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The Arcade Game Tip Thread
Yeah, this one will probably drop like the proverbial stone, but wtf.
Here is the one-stop thread for tips for all your favorite new and old-time arcade machines. Being a man in my, a-hem, thirties, my tips will tend to be about machines that are better found on MAM..., uh, some unnamed emulator somewhere.
Robotron: 2084: Can be found in the totally awesome Williams Arcade Classics collection, which I found in a Wal Mart in Auburn AL about 5 years ago. I absolutely ruled this game as a kid, and I still play it today.
But, it is much harder playing it on the keyboard, so I'm not getting anywhere near the high scores that I'm used to... which is good, 'cause I don't have hours and hours to play a single game.
General strategy for every wave should start with the following: Go after the Spheroids! These things are the most dangerous creatures in the game - not only do they spit out those Enforcers, but they take great pleasure in purposely ramming your ass at the start of a level.
But... be sure to leave 1 enforcer alive at the end of the wave, if possible, so you can rack up on the people. Nice thing about enforcers is that they are easy to avoid and the closer you get to them, the slower their shots move (same thing goes for tanks).
The "Brain" waves, which occur every 5 waves (5, 10, 15...) can be had for major points because of all the people. One glitch (I think) in the game has all the Brains focus in on one specific human at the start of the level - if you can keep that human alive, the brains will NOT go after any others. But as soon as the human is killed or rescued, that frees the brains to go after all the others. In the "Mommy" waves, the human the brains go after first is the only Mikey in the wave - keep him alive and you'll do OK.
"Tank" waves: Most people play with the following strategy: head out towards the walls and shoot in, killing as many as you can while waiting to be killed by some bank shot. BIG MISTAKE. As with the enforcers, the tanks' shots move much... more... slowly the closer you are to the tank, so the best strategy is actually to stay close to the middle. If you get killed and respawned, the best thing to do is pick a side (left/right) that you'll want to hang in, kill all the tanks on that side, and then (staying in the relative middle) kill all the tanks on the other side.
Tanks also have a 20-shot limit for the entire wave. That means, that if 20 of the tanks shots go without being shot down by you, the tanks
will stop shooting.
Due to the 8 bit processor, the machine could only count up to 255. Once it hit 256, it "rolled over" to 0. This causes some interesting and frustrating things to happen:
1. Once you hit wave 256, you started again on wave 1.
2. If you get 255 extra men, and you reach that 256th extra man, the machine will roll over and give you 0 extra men. You still have the man you're playing. I lost two 25,000,000 point (6 hours each) games this way. Both times I was going for the record of, at that time, 100,000,000 points. I was quite pissed. I later rationalized it as giving the machine such a butt-whupping, that it quit. Rolling over your men is as close to beating Robotron as you can get.
(btw, before y'all ask I don't really give a tin-shiite about the +1. I'm just looking for responses.)
Here is the one-stop thread for tips for all your favorite new and old-time arcade machines. Being a man in my, a-hem, thirties, my tips will tend to be about machines that are better found on MAM..., uh, some unnamed emulator somewhere.
Robotron: 2084: Can be found in the totally awesome Williams Arcade Classics collection, which I found in a Wal Mart in Auburn AL about 5 years ago. I absolutely ruled this game as a kid, and I still play it today.
But, it is much harder playing it on the keyboard, so I'm not getting anywhere near the high scores that I'm used to... which is good, 'cause I don't have hours and hours to play a single game.General strategy for every wave should start with the following: Go after the Spheroids! These things are the most dangerous creatures in the game - not only do they spit out those Enforcers, but they take great pleasure in purposely ramming your ass at the start of a level.
But... be sure to leave 1 enforcer alive at the end of the wave, if possible, so you can rack up on the people. Nice thing about enforcers is that they are easy to avoid and the closer you get to them, the slower their shots move (same thing goes for tanks).
The "Brain" waves, which occur every 5 waves (5, 10, 15...) can be had for major points because of all the people. One glitch (I think) in the game has all the Brains focus in on one specific human at the start of the level - if you can keep that human alive, the brains will NOT go after any others. But as soon as the human is killed or rescued, that frees the brains to go after all the others. In the "Mommy" waves, the human the brains go after first is the only Mikey in the wave - keep him alive and you'll do OK.
"Tank" waves: Most people play with the following strategy: head out towards the walls and shoot in, killing as many as you can while waiting to be killed by some bank shot. BIG MISTAKE. As with the enforcers, the tanks' shots move much... more... slowly the closer you are to the tank, so the best strategy is actually to stay close to the middle. If you get killed and respawned, the best thing to do is pick a side (left/right) that you'll want to hang in, kill all the tanks on that side, and then (staying in the relative middle) kill all the tanks on the other side.
Tanks also have a 20-shot limit for the entire wave. That means, that if 20 of the tanks shots go without being shot down by you, the tanks
will stop shooting.
Due to the 8 bit processor, the machine could only count up to 255. Once it hit 256, it "rolled over" to 0. This causes some interesting and frustrating things to happen:
1. Once you hit wave 256, you started again on wave 1.
2. If you get 255 extra men, and you reach that 256th extra man, the machine will roll over and give you 0 extra men. You still have the man you're playing. I lost two 25,000,000 point (6 hours each) games this way. Both times I was going for the record of, at that time, 100,000,000 points. I was quite pissed. I later rationalized it as giving the machine such a butt-whupping, that it quit. Rolling over your men is as close to beating Robotron as you can get.
(btw, before y'all ask I don't really give a tin-shiite about the +1. I'm just looking for responses.)
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