Tournament Formats

[StarMask]

I have a decent collection of shmups and am considering hosting a tournament using my boards. What are some tournament formats that work well with this genre? I know some games can take 30 minutes or more, so a fighting game-style bracket doesn't necessarily seem like it would be practical.

[Steven]

Besides the obvious "high score = you're winner", there are a few odd games like Change Air Blade and Twinkle Star Sprites, which are PVP games, and Shippuu Mahou Daisakusen, which is a weird racing/STG hybrid that you can play for score, completion speed, or both. Of course, it depends on what you have available, or I guess you can use MAME or whatever if you want. If you don't have time to do full runs of Shippuu you can do the first few stages and then do some math stuff to figure out player rankings based on a combination of completion time of those stages + score or whatever. I hate math and am lazy so I'm not going to try to figure out how to best do that, but it can be done. I think you might be able do a simple score/time division and call it good or good enough, but yeah.

Mikado had the Kyuukyoku Tigerist competition a few years ago where they played the game set on the highest difficulty setting, disabled the bomb button, banned autofire, and banned changing weapons after stage 1. First person to die or pick up a different weapon after stage 1 lost. Or something like that.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

At the past California Extreme shows, they've had the Street Fighter II tournaments in the past but never an STG tournament whatsoever. What arcade stg pcbs do you have to plan for doing such a tournament?

Of course, it'd be ideal to have more than one of said arcade pcb so that two players can compete at the same time.

If you have access to a "Scart to Jamma" pcb, this particular setup opens up the home gaming consoles to be played on a candy cab or supergun setup (i.e. -- the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 Caravan based stgs like Gunhed Special Version, Soldier Blade Special Version, Super Star Soldier, Final Soldier, Spriggan, etc. that have 2 minute & 5 minute playing sessions). The PCE/TG-16 versions of Soldier Blade actually do save all the regular & Caravan high scores & high score initials for posterity/safekeeping on a real PCE Duo/Turbo Duo setup -- which is a really nice benefit/perk to have from the get-go (or if you have access to an NEC Tennoekoe Bank II add-on hooked up to the PCE/TG-16's backside "Expansion Port" interface with two on-board double "AA" batteries to save them or just use a Krikzz Turbo Everdrive Pro flashcart instead as it already saves all regular & Caravan scores + high score initials with Soldier Blade as it is).

Having a PCE/TG-16 Caravan stg competition among the tournament players is ideally, quicker & smoother as they take less time to pull off, time-wise. Is something to take into serious consideration with your proposed stg tournament, Star Mask.

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The Sega Genesis homebrew stg title of "Omega Blast" is another Caravan-based stg worth owning/playing indeed. It has just a two minute Caravan mode at best.

It can be bought on Etsy listed here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1538423992 ... 1538423992
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PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[R8Spike]

https://touhouworldcup.com/ The Touhou world cup exists, and has been running smoothly for a while so maybe read over their rules and see if any ideas look cool