Fantastic.

Oh, I also want to thank you for your advice on how to break the black marble. It's easy to do and the extra thousand really helps. I try to go for it every time.


 

Nice job! You better start recording dude!

CONGRATS! What's the tip for breaking the black marble?

Yeah, that thing pisses me off sometimes. How do you take him out?

 

You know the long downward slope when you get to the black marble? Race to position yourself on the squares at the top of the slope (middle square seems to work best), wait, and the black marble will often commit suicide by bumping into you. It's surprisingly simple once you get the hang of it, and it's a quick 1000 points.

Here's a demonstration video that someone made.








 

Damn dude, awesome achievement.

Amazing! Incredible performance. I always enjoyed this game as a kid but was never very good at it.

My pleasure, I was actually surprised you weren't doing this already. Can't look down on a little extra 1000 points.

Good job!

Congrats! I haven't been on here much,but it's nice to see you progress from where you were to where you are now.

I seriously wasn't ready when we played that week.

To consistently get high scores you should be able to have 99 seconds for the ultimate race even without wands as well as being able to beat the game with at least 77 seconds left on the clock. Otherwise scoring over 170k is a big struggle that depends too much on luck.

 

I appreciate Marble Madness as a game. It is fun but I’m just not that big into it to try to even get close to any huge scores. I was happy enough to just beat the game.

BTW, I just beat this on the Nestopia emulator using a DualShock 4 controller on my PC. I was lucky to beat it at all. My score was a whopping 67,890 and I died 20 times, lol. It's one of those games where playing on original hardware and NES pad makes a big difference for me.

 

This is exactly the reason I jumped from emulators back to real hardware.  I noticed I played much better on the console. 

178,520

I just got my second highest score ever! This was just getting the second stage wand and beating the game with 78 seconds. No black marbles broken this time. It's still a hair shy of the tall guy's impressive score from the 2009 contest.

and to think I was happy to just make it to the final stage hahaha. Great job man!

This will make for some fun times when the contest rolls around again. I'm sick of being 3rd every time. I need to step my game up. I honestly never broke the black marbles. So, that's something I should probably start doing.

I still can't believe you came in second at CCAG to your buddy.
 

It seems to be a frustrating game for most people. There's a contest over on AtariAge and the average score is around 20k. My 176k that I got without any wands really sticks out.


http://atariage.com/forums/topic/...
 

The only times I've beaten the game were on an emulator using the directional arrows on the keyboard.

Having the ability to clean tap the keys was actually a substantial boost in my performance.

 

The other day I beat the game with a little over 100k on the emulator with DS4. Still nowhere close to my performance on real hardware, but the DS4 isn't bad at all.

I just tried with keyboard and I made it to the third stage with a score of around 12k. Arrow key control  in Marble Madness doesn't feel right to me at all. I know that some people can do it. In the last contest Bea got 170k with a keyboard.




 

I found that my ability to quickly make a specific number of taps was much better on the keyboard.

It took some getting used to, though, and I'm NOWHERE near 170k territory.



 

You are one dedicated mother f#cker. I beat it the one time and then gladly put it back into its tomb

Yeah. I remember you giving it the middle finger, lol.

At least I have some talent for this game. I've put a similar amount of time into Tetris which I also love and I know that I'll never be great at it.