Why Does No One Play Punch-Out!! High Score?

so you might have seen some of my recent videos covering the world record histories for the individual fights in Mike Tyson's punch out these fights are just one piece of the full game speedrun known as single segment the main speedrun category for Mike Tyson's punch out over time more categories have been introduced in attempts to keep the game fresh and enjoyable and leaderboards for these categories are tracked on speedrun.com and have seen plenty of love and good competition among the community if I to make a tier list for these categories it would go something like this single segment goes in s tier another world circuit goes in B tier real time attack goes in C tier blindfolded goes in low a tier but unfortunately I won't be able to show you that because Tyson challenge is going in F tier and 19-minute challenge in D tier now that I may have pissed off a significant portion of the mtpo community allow me to explain when I put things like the Tyson Challenge and 90-minute challenge really far down I'm not saying they aren't fun in some way they just don't offer a new way to play the game the Tyson challenge is like a what if scenario what if all 14 fights were just against Mike Tyson there is nothing that you get from this category that you wouldn't already get from Tyson I attemps which if I were to put on this tier list would go in s realtime attack does have a few different strategies like knocking Honda 2 down a single time and not taking a knockdown on Sandman unfortunately a majority of the f lights remain the same and you get the awesome bonus of either losing or gaining time due to opponent's getting up on random counts or fake Rising which is the very reason why this game's main category uses the in-game timer if single segment was like a 100% run then another world circuit is kind of like any percent typically any percent runs in other games use riskier strategies over the 100% run counterparts but another world circuit doesn't offer that at all even though Joe Kaiser Honda one Da One and bull one are skipped everyone still does the fights the exact same way they would in single segment with the exception of King Hippo because the manipulation to get him to open his mouth is much less reliable and you can get faster Times by not going for the manipulation anyway nevertheless this category does have merits you get into the meat and more exciting fights much sooner don't get me started on 90-minute challenge this isn't even a speedrun instead the goal to get as low of a Time on all 14 fights but you can try any fight you want as many times as you want and you have 90 minutes to do as best as you can there are some tactics about which fights you want to go after first but after that you guessed it it's just the same old strategies you see in single segment and maybe if you're lucky at the very end you might get some hail Mar attempts to go for a risky I strategy or two my main issue with all these other categories is that they are very derivative of single segment and the only exception is blindfolded by the very nature of the run you are forced to use and develop other skills and strategies to play the game for almost every fight there is only one small issue that bumps it down from s tier to a tier and that is because most strategies are geared towards consistency and eliminating random events that can't be reacted to and the fights from run to run become very repetitive of course you can start to play with more risky strategies but then you run into the issue of dealing with Randomness that you simply cannot react to nevertheless this is a good category this tier list is almost a direct correlation to how much I participated in each category and yet if I were to make an estimate my total time practicing or running these categories would come to about 60% which leaves about 40% missing this time was spent playing the only other category no one else wanted to participate in punch out high [Music] score it's no secret that speedr running has completely dominated high score in terms of modern competitive single player gaming keeping track of the score is after all a remnant of arcade games which has its roots in pinball machines and if you go way far back to potentially this game known as as bagatell in Mike Tyson's punch out the score does have a very minor purpose it's used to determine who wins the fight if neither you or the opponent win before the three round time limit nine of the 14 fights are winnable by decision and in the other five you will always lose no matter how many points you get unless you hack the game to force it to happen your score can only go up in five different amounts you get 10 points for landing a normal punch 110 points for getting a star 500 points for landing a star punch 1,0 points for achieving a knockdown with a regular punch and 1,500 points for a star punch knockdown if you are wondering a double hit will always result in you scoring zero points and depending on the frame you may or may not also deal damage to the opponent just at first glance you may be able to tell that to achieve high scores you'll want to land a lot of star punches and knock your opponent down as many times as you can you can't just knock him down too much too quickly though if you knock them down three times in a single round you'll win by TKO instead you want to drag the fights out as long as possible pushing them all