Dr. Morbis

And here's some food for thought: why didn't he run out of bullets? I never ran out of bullets during any of my attempts this week, so I don't remember what happens in this game when you run out of bullets, but how did he point-scum the boss for "an hour" without running out of bullets? And question number two: why does he have exactly 50 bullets in both of his screen shots that he described as being from two different attempts? Isn't that a gargantuanly huge coincidence that he would have the exact same number of bullets at the completion of both runs?!? (Never mind the fact that it's such a nice round number... hmmm...) Now I'm not an expert at the inner workings of NES Rolling Thunder by any means, but perhaps @BeaIank and @guillavoie should take these two considerations into account before rendering any verdict, one way or another. Once again, I'm not an expert, so maybe there is some logical explanation for this, but something really smells around here...

Well I'm sure it's amusing looking in from the outside, but I spent like six hours memorizing those three levels just to get to the boss, and then it took me three tries to beat him, and I knew nobody else in the field would even have the gumption to accomplish the feat (just like Code Name Viper last year when I was the only one to beat it); and then to see someone casually say he's basically a machine and can point-scum a really difficult boss of a really difficult game for an hour like it's nothing?!? Like does he even understand the field he was playing against? No one else here was even going to beat the game other than us two and he already had the tourney locked up even if I won both games this week, so why would he realistically even bother trying to roll the score from 2-8, knowing how impossibly difficult it would be to do it legit? It really makes me question his Boulder Dash and Galaga performances as well - no joke. That last volcano world of BD is exceptionally difficult, as is getting to level 31 of Galaga with tons of men in reserve (It took The Mexican Runner over 15 hours to clear Stage 31 of Galaga, and he is a God at NES gaming, just to put Blackvega's "performance" in perspective). I probably clocked in around eight hours myself, and I'm pretty strong at shooters in general. Anyway, outside of seeing him post a video of point-scumming the final boss of Rolling Thunder for even like ten minutes, there is no way in hell I believe his scores are legit...

Thanks for the compliment, but it does nothing to dissaude me from feeling that your score is pretty much impossible to do. A couple of times I've had a score in one of these contests that I thought people wouldn't believe, so I've recorded videos just to remove all doubt (Ice Hockey and Pro Wrestling). The thought of someone point scumming on the Rolling Thunder boss for even ten minutes without accidentally killing him or getting hit one single time himself seems absolutely ridiculous to me, never mind doing it for an hour. Whatever the show runners decide, I'll accept their verdict, but I personally don't feel like I've been beaten legit...

I just watched a video on youtube and you get like 300 points every time you hit one of his projectiles, and he only takes a few hits to take down, so you're saying that you: successfully hit his projectiles hundreds upon hundreds of times in a row without getting hit one single time yourself or accidentally hitting his body the handful of times you need to take him down???? I mean, I know we're on the honour system, but come on...

...For hours, without getting hit once?!?

...Unless the time doors are reusable (I didn't check)... ???

@BlackVega Re: Rolling Thunder, you were supposed to put in the password for 2-8, not play from the start, and there's a timer so you couldn't have point scummed long enough to get those scores if you started from 2-8?

That's actually pretty cool. The Turbografx 16 has an interesting method that works on all games: pressing Select and Run at the same time resets the console; I'm thinking they did this because there is no reset button anywhere to be found on the system itself...

Yeah, CN Viper was in last year's tourney. I disagree about it being tougher than Rolling Thunder, though; if you ever try to beat RT to get the true ending after 4-10, I'm sure you'll agree that 4-10 is way more difficult than the final level of Viper. RT feels like a 60's Bond movie to me, and then Viper is like the 80's remake that tries to capture the same spirit...

Actually, the first quest is Stories 1 and 2, and then it gives you a password for the second quest which is Stories 3 and 4. I'm actually kind of surpised you didn't make us start on Story 4-8 instead of 2-8, since it is significantly harder to get through on the second loop. But I agree, the game is straight up awesome once you're good at it...

Are you using a Turbo controller? Because your 100M dash, and more specifically, your weightlifting seems literally impossible to do with a standard controller, unless you know some sort of trick or glitch about the game that no one else on the internet does... EDIT - Okay, I just saw that you used an apparatus to help you, which seems to me to be brazenly against the rules of fair competition to be bringing in physical devices to get a heads up, but I guess that's for @BeaIank to decide. Even when deafcode was tearing the games apart at code level, he was still actually playing the games normally with his own two hands... EDIT #2 - and if physical cheat devices are going to be allowed, that ruling needs to come down sooner than later so that we can redo our scores with whatever contraptions we can come with while there's still time...

Go back and jump on top of the barrel to the left of the first one that appears to take care of it before it swoops, then shoot the second one just as it starts diving at you...

