Kennel posted:

KennyMan666 posted:

For quite some time, it has been known that Cave's genre-defining DoDonPachi from 1997 contains a scoring glitch. The first instance of it happening is believed to have been shortly after the game came out, but it was in 2015 that a Japanese player found how to use it on deliberately. This glitch allows you to get a much higher score than you could get without it. "Regular" top high scores in DoDonPachi tend to be in the realm of 600-700 million points, depending on ship and shot type. A player by the name of Blackisto has calculated the highest theoretical, sum-of-bests high score with all known strategies (without knowledge of the glitch) to be ~793 million points, using type A-L. Currently, the highest known western score recorded in the high score thread for the game on the shmups.com forum is 638,295,200 by Jaimers, using type C-L, set in October of 2019.

So, note how I said "western", there. The Japanese scores are a different story entirely.

Already in March 2016, three new world records were put up by JHA, a Japanese scorekeeping organization.

The old records were 754,937,640 with type A-L, 704,638,650 with type B-L, and 747,563,190 with type C-L.

The new B-L world record was a fairly reasonable increase, getting another 25 million points to bring it up to 730,186,030. C-L saw a slightly more questionable increase of 43 million points to 730,186,030.

And A-L increased by a whopping 108 million points, bringing the DoDonPachi world record up to an insane 862,976,450 points, well beyond the theoretical maximum posited by Blackisto. It was clear something was amiss here, and it was clear these records had been attained using the elusive scoring glitch. So - that should mean it was out in the open now, right?

Well - no. Japan doesn't do things like western players are used to, with posting replays, sharing strategies, and all that.

Here is an article detailing the Japanese scorekeeping and how it relates to the DDP scoring glitch (and some more information about what was known at the time), but to summarize, Japanese high scores have to be set in an arcade, confirmed by the arcade operator, and JHA requires no video proof (and it's not always allowed to shoot video in an arcade). So no different categories can be made for glitched/non-glitched scores. Only a handful of Japanese players knew of the glitch, and they were not interested in sharing it outside a small "inner circle". So for years, western players had no idea how to come close to these scores. Some players triggered it accidentally over the years, with the only evidence being ending up with points they had no explanation for how they might have gotten, but these instances didn't lead to any further findings.

But in February of 2020, DoDonPachi history was made.

The aforementioned Blackisto dug into it hard, examining every detail, every bit of information that was known, and finally pieced it all together, finally making the DoDonPachi score glitch public knowledge.

An article by Plasmo, detailing the entire thing, can be read here. In short, and somewhat simplified to not get too into DDP scoring mechanics, a certain enemy in stage 6 does not work properly with regards to a chain-related point value, if you gain a laser hit from the enemy on the same frame you destroy it. Rather than add a measly 10 points to this value, as the enemy would when destroyed normally, triggering the glitch will instead double said value, which will at the point it can be done be significantly higher if you have chained the stage as you would on a score run, thus adding a lot of additional points to your score. This enemy appears four times in stage 6, and thus the glitch can technically be done four times per loop, but as there's a very strict setup required for each instance of the enemy, doing that while also keeping your full chain is probably only possible in a tool-assisted superplay.

So at last, a longstanding shmup mystery has been solved, leveling the playing field between the Japanese and western DoDonPachi players more.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

LifeSunDeath posted:

This reminds me of my strategy for most racing games which is: full speed into turns, slam into the AI cars trying to actually corner, bounce off them and end up ahead. I tried this strategy while driving very fast go-carts and it did not work.

ToxicFrog posted:

This of course assumes that what makes me fascinating to NPCs is casting Chameleon, not the chameleon status effect itself; if it's the latter, the answer is "as I enter the town, I am immediately trampled by a deluge of NPCs, then the game crashes".

LifeSunDeath posted:

LifeSunDeath posted:

Captain Hygiene posted:

I'm gonna say that's a yellow card

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Fathis Munk posted:

Holy poo poo I hadn't though about Helixsnake's videos in so loving long. Those were the days.

E: man the memories https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaUR6u8nHoM

Krankenstyle posted:

the combination of the realistic ambient sounds with the stoic silence of the people is a huge plus for those glitches

LifeSunDeath posted:

Fathis Munk posted:

Holy poo poo I hadn't though about Helixsnake's videos in so loving long. Those were the days.

E: man the memories https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaUR6u8nHoM

Fathis Munk posted:

Holy poo poo I hadn't though about Helixsnake's videos in so loving long. Those were the days.

E: man the memories https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaUR6u8nHoM

Testekill posted:

Don't forget that the music video for Somebody New by Joywave was created as a tribute to his videos.

Fathis Munk posted:

Holy poo poo I hadn't though about Helixsnake's videos in so loving long. Those were the days.

E: man the memories https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaUR6u8nHoM

Nordick posted:

You know, for virtual inanimate objects, some of these flying dumpsters etc in this video have loving impeccable comedic timing.

Jesus christ I haven't laughed like this in months.

Cardiovorax posted:

It's such a simple thing, but I think the "my skateboard telekinesis is failing " clip at 2:20 is still one of my favourites. It could only be better if there was a voice going "no!... ugh!... c'mere!... goddammit!' the entire time.

Cardiovorax posted:

It's such a simple thing, but I think the "my skateboard telekinesis is failing " clip at 2:20 is still one of my favourites. It could only be better if there was a voice going "no!... ugh!... c'mere!... goddammit!' the entire time.

RandomFerret posted:

The secret is that Skate 3 wasn't really that buggy, most of the funny clips were taken after helixsnake broke out of bounds into parts of the map that were never intended to be playable

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

More cheating by posting my own game. I'm working on improving performance, and as part of that am trying to make a faster but less detailed model for the AI ships to use for steering and wave motion. It uh, is not quite there yet.

https://i.imgur.com/2jlOUlD.mp4

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

It uh, is not quite there yet.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

More cheating by posting my own game. I'm working on improving performance, and as part of that am trying to make a faster but less detailed model for the AI ships to use for steering and wave motion. It uh, is not quite there yet.

https://i.imgur.com/2jlOUlD.mp4

marshmallow creep posted:

Time to wrap up my legacy in State of Decay 2. Just need to finish off these hostile survivors and...

https://twitter.com/WingfieldGareth/status/1244837633068601345


....hrm.