hello everyone, nice forum/wiki, alot of useful information, thanks for that! i'm new here (and i barely can reach S5 in TGM), so sorry if this was asked before: in TAP, there are something like medals or awards or something like that; the icons with two letters, like "SK", and a whole load of them. what do they mean, any info on that? also, in TGM3/ACE i saw something like "T-SPIN!", what the hell is that? thanks in advance for the answers.
TAP medals: AC - All Clear Clear the whole field. Bronze for once, silver for twice, gold for thrice. RO - Rotation Awarded for excessive rotation of pieces. Difficult to get without being playing strangely. ST - Section Time Each set of 100 levels is known as a "Section" A gold ST medal means a new record for that section time. Silver and bronze are awarded if you are close. SK - Skill Pure tetris count. I can't remember the exact numbers for bronze/silver/gold off the top of my head, but get lots of tetrises and you will receive this medal. RE - Recovery Awarded when you clear much of the screen in a short space of time. Exact requirements haven't been described well. CO - Combo Awarded for consecutive line clears (requirements are quite high and must start with a tetris) As for T-spins, it's the act of rotating a T piece into a gap you wouldn't have otherwise been able to place it in. "Official" games are forced to acknowledge them for licensing reasons.
I think actually that it doesn't need to start with a tetris. From what I remember, bronze CO is a 4 hit combo (a combo clearing lines with consecutive pieces) where each hit is a double or better; silver is 5, gold is 6. The SK medal in TAP is 10/20/35 in Master mode, and half that in Death mode. For TGM3, it's higher, but I forget how much higher, and it's half of that in Shirase. The way T-spins are detected in TGM3 is different to how "guideline games" detect them. It only checks that the last thing the T did was rotate when clearing a line (which can fairly gives false positives when comparing it to other methods). Guideline games also check that the T is sufficiently immobilized, by checking if 3 of the "corners" (diagonally away from the central block of the T) are occupied.
I'm almost positive that 4 consecutive doubles will not work. You need to get the "combo" counter up to a certain value. I've never seen a CO medal awarded without starting with a tetris although that may just because it is so difficult otherwise. I'm pretty sure the minimum requirement is tetris-triple-double-double.
To clear up: Combos don't have to start with a Tetris. T-Spins don't have to clear lines in TGM3. Recovery doesn't require fast clears. You just have to go from near death to recovered.
No reason. I know I haven't added it simply because most medals are not completely understood. We know: AC SK Anybody methodical could figure out the specifics of: ST (What are the Silver and Bronze threshholds? Is a tie Gold?) CO (TGM1 scoring as appears on the wiki clearly defines what a combo is... You 'd just have to learn how large you have to pump up the combo multiplier to get the different medals.) And it would take quite a bit of work to know precisely: RE RO
are we sure that RO is rewarded with exessive rotation "only" ? maybe is a little bit more subtile. i remember that if you use cgwg cheat (eg Death 500), and start with an IRS you will instantly get a RO bronze medal...
