I just finished watching King of Kong last night (it was a good/sad movie btw), and it got me to check out Twin Galaxies web site, and was wondering if you guys had already seen the scores posted and/or are on the list? Click here for the Tetris Scores (they base it on the Apple II, Arcade, Atari ST, and Game Boy versions) Game mode B, level 9 high 5 score is ' 44,641 ' ... I need to find my Game Boy and see what I used to score, I remember being pretty damn good at that (probably not as good as some of you guys here... but in my neighborhood I am number one!) Game mode A top points are 593286 and for lines it is 327 (Note: I was looking into this, some people submitted scores using a Super Game Boy on the SNES and recorded a video of their game)
If I were Spectre I'd be pretty damn irritated by all these so-called "World Records" His 999,999 video has been around for a while.
It's not verifiable proof, though. They have high standards. If I were Spectre, I'd do it again for Twin Galaxies and get it verified. And what do you mean by Guinness World Records? I know Twin Galaxies is somehow affiliated with Guinness, but is there a Tetris world record in the book?
Correction. The morons at Twin Galaxies have stupidly low standards for scores, and high standards for score verification. Sure games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong have competitive scores, but those games are in the minority. Any random gamer could beat a dozen of their "world record" scores in a single afternoon. I don't care how great they once were, or how high their verification standards are. The modern Twin Galaxies is a sad joke.
Well, for the longest time they only accepted video proof from VHS cassettes. Apparently this is changing, but they are still way too restrictive and their website is wholly unclear on the matter and discourages non-VHS submissions. They were fine in the 80s but they are still stuck there. Check it out: Galaga has authoritive world record. Ikaruga has a shameful score. VHS cassetes are valid proof. Digital video formats are evil and are not acceptable. The fact that something like my current game recording recording setup is inadequate, which is as good as it gets within financial reason, is simply beyond ridiculous. The fact that they only deal with English-speakers is another huge issue. Arcades have been on life support outside of asian countries for so long that any half recent game typically has true world records entirely held by Japanese players.
CT: What's so inadequate about your recording rig? Does it not produce a composite or S-video signal? Or is it the fact that VHS decks that can record are soon to become collector's items because nobody wants to manufacture a VHS recorder with a built-in ATSC decoder to sell to North American customers? Oh wait, they appear to have amended their rules:
The various stages of my video processing pipeline produce an NTSC DVD of the play, a deinterlaced 60fps MP4 of the play, and a youtube video of the play. None of these are a VHS cassette, so it's not good enough for them. Their scoreboard FAQ ignores the existence of everything but VHS and camcorder proof. They are stuck in the 80s.
Can they tell whether an NTSC VHS was produced from an NTSC DVD? The scoreboard FAQ only links to the server error. When you record the NTSC DVD, are you recording composite video, S-video, component video, or something else?
I think Twin Galaxies main problems are 1. Lack of funding. There aren't a lot of ways for them to make money. 2. Video games aren't played the same they once were. Highscore used to mean everything. But nowadays I see most people get a new game, play it, win, and they're happy. Otherwise, they play multiplayer. Mainstream single player games are a lot shallower than what they once were.
caffeine, there are still competitive singleplayer games and players who play them. They are less popular, sure, but the culture still exists. With competitive sites like cyberscore.net and speeddemosarchive.com, there's no reason to support Twin Galaxies for modern games. From memory, I recall them saying that transferring something to VHS from a different source is unacceptable. In fact, I think the official interpretation of such an act would be that you are doing this to somehow hide cheating, and then you'd get put on their shitlist of naughty players. When I record an arcade game, I unfortunately have no choice but to use composite. When I record console games I can use S-video. I am technically able to record component video, but because I don't have a device that can split component video signals I wouldn't want to record action games like that. When you pass a video signal through a recorder to your television, there is video lag.
So would it suffice for another member of this forum to purchase a VHS VCR for you? If not, why not? I am at a roadblock in my own research into this question due to the server error, which continues as I write this post.
Theoretically it would suffice if I used a VCR or video camera as my recording device. I'm not asking for one though... I'm not interested in dealing with tapes. Really Twin Galaxies should get with the times instead. My point is that "modern" digital captures (surely people have been doing this for a decade at least?) should be allowed, but they don't like that. Their argument is that it then becomes too easy to do video editing to fake a score or something equally pathetic. Digital video captures have the advantage of much higher video quality, which should in theory more easily allow someone familiar with the game to confirm that the play is legitimate.
Yes, VHS forensic techniques are more mature than those used with DVD. But then again, the site has TGM1 listed as running in the "MAME" platform.
They require either personal witness, or pure unedited ANALOG CAPTURE. THIs means aim a camcorder at the screen for arcades, or record the console output to vcr directly.
I think they allow MAME for non-record scores or something along those lines. (In a desperate attempt to fill their scoreboards with shameful performances.)
What will they do once HDTV penetration is deep enough that the latest video game systems no longer have a composite output?
