Counter stopping's effect on popularity, game revisions, etc

[Rob]

The thread for the few people who know these sorts of things! But, you know, post whatever you want until they show up.

Are there any semi-recent examples of arcade games that players have counter stopped aside from Guwange and Mars Matrix? Nothing is coming to mind.

Second, why wouldn't these companies create non-counter stopping revisions? I can't imagine it being good for a game's popularity in the arcade. Both of those games were not followed up in any way, really.

[Pirate1019]

Good point. If a game cannot be counter stopped, then it implies that you can still score better. If you counterstop something, then you have essentially done as good as you can possibly do, so there is little incentive to go back and play it again aside from doing it for fun (and none of us do that, now do we?).

[Rob]

aside from doing it for fun (and none of us do that, now do we?).

We are talking about score here (antithesis of fun).

[Twiddle]

The way I understand it, counter stopping used to be the "cool" thing to do since most games had only 7 digits in the score, and when games appeared that had 8 digits, they stopped at where the old barrier did (10 mil = 10 more points than 9,999,990.) Doing such a thing is a mark of a player's endurance and/or showing what little obligations the player has. This sort of thing took 3-8 hours, and in games with infinite extends, like Twin Cobra or Truxton, this sort of thing allowed for restroom breaks.

Now that arcade games don't loop indefinitely (in the interest of more earnings if the players at a certain arcade get that good) counterstops are more a mark of a scoring system that simply cannot accomodate more player ability in said game than is possible due to insufficient digits, and a lack of keeping other values on record (Mars Matrix EXP, for example) just makes the problem worse. Lower-tier players are given incentive to do this for kicks, but this gives high-level players no incentive to play it because the WR of "first person to do this" is unbeatable.

There are also other kinds of counterstops, as well; the kind that have a definite point cap due to the scoring tabulation method (Outfoxies) or that the theoretical point maximum has been reached and there is no way to earn anymore (World Heroes, some Beatmania games)

2) One word: cost, and unless the program is rewritable ala Cave third generation PCBs that's a whole lot of wasted ROM chips.

note: I ninja edited this thrice, please add/correct what I added/corrected if you quoted this, thanks.

[shoe-sama]

Battle Bakraid counter stops, so they had to make like an unlimited version. Dimahoo counter stops too, but only 1 person has done it.
Also Batsugun Special.

[Pirate1019]

aside from doing it for fun (and none of us do that, now do we?).

We are talking about score here (antithesis of fun).

I meant just playing it, not going for the counterstop again. Who would do that? Not exactly a cool trick to pull out at parties.

[Rob]

Some games within the last 10 or so years that have received revisions excluding recent Cave (from Oxtsu's awesome Chronology of Shooting thread):
-Trigger Heart Exelica (2 months apart)
-Radirgy (2 months)
-Senko no Ronde (4 months)
-Psyvariar (6 months)
-Battle Bakraid (2 months)
-Space Bomber (3 months)
-Armed Police Batrider (2 months)
-G. Darius (3 months)

(and the revised Mars Matrix port came out shortly after the arcade release - guess they just left that one for dead)

I'd be curious to know what some of these are about (if not already obvious). It seems like counter stopping would be at the top of the list for needing a revision.

[Pirate1019]

Maybe somebody forgot to make the bosses timeout.

[Twiddle]

Psyvariar and VP1 recieved revisions to improve the gameplay in a number of ways, because the original Psyvariar lasted 10 minutes on an average game, and VP1 had an intolerably shitty weapon system (though Seibu put in some things to be an even bigger asshole to the player, like increasing the hitbox size and doubling the bullet and rank speed)

Senko no Ronde is primarily a fighting game, and thus fighting games get numerous revisions to adjust the unforeseen imbalances that come to light through human players.

Bakraid Unlimited also added a number of things and secrets that didn't make it in the first version (like the boss rush) instead of just increasing the score cap to 9 digits.

Virtually all of the others had misc bug fixes not worth mentioning or egregious Arcadia-disqualifying oversights (Batrider, infinite milking) though.

[tada]

I have heard of DrumMania being counter-stopped at 9,999,999,999. Under most normal circumstances though, this won't happen. You have to play an Expert course with really note-heavy songs (in total, roughly 24,000 notes) and combo it.

Not an arcade game, but there is always Lumines, which is probably one of the easiest games on the planet to counter-stop. If it didn't keep the total time, I probably would have stopped playing it the first time I got 999999.

These days, I don't see why there should be counter-stop at all. I could understand in the 80s when memory was scarce, and pinball machines used LEDs for score (which obviously had to counter-stop). It probably was sort of like "beating" the game. But now that most games have a true end...