Am I the best all around player of the 3 Donkey Kongs?

[Simpsons99]

TY George!

Good to know there are people who think other wise than I do.  So it seems like a good majority of people still don't think I am the best overall of the 3 Kongs.  I guess I'll keep on trucking along.

Yeah, I guess if you go straight by adding ranking without adding weights I lose that one.  You can argue it's not the most mathematically accurate, but fair enough.  At least there is one way I lose out math wise.


Hey, I think the adding rankings also works out in Brian's favor as well.   Sounds fair enough.  I admit defeat.  Ranking wise Mark Kiehl, and a few others like Steve Wagner, Mark Kiehl, Billy Mitchell, Steve Wiebe, Brian Allen.

Yep, I jumped the gun on this one.   Thank you for showing me the error of my ways!

[marinomitch13]

George, how long do you think it would take someone, cold turkey, to get 1m+ on 5-man? I am assuming that Mark is not cold turkey, so he'll have a little head start. I am cold turkey on DK3, as I have only ever played about 12 attempts in total (and I was completely rushing just to qualify for the CAGDC tourney), and I can get about 100K on 5 men already. I've watched and seen how the game gets tougher, and I think if someone really wanted to, and watched INPs of good players and actually practiced patiently (which I haven't done either), that they could do it. It has happened with DK (e.g. Jeff Willms). It's not a diss on you or other DK3 players, as it is a compliment to Mark and a comment on how much being able to watch other players helps with the learning curve.

I'll be back later to see what pops up on this thread, for now I gotta go try for a big BurgerTime score. Can't wait.

P.s. My improvement on BT is a prime example of my point. I've watched hours of INPs, so I'm already gunning for 5m+ with maybe less than 8-9 practice sessions. Without the INPs or my dedication to study, I'd be at like 100-200k. (Insert "That's Just the Way it Is" song here).

[Simpsons99]

Mitch i think your 12th place of me is alittle bit of a slap in the face.

[homerwannabee]

George, how long do you think it would take someone, cold turkey, to get 1m+ on 5-man? I am assuming that Mark is not cold turkey, so he'll have a little head start. I am cold turkey on DK3, as I have only ever played about 12 attempts in total (and I was completely rushing just to qualify for the CAGDC tourney), and I can get about 100K on 5 men already. I've watched and seen how the game gets tougher, and I think if someone really wanted to, and watched INPs of good players and actually practiced patiently (which I haven't done either), that they could do it. It has happened with DK (e.g. Jeff Willms). It's not a diss on you or other DK3 players, as it is a compliment to Mark and a comment on how much being able to watch other players helps with the learning curve.

I'll be back later to see what pops up on this thread, for now I gotta go try for a big BurgerTime score. Can't wait.

P.s. My improvement on BT is a prime example of my point. I've watched hours of INPs, so I'm already gunning for 5m+ with maybe less than 8-9 practice sessions. Without the INPs or my dedication to study, I'd be at like 100-200k. (Insert "That's Just the Way it Is" song here).

There are nuances to the game, that take a very long time to get down.  By the way, what you played was Donkey Kong on Easy settings to get 100k.  Burgertime is a  pattern game, and producing the same moves gets the same results.  I don't use patterns for Donkey Kong 3.  I don't think you can use patterns for that game.  Not successfully anyways.

[marinomitch13]

I haven't been able to leave for the arcade yet (making food currently), so I'll respond now, since I can.

Brian, I wasn't trying to slap you in the face with my placing. I tried to be as objective as  could by assuming what I thought were relatively safe assumptions and also looking up everyones' scores that I could find, that I didn't already know. If you see it as a slap in the face, it is probably a sign that you think you are better than you actually are relative to the competition -that is, unless you can prove my ranking wrong. Realize that if yo think you are being overlooked, it may be that you are actually overlooking others.

