lot of attempts to finally get that one good game. At the point I'm at, having this "breakout game" basically comes down to being insanely lucky on brain waves, like I mentioned. There is never a good plan for these waves, and getting past one without dying is insanely rare past Wave 15. Having to do one of those every 5 waves means at least one very difficult death to avoid. And that's just assuming you don't get screwed by an Enforcer bullet on one of the waves somewhere before then! This might come off as a tiny bit dickish, but... as a 200k player you might not be aware of the difficulty of these later stages and just how difficult it is to consistently get by those later brain waves without one of the 5 deaths you're alloted.
3) I don't think McCallister's playing this game, day in, and day out either on arcade. So I think McCallister can probably do much better on this game because of that.
Having said that, I also think McCallister's score is an amazing score. Definitely somewhere in the top 5 all time for any arcade score in my book.
Oh yeah, he definitely doesn't play it that much, he's just very gifted at it. He barely played it at Ken's during BOTA, he played maybe a few games, got his 600k and moved on. Way less attempts to break 600k than I took. I don't know how much he was playing back when he got his 1.2 mil, he just kind of dropped it on everyone out of nowhere.
Now since you mentioned Shock Troopers, you give me an excuse to mention that lol. It's highly unlikely that unless I offered a cash bounty or something that anyone would ever come forward and beat my 32,703,800 on it. I've done my best to try to get people interested in playing it, always shared my info and uploaded replays and videos and streamed some score runs, but nobody was ever interested in playing it for score. Everything I figured out for that game was on my own since I had nobody to bounce ideas off of, just me chasing after a 31.3 million score reported in a Japanese magazine. But knowing what I know about the game, 32.7 million is not unbeatable in theory. Taking my highest scores from each individual stage puts together a score that's over 34 million, the problem is there's a lot of randomness involved in things like the point drop items from killing enemies. Kinda like the fruit in Ms Pacman. But then again, maybe better patterns for optimizing the clock in each stage are possible, it's why I've always tried to get people to play it, to get a fresh perspective from someone else, but nobody is interested in taking me up on that. So yes, that 32.7 million score will probably stand unless I get motivated enough to try to break it.