the way to the end of round three to really maximize your points and when your opponent has severe CTE only then do you score that final knockdown to score the last 1,500 points this is the brilliant thing about punch out the star punch is both the main tool for achieving Fast Times and attaining high scores but the difference is in the speedrun where you want your star punches to do maximum damage in high score you want your star punches to do as little damage as possible this is a major but far from the only factor that determines how high of a score you can get on any given fight I can assure you that getting a really high score requires strategies and game knowledge just like trying to get the fastest times do so that begs the question why does no one play Punch Out for high score this question has haunted me since I first tried to learn the category in 2016 and there may or may not be a very simple answer to this if I were to try and answer this simplistically I would say that speedr running is just the more dominant culture over high score in this day and age the first person to try and run this category at a high level was Sinister 1 who last ran the category more than 10 years ago in 2013 and he had this to say about the matter people don't do high score for retro games that are not arcade games games and even that scene was slowly dying outside of extremely popular games like Donkey Kong high score on Console was just never popular for any game it was only a metric for arcade games because they couldn't be beaten since they had no defined ending going for high scores was the only way to compete for the most part I agree with this this is exactly how many arcade games were designed to be a never-ending Gauntlet of obstacles for the player to overcome there were a test of skill and endurance the further you progressed the more points you would be able to attain Home console games moved away from this model and games started to have defined endings and score became redundant of course there are exceptions to this like Tetris on the NES which has a competitive high score scene but even though it's on a Home console I think you would agree that this game plays more like an arcade game Tetris isn't supposed to end so is that the big difference games that are gauntlets of progressing difficulty and have no ending are just better for highest score since speedr running them doesn't even make sense while games which have endings just naturally make more sense to compete in a timed manner with the better players being able to navigate The Game's obstacles faster and reach the Finish Line sooner perhaps but it could be even more nuanced than that if we go back to Donkey Kong this game infamously does end on the level 22 kill screen and thus you cannot play on forever no matter how good you are even though this is not what you would call a traditional ending does that really matter as long as you set a defined start and end point it can be speedran and interestingly Donkey Kong does have a few submitted speedruns to the kill screen although with only eight different Runners over the last 10 years I imagine playing Donkey Kong for Speed is much less interesting than high score if we take this a step further I believe the reason that high score surpasses the speedrun in this case is because of the gameplay mechanics which force certain strategies techniques and skills used to approach optimal play are simply more interesting than the ones that govern the speedrun I have never played Donkey Kong only watched a little so whether this is true or not I can't be sure of one more fact I would like to bring up about Donkey Kong high score is a very specific mechanic that provides substantial depth to the category if you thought you could circumvent the level 22 kill screen by staying on an earlier level forever to rack up points you would be wrong each individual stage has as a timer when the bonus hits zero you only have a few more seconds to complete the level otherwise you lose a life this means in order to achieve an extreme score you cannot play safely and just dodge one barrel at a time you need to perform complex Maneuvers have a good sense of timing and overall screen awareness you never know when DK will throw a wild Barrel at you this leads to a more in-depth experience for the player this very same mechanic is seen in Mike tyon punch out there is a finite amount of time to complete each fight you cannot play dumb and safe if you want to maximize your points you need strategy tactics efficient scoring methods and most importantly to understand the game Landing a lot of star punches is a good first step to getting a high score the next question is how do you land more of them even if you make all of your star punches do as little damage as possible and your opponents get the biggest refills you will find that you deplete your opponent's Health way faster than the TKO rule of no more than two knockdowns per round would allow so not only are your points Bound by how much time is left in the fight they are bound by how much health your opponent has left but if the opponent's health is depleted way faster than the time that should be the limiting factor right well yes and no the opponent's Total Health is a little more flexible than the time left in the fight if they are at low health and punch little back they will regain a small amount 4 HP to be exact for most fights this is a soft cap at 