George, agreed, BurgerTime is a pattern game, so it is much easier to improve at IMHO. I was just trying to prove my sub-point that with being able to watch other good players' INPs so easily (and not to mention save-sates!) one can improve at an incredible rate. BurgerTime may have not ultimately the best example. However, many games are filled with pseudo-patterns that, once realized, help the player develop much more quickly. Galaga may be a better example to DK3 in this regard (since it is a shooting game and the enemies in both games have their own patterns/tendencies that can be discovered/learned). This obviously will hold less true with DK3 than it would for Galaga, but I think my suggestion of watching INPs in order to improve on DK3 very quickly is valid since it would easily work wonders for anyone trying to get a great 5-man score on Galaga.

Another thing to realize is that DK3 5-man is a survival game/track. I think I said earlier that these types of games/tracks are typically much easier. I'll also add, that these types of games/tracks present a much higher chance for the player to get lucky 1 or 2 times in the hardest part of the game and thereby increase the one's score considerably. You currently have over 1.3m on the 5-man settings, but imagine if maybe one of your deaths you could have lucked out and barely survived on -you could have maybe gotten another 250k! That's just the dynamics of how the game works when the difficulty of the various screens is rather punctuated (meaning some screens are harder than others). If someone is playing a game that requires a lot of pressing, the chance for these types of score improvements usually goes down.

Oh yeah...and "what food are you making?" you might ask....

Pie. 250 posts: booyah!

We're living the good life, aren't we Chris? Did you get blueberry or strawberry? I got pumpkin!

[homerwannabee]

TY George!

Good to know there are people who think other wise than I do.  So it seems like a good majority of people still don't think I am the best overall of the 3 Kongs.  I guess I'll keep on trucking along.

Yeah, I guess if you go straight by adding ranking without adding weights I lose that one.  You can argue it's not the most mathematically accurate, but fair enough.  At least there is one way I lose out math wise.


Hey, I think the adding rankings also works out in Brian's favor as well.   Sounds fair enough.  I admit defeat.  Ranking wise Mark Kiehl, and a few others like Steve Wagner, Mark Kiehl, Billy Mitchell, Steve Wiebe, Brian Allen.

Yep, I jumped the gun on this one.   Thank you for showing me the error of my ways!

No problem.  The person you should thank is Steve Wagner.  It's his idea to apply BOTA system to this.  I mean you are at least 20 places ahead of me in Donkey Kong only 5 places behind me in Donkey Kong Junior, and only 6 places behind me in Donkey Kong 3.   This means you are 9 spots ahead of me over all at least, and probably more.   I was blind Allen before Steve Wagner offered this awesome ranking system, and now I see the light.  It's as plain as day that you are truly better than me on all 3 Donkey Kongs.  I mean the numbers don't lie.

[giv]

I'm  not speaking of you .

It's alright Brian, you didn't need to be. It worked out anyway.

[JCHarrist]

 

[marinomitch13]

George Leutz, that is amazing. So funny!

[homerwannabee]

One thing I just noticed about the BOTA ranking system.  The games are evenly distributed with the same amount of people.   It really doesn't work that well when the ranking are heavily distributed towards one game with more participants.  It gives an disproportional distribution towards the weighted game.

[up2ng]

Ok, first of all this thread is at least borderline obnoxious and the topic itself is very arbitrary.  Many CAGers both past and present consider the fact that DK3 used the DK name and character to be pretty much blasphemy -- a clear "jump the shark" sort of marketing ploy to try to sell a shooter to people that enjoy platformers.  To me, this is sort of like just picking any three games, like "Who is the best all around at DK, Moon Patrol and Satan's Hollow"?  (Answer:  Ben Falls)

BUT, if we're going to discuss this topic once in a while anyway I might as well throw in my two cents and actually throw my hat into the "competition" as time allows too. . .

