Score Screen

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

You've just beaten a level and a screen comes up tallying up the points you got from the coins you collected, and from any bonus objectives you accomplished. The points are totaled up from each source, then the numbers are "drained" odometer style into your total score. Very common in games with Scoring Points.

Some games just run a clock, in which case the odometer (or digital clock) runs up until the amount of time you used is reported. Often it will show the (ridiculously unreachable) "Par" score the developers of the game used to get to the exit. Like you've just sweated your ass off to finish the level, it took you 48 minutes to finish and it was really hard to get it even that quickly. So below your 48:13, is the developer's Par time: 1:45. Well, maybe not totally unreachable, you just do like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day when he explained how he was able to toss cards into a hat and never miss once: "Oh, not much practice, eight, ten hours a day, every day for six months."

In newer games, Scoring Points are often replaced with statistics and a rating of the player's performance. In this case, they're vulnerable to Rank Inflation.

Examples of Score Screen include: