Ok, a more serious answer from me but an even less helpful one.
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It doesn't make a smegging bit of difference what sort of point system we use if we don't adjust it for games it doesn't work on. Chris Parsley's Superstars proprosal struck such a nerve, because to me it seems like replacing one rather arbitrary scoring system with another. The key advantage the percentage scoring system has is assigning a nonzero value to all scores, present and future, as a method of gauging how good all the contestants are. Problem is, the percentage system is just as arbitrary. As he pointed out, the 1400+ games do not have similar enough scoring methods to rank properly... he just missed that no simple blanket system will.
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The first, and should have been the easiest, category are junk games. There are two types of these. The first is non-playable games, of which MACH 3 is sadly the most glaring example. The second is non-competitive games, in which all players "achieve" the same score. I hadn't noticed these until listing the D games, I found Dominos right under Domino Man, with a breathtakingly high score of 4, which was somehow reached (after countless milliseconds of developing their skill to the exacting standards required) by no less than 3 players. If you weren't paying attention, ALL games of Dominos end 4-0.
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The second category are like the bowling or trivia games that aren't exactly easy but with some work all good players can have perfects. The only real difference between scores in this sort of game is the time of filing, which is probably what the rank should be based on.
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The third category are the games with "Ninth Key" levels, but no forced ending, where after a certain point the game doesn't get any harder and you can play until you give up. Mat Mania hits this point somewhere around Match 20, depending on the difficulty setting. After about 300,000 points all Mat Mania scores are demonstrations of stamina.
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A fourth category are games with "Ninth Key" levels and a forced end. Pac Man, the game this reference comes from, has about 20 unique levels, then 200+ repetitions of "Ninth Key", then finally an end screen. The worst plausible finishing score, by a player who didn't know how to catch a single monster but caught both keys every time with their "Ninth Key" pattern is probably around 3 million points, or approximately 90% of a perfect game. Although a few players have come very close, no perfect games yet. Is 3,000,000 worth 90% of what a perfect score recieves?
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The fifth category are games which have non-repeating levels and forced endings, such as 1942 or Black Tiger. These games could be judged either on the number of levels completed (all finish scores equal), or ranked by the amount of points the players can squeeze out of them which inevitably favors the most recent entrant.
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The sixth category are games with a number of levels repeating in a loop. Scramble, Gyruss, Gladiator, and I suspect every game Namco ever made (at least from the early to mid 80s) fall into this group. Once all the levels of the hardest loop are mastered, these games are demonstrations of stamina. Perhaps a Track & Field "One Round Only" rule for these?
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The seventh category are games with no known point of maximum difficulty, repetition, or forced end. There is a good chance the games that seem to belong in this category (like Super Punch Out or Domino Man) have not been completely mastered yet, but until then the percentage scoring works very well on these.
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The eighth category are timed games, where the high scores are often quite low compared to other games. We know the best Depth Charge player is German Krol, but we don't really know just how amazing (or if) his score of 3,510 is, but it has to be much more than twice as hard then scoring 1,755. Many sports games fall into this category.
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I've probably missed a few groups, but by now the idea should be clear. We either settle for a simple system, or we use our collective expertise to come up with appropriate rules and methods for each type of game seperately. For instance, category 7 games might have straight percentage scores (0 to 100) that go into the leaderboard, where category 5 games might send the levels_completed / end_level as the score (the #1 ranked game not neccesarily being a 100 if nobody on MARP has finished it), but category 8 games only score a top five (#1=100, #2=80, #3=60, #4=40, #5=20).
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So, which answer was more annoying?
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Aqua
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aquatarkus@digicron.com
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