Yeah, this whole contest is all memorization for Rolling Thunder. I gave it a go tonight and it struck me as being really odd that 2-9 is so much shorter and easier than both 2-8 and 2-10, like what is that stage even doing there between those other two? And as for 2-10, holy shit there are some difficult sections...

I agree with you in theory, but something would definitely be lost. Think of all the Disney classics that rely on ripping off, I mean rely on retelling other people's stories that have fallen into the public domain. The animated classic that got the whole ball rolling for them (Snow White) wouldn't exist, for starters, never mind most of their best animated movies that came after. I think the powers that be should just set a really long time period, like say: one hundred years for you and your kin to make a bajillion dollars off of your hard work, and after that your creation is recognized as a part of our history and thus belongs to humanity at large. Like what if some random 35th cousin of Mozart was getting royalties every time a piece of Mozart's music was used anywhere in the world 250 years after it was written? I mean, you've gotta draw the line somewhere. Your principle is sound, but it just doesn't feel... right...

I'll believe that the day Mickey Mouse goes into the public domain. I honestly think there is a shift happening and we're moving toward a "this is ours and we own if forever" copyright paradigm here in the West...

Yeah, but wouldn't you want to hire henchmen who are stronger (or nearly as strong as) yourself? It always bugged me that the final bosses of video games have such God-like strength compared to their body guards; like, why did you even bother to hire these guys in the first place? If I made a game, I would have a bad-ass boss battle near the end, but then the master-mind behind it all would be a feeble regular-strength dude that you get to mop the floor with because all of his protection is finally gone (think: Dr. Wily)...

Kid Icarus: the final shooter level, on NES. This is a huge pet-peeve of mine as well. The original Final Fantasy had a rather long final dungeon, but it's still managable, and you could use an exit spell to get out and save your xp progress, but the final dungeon of Final Fantasy III (for Famicom) is ridiculously long, and exit spells don't work, meaning it's all or nothing as you can't save your earned XP and bail without walking all the way back down to the ground floor, and then through another smaller dungeon that rings around the final dungeon, before you can finally get back to your airship (and you can't even return at all once you've crossed into the last part of the dungeon, which is pretty large and cumbersome on its own). That final dungeon is probably about a third of the entire game in terms of length of time to play through, especially if you decend first for the powerful items and weapons below before going up the tower, and it's enough of a drag that I absolutely will not revisit this otherwise great game again as long as I live; just the thought of having to slog through all that shit at the end is enough of a deterrent on its own...

It makes no sense, then, in the context of your response, why you would use the word "wasted;" I mean, why even use the word at all when you could use "spent" or something? If other people are judging the percieved monetary value of your collection as the entirety of its worth, then why would they consider the time accumulating such worth to have been "wasted"? Likewise, why would you consider it "wasted" yourself if it holds both intrinsic and extrinsic value, not only for you personally, but also in the eyes of other collectors at large? I disagree on this as well. If you had millions of dollars and an internet connection, exactly what in your current collection couldn't be found and purchased and shipped to your door within a calendar month? Seriously, even if you've got Stadium Events CIB or a gold NWC to replace, with enough money, both would be yours, probably within a year. There's a picture of Dennis Kahn, the primary founder of WATA, holding a Gold NWC and Detective Comics #27 at the same time, and he wasn't even thirty-five years old when the picture was taken. How did he get such grails so easily? (Answer: money). You are vastly under-estimating the power of money and vastly over-estimating the value and unattainability of video games; they're not 8-figure one-of-a-kind paintings, you know: the stuff that real wealthy people collect...

...And you're guaranteed points in the final round as well, no matter what kind of scores you post...

Wasted?!? None of that was "wasted" for me, because the objective from the very start was to have a library of video games to play, first and foremost, valuation be damned. You're assuming that every last one of us is doing this as some sort of investment strategy? I can honestly say that if all video games fell to a value of $1 each tomorrow, I would simply shrug my shoulders and pop in whatever the next NES game was that I had chosen to play...

This game defined the Sega Genesis for me back in the day: all flash and no substance. I've since learned that there are some excellent games on the console, but back then, any time some braggart would want to show me the game that was going to blow me away and change my mind, it would invariably be something like this... total meh.

I like to go with this one because it's pretty cut and dried (even uses a rastar CRT) and it's the start of the video game "industry" rather than, as you say, random dudes dicking around in their basements (or the University's basement, as the case may be...)

Yeah, the header said battery back-up, but I just double-checked the list and there isn't a single released battery game that's compatible, so too bad...

Pretty sure it's just one Phillips screw holding the cover over a standard watch battery in the back of the left one in the picture, as that's how mine works. As for the smaller one on the right, let me know when you're ready to sell it to a huge Adventure Island fan

Before this week, I thought that green guy was the leader that you had to kill to beat the level - I literally thought that's how it worked from my first rental of the game like 35 years ago to the present! I was also killing all three guys in the building on the final base for the first bunch of runs until it finally dawned on me that it would probably just be timed like the other three bases...