Stupid name, good shooter....







RULES:
Round 5 starts 30th of April and will end midnight, 20th of May (GMT)
The aim of the game is to score as many points as possible.

Play only until the score counter wraps
No score whoring!

Post screenshots in this thread.
Please ensure that you own a legal copy of this game to compete.
Don't cheat! - We know where you live!!!

OFFICIAL COMPETITION VERSION OF THE GAME:
To Be Announced

GAME INFO & COMMENTS
Slap Fight@Lemon64

QUESTIONS:
Please check the Lemon Games Compo FAQ

ROUND 5 SCORETABLE:
Courtesy of our scorer Shocktrooper



OVERALL STANDINGS:
are here!

EXTRAS:
Check out the Games Competition at Lemon64's sister site, Lemon Amiga!
The Scorelord keeps a watchful eye on the top c64 scores on the net here.
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Woh! The minute I heard the music and gave the game a go I thought I was going crazy because I never heard of this title. Yet the music and game play looked familiar because I knew I had played this ages ago. But under a different name. ALCON. I'm guessing that ALCON was the U.S. or North American release of Slap Fight? Anyone know if there are any differences or why the name change? Looks exactly the same to me. But I've only seen level 1 so far.
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This game is so SEUCK'ish that my hurts when I play it.

Now if you want a quality shooter, go try Hades Nebula. Survive the first 3-4 minutes and listen to the most awesome music ever composed on the 64.

Sorry for being offtopic, enjoy the compo, ye' Slap fighters!

ALCON stands for 'Alien League of COsmic Nations' which is the body which has chosen you to pilot the top secret experimental SW475 StarFighter - as per the arcade game scenario.

As far as Im aware TAITO released the game in Japan/US as ALCON, but I would hazard a guess that Alcon means some obcenity in a European language so the title was changed to 'Slap Fight' for UK/Europe.

Same goes for Contra which was released as Gryzor in the UK/Europe...
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This is all I can stomach for starters, a bit past the 1st music change: 13650



There are quite clever ideas, such as the upgraded wing actually presenting a bigger target. And you don't have to hammer the firebutton. But it's still somewhat satanic idea to see only 2 kinds of enemies (1 for most of the time) for the first few minutes..

Some questions..

1) Are we supposed to play one round of the game only, like in Who Dares Wins 2 compo?

2) Anyone managed to get hit in such way that only part of the wing gets destroyed instead of whole ship? In the longplay I watched he sometimes collected the highest powered wing again, but that might have been a timed degrade also..

I must remember to compete in this round. I've been so caught up in other stuff lately...
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My first lame score: 7'000. Not worth to post a screenshot, yet. I'll increase my score for sure
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After a couple of goes I had a good run and got just past the robo-crabs.

btw, has anyone ever found a reason to collect the bomb power-up? I just tried it and it seems next to useless. I thought it might be able to bomb those little rail-riders (the ones that shoot in all directions at the junctions) when they're on the blue sections, but no go.

32100

No-one has an opinion one way or the other on whether we should loop then game then?

... ok...

In that case, We won't be playing through to the end just once. For starters, although a ninja shootemup master should be able to loop this game, it's not quite so trivial (as, say, Who Dares Wins ). Plus, the game is pretty sparsely populated, and those homing missiles are pretty easy to shoot everything with, so we'd all end up with the same score at the end (although, more on that later). Finally.... this is a high score competition! Are we not men? (A clinching argument, I'm sure you'll agree )

The thing to do therefore is this: we'll play until the score counter wraps. That should be about 10 or 11 times round, I reckon, which is marathon enough. Save your screenshot when you get to 999,000 or so, and we at the Games Competition will round up it generously to 1,000,000... even if you have to kill yourself to take the screenshot and end up taking a shot of the highscore table. You'll get style points for scoring as close to 999,999 as possible, but it won't count for anything in competition terms!

This just leaves us with this problem:



You can sit on this screen for as long as you like shooting the guys that enter from left and right for points. Sigh. If you're tooled up with homing missiles, of course, you can't avoid hitting the big red screen and which will eventually force you to progress... but you can easily get round that problem by just dying when you reach this screen so you revert to the basic shot weapon.

