Bea,

At least for me - I always want to see how I measure up against the best each week. Wherever my score falls is where it's supposed to be.
When experts such as yourself, rdrummer, GameboyRicky, dra600n, Uncle Tusk,  bearcat-doug, etc post scores I'm always excited.

Do not apologize for greatness.

In fact - never, ever apologize for greatness.
 

If it makes you feel better Bea I cheated my way to 9th place in Golf with a hand-made measuring device. Ya!

Wait, I got 9th in Rad Racer.  And I'll probably get 9th in this.  Its a sign.

41,920



Improvement! We're at each other's heels mbd.

9,330 (Stage 15)

I'm not very good at consecutive shots.   

That is what makes this game so unforgiving. Stage progress really means squat in terms of score.  If you don't get consecutive shots and some perfect stages, you won't get a high score.
 

Out of respect to Guil and Bimmy I won't complain about any more games after this.  But between this and Pro Sports Hockey I'm contemplating less painful hobbies.  Playing in traffic being one.





 

I'll have to agree with Santa on this one and not just because he callled me an expert.   From my point of view based on past experience, preparation and practice are as much a part of putting up a great score as the actual gameplay. I know I used to put almost as much time into studying scoring systems, patterns, damage charts and practice runs as much I did playing the games, so it's all just part of the process to me. Given the extra time and effort involved, the great score that you get as a result is just a reward for your hard work.

 

It's somewhat random. The exact same series of shots that result in a perfect board on one run might not go as planned the next. The randomness is more of an issue on some boards than others, and it adds a great deal of frustration. I try to figure out strategies that have a high probability of working.

The randomness is still there even when I hard reset the emulator.

This game SUCKS! *tosses controller in the air* (a la' bob barker in happy Gilmore) 

I'm becoming obsessed with figuring out this game.

I am actually memory sniffing it to debug and figure out exactly what is going on.
I can repeat my shots from a fresh boot with proper input timing pretty much 100% of the time, but from a software reset after I do a shot there is distinct behavior shown.
I know for one now that memory address 03A0 stores the shot gauge power and it increases 3 points every tick, but that is not the only factor affecting the shots.
Luckily, the game stores all the useful info within a very short memory space, from 0000 to 07EF, so debugging the other variables will be easy.
 

3840

Checking code now... I admire your dedication to figuring out this game!

I noticed that even when I set everything the same, I get different behaviors on the first break.  Some of them seem similar, and in fact they may repeat.  So I don't know what the other variables are, if they are random, or if there are a finite set of options. 

 

20,190

So, I wanted to be like Bea and figure this thing out with vector math.  I got caught up on the uncontrollable variables, so I never got there.  However, after all of the practice I was able to have a decent run anyway.

From my findings from today, it is all coming to input timing.
I will reverse engineer the physics math the game uses tomorrow to determine that for sure.
There isn't an address of data that I found that has anything that looks like an rng seed that keeps changing between resets. Shooting at the same tick seemed to always incour in the same spread at the break no matter what I did.

 

11,600

Going for participation this time. I did enjoy checking this game out; definitely gonna play more of this in the future.

https://i.imgur.com/Ddbr6AZ.jpg...
i took this pic Friday before I left work, hoping to  get a better score at home. Weekend was busy as heck, never got a chance to try for a better score. 

Guys, I broke into rich's condo to check on him and I don't even know what's going on. First of all I got attacked by some guard dogs one of them was even a pit bull. I managed to lock them in his old game room which had a bed in it for some reason. All his stuff is packed up into his back room. Later some girls showed up and started watching wrestling. Rich is nowhere to be found..... I took some pictures I can upload later but this is very confusing

Not a bad game, but definitely have to put some time into it to consistently sink the balls. I got really good at hitting the cue ball in.  

Nice job Bea at totally destroying this one!

This game hooked me. I grinded the heck out of it. I'd spend hours just figuring out how to clear a particular stage.

Sounds like a fate worse than death

 

I was hitting reset an unbelievable amount of times just to get perfects on the earlier stages. Mess up one shot and it blows your run. If I hadn't been using an emulator where I can just hit shift+t, all that hitting reset on an actual NES would have driven me mad. I probably would have quit with a much lower score.

 

Pinball will be a welcome return to mindless arcade action. But thank goodness for break week.

UPDATE 8/21/16:
11,770

No contest this week! How will I survive?