32 HP meaning if they hit you while they are at 32 HP or above then nothing will happen but if they are at 31 HP they can recover to 35 just this mechanic alone can make strategizing more complicated how much time can you afford letting the opponents hit you allowing them to recover some fights can even push this to the extreme until you have used all of little Max Health but guess what little Max health is also flexible he can recover when he's at low Health too so you can end up in this dance of both you and the opponent regaining and depleting health health recovery is just one of the many other mechanics found in high schore strategies that are never utilized in the speedrun the opposite in general is not true in fact almost all speedrun techniques can be utilized in a high score run even maximum damage star punches Landing star punches for minimum damage or into an opponent's punch can be tricky business and opponents can dodge star punches if they are in their dodging State and one of the safest ways to knock an opponent down is with an undodgeable Max damage star punch another major difference with the high score run is how the strategies themselves function a little differently from the speedrun strategies what I'm talking about is the comparison between the two to get Optimum results in the speedrun there is the best luck for a strategy you are going for and then all the backup strategies for nonoptimal luck and minor errors this can all be mapped out beforehand if you get the low refill do this to get the best results and if you get the big refill well unlucky but handle it this way and you won't lose too much time the tree of possible outcomes can become complicated for some fights but if you're prepared you should always know what to do from experience high score doesn't play out quite like this it always seemed like no matter how much you prepared for each fight you can and will be put in situations which may seem foreign or familiar which one it doesn't matter because usually you don't have the luxury of wasting time to figure it out you need to act immediately the speedrun can seem like a moderately complicated search tree but what you should do is clear and obvious if you've put in the practice the high score run is a more complicated tree tfold but what you should do is not always obvious and the optimal route can be very fuzzy in specific sections this fuzziness arises by trying to play optimally for random events that will happen in the future rather than reacting to an event that just happened one of the best examples of this is trying to skip bold Bulls bull charge the bull charge Works off of the in-game timer and Bull's first one will always happen at 2 minutes in round one in order to skip it you need bull at low enough health and for him to hook right before the time trigger this can be very difficult to set up because of his pattern he can choose to not go for this third hook and go for triple rolling Jabs and if you are trying to skip the charge on his third hook there is going to be a 25% chance you get screwed or he could even get stuck in this uppercut cycle where there is only slightly less than a 50% chance it breaks and after that there is a variable delay to the first hook which has about a 1 and 1/2 second difference in the leading seconds up to the bull charge you need to make some quick assessments to try and figure out how to maximize your chances at a successful skip the situation I'm in here is actually horrible as he isn't quite at low enough Health yet but it's not impossible I decide to attempt to Loop through his patent and hope for only one uppercut I end up getting two and the long delay which means I can't skip the bull charge with a star punch knockdown he was at low enough Health to knock him down with regular stun punches which would have saved me a little time but by using the final hook to get get a star I'm better prepared for the next Bull charge which will occur in just 22 seconds my actions would have been based on a few factors where I am in his patent what the current time is and how many hearts I have left as I can stall his patent or cancel punches to speed it up if I have the hearts available furthermore by being at exactly one heart and then going pink I could have guaranteed a hook and a patteron reset whenever I wanted all of this needs to be analyzed quickly and this leads to you having to improvise your gameplay rather than having already predetermined how to handle a situation I could go on and on about the intricacies but what I'm trying to illustrate here is that I don't think Punch Out high score is lacking a depth in strategy or techniques that make it unappealing I love the game of puncher and I wanted my experience of the game to be at its fullest once I already had a strong grasp of the speedrun I also wanted to learn high school and found that it offered a whole other dimension to the game despite my efforts almost everyone else in the speedrun scene was completely disinterested in learning such a run they wouldn't even give it a go perhaps I had scared them off a bit after I had already invested a significant amount of time into it I knew it was no Cakewalk and I told people that there was probably 10 times more information you'd need to stuff into your brain for a high score run compared to the speedrun at least that's what it felt like but hey if they love the game the same way I loved the game I thought