MAME ROW #92 - Legend of Hero Tonma

obsidianspider

This week's winner is Legend of Hero Tonma

youxia

42400
alt text

This is hard! (though I guess continuously complaining about arcade games being hard is a bit pointless :)
Only made it to the first boss despite several attempts. You need to shoot more than in R-Type and stay focused all the time. But, I like it a lot. It's quirky and has lots of freedom of movement, unusual for an arcade game.

cyperghost

@youxia said in MAME ROW #92 - Legend of Hero Tonma:

This is hard!

Yes a very difficult game with it's own charme. But nice score ... I just made 25k points.
You need every powerupgrade or you're lost.

Tipp: You can jump on the enemies and they will get a slight shock and don't move for a short time.

obsidianspider

I was finally able to reliably get to the first level boss, but I never did beat it. 34,100, but no photo, so it doesn't count for me.

obsidianspider

MAME ROW #93 is live!

thelostsoul

Late entry for me. I think, I know how to beat the boss now, but I fail often times. If you enter the room, just shoot as fast as possible to his legs. If he fell down, jump to other side and shoot to his back. Not sure if this is the trick to do it. If he starts his shooting, it gets really hard. He shoots more and more and on one point I was jumping away from 4 "following fireballs" for 4 or five jumps until they hit me.

Is waiting on one point at the stage and farming points ok? If this would be a real competition, I probably do that. But its not fun, so normal play only. Btw, that one powerful wave of your gun is strange. In the corridor before you meet the boss, its hard with this gun, as you have to stay at right distance to the enemy to hit him. I don't like this wavy gun.

41'000

youxia

@thelostsoul said in MAME ROW #92 - Legend of Hero Tonma:

Is waiting on one point at the stage and farming points ok? If this would be a real competition, I probably do that. But its not fun, so normal play only.

Interesting question. The reason my score is still bigger than yours despite the fact that I have not beaten the boss is probably because I went back once to get all the chests from the beginning (and it was still "fun" :) and maybe was lucky with other coin spawns. I think in case of this game and maybe in general it's ok, as long as you do not abuse glitches or some obvious design errors. This game is designed so you can go back few screens if you want to, and get the loot/powerups, but it also has the clock ticking so I think it balances out.

I also did not like the wavy gun...to unpredictable.

And re: what @obsidianspider was saying earlier about "no photo - don't count" - not sure...after all, you can cheat even with a photo (savestates). So I guess it's all about fun & trust here. I like to post a photo more for CRT-porn reasons :P but the only way to be 100% sure it's a genuine score would be to record the whole run - and that'd be just a bit silly and totally impractical.

thelostsoul

@youxia Not really silly. I had made a post for a wish. There is a version of Mame out especially for this, used by world records too. Its WolfMame and disables the ability to pause, auto shoot and ignores some nvram stuff and such. Then usually you play with the in emulator recording of your input, resulting in an .inp file. Its not a video file and so extremly smal like a simple photo. On pc I used this as my default option and so every play was a recording. Even standard mame supports input files. But I don't know of its impact at sd cards.

GtBFilms

@thelostsoul said in MAME ROW #92 - Legend of Hero Tonma:

Is waiting on one point at the stage and farming points ok? If this would be a real competition, I probably do that. But its not fun, so normal play only.

It's an interesting point. I did this when we played R-Type - I always lost all my lives at the start of stage 4, but stage 3 has a huge amount of points available ( and only one spawn point, right at the start, so when you die, you get to do the whole level again). So I could actually get a much higher score by intentionally getting killed at the end of level 3 with all my lives, rather than playing the game properly.

It's just as well we only play for fun, people could fall out with each other over such shady tactics!

thelostsoul

@gtbfilms While in R-Type there is an autoscroll and you have to play to get the points, even if you die intentionally. In Hero of Tonma you can stay at a specific point without making a progress and with little skills and farm them until time is out. This makes especially more sense, because nobody is able to kill the boss yet.

youxia

@thelostsoul I didn't know about the .inp files or WolfMame. That is much more practical than recording every run via phone or some screencasts then dealing with uploading it.
Even so, I still rather trust people here and expect that they just play for fun and so won't do anything dishonest. That's why I'm fine with folks posting only scores and no other "proofs". We're not Twin Galaxies after all :P And if someone cheats then, well, so be it. It's only videogames after all.

I guess dying on purpose to farm points would be a bit shady. But perhaps it's also a valid "tactic". If somebody does that, eh, fair enough. As above, I wouldn't want to get too obsessed with these things.

thelostsoul

@youxia Thats how I see this too, its like playing and sharing scores with friends and having a good time. Exploration and discussion is what this thread is for, in the first place.

obsidianspider

@youxia said in MAME ROW #92 - Legend of Hero Tonma:

after all, you can cheat even with a photo

Well sure you can, but as was said by others many times over the history of MAME ROW, we're on the honesty system. That said, I stand by the "pics or it didn't happen" rule, even for myself. In the end this is about discovering new games and having fun. I know I enjoyed this game a lot and before MAME ROW didn't know it existed.

GtBFilms

@thelostsoul Good point.

We used to have a couple of arcade machines in the common room at Uni. They swapped them around every month or so.

I remember one time they had Robocop, and people used to stand next to the enemy guy that throws hand grenades and just shoot his hand grenades over and over again while the timer counted down. They knew how many seconds they had to have left in order to complete the level before they ran out of time.

I never worked out whether you got more points per shot hand grenade than you got for remaining time left, but presumably they thought it was worth their while.

Made for a pretty boring game to watch though!