Pinball Scoring: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

{{quote|Scoring is quite unique in pinball; the game is notorious for being generous with "points," a unit of measurement analogous to the haypenny, the microsecond, and the nanometer -- they are all units of measurement that are too utterly small to be of any use whatsoever.|[http://rinkworks.com/lights/ Lights and Noises]}}

''More Zeroes, More Fun!''

 

 

And like currency, it can be subject to [[Ridiculous Future Inflation]].

 

The point-value equivalent of [[Rank Inflation]]. Compare [[Money for Nothing]], where this applies to currency instead of points. The same reason apply though; we feel special and powerful if we can casually buy something that costs 1500 (whatevers)... even if the relative value would make it equivalent to a 15 point item using a reduced currency count. See also [[Trope 2000]], another area in which extra 0s are added for the [[Rule of Cool]].

 

== Pinball ==

* The most visible use of this trope lies in the pinball medium. Machines routinely display scores in the millions, and often even greater, depending on the machine. In Spanish-speaking countries, pinball machines have obtained the nickname "maquinas del milliónes".

** ''Johnny Mnemonic'' has scores of roughly the same magnitude as ''AFM''. One of the keys to scoring is Spinner Millions, which will give you 10 million points in bonus for each spin of the spinner (For about 150-200 million each trip through it). On a good ball this can amount to billions of points. The bonus multiplier applies to this, so you can multiply your Spinner Millions total up to 4x. And by getting Hold Bonus, you are awarded your bonus from the previous ball not just once, but '''twice''' due to a [[Good Bad Bugs|good bad bug]]. There is also the Power Down wizard mode which typically awards several billion points.

** ''Who Dunnit?'' is another good example. Solving a case and catching the criminal starts a four-ball multiball where pretty much any shot scores up to 100,000,000 points. It's not hard at all to get a score in the billions.

*** Even the classic ''Pinball Fantasies'' caps out - at a trillion minus ten. The record stands at some 44 trillion.

*** ''Microsoft Pinball'' was also capped - at 999,999,950. You can never score in increments of less than 50.

** Pokémon Pinball. Scoring in the main game is already pretty ridiculous, but the [[Game Breaker]] Mewtwo bonus stage will give you 50 million points every time you hit him, adding up to around a billion points each time you play it. With a little bit of skill and a lot of patience, scores in the tens of billions or more are possible.

** Kirby's Pinball Land is somewhat of an aversion of this trope as most ways to score points are 'only' in hundred or thousand increments. The highest individual payoffs are 50,000 from defeating a boss, 77,700 from a top level jackpot, or the maximum of 99,990 in a bonus stage. The score loops back to zero after exceeding 99,999,990 points, which was probably just left in the game as it usually takes several days of play to reach it.

== Board Games ==

* In standard Japanese [[Mahjong]], all hand values are rounded up to the nearest 100 at the end of calculations. As a result, some competitions and games will show scores in thousands, e.g. 7.7 (thousand) instead of 7,700.

* The Here and Now versions of [[Monopoly]] multiply all the amounts of money from the original game by 10,000. This means that passing Go is worth 2 million dollars (U.S. Edition) or [[Global Currency|Monos]] (The World Edition).

** Back before the Euro, the French version used a hundred francs for one dollar: passing Go awarded 20,000F. Talk about an exchange rate!

 

== Card Games ==

** People have tried to make [[Rules Conversions|conversion systems]]. It ends in madness.

* When a classic gambling game such as poker is played for 'fun' (when the winner gets [[Bragging Rights Reward|little more than bragging rights over his buddies]]), it's routine for players to agree that the lowest-valued poker chip is worth $1,000, or $1 million, with higher-valued chips being multiples of that base. Everyone wants to feel like [[James Bond]].

** The same thing happens in gambling tournaments when played for money. A casino tournament with a $15 buyin will rarely give the player $15 in tournament chips; $1500 is a far more likely starting amount. Of course, the chips are useless outside of the tournament, and a player's winnings tend to be determined by a payout based on elimination order, so there isn't a need for a "tournament dollar" to correspond to real money in any way as long as all players start with the same amount.

 

== Live Action TV ==

* Taken [[Up to Eleven]] in a kids' Bible game show titled "Kids on the Move." The ''first'' round was a variation of [[Series/Hit Man|Hit Man]] (here's a short film, now answer some questions based on the film's dialogue) with questions worth ''35,000'' points each. The next round was a stunt round played by a different team outside the studio) which offered ''250,000'' points, and the final round (unscramble this Bible verse within 60 seconds) had a total of '''''500,000''''' points on the line. (If memory serves, it was something like 250,000 for solving the verse, 100,000 for identifying the book, chapter, and verse number, and 150,000 for solving the verse in a faster time.)

* Inverted by ''[[Sale of the Century|$ale of the Century]]'', where contestants were actually paid their scores in dollars... and each question was worth a measly $5. Of course, the point was to accumulate enough score money to buy the prizes at ridiculously low prices.

 

== Sports ==

** Although it has to be said, in a game in which you have a game score, a set score, and a match score to keep track of, it's actually a good idea to count at least one of them different from the two others, to easier keep track. Not sure if this was intentional, or just a happy side effect.