they would at least give it a go nevertheless yes there are two people's experiences with high score I would like to talk about the first of which is summoning salt the current world record holder for all of the speedrun categories in Mike Tyson's punch out in my opinion salt is the best player this game has ever seen and although the Gap has greatly narrowed between him and other top players in the last couple of years he is still a clear number one for me in 2020 salt did a high score run which I believe to be the only one he ever completed there is no saved video of this run but I vaguely remember watching it live what was extremely interesting about it was that salt did not have any strategies if he had any game plan at all for a fight it almost certainly would have come from his knowledge of game mechanics or trying to remember what he had seen in one of my own runs I asked salt why he thinks no one runs high score and he cited four specific reasons for why he never picked it up one he knew it would be a major time commitment to learn two he said that hanging around on a fight for as long as possible is less interesting than moving quickly and believes he would lose patience three in general he prefers shorter runs over longer runs and four just like the speed run he knows high score is extremely luck heavy and if he were to grind something luck heavy in mtpo he would rather play a category he enjoyed more and had more competition like single segment I have no qualms about his reasoning high score is absolutely not a short run as it takes about an hour and 20 minutes to complete it is a massive time investment to learn everything and in the end almost all of the extra game knowledge wouldn't be transferable to make his speedruns better even though he has completed the 90-minute challenge several times and equally long run he would not have had to learn anything new to play that at a top level due to his experience with single segment Salt's completed run managed to attain a score of 29,7 190 points which honestly surpassed my expectations considering I was pretty sure he was basically doing it blind the second person's experience with high score is a runner known as Cleveland Tom at first Tom speedran puncher and over the course of a year achieved a modest time of 18 minutes and 41 seconds good for 38th Place on the current leaderboard well this is not what I would consider a top time Tom definitely knows the basic elements to going fast in each fight and can even manage to squeeze out a round one Mike Tyson at the end an achievement that takes quite a bit of practice to pull off after after speedrunning he spent a good 2 months practicing and running high score and even though his game knowledge and mechanics aren't as fleshed out as summoning salts Tom was able to complete a high score run with 225,000 points the equivalent of nearly 32 extra star punches landed over salt Tom also cited a few reasons for why he thinks people don't run high score and like salt he agreed that the Run was just a lot longer than what most Punch Out Runners were used to doing aside from that there were a few unique reasons he went into great detail with much of the Run can be an absolute SLO as even the first fight glass Joe can devolve into a repetition of inputs as the one counts prevent you from Landing star punches without knocking him down instantly Kaiser and Honda 1 spice it up a little but then you get to the major circuit where Dawn one is almost entirely a brain dead fight just utilizing the zad buffer over and over or just intercepting uppercuts over and over once again a single star punch will always result in a knockdown so you can only land them sparingly hippo has no star punches and is such a non-factor in the Run since you can only score a single knockdown you can spend all the extra time in this fight that you want but you will only score about 200 extra points at the most and great tiger is very similar to Dawn one there is no Randomness in Tiger's patterns and you can basically pre-plan how the entire fight will pan out the novelty of juggling Tiger's uppercuts wears off quickly and by this point you would have spent more than 30 minutes on the run and haven't even touched the more exciting fights yet another reason Tom cited that running the game for score was a shock to his system and it reduced his capability to speedrun the game afterwards he had a serious case of strategy Amnesia where he simply couldn't remember how to speedrun many of the fights he had already spent a year learning the high score strategies were apparently so different and immersive to him that his brain had pushed out all unnecessary information about the game to focus on the goal of high score he then explained that this would dissuade top speedrunners from playing as he knows that it would be important for them to keep on top of their game Cleveland Tom says he did enjoy playing high score and believes like I do it is a great run every reason he gave was him trying to put himself in the shoes of a speedrunner who would not give it a chance for one reason or another some people just don't like longer runs that's fine some people don't want to learn a whole different section of a game that has nothing to do with the aspect of the game they want to play that's fine some people want to play in active category with growing competition that's also fine I get that a speedrunner wouldn't want to play high score