Here at Twin Galaxies, we love ourselves a good high score and a record time. It’s why every week we look deep in the wealth of Undisputed and Verified scores in the Twin Galaxies Adjudication Archive and dig up our favorite scores of the previous week! On this edition of the Scoreboard Spotlight, we look at a supermassive Bases Loaded blowout, an amazing perfect score on a certain version of Tetris, and more!
Alex Holbrook - Tetris (Game Boy/Game Boy Color): Points
We start off strong in this Spotlight with a classic Tetris run on Game Boy. Alex Holbrook snaps that cartridge in and takes this version of the classic fast-paced puzzle game to its absolute limit in his world record run. All the way up to level 20 where even the slightest lapse in judgement or reflexes can mean disaster, Holbrook continues to set up and clear lines with his fast falling tetrominoes. By the time Holbrook finally messed up and got a game over, he was well past a max-out of the Game Boy version’s max score at 999,999 points, making him the first player verified and recognized by Twin Galaxies to do so on this version of the game! For that max-out, it took 497 cleared lines, but it's worth noting that Holbrook took the game beyond its score keeper and ended up with an impressive 523 lines. Of course, that sets Holbrook at the top of the hill on the Tetris Game Boy scoreboards. As long as Tetris has been around, it’s fascinating to know that dedicated and talented players like Holbrook are still finding ways to push this classic game to new and virtually untouched boundaries. Big congratulations on the max-out and good luck to anyone who chases this mountain of a record.
Johnny Bonde - XXX-1 Multi-PCB - Lady Bug (Arcade): Medium Difficulty, 3 Lives Start - Points
Lady Bug is an interesting and complex take on the Pac-Man style of maze runner. The goal is still to eat all the pellets and get the bonuses on the board, but there’s a few different rules in play. Johnny “fliplismcs” Bonde takes on the game in a multi-arcade format and handles the eccentricities of Lady Bug quite well in his run. By moving shifting gates in the maze by passing through them, Bonde manipulates the enemy bugs in the maze well so he can get to the bonus vegetables that allow him to push up a high score. As the game gets harder, more bugs are introduced, and the pace gets quicker, Bonde continues to work his way around them and manipulate the maze well to stay safe and keep his lady bugs safe well into hundreds of thousands of points. Bonde lands at an impressive score of 280,780 by the time his final lady bug gets caught, putting him squarely at the top of the XXX-1 Multi-PCB Scoreboards for Lady Bug. Bonde’s run isn’t just impressive, it’s also an exhilarating watch in classic gaming.
Neal Pierotti - Bases Loaded II - The Second Season (NES/Famicom - NTSC): Biggest Blowout
Batter up. For this Spotlight Neal “Patentman31” Pierotti takes to America’s game with Bases Loaded II - The Second Season and puts his batting and catching skills to work on beating a team by the largest amount he can. From defense in the field to offense at the plate, Pierotti strikes out players left and right, catches each hit, and belts the ball around the field when he’s up to bat, driving in run after glorious run. Any baseball team would probably throw in the towel once the run count had reached 10, let alone 20, but Pierotti brings in a total of 31 runners to make a complete fool of the opposing team and completely conquer the diamond. Safe to say that Pierotti’s 31 run blowout lands him heavily at the top of the Bases Loaded II blowout scoreboards with the next closest score coming in at 25 runs back in 2009, set by Andrew Furrer. Players looking to top Pierotti’s spectacular performance are going to have to bring their A-game and swing for the fences, all the while keeping the opposing team from doing the same in any way.
Michal Kellner - Scramble Spirits (M.A.M.E.): Single Player - Points
On this next Spotlight, we head back to the realm of bullet-hell shooters for this M.A.M.E. record by Michal “Baldbull” Kellner. Kellner takes to Scramble Spirits to lay down fire across the usual array of screens full of fighters, tanks, turrets, and plenty of death dealing projectiles to dodge. What sets Scramble Spirits apart from other bullet hells are some particular “bonus” segments of the game where the screen zooms in and you must “strafe” a certain zone of the level, destroying everything while avoiding death. In this zoomed-in segment, there’s less space to dodge death and you only get the bonus if you destroy every single target on the section. In Kellner’s record run, he does just that and gets away with thousands of points each time as he makes his way through the rest of the levels in an impressive array of shooting and maneuvering. At the end of his lives, Kellner found himself with a wealthy point value of 1,045,020, overcoming the previous record set by Saulo Bastos in 2011 by a hefty amount on the M.A.M.E. Scramble Spirits leaderboard. With so many perfect bonus sections under his belt, it’ll take some ace skills to outdo Kellner’s run.
Ronnie Weston - PAC-MAN 256 (iOS): Get The Highest Score
Finally, we look at a fresh mobile take on a classic taste with PAC-MAN 256 on iOS. This unique take on pellet-gobbling ghost dodging action employs a unique feature based off the famous Pac-Man killscreen in which digitized “killscreen” scrolls up from the bottom of the maze as players navigate, gobble pellets and power-ups, and dodge, eat, or kill the ghosts with those power-ups as they go. Ronnie Weston goes on a mad dash through PAC-MAN 256, outrunning the oncoming killscreen and ghosting ghost after ghost, as well as picking a healthy bushel of bonus fruit on his way. By the time the massive number of ghosts later on in the game finally catch up to Weston, he was able to put up a pretty tidy score of 25,752 for his efforts. He’s got himself a little competition going with fellow PAC-MAN 256 Scoreboard competitor Brandon “speedy47591” Kelly, and of course the more the merrier in this neat little game, so this Scoreboard just might be well worth watching for even more high-scoring in the near future.
And that covers our Scoreboard Spotlight for this week. As a reminder, these were just a handful of the wealth of amazing records that were adjudicated and accepted. Every record that made it through verification and landed on our leaderboards has a well-deserved place in the Twin Galaxies gaming pantheon. Keep scoring high and finishing fast and you just might end up on our next Scoreboard Spotlight!
In the meantime, check out our previous Scoreboard Spotlight featuring a master display of marksmanship on a new Vs. Duck Hunt world record!
