Hello everyone and welcome to the latest installment of the Weekly Contests!
Bimmy is still my prisoner, mwahahahaha! And your only hope to save him is by stacking HATS! Yes, hats! I am so evil!
Are you a mad enough hatter to save Bimmy?

This week's game is going to be Hatris, a game designed by the legendary Alexey Pajitnov!

Here are the rules:

• Play till game over
• Highest score wins
• Participation score: 2,000
• Genre: Puzzle

The contest ends Sunday, 9/30/18 at 11 PM NA time.  Your user name MUST be written or typed on a piece of paper and be in the picture for your score to be valid.  The entire TV screen, or computer monitor if you are playing on an emulator, MUST be in the picture for the score to be valid.  No partial screenshots will be considered or accepted.  No screenshots by hitting "print screen" on a computer will be allowed.  You must take a picture of your computer monitor.  There may be instances where this will be acceptable, but it will be at the discretion of myself and the contest organizers.  Also, the use of turbo controllers is forbidden, as well as any cheat codes, Game Genies, slow motion functions, or save states if playing on an emulator.  Also, we will only be using NTSC systems for the contests.  The use of PAL systems will NOT be allowed.  Good luck everyone and have fun.  

 

1st	tablew/chairs	349,786
2nd	Krunch	210,716
3rd	mbd39	149,139
4th	arnpoly	70,647
5th	Stooperzero	69,116
6th	Yoshi	57,862
7th	Ausden	39,083
8th	Murray	29,402
9th	skinnygrinny	12,123
10th	Seppatoni	8,303

Another game that I've never played and most likely never would have played if not for the weekly contests. Woohoo.

149,139




 

Score: 39,083

nevermind..

this music makes me wanna pour acid in my ears. 

After the debacle that was Super Pitfall, I am done for the season. Good luck all!

What debacle?

You decided to take a harder approach that you knew would get you a lower score because you liked the game so much.

I would expect other players to use a guide with a game like this. Skinny says that he's going to copy a Youtube video.

Besides, do you need a first place score? I bet your score was pretty solid anyway. I expected to win Palamedes with 956k and I still lost to tables. So what?



 

damn i suck at this.

I think the debacle is the honor system ethics. Much like the debacle about score sniping. Is it allowed? Yes, it's it frowned upon? Yes. Is it a really frustrating pain in the ass to see yourself get outdone after playing your ass off? Absolutely.

That's what irritated me about pitfall. I dumb luck found a bonus room and worked with very little time to get to play. Put some good effort in, posted my score. Then see people using maps and watching videos about how to find hidden stuff. We'll shit I could have done that myself and got a great score on my first go but I wanted to, and I think it's the fair way to play in this competion, to experience the games with nothing but previous experience and ability being the only advantage you have over opponents.

But hey, what do I know. I picked Felix the cat as a game for last years contest because I knew, I just knew I was better than everyone else at it. Why? Because I put hours upon hours into that game as a kid. I know where all the extra lives and bonus point clouds are. And I knew playing it low score that would be my advantage. Being able to avoid those. And even with that I still got third. Thats how it should be. I got out played at my own game by either better gamers or players that knew something I didn't. And they (at least publicly) didn't use a guide to tell them those secrets

But I did put effort into it. Sure, I studied the maps or watched some playthroughs when I wasn't playing because this game is so fucking cryptic. I didn't just sit there and copy a video for an hour to get my score and then I was done. I tried pretty hard for most of the week. Sometimes there would be many resets near the beginning because I died and I wanted to have as many lives as possible for the more frustrating parts later on.









 

Nice score. The best I've done is around 14k. This reminds me of Yoshi and I suck at that game too.


 

Let's see. The Super Pitfall contest started on the 16th. As you can see my final score update was on the 21st at 10pm. So it took that many days of effort to get my score even even with studying maps. So yeah. I didn't just copy some video on my first go and then had over a million.

Enough with this stupid drama.

This is a competition for fun first and foremost. If you can't have fun playing the way you want to, then either don't play, or play a different way. There have been plenty of pissed off people doing these competitions. I got a little upset myself with the Stinger championship, but I got over it quick. When I first started playing, I was accused of cheating and had to prove myself through video just because I was putting up high scores, and nobody knew me.

Ultimately, these contests come down to about 30% skill and 70% amount of time to play. There hasn't been any rewards for playing this year, and yet still many people are playing. Why? Because it's fun! If we were playing for money or some big prize, I could understand wanting to tighten up the rules. Play blind, without the help of guides or youtube. But what if Bea was playing? She is a master at Super Pitfall, and would have killed us all in a "fair" competition because she knows the game.

I could ramble on and on about how ridiculous it is to get pissed over how another person plays the game and beats your score, but I really don't have time. I just wanted to put in my 2 cents, and perhaps anyone with a gripe about these weekly competitions can see a different point of view. I like the NES. I have come to hate new games, and so almost exclusively play NES games now. I do this for fun, and I'd hope everybody else does too.

With all that said, Hatris is fun, and I'm going to kick everyone's butt!

While I understand arguments coming from every positions about these issues, the cruel truth is that there's absolutely no rules that will prevent anyone to gather information about a game in order to excel at it at a quicker pace then it would be to play it with no 'external help'. The 'nature' of the games themselves are irrelevant to our context because the constraints you guys must conform to are not stated by the games, but by the contest.

The constraint of the contest are already present in its format, in the sense that you guys have one week to post your scores. That is the frame limited to everyone, and if someone is already a beast at a game, fine, but it shouldn't take precedence over someone ready to 'study' the way he wants it before trying to do his best at it.

Fairness is about having the same restrictions of play, and the simplest and most obvious choice in that sense is to allow players to do WHATEVER they want in order to get better at a game within the week (or beforehand, cause once the schedule is up you can practice any game you want in advance) as long as they do their legit runs clean. This is fair, because the rules are the same for everyone. If someone wants to refrain from using this or that kind of 'help', than they need to keep the constraint to themselves, and not deter the way other players are practicing.

I hope you guys will understand that these decisions have been taken long ago to insure that the standard of 'what is allowed and not' is simple, clear, easy to moderate, and fair for all. And like bert just said, that the most important point of the contest is to have fun all together.

While I didn't have to, I tried to stick to the same honor rule for this game that we used in Puzznic. Do your homework outside of your runs and then rely on memory while playing. There may have been at instance where I was completely lost about where to go next and so I looked at the map, but most of the time I avoided it. This is why it still took me almost all week to get my score. I didn't think that it would be such a big deal for a platformer.

 

210,716



Ohhhh I'm gonna lose a lot of hours to this one this week

Well done Krunch. I need to review a few things, as I think my score could be a lot more even at the same level. Sorta of like jumping from the first score to the second...a jump of 15k.

All the major points center around the workers
 

For the record I gave out prizes from my own pocket without being a mod or admin. Simply because I enjoyed doing so. I even have a final giveaway planned for the year but.... You know. Kickle can't hump everything.

starting to think somethings wrong with me, cant get above 5300 .

Here are a couple tips.

You can sort of move the hats separately. After laying one hat down, you can move the other one to where you want to place it.

Click the money bag after every stage for more points.

 

gonna try keyboard mode as a 360 controller even with the d-pad is way too sensitive.

I use a PS4 controller with my PC and it works beautifully. The dpad beats any other PC controller that I've used.

57862
40405



I was able to escape from some pretty tight spots to live onto the next round. This game is a pleasant surprise.