I’ve been trying to beat Benjamin Stevens high scores on VB games for the challenge to win Virtual Bowling and SD Gundam Deminsion War. I was wondering if we’ll ever be able to submit high scores for Bound High and Golf. I know high score submissions from emulators won’t be excepted, but what about submissions of Bound High high scores if it was played on a reproduction cart or Flashboy? Then with Golf you get a final score after a game, so could we be able to our final scores for each mode?

No additional high score modes will be added while the challenge is running for obvious reasons, but I am totally open for adding new ones after the challenge has ended!

Anyone is invited to propose new modes to add, but not just game names please. The more detailed the proposal, the easier for me. 😉 For possible modes, we’ll have to investigate which data a game provides to compete in and if there’s any way to take screenshots of scores, like highscore tables.

There has been some discussion in the past:

Adding Bound High! scores has been proposed by e5frog, but it seems there’s no good way to record your scores. We could say the game would have to be paused before dying to take screenshots. On the other hand, since BH was never officially released, score could not count towards the Top 10.
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=3924&post_id=11189#forumpost11189

VirtualJockey proposed adding Virtual Fishing highscores. The game povides some nice score tables which show stuff like most fish, longest fish, longest total length and best time for each location. Some more investigation has to be done and maybe someone needs to translate some in-game screens.
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=3895&viewmode=flat&order=ASC&type=&mode=0&start=0

A new Teleroboxer mode has been proposed by Fwirt, but caused zero feedback.
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=4273&post_id=14828#forumpost14828

Golf saves personal records like Longest Drive, Longest Putt, Nearest to Pin and Longest Chip. Those should be easy to add, but need some more investigation, because it might be that such information can be restored using passwords, which would ruin any challenge.

How about best times in Insmouse? We need to check if there’s any good way to take screenshot of your times.

On the homebrew front, table for each song in Game Hero could be added.

Anything else? Let’s discuss and try to nail down all the not-yet-listed modes so they can all be added after the challenge ended. This does of course not mean that you can not start hunting scores in the missing games just yet! 😉

In order to expound a little more on what Krisse was saying about Golf, for any who haven’t already figured it out, the primary reason why the password system for Golf creates a predicament when deciding whether it should be allowed to be a game for which high scores can be submitted is that the passwords save both the score and the hole that the player is on when he quits. Thus, a person can “cheat” by simply retrying a hole by using a password until a birdie or eagle is achieved, so if one gets a birdie or eagle on the first hole, one can take down the password before trying the second hole. If one then simply gets a par or worse on the second hole, one can resume the original game with the password and keep trying the second hole until a birdie or eagle is achieved and then take down the next password and continue from there. Thus, the only way that high scores could be “legitimate” is if a person video recorded an entire 18-hole game of golf, showing that the high score was achieved in one full attempt.

Now, while the above method might be considered “cheating” according to professional golf standards, if the Virtual Boy community is okay with scores being achieved in such a manner, then we could still allow high scores to be submitted, even knowing that some people may apply the above technique. The thing is, even with the above technique applied, one might still never be able to get eagles or holes-in-one on particular holes, no matter how many attempts are made, so there could still be a variety of good scores genuinely earned using the above method. However, if the person who has the highest score ever reveals his passwords for some of the later holes, people could then definitively cheat by starting a game on one of the higher holes of the current champion’s game and then simply get a better score in one of the later holes. No matter how one would look at that situation, one would have to say that definite cheating occurred, which breaks the site’s rules.

This is the primary reason why scores haven’t been allowed to be submitted for Golf up to now. If the requirements still rest with a screenshot of one’s final score, I think that if Golf is given a high score submission possibility, the scores should nevertheless not count towards one’s gamer points. The only way it could count for gamer points is if people submitted videos of their games, which I imagine is pretty tough to set up for games occurring on real Virtual Boys.

But yeah… if records like Longest Drive, Longest Putt, Nearest to Pin, and Longest Chip were added, I’m pretty sure that there is no way to cheat on those, other than by retrying a course until the wind conditions are perfect (which would primarily assist in the Longest Drive). I can’t remember offhand if there is a “no wind” option in the game, but if there is, the Longest Drive record should probably be recorded without wind.

So, since the challenge is over, we can start defining and adding new tables.

Ben pointed out to me that M.K.’s VB Racing shows your times for each stage after finishing the game, which would make some more interesting tables.

About certain modes, in which cheating is possible: we could add them and simply not award any gamer points for them, but compete in them just for fun?

I was just playing your game KR155E, BLOX, and noticed that one can take a screenshot after each level is concluded and the screen shows the number of moves in which one finished the level. Thus, you could add “high scores” for each level, where the lowest number of moves wins. For the easier levels, a lot of people may have found out the shortest number of moves, but it would be quite tough for some of the later levels, I would think. Although, as creator of the game, do you know the absolute minimum amount of moves necessary for each level? If so, you can’t submit. 😉