Hello everyone and welcome to the 2014 NintendoAge Weekly Contest Winter Tournament Round 1.  This round of the tournament will serve up a healthy dose of competition with Dr. Mario.  Here are the rules (Participants, please read the rules carefully for your tier to make sure you play by the correct rules.  Failure to play by the correct rules can result in your score being invalid):

Tier 1

• 1 player only
• Play on Virus Level 0, Speed Hi
• Play until Game Over
• Highest score wins
• GENRE: Puzzle

Tier 2

 

• 1 player only
• Play on Virus Level 0, Speed Medium
• Play until Game Over
• Highest score wins
• GENRE: Puzzle

Tier 3

 

• 1 player only
• Play on Virus Level 0, Speed Low
• Play until Game Over
• Highest score wins
• GENRE: Puzzle

The contest ends Sunday, 1/4/15 at 11 PM NA time.  Your user name MUST be written 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, 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

Hi

Im curious, why are PAL systems excluded? It just so happens I was organising my collection today and found a dr mario nes which I didnt remember having... Would like to have entered this, but guess I cant?

I am in the wrong tier for this game, slow speed makes me want to chuck my controller. Should get a nice score though.

If I was in this at Tier 3, I could play basically forever. I could play up to level 24 and just stay on 24 for hours before I finally died. Good luck to the challengers!

Diffrent timings in pal games is common, and many times they just flat out made game changes.  More than a few games play 16% slower on pal systems just because they didn't bother converting the crap to a true 50 fps.  Even if they did they may have issues. If you don't have an NTSC version, you could try an emulator.

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More technical ramble you can skip over.  Say a sprite moves at 1 FPS on the NTSC, running at 60 FPS.  He could cross the screen in 4 seconds.  If you just took the system as-is onto pal, with the 50 FPS, it would take 4.8 seconds to get to the other side.  You could update the movement at 60 fps if the hardware allows it, and only show 50 fps, but that's very clunky.  You could adjust the players movement, but if you made it 2 frames per second,  he would cross the screen in 2.4 seconds in pal. 

Since you can't really move the sprite half pixels, you half to move the sprite 1.2 pixels a frame, and use rounding.  So the sprite moves 1 frame, then every 5th frame it moves 2, giving a choppy feel.

In otherwords, pal gamers got boned 90% of the time.

Woo Hoo! Good luck everyone, I'll definitely post a score tonight! P.S. The Chills music is the way to go, I love that song.

I'm more of a Fever guy, if this was the Gameboy version that is. The added sections to the song were a nice touch. Speaking of the GB version, it has chaining point bonuses unlike the NES version.

Figured you'd have already posted that 200 point score already.

318,900

Nice opening score!

Thanks brotha! I have no clue where its gonna end up, thats for sure... Played this game a ton growing up, alot of the time it was in 2 player mode against my friends though...

This is one of those games that I'm not real high on but definitely don't hate it.

Thanks for a starter.benchmark. this is the first time I have ever really spent time on this one so I am still figuring out the switch from massive combos to survival, and have no concept of what a decent score looks like.

Tier 2- 170,800. I'll start off tier 2. I am no way decent at puzzlers and this one required alot of my concentration. I hope this score can at least get me to the next round.

Thankfully no one from that contest is competing this year,but I know when this was played last year,the top 10 scores were all above 200k,with the winning score being around 964k.

At high speed?  Wow!

Broke 200k... As far as Tier 1 scoring goes, I think a score of over 350k would be considered excellent. At my pace, that would need to be around level 17 or higher... I messed around a little bit on level 17 and it gets really tough.

Definitely agree. I can usually get through any game we play with my kids climbing all over me, but for this game I have to banish them from the playroom once I get to about level 15... Sorry kids but Dr. Mario is a very important game, now go bug mommy.

Do you mind sharing your typical combo size at level 6+?

i have figured out how to get a perfect score on the first couple of levels, but obviously that isn't sustainable, and I have to drop back to mostly pairs and triples, with the occasional quadruple if I am lucky.

Also, I notice the speed gradually increases... is this like Yoshi where the game re acquires max speed faster each time?  Or does it work on a fixed interval that is always the same?

When possible, I try to go for the doubles or triples but honestly progression is first and foremost to me (we'll see if that strategy comes back to bite me in the ass!)... As far as the speed goes, it does feel like the game starts out faster as the levels get higher but that might just be my imagination. According to the instruction manual on page 10, it states that the speed increases slightly after every 10 capsules.

I believe I scored a little over 300k during that contest so I'm hoping to beat that score this time around

I can't remember if those scores were on high speed or not,but still impressive either way. And the speed definitely gradually increases. What sucks about that is the game is very cheap about it by way of often giving you every type of pill color you DON'T need. That,or you'll get 8 of the same pill color in a row.

It definitely gets tough in those later levels,although I'm playing on medium speed per Tier 2 rules. (Takes a bite of a chicken nugget.) Do we get activity books at this table? I want to help some hokie cartoon character escape a maze using a crayon.

Oh dang,you were in that. Sorry dude. Either way,those were some nice scores!

Yeah man, I thought that score was pretty good but still put me closer to 10th. Gameboyricky and crabmaster killed it that contest!

Looking back at that year, it seemed like so many competitors participated in the weekly contests

Bimmy told me he has some plans for next year to boost participation.