* In Quidditch, the [[Fictional Sport]] from ''[[Harry Potter]]'', scoring a goal is worth 10 points, and catching the [[Golden Snitch]] is worth 150 points. There doesn't seem to be a reason for them to not be worth one and 15, respectively.

** The 150 points from the snitch are explained in [[All There in the Manual|Quidditch through the Ages]], where it all started when a Golden Snidget (a bird) was released during a match with 150 galleons (which at the time was a huge sum, worth over ''a million'' galleons in modern terms) promised as a reward to the one who could catch it. The number was then kept when the Snidget catching was actually incorporated into the game.

** In non-universe terms, the point values were probably inflated so that the game would seem rather more fast-paced and interesting than it transpired to be, making it seem even beyond basketball in terms of 'action'. When someone says they won by a hundred points, that sounds like there's a lot going on, while in reality they were probably 5 goals down and then lucked out on the snitch.

* In [[Rugby Union]] and [[Rugby League]], a ridiculously large number of points in a match is often referred to as a "cricket score", a reference to the large number of runs usually scored by both sides in a game of cricket. This big a number of points isn't usually a good thing, as if achieved by only one team it means that the match was severely (often dangerously) one-sided, and if both teams get a very high score it means neither of them could defend.

 

* The [[Katamari Damacy|Katamari-clone]] ''[[The Wonderful End of the World]]'' parodies this by giving your score as a very literal count of how many items you've assimilated, with, written after it in brackets, '(billion)'.

* ''[[Guitar Freaks]]'' and ''[[Drum Mania]]'' played this trope straight up until V6; the value of each note is multiplied by your current combo, leading to mostly 8 or 9 digit scores for decently-skilled players. Averted as of the releases of V7 and XG, where the maximum score on any song is around 1,000,000.

* Seen in the arcade shoot-em-up ''[[Giga Wing]]'', needed because of how the game's score multiplying system works. A good player can easily get a ''score multiplier'' in the millions (meaning that the point value of every destroyed [[Mook]] is multiplied by a million), and decent final scores start in the trillions. In fact, this aspect of the scoring system is touted in the [[Attract Mode]].

** ''Giga Wing 2'' and ''Giga Wing Generations'' push the envelope, with the latter allowing you to have upwards of ''twenty'' digits.

* In the [[Neopets]] flash sidegame ''The Return of the Return of Dr. Sloth'', high scores rise exponentially with play skill, though it is one of the lower scoring of games with this distinction. The current high score board has only one entry in the hundred billions.

** This game has not only a score multiplier, but a ''score multiplier multiplier''!

** [http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/474239 The original Newgrounds version] was updated shortly after release; one of the changes was a more standard scoring system (items give you 1000 points instead of doubling the score).

* Averted in many Konami arcade beat-'em-ups of the early 1990s, like ''[[The Simpsons]]'' and ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]]'' - everything worth a point was worth exactly one point. Even the [[Final Boss]].

* ''[[Total Overdose]]'' is notable for an FPS, having a point system that simply represents points scored and aren't a form of currency. Initially exploration is rewarded with these, unlocking upgrades at arbitrary increments. Later these global points become irrelevant, but mission totals remain important for scoring performance and unlocking additional upgrades.

* ''[[Capcom vs. Whatever|Tatsunoko Vs Capcom]]'' measure damages in this manner. If you've been playing or watching the Japanese version, and have some knowledge of kanji, you'll notice that damages start in the ''ten thousands'' and can rise to the ''billions''. The English translation for non-Japanese regions revealed it in all its glory - a magazine screenshot shows Ryu landing a [[Kamehame Hadoken|Hadoken]] for 19 hits and 8.655 billion damage. Yeah.

* In ''[[Glider]] PRO'', all points come in multiples of 100. This was not the case in previous games.

* TI-89 calculator game "Drifter" had a problem with this. It was essentially a game of moving the player object left and right to avoid the ever-shrinking walls of a tunnel. The problem came in with the scoring system for the Classic mode. "Drifting," or not hitting the left or right keys to change your horizontal velocity, would give your entire score multiplers. Drifting one screen would add 25% of your current score to itself, two 50% (of the NEW score after the first screen), and each screen drifted 3 and after (consecutively) would double your score. You can already see where this is going if you drift for ten screens straight or so, but add to that the fact that each "level," for which the tunnel shrinks one pixel or so every 5-15 screens, increases the amount of points added for each tick. Stage 1 gives you one point for each tick, stage 2 gives you two, etc. On a particularly good run, you can get up to stage 15-20. One level is about 100-200 ticks by the way, considering that the first level gives you about that many points if you do very little drifting. tl;dr, the game can crash your calculator due to some massive memory overflow. Certainly nowhere near Giga Wing's and [[Mv C 2]]'s scores, but it probably could get that ridiculous with absolutely no inflation if the calculators were actually Windows XP computers. Fortunately, the mode that scored by only drifts, given arbitrary numbers of points instead of multipliers, did not have this problem. There were multipliers in the form of chaining multiple drifts together, but they only affected the points being earned, not total score, and chaining drifts is near-impossible in higher levels.