George, what a lot of people keep trying to explain to you is that since DK3 has no kill screen you cannot just use simple math for this topic.  For example, you definitely CANNOT just add up your 3 scores on the three games and have that be meaningful in any way (as you seem to want to do often in these threads).  Even your recent attempt to compare scores against the 5-man track just does not work since someone "could" still play the game indefinitely as long as they don't lose 5 men -- something that is physically impossible with the other two games because of their kill screens.  I suppose if TG had a well established and highly competitive track where the players played on 5-man settings and their score was taken after completion of Round 32 (or something), THEN you could at least begin to (sort of) compare the scores mathematically.  But DK3 is not played that way.  So, that's why the whole thing becomes very subjective -- especially since one person isn't clearly dominating all 3 games.

The point of course is that the difference in points does not accurately describe the difference in skill from one game to the next -- it only paints a picture for one particular game.

For example (getting very subjective here), it would be silly to say that a 1.1 million point DK player is "10% better than" a 1 million point DK player, despite the score being just 10% higher.  The reason, of course, is that the kill screen forces a player to squeeze extra points into the same number of (Timed) screens and so mathematically, the increase in skill required to do so is not linear -- it's something more like logarithmic or geometric.  Very roughly speaking, I would say that a 1.05 million point player is about twice as good as a 1 million point player.  A 1.2 million point player might actually be 3 or 4 TIMES as good as a mere 1.175 million point player.  (a 800,000 point player is probably quite a bit LESS than twice as good as a 400,000 point player) -- and so on.  This sort of thing isn't even remotely true of DK3 scores.

On the other hand, further complicating matters is the fact that DK3 has one massive plateau.  All of us who have scored somewhere around 1.2 million to 1.5 million points understand that the BEST way for US to score the MOST points is to use the super spray to pretty much skip 2 screens and then INTENTIONALLY die on the 3rd screen -- rinse and repeat.  It is actually significantly WORSE to try to pass the 3rd screen and mess up the cycle.  In order to get to the point where one can routinely pass ALL of the screens WITHOUT the super spray to the point where they can actually score significantly better than just playing that 3 screen cycle, they must overcome a MASSIVE plateau -- but once this skill level is achieved, scores can potentially skyrocket with a relatively small increase in skill since the game's difficulty is maxed out.  So comparing the skill level of someone who plays the 3 screen cycle and someone who is able to get significantly higher scores becomes totally subjective and is not well related to the score.

Since you like analogies, suppose someone discovers a special technique to be able to achieve a 30 million point jump on EVERY single board of Zookeeper, over and over again.  This might require a small increase in overall skill beyond other good players who are unable to score 30 million point jumps.  Soon, this player is recording scores on this game in the BILLIONS of points.  Is this player literally HUNDREDS OF TIMES better than a very good 10 million point player?  No, clearly the difference in scores would not accurately reflect the difference in skill in this case.  I think we have similar issues occuring with these 3 games in this thread -- so very subjective comparisons are naturally going to result.

(BTW, I do find it mildly amusing that no one has scored 1M on all 3 games yet (Ben Falls?  Steve W, Billy M?)  Perhaps I should find some time in the near future to run through some boards on DKJR. . . )

[Simpsons99]

very good post Dean.

I belive Steve Wagner is the closest to 1 millon on all 3 games.

I only need about 310k on Dk and i'm there

Ok, first of all this thread is at least borderline obnoxious and the topic itself is very arbitrary.  Many CAGers both past and present consider the fact that DK3 used the DK name and character to be pretty much blasphemy -- a clear "jump the shark" sort of marketing ploy to try to sell a shooter to people that enjoy platformers.  To me, this is sort of like just picking any three games, like "Who is the best all around at DK, Moon Patrol and Satan's Hollow"?  (Answer:  Ben Falls)

BUT, if we're going to discuss this topic once in a while anyway I might as well throw in my two cents and actually throw my hat into the "competition" as time allows too. . .

