Why did score become irrelevant? As a kid did you ever care about score?
High score is for endless arcade games. It never made sense in something like SMB but developers kept adding it to games due to cultural inertia.Wolfenstein 3D is another example of a very late game with a pointless high score system.
I literally couldn't care less, I just wanted to get to the end of the game and move on to the next one
Video games progressed beyond being merely a challenge of player's skill to being a structured narrative experience.
>>12109285The only time I have ever cared about score is when playing shmups.
never paid any attention to it and i dont think hardly anyone did
>>12109285It became irrelevant because it was boring and better systems became easy to implement quite early in the history of video gaming. Even something stupid and superficial like a special "congratulations you won" screen at the end of a game that you can only see if you do ESPECIALLY well is fundamentally superior to a score. If the reward for playing especially well in something interactive like an advanced secret stage you have to fight through, all the better. And designing some kind of special unlockable content like that, that only the very most skilled players will ever see, is pretty easy even on fairly primitive hardware. In many games it's trivial to come up with difficult challenges that NO human will ever achieve without cheating. There really isn't any need anymore for infinitely looping games that measure your progress simply by increasing a single number and letting you see how high the number has gotten. Not that those are bad, the old ones can be great and it's fine to make new ones, but there's no real need to.Of course the dark side of this is insufficiently interactive moviegames.As a kid, I NEVER cared about score. As an adult, I first began caring about it a bit in certain games that gave me extra lives for scoring high. Later, I learned to enjoy going for high scores in old arcade-style infinitely looping games. That is fun, if the game is good enough. But it's still just one boring number.My favorite substitute for a high score is creative achievement, as in a building game like Pontifex where you actually design something original that wins, instead of merely completing a pre-written story such as "Mario beats Bowser and saves the princess". I've made some really crazy functional artworks in games like that.
Score games were old shit before the Famicom had even reached its twilight years. As early as about 1988, really. But the seeds were planted around '86, were there were a bunch of big games (Zelda, DQ) that lacked real scores, and that paved the way for everything else. It's kinda hard to care about scores when home games can facilitate longer and more adventure-driven experiences than dedicated arcade machines
Only characters in the movies cared about scores in SