World’s Greatest Shmup Player Tournament?!

DJ Incompetent · Post by **DJ Incompetent** » Fri Jun 08, 2007 5:13 am

so...basically nobody's gonna be able to recognize anybody if we go...right?

Hmmm, it seems my avatar beard is no longer fully accurate.

Um..I'll try to rock a Boondock Saints shirt....or something?

Rob · Post by **Rob** » Tue Jun 12, 2007 8:11 pm

So did this not go well or are you all recovering from the intense competition?

postman · Post by **postman** » Tue Jun 12, 2007 9:09 pm

I didn't want to mention anything until I got the writeup posted, but I thought it was great.......

DJ Incompetent won it all (congrats!)..........

I should have the article finished by later today, details will be there....

durias · Post by **durias** » Tue Jun 12, 2007 10:08 pm

postman wrote:I didn't want to mention anything until I got the writeup posted, but I thought it was great.......

DJ Incompetent won it all (congrats!)..........

I should have the article finished by later today, details will be there....

Nice! Looking forward to it!

Rob · Post by **Rob** » Tue Jun 12, 2007 10:23 pm

So awesome.

freddiebamboo · Post by **freddiebamboo** » Wed Jun 13, 2007 12:51 am

Well done DJI

DJ Incompetent · Post by **DJ Incompetent** » Wed Jun 13, 2007 4:18 pm

Thank you. It was a good time. Well, as good as a marathon can be.

They didn't do their homework on game picks. I made sure they paid for that. 8)8) Afterwards, they vowed to revamp everything.

Post by **Icarus** » Wed Jun 13, 2007 4:54 pm

What were the game selections?
Also, grats DJI. You're now the Worlds Greatest. ^_-

goatdan · Post by **goatdan** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 7:31 am

Hey all... I posted this on another forum, but I think it works out perfectly here too, so I'll just paste it in here...

I'm going to just toss in a couple cents here, and then go to bed as I actually need to work in like 5 hours...

For the shmup tournament, a few things -- #1, it was not a disaster by any stretch. We had a lot of people who played in it. We had a very competitive final round. Were there some mistakes that were made with it? Absolutely. Do I think it ultimately worked out? Yes. Do I want to improve it for next year? Definitely. And I have taken note of many of the comments, as well as compiling some of my own.

The first and the biggest thing to understand with the tournament is that the reason that it was run like it was run is because ultimately it is a new concept in how to hold tournaments like this for shmups. Do we have room for tweaking? Absolutely. And it will be -- just like pinball tournaments are tweaked every single time they are ran. The difference is that with pinball tournaments, there is pretty much at least one a month. With this, so far, there has been one. Will we fix it completely by the second time we run it? No. I won't even claim we'll get close. Will it be vastly improved for last year? Absolutely.

One of the problems, just so that everyone is aware of this with it, is that when there hasn't been actual rules that are set, it is hard to really dig down deep into what other people have written about it and come up with something that makes sense completely. The thinking had been that the 10% rule with the lives at the end would have greatly helped speed players through games, but obviously we missed a couple places there. We will be tweaking this for next year to work out better.

The idea, of course, was not to end up with people corralled in one area for an entire day, but to get them to compete and finish up earlier. It didn't work out that way, but the players themselves seemed to be okay with most of it. Will this change next year? Again, yes.

Finally, the game thing is something that I actually started looking at two weeks in advance of the show. Myself and one of the pinball guys were talking about ways to even the field by announcing the games early, and by only using the same games. We *were not* planning on doing that with pinball this year, but it just worked out that way, which in many ways was truly kinda neater. Last year, we did rotate the pinball machines. The plan will be to do something similar with the shmup tourney next year.

[quote author=DJ Incompetent link=topic=3370.msg54352#msg54352 date=1181777430]
Unlike Pinball where you can use basically anything, a fair amount of the Shooting Games we want to compete in were not designed with fair, standardized tournament play in mind. A lot of games have a score built-in only out of habit from the previous games in the genre that came out before it. This is pretty true for most of the 8-16 bit era of games.[/quote]

Actually, it's kind of ironic that you mention this. Pinball has slowly developed which games you can and cannot use based on scoring rapes that are very similar to what we are describing as what happened in certain parts of the shmup tournament. And there is no way to eliminate that part of those games, so the games are just eliminated. Also, many pinball machines are not really designed with fair, standardized tournament play in mind either. Even Jurassic Park, which came out in the early 90's when competitive pinball was truly at it's peak has some potentially really unfair scoring methods that made it an interesting choice for the tournament this year. There was a big to-do about Star Wars on Friday night because if it doesn't have a certain software tweak, a decent player can just endlessly rape the machine for points. The machine we used had the updated software, or we couldn't have used it.

With pinball though, we're drawing on the collective knowledge of having had hundreds of tournaments happen. We don't (yet) have that with shmups. I'm heading back to the drawing board with certain aspects though, and I think you'll see a much more refined tournament for next year!

Hope to see more of you then! We'll start announcing stuff much sooner than last year!

postman · Post by **postman** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 7:46 pm

Post edited

Rob · Post by **Rob** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 8:16 pm

Mars Matrix (Dreamcast), Silpheed (Sega CD), Galactic Attack (Saturn), Gradius 5 (ps2), and Vapor Trail (Genesis).

I woulda dominated this round.

Aerofighters (Snes), Demon Attack (Atari 2600), Blazing Lasers (Turbografx 16), Raiden 3 (ps2), and Mega SWIV (Genesis).

ANTICLIMAX

Unfortunately there were no competitors for the Junior bracket or the women's bracket, so they may be eliminated in future events..........

Haha. Men and women should all compete in the same group anyways. I can't imagine kids being there unless the adults brought some along. And then would they want to play Aero Fighters?

Davey · Post by **Davey** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 10:27 pm

Ah, I would have got dominated. Aside from already knowing that DJI > me, Mars Matrix is the only game out of all of those that I'm even remotely familiar with. Although for a console-only tournament, the game list could have been a lot worse.

postman · Post by **postman** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 11:25 pm

Well, remember that even if you are weak with one game, you can always make up with the others in the round. That's what I think really worked for this compo, the multi-game format. If I screw up a run on Mars Matrix, there's always Gradius 5 to fall back on and land me an easy 4 points in the rankings.

DJI did have some impressive skills, I wanted to be able to watch the other players a bit, but due to time constraints that wasn't possible as we were all playing at the same time.

durias · Post by **durias** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 3:41 am

postman wrote:Here's the writeup for Shootthecore...

Nicely done! Congrats and thanks for sharing. Sounds like a lot of fun. Maybe next year...

durias · Post by **durias** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 3:45 am

goatdan wrote:I posted this on another forum, but I think it works out perfectly here too, so I'll just paste it in here...

I appreciate your work on this and it sounds like the event was a success. Well done and congrats! Also, it's really cool how you've engaged this board so positively in spite of the cynicism.

Would it be helpful if a handful of us ran smaller scale shmup tourneys using your rules to help continue the development of your tournaments? We could run 'em and then dialogue with you about how it went. It may inform the planning/implementation of your future events. Further, I have plenty of experience running poker tournaments and I bet some of it is transferable to shmup tourneys.

goatdan · Post by **goatdan** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 4:33 pm

durias wrote:Would it be helpful if a handful of us ran smaller scale shmup tourneys using your rules to help continue the development of your tournaments? We could run 'em and then dialogue with you about how it went. It may inform the planning/implementation of your future events. Further, I have plenty of experience running poker tournaments and I bet some of it is transferable to shmup tourneys.

ABSOLUTELY!

Contact me at loosen at goatstore dot com and I will be happy to talk through everything with anyone. We found some obvious tweaks that need to happen before the next one, and the more we can refine this, the better it can get! I'm sure we'll continually find tweaks, but overall, I think this will end up being a great way to compete in a completely different fashion!

postman · Post by **postman** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 5:14 pm

The official writeup on ShootTheCore is finished:

http://shootthecore.moonpod.com/article ... ng_classic

Now with pictures!

Enjoy

durias · Post by **durias** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 5:56 pm

goatdan wrote:Contact me at loosen at goatstore dot com...

Done!

RotateMe · Post by **RotateMe** » Sun Jun 17, 2007 5:49 pm

postman wrote:The official writeup on ShootTheCore is finished:

http://shootthecore.moonpod.com/article ... ng_classic

Now with pictures!

Enjoy

It would be nice if there were some information about the scores. But anyways, nice compo (hence the title) and congrats to DJI!

For next year, it would be cool if you would record some replays of the final rounds and make them available.