George, what a lot of people keep trying to explain to you is that since DK3 has no kill screen you cannot just use simple math for this topic.  For example, you definitely CANNOT just add up your 3 scores on the three games and have that be meaningful in any way (as you seem to want to do often in these threads).  Even your recent attempt to compare scores against the 5-man track just does not work since someone "could" still play the game indefinitely as long as they don't lose 5 men -- something that is physically impossible with the other two games because of their kill screens.  I suppose if TG had a well established and highly competitive track where the players played on 5-man settings and their score was taken after completion of Round 32 (or something), THEN you could at least begin to (sort of) compare the scores mathematically.  But DK3 is not played that way.  So, that's why the whole thing becomes very subjective -- especially since one person isn't clearly dominating all 3 games.

The point of course is that the difference in points does not accurately describe the difference in skill from one game to the next -- it only paints a picture for one particular game.

For example (getting very subjective here), it would be silly to say that a 1.1 million point DK player is "10% better than" a 1 million point DK player, despite the score being just 10% higher.  The reason, of course, is that the kill screen forces a player to squeeze extra points into the same number of (Timed) screens and so mathematically, the increase in skill required to do so is not linear -- it's something more like logarithmic or geometric.  Very roughly speaking, I would say that a 1.05 million point player is about twice as good as a 1 million point player.  A 1.2 million point player might actually be 3 or 4 TIMES as good as a mere 1.175 million point player.  (a 800,000 point player is probably quite a bit LESS than twice as good as a 400,000 point player) -- and so on.  This sort of thing isn't even remotely true of DK3 scores.

On the other hand, further complicating matters is the fact that DK3 has one massive plateau.  All of us who have scored somewhere around 1.2 million to 1.5 million points understand that the BEST way for US to score the MOST points is to use the super spray to pretty much skip 2 screens and then INTENTIONALLY die on the 3rd screen -- rinse and repeat.  It is actually significantly WORSE to try to pass the 3rd screen and mess up the cycle.  In order to get to the point where one can routinely pass ALL of the screens WITHOUT the super spray to the point where they can actually score significantly better than just playing that 3 screen cycle, they must overcome a MASSIVE plateau -- but once this skill level is achieved, scores can potentially skyrocket with a relatively small increase in skill since the game's difficulty is maxed out.  So comparing the skill level of someone who plays the 3 screen cycle and someone who is able to get significantly higher scores becomes totally subjective and is not well related to the score.

Since you like analogies, suppose someone discovers a special technique to be able to achieve a 30 million point jump on EVERY single board of Zookeeper, over and over again.  This might require a small increase in overall skill beyond other good players who are unable to score 30 million point jumps.  Soon, this player is recording scores on this game in the BILLIONS of points.  Is this player literally HUNDREDS OF TIMES better than a very good 10 million point player?  No, clearly the difference in scores would not accurately reflect the difference in skill in this case.  I think we have similar issues occuring with these 3 games in this thread -- so very subjective comparisons are naturally going to result.

(BTW, I do find it mildly amusing that no one has scored 1M on all 3 games yet (Ben Falls?  Steve W, Billy M?)  Perhaps I should find some time in the near future to run through some boards on DKJR. . . )

[marinomitch13]

Even your recent attempt to compare scores against the 5-man track just does not work since someone "could" still play the game indefinitely as long as they don't lose 5 men -- something that is physically impossible with the other two games because of their kill screens.

Good post Dean. This point in particular is the trouble maker. This is way in another thread somewhere I was saying that a 1 hour time limit on DK3 was the best one to use, but even that still runs into issues with the plateau/skill points you also made.

(BTW, I do find it mildly amusing that no one has scored 1M on all 3 games yet (Ben Falls?  Steve W, Billy M?)  Perhaps I should find some time in the near future to run through some boards on DKJR. . . )

Do it! Take a well deserved break form DK sometime and put up a 1m+ score on DKjr. Btw, have you done 1m+ on DK3 TG settings?