Since we're going to be playing through the game multiple times, I'm happy to instigate a 'no score whoring' rule on this screen. While it's true that a player with less weapons will score more points here than a fully tooled-up player even if he's trying to progress, it'll hardly make any difference in the long run.

So, when you reach this stupid looking head, you MUST concentrate your efforts on shooting the big red rectangle at the top centre of the screen. You are allowed to shoot the guys that enter from either side, of course, but when you aren't shooting them, shoot the red thing!

Ok? Here's the abbreviated version of this post for those of you with short attention spans:

We're playing until the score counter wraps.
And no score whoring.

Job done. Now I have to go figure out how to resize my screen so i can READ my score
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So I finally got around to trying this today and it's not quite as diabolical as I first feared - but then I'm sold by anything that rips off Gradius' incremental power-up system. Frequent moments where several bullets have come at me from all sides and I've done nothing but freeze like a deer in the headlights have led me to invest in multiple speed ups. By the way, how many times can you use the same power-up? Or does it vary between them?
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Shteev

Good call on the above rules. Not sure how many of us will need to implement them though!! You are talking scores of 1,000,000 and Im barely making 10,000 at this stage!!

p.s. @qazi - Gradius was the pioneer of all power based shoot-em ups, and for that deserves a special mention.
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Shteev's rules sound pretty good to me. I forgot to add my 2c about looping because I never beat the game back in the old days and can't imagine beating it now. Having fun trying though.

47825

I'm nowhere near 1,000,000 either... yet



96,675

TBH, even though I LOVED Gradius (or Nemesis as I knew it in our local arcade), these days I favor games without power-ups. I dislike the way that losing a life in the late game means game over since you haven't got enough power from a new start up to survive. It's nice to have a variety of weapons, but I prefer a game where there's a reason to use all of them (like Hawkeye, Creatures, or Cybernoid).

This is a pretty cool game to play, but that's because it puts you firmly in your comfort zone, as opposed to the mind-buggering, nerve-shattering 'the zone' of legend.
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This is my first post here. Only just found these great forums and this wonderful games competition!

I've had a tough time playing Slap Fight. Only once made it past those omnidirectionally firing objects that shoot at the junctions. After that it seems to get a little easier for a while.

Is it just me or is it terribly hard to advance in the game once you've lost your first life? My scores would hardly be different if I only had one ship.

My score: 62225

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Hi LeFosse, welcome to Lemon64, and welcome especially to the Games Competition! We welcome allcomers here, from ninjas to n00bs... of course it's nice to win a round of the competition, but the coolest thing about it is that it gets a lot of people playing the same game every month so we can all have a good root around in it and discuss it.

LeFosse wrote:

Is it just me or is it terribly hard to advance in the game once you've lost your first life? My scores would hardly be different if I only had one ship.

You're not wrong. One speed up is frankly rubbish. You can't really shift around the screen fast enough to shoot everything until you've got 3.
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Hey, you. Dumbass. Yeah, you in the tank. Cosy in there?

Hi LeFosse and welcome!! Good score too.

First effort from me, jeez those bullets are big! Also, by the time you're all powered up - theres not much space left on the screen to move!! A good conversion of the arcade game though.

11,200


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Thanks for the welcome, shteev and Predator! It's very cool indeed to be playing the same game with a lot of people! Makes it all the more worthwile.

I'm enjoying Slap Fight quite a bit. Must be almost 20 years ago since I last played it. Terribly hard though, I don't quite see myself getting through the entire game anytime soon. I think I've almost made it to the end, but I couldn't make it past the second red rectangle (bullets appearing out of nowhere, lots of them too). Don't see myself reaching that point on a regular basis though. Got lucky in the middle of the game and was able to power up completely again after having lost a ship.

The only useful power-ups seem to be speed, homing missiles, side fire power, and shield. Expanding your wing size pretty much turns you into a big sitting duck. I haven't been able to get very far with it.

My score: 110,700. Don't think I'll be improving this much in the near future. And I certainly won't be able to get to the 1 million points!

First warm up try I got 4,500. But I like the way the game functions and feels so I'll be in it for the 1 mill score, hopefully.
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