Hi folks, nice community you have here; I look forward to getting to know all of you in the future! Anyways, here are my theories on the Medals: AC: this is one of the easier ones to confirm; 1, 2 and 3 bravos for bronze, silver and gold respectively. It's the same requirement for both Master and Death. SK: relatively easy to confirm; in Master it's 10, 20 and 35 tetrises for bronze, silver and gold respectively; in Death it's 5, 10 and 17 (not 1. CO: Lardarse almost got this spot on; tetrises aren't required, it's just consecutive line clears with doubles or better, 4 for bronze, 5 for silver, and 7 for gold. Consecutive doubles with no triples or tetrises will work, and in fact I tested it by getting 7 doubles in a row, getting the bronze on the 4th, the silver on the 5th and the gold on the 7th. It's the same requirement for both Master and Death. ST: I've only confirmed this for the first section of Master mode so far, but I suspect that it's the same for all sections of both Master and Death. Gold requires that you get faster than the current section time record, silver is awarded if you're less than 5 seconds slower, and bronze is awarded if you're less than 10 seconds slower. To clarify, if the section time record is 1:30:00, you would have to get at least 1:29:98, 1:34:98, or 1:39:98 for gold, silver or bronze respectively. A tie will not count. RE: Again, I've only tested this in Master mode. I'm convinced that in order to get this medal, you have to let the volume of blocks in the well get to 150 blocks or more, and then reduce it to 70 blocks or less. Do this once for bronze, twice for silver and 4 times for gold. The siren that plays when the well is nearly full appears to be irrelevant; you can keep one side of the well completely filled to get the siren to play, and leave it playing for an entire section or more, as long as the volume of blocks in the well doesn't hit 150 you will never get the medal. Another theory I tested was that the volume of blocks in the well has to be above a certain number for a certain time; I kept it at 140-148 (the highest possible without hitting 150) for ages and didn't get the medal, but as soon as you hit 150 then go down to 70 or less, you will get the medal. RO: I have absolutely no idea about this one. What classifies as "excessive rotation"? If anyone has any clues, I'd really appreciate it. Although I've managed to convince myself about the first five, someone else might want to confirm my findings before this gets wikified. I hope all this stuff helps!
Thanks for sharing edo! I'll verify this in a bit, but I thought that a tie will count (at least for Gold). This is pretty easy to check when you have the cheat file locking the level to something 20G, as the first line cleared "advances" the section. By never locking, and clearing a single with 3 pieces that always stay at ground level, you can guarantee the same section time.
@jagorochi: Yes, I used MAME. The combination of save states, cheats, and frame advance make it a very useful tool in situations like this. @Taratang: Sorry, I don't have a video, but if you use a cheat on MAME to give yourself all O tetrominoes, it's quite easy to see for yourself. @colour_thief: The way I checked was as follows: reset the section time records to 1:30:00, then use a cheat to get all I tetrominoes (just to make it really easy), then play at a rate of approximately 1 tetromino per second so that you arrive at level 99 with about 1:28:00 on the clock. Now, make a save state. When placing the final tetromino into position, use pause and frame advance, and lock delay cancel to govern exactly when the tetromino locks. You can reload the save state as many times as necessary. What I found was that the gold medal would first flash up on the screen at the exact same frame that 1:30:00 was displayed on the clock. However, the new section time record was listed as 1:29:98, which led me to the conclusion that the medal was awarded one frame before it started to flash up on screen. Reloading the save state and locking the tetromino one frame later resulted in a silver and not gold. I wasn't aware of the existence of the cheat file that colour_thief mentioned, so instead I worked out my own. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression that you're unaware of this one: The address 06064BF9 stores the value of the "next" tetromino. Set it to a value of 2 for I, 3 for Z, 4 for S, 5 for J, 6 for L, 7 for O, 8 for T. Using this cheat would make a lot of my findings relatively simple to confirm.
I just checked and my memory was wrong about ties: a tie with the record gives you silver. Also, now that you mention it, I remember hearing that combo medals are based on how many "doubles or higher" are contained in the combo. Note that they don't necessarily need to be consecutive. Anyhow, this may be of some use to you (thanks to cgwg for finding these):
I know a little about this one. There are checkpoints... Level 300, 700, and 999, I think. At each checkpoint the game checks for "excessive rotation" and will grant you bronze, silver or gold depending on the checkpoint. I don't think you can get silver without first getting bronze, so if you miss it at 300 you're screwed. I'm not sure what "excessive rotation" is, but rotating every piece at least twice seems to guarantee it. However it's not strict and you are allowed to under-rotate the occasional piece. And yes, I think rotating the O piece counts. When using cheats to jump to 999, you'll get a bronze, silver, and then gold with the first 3 pieces that drop. More generally, you'll see a similar effect when cheating past 1 or 2 checkpoints. This means that the game doesn't check for "x" number of rotations at each checkpoint... It's got to be something more sophisticated like the average number of rotations per piece, or percentage of pieces that are rotated more than once.