[Simpsons99]

George L

I thought this was really cool!

I'm  not speaking of you .

It's alright Brian, you didn't need to be. It worked out anyway.

[homerwannabee]

Since you like analogies, suppose someone discovers a special technique to be able to achieve a 30 million point jump on EVERY single board of Zookeeper, over and over again.  This might require a small increase in overall skill beyond other good players who are unable to score 30 million point jumps.  Soon, this player is recording scores on this game in the BILLIONS of points.  Is this player literally HUNDREDS OF TIMES better than a very good 10 million point player?  No, clearly the difference in scores would not accurately reflect the difference in skill in this case.  I think we have similar issues occuring with these 3 games in this thread -- so very subjective comparisons are naturally going to result.

Well there is a small problem with the analogy.  I actually show my videos, and my technique is for everyone to see.  If the skill level was that minimal for kill yourself off, and get the super spray from passing all the boards then it should be easy peesy for someone to look at one my videos and actually copy what I am doing to get a similar score.  Hmm, but that didn't happen.

Most of the wide gap scores in games like Junior Pac-man, Super Pac-man, and so on are hidden submissions with the owners keeping what they do a well kept secret.

Also one more thing.  If it really is so much easier to get the the Donkey Kong 3 high score, than how on earth did I  pull off a 1,313,800 score on Donkey Kong Junior?  Yeah, Junior is easier than Donkey Kong, but it still a relatively hard game.  And if getting the Donkey Kong 3 record is so easy despite the extremely high score I should theoretically not even be close to the Donkey Kong Junior record score.  And I could argue that I am more of a dodge, and shoot extremely accurately type of guy.

One last defense on how hard Donkey Kong 3 is.

1.  Donkey Kong 3 has a timer that make it so you have to kill all the insects before time runs out or be killed.  Easier to do on Easy, but much harder two settings up.  How many shooter games actually have timers to give you a certain amount of time to kill your enemies?  Hmm, not many.  Not many at all.  Off hand the only one I can really think of is Megamania, and River Raid for the Atari 2600.  I am sure there are others.

2. Donkey Kong 3 has worms that will climb down to make it themselves an obstacle.  They can not be killed when shot, and in fact they actually block your shots when trying to shoot at other insects.  Again how many shooter games actually have objects that stay on the screen the entire level that can't be killed, and block your shots at other enemies.  Again, I can't think of many.

3.  Donkey Kong 3 has Donkey Kong that can not be eliminated in the round unless you have the Super Spray to spray him up all the way to the top, and will constantly throws barrels at you while constantly moving down the ropes to kill you.  If you don't pay attention to him enough he will climb down, and kill you.  Only way to stop him without the spray his to kill all the insects.  Again how many shooter games have a boss that can not be killed, and is constantly throwing projectiles at you, and if you ignore them will drop down to the point where it's instant death?  Again not many shooter games do that.

4.  Donkey Kong 3 has no safe spots.  This one is really important compared to the other two.  Let's be honest, In Donkey Kong, and Donkey Kong Junior there are points in the game where a person can mentally check out.  For Donkey Kong Junior it's the Point pressing on the Jungle Stage, and the Point Pressing on the Hideout stage.  People constantly talk about how tiring both Donkey Kong, and Donkey Kong Junior is.  Well it might be, but it is nowhere near as physically tiring as Donkey Kong 3.  You constantly have to stay alert for this game when you're playing it.  The game literally is a think game.  Most of the top players play the game while standing up.  I don't see that with Donkey Kong, or Donkey Kong Junior.  Almost every single Donkey Kong, and Donkey Kong Junior player plays sitting down. 

Lastly, to tell you the truth.  I really don't know how hard my Donkey Kong 3 records are to beat.  I actually do have some decent scores in other games console, and arcade/MAME, and I do know I take to DK3 like a duck to water.  Does that influence how hard it is to beat my score?  I would think so, but I am not 100 percent positive.