* [[Every Extend Extra Extreme]] has 20 digit scores.

* ''DJMAX Portable'' from the second installment onwards does this with [[Combos]], thanks to the [[Limit Break|Fever]] system (which multiplies how much your combo goes up when you hit a note) and the way hold notes are handled in combos. You can easily get 5,000 combo in a single song, even if the song only has 700 actual notes.

* Inverted with ''[[Beatmania IIDX]]'''s "Expert" scoring system; getting a Just Great yields 2 points, a Great yields 1 point, and every note judgement below is worth 0.

* ''[[Peggle]]'' developers Popcap Games noted that playtesters were strangely dissatisfied with their performance in the game. Popcap found that when some zeros were added to the scoring system, the game was much more satisfying.

* The smallest value of points you can score in ''[[Geometry Wars]]'' is 5 points, before multipliers.

** 4th mix's endless mode has "only" 32 digits, but it takes even longer to counter-stop than 3rd mix. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgugWIlzYbA See this video.] By comparison, 3rd mix's Endless mode takes around 250-300 stages of straight Perfects.

** Hell, in ''any'' of the DDR games before [[Supernova]], you have this trope. A 10-foot song garnered a maximum of 100,000,000 points.

* The HP and damage of the first ''[[Valkyrie Profile]]'' can get into this range. Damage easily gets into the high tens of thousands (and hundreds of thousands if properly done), with many millions of HP for high-end bosses, for no apparent reason other than dramatic effect.

* Almost all ''[[Super Robot Wars]]'' games use this too. Even at the beginnings of them, your units will have 4-digit to low 5-digit max HP and be dealing 4-digit damage.

* The money credits in the Japanese version of ''[[Gran Turismo]]'' has two more digits making the last two zeros meaningless. Example: 10,000Cr = 1,000,000Cr

* The ''[[Touhou Project]]'' games have a different scoring system for every individual game. In the first six games, potential scores [[Sequel Escalation|inflated over time,]] from 10-20 million in ''Story of Eastern Wonderland'' to over 100 million in ''Lotus Land Story'' and ''Mystic Square'', to over 600 million in ''Embodiment of Scarlet Devil''. From the seventh game, ''Perfect Cherry Blossom'', all subsequent main games (except the ninth) placed the focus of scoring to ''raising the value'' of Point Items, rather than just collecting them; potential scores are in the billions, depending on the game (''Imperishable Night'' is the highest with a record of over 6.3 billion; ''Mountain of Faith'' is only 2.2 billion).

** The spinoff games, ''Shoot the Bullet'' and ''Double Spoiler'', have the player take pictures of patterns. Base scores depend on the position of the boss and the number of bullets, but then bonus multipliers are added, ranging from how centered the boss is in the photograph, to having a large amount of bullets all be the same color, to having one of the bosses in her [[Petting Zoo People|cat form]] at the time.

* In the original ''[[Out Run]]'', you get up to tens of thousands of points per second just for driving, and if you finish, 1,000,000 points for every second you have left on the clock at the end.

* Doujin shooter ''[[Altenative Sphere]]'' is ridiculous in this respect. A normal playthrough of the lowest difficulty level will get you a ''twenty-digit'' score.

* Freeware game ''[[Distorted Travesty]]'' gives Awesome points for... well... just about everything, so you're going to end up with a lot of 'em. They actually do something too: the more you have, the more XP enemies give out.

 

 

== Real Life ==

** The SAT's scoring is not quite so wild as one thinks. It is designed so the mean is 500 per section and about 100 points is the standard deviation, leading to a normal bell curve where a 600 means "3 standard deviations below the mean on all sections" and a 2400 means "three sd's above the mean in all sections." The LSAT (the SAT for law school) is scored from 120 (did you answer anything right?) to 180 (maximum), making the first 120 points meaningless. The mean is roughly 150 and standard deviation about 10. Law schools frequently throw your score into a math formula with your GPA to create an "index," or measure of how competitive your academics are overall. The GRE is scored similarly to the SAT. However, the MCAT (med school) thoroughly averts this trope, with each of three categories rated from 1-15 and the sum total your final score. In all cases, the tests standardize so that a certain score is the mean and an interval the standard deviation. For the MCAT, about 8 is average and about 2.4 the Standard Distribution. Considering a thirty or so is necessary to get into most medical schools, most folks who test don't have very good odds of entering med school at all.

 

* Many video games with a continue feature increment your score by one point whenever you continue. Thus, high scores that end in 0 show more efficient gameplay than those that do not.

** Depending on the scoring system Some games cap the number at 9 continues. Others cap at 99 continues. Some even cap at 999 Continues. The game might also reset your score when you continue and then add the numnber of continues to your score.

** As of ''Brawl'', bonuses have been removed entirely, to the sadness of many. Now the ones digit represents the number of continues used.

* When playing games at Pogo, to ratio of games points of token value (for your cumulative token amount) varies from game to game. In some cases, the game score might even be only ''marginally'' related to token value.

[[Category:Video Game Tropes]]

[[Category:Pinball Scoring]]