StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I just got finished dicking around with Gigawing - nice little SHMUP, but more than a little insane in terms of some of the stuff that it throws at you. But what really interests me about this game is the score you can rack up given enough lives and bombs.

Check this out: 10,227,219,899,970 points.

And now, naturally, I'm curious about how far this goes. Is there any game, be it arcade, console, handheld, or whatnot, where the developers had gone "fuck modesty" and designed systems where scores have been marked in the hundreds of trillions, quadrillions, and beyond?

Mars Matrix is fairly similar to Gigawing, in terms of the insane amount of points you can rack up and style. (Although its difficulty level is rather insane). Though it's been awhile since I played it, so I'm not exactly sure what the max amount of points is you can get.

The term 'shmup' is deeply stupid.

Many modern-retro games have way, way too many numerals. Most I've never even seen use all of them - scores are always 00076263520 etc. Because scores are never in units, always tens/hundreds, just to waste even more numerals!

I've seen pinball machines that go to trillions. That's, like, 000 000 000 000 right? So similar to the OP example.

Well that game seems to be using a 64-bit value to represent the score, so theoretically, you should be able to get 18 quintillion points there.

I don't know of any games that uses more than that (it is theoretically possible though, you could use two or more 64-bit integers to represent an incredibly huge number. Seems a little pointless though ) but I know that I had to switch from using a 32-bit floating point number to a 32-bit integer for my Ufo game because it would start losing precision once I got over a billion points (then I also made it a little harder so it wouldn't be so easy to get that kind of score).

Stark wrote:Many modern-retro games have way, way too many numerals. Most I've never even seen use all of them - scores are always 00076263520 etc. Because scores are never in units, always tens/hundreds, just to waste even more numerals!

It seems like most arcade games give scores in tens/hundreds, if not thousands. You get 1,000 points in Mario 3 just for picking up a powerup and 100 points per coin.

It could be because breaking 1,000,000 with 100 points as the lowest possible (nonzero) score subjectively feels more impressive than breaking 10,000 with 1 point as the lowest possible score.

I've seen pinball machines that go to trillions. That's, like, 000 000 000 000 right? So similar to the OP example.

I don't think I've ever seen a pinball game that doesn't allow for absurdly high scores.

Mad wrote:I don't think I've ever seen a pinball game that doesn't allow for absurdly high scores.

Oddly enough, just a couple weeks ago I went to this awesome arcade in my region (a town called Lansdale, for anyone who know where that is). Basically this guy is a pinball and arcade game collector and has a barn-sized garage full of these games adjacent to his house. You get a big group together and pay $5 each for an hour of unlimited plays. And you're in the middle of nowhere so there's no little kids or teenage punk shits around. Totally kickass.

But the neat thing is he has one whole room that all really old pinball games (from the 50s, I'd have to guess from the styling). These all play really low scores in comparison to modern games. Not to mention they are a fucking bitch to play because there's not nearly as much "bounce" to the board.