after all a high score run is basically the opposite of a speedrun even so if no speedrunner of punchout wanted to play high score why is there no other sub community that wants to I honestly think the reason is all of the above speedr running is the more dominant culture at the the moment an in-game score is basically non-existent on most PC or console games made in the late '90s or after and that number continues to decrease speedr running a game however is almost Universal and can be applied to just about every game even games which do have a point system people can speedrun to reach a certain point threshold that all being said just because speedr running is the more dominant culture that doesn't mean fans of speedr running are interested in every game just because it can be speedrun surely there is a reason that people who like playing Mike Tyson's punch out might not like playing it for a high score maybe they had just never even considered it didn't even know there was a very Niche sub community that has done that summoning salt talks about there being active competition and I feel similarly if there are people also participating in the same hobby it can be more enjoyable if I was to make a judgment based on the specifics of Mike Tyson's punch out it's because the game is quite complicated and new players don't learn the game very quickly beating it casually is pretty difficult unless you know how the opponent's patterns work you are almost entirely playing this game on your reaction timing alone after a person beats this game casually and starts learning the speedrun they suddenly realize that they are in a completely different world and there are so many cool mechanics under the hood and once they get a grasp of that they get a taste of what it was like to be a real Prime Mike Tyson beating every opponent in the first round or all of the strategies fight mechanics and inside of speedrun knowledge makes what you do seem like complete magic to a person that doesn't have that Insight you can even see the difference from your past self a once difficult game has become so easy that there is now zero chance you would ever lose a fight ever again you almost feel like you could play the game blindfolded even with little practice this amount of knowledge is enough to satisfy most to delve into high score is to go deeper to the bottom of the iceberg of game mechanics and extend your knowledge of how each fight Works through all three rounds like I said before to run high score at an extremely high level you would need about 10 times more game knowledge than you would for the speedrun and most find that learning the speedrun is challenging enough from personal experience once you get good enough at the speedrun you feel like you're in complete control of a fight you know exactly what the opponent will or can do and you know exactly how to respond like a master chess player against a novice high score relinquishes this and you play handing much of the pace of the fight back into the game's hands as you take calculated risks all over the place and it's difficult to know if the decision you made was correct even if you get the result you wanted many of the other punch out speedrunners see me as a Fountain of Knowledge for this game and I can attribute much of that learning to playing high score the more points you want the more you will have to dive deeper and deeper and maybe that's what scares them we all know that once you learn to speedrun a game it can be tough or impossible to go back and play it casually you know too much about how it works well the more I continue to learn about punch out the more I found the speedrun strategies too simple and boring by diving too deep they are scared they won't love the speedrun anymore I really do think high score is a slepton category it's extremely interesting challenging and will completely push every faculty of your brain as long as you're willing to push to keep trying for higher scores while the 80 minutes it takes to complete a run isn't quick I don't think it's tremendously long either shorter than a 120 star speedrun I have made tutorials for some key mechanics and each of the fights which you can find in a playlist on my channel looking back on them I think they can be greatly improved I made the cruel error of assuming that a person would have pretty decent knowledge of how to speedrun the the game and would know how to execute most of the techniques in each fight also these tutorials cover the most effective strategies I know of and are not geared to new players of punch out but there are plenty of helpful tips I don't recommend attempting this run like salt did playing with no strategies or game plan will likely end in inconsistent results and frustration I've seen salt try this run two other times both he didn't complete pure game knowledge can only get you so far even the tutorials can't really teach you everything you have to really sink your teeth into each fight and try them out there are just too many situations to cover and explain there are some score Milestones I would like to see hit in my lifetime whether it be from myself or another upand cominging player you may even be able to pull me out of retirement I'm dying for the competition [Music]

Channel: Pap

Views: 15,266

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Id: vehJh4BI8G8

Length: 27min 6sec (1626 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2024