Thanks again everyone! It was a lot of fun finally getting this done on my stream with so many viewers online watching and able to enjoy the moment with me. For an online / MAME player, that's as close to the equivalent of a large crowd forming behind your arcade machine when something big is about to happen as we can get. It definitely helps to ramp up the excitement that's for sure.
Thanks to Andrew G. for apparently throwing a whole bunch of viewers my way towards the end of my game.
Thanks to Corey for finding and uploading my .inp file here:
https://donkeykongforum.net/index.php?topic=364.msg9160;topicseen#msg9160Thanks to Scott for his quick and accurate and detailed summary of the stats for this game here:
https://donkeykongforum.net/index.php?topic=304.msg9166#msg9166That will make it easier to talk details about the game...
As I mentioned at the end of my stream last night, the game felt a little unusual (besides the score of course) in a few ways.
Looking at the stats, the most obvious issue was the small amount of points gained with lost men. In the past, I had actually been aborting a lot of my games that featured a second "bad death", especially one that comes quickly after the first death like what happened here. But, since I recently downgraded my goal to 1.19 million AND since I had an extremely strong start for that pace goal, I decided to play it out. You can see that I immediately tightened up and played very unrelaxed for the next several Levels, scoring under 60,000 in 3 out of the next 5 Levels. I found the groove again for a little bit after that but was soon running into the "fatigue factor" just a short while later. Levels 16 - 21 scored about like I would expect on a game that goes that deep, the scoring rate being significantly lower than it was, say, during Levels 4 - 9. It's hard to explain what exactly happens when you become "fatigued" during these types of games, but it becomes a very serious challenge that you just try to push through as best as you can without dying and that often results in a small decline in the scoring pace.
Sort of on a related note, dying 3 times on non-barrel boards is pretty unusual for me these days as well -- I almost always have one or more barrel deaths, some of which are "good deaths" where a fireball gets to the top and you get to basically sacrifice the man for maximum points. I didn't have any of those in this game, which is somewhat unusual. Obviously, dying on an Elevator board is very unusual as well.
Another detail that's a bit strange is the wide variety of Level scores -- they were really all over the place in this game, which is rare. Most of my good games lately just don't have any really bad Levels. This game had a totally catastrophic 54,400 Level and 3 other sub-59,000 point Levels. That would seem like a poor game for me until I see that I also had SIX Levels of OVER 63,000 points! That's equally surprising. Generally I might expect all of the Levels in a full game to fall somewhere inside that 59,000 - 63,000 point window, so the way this one played out was interesting.
Overall, I'm pleased with the final Level average of 61,000 points. That's right around what I had estimated that I should be able to sustain for a full game. It's funny, because with each of the board type averages, none of them really stand out. I have done significantly better than that in each of those 4 categories in different games and yet these particular numbers all add up to 61,000 which is a good result.
Well, that's all I can think of for now. Looking forward to at least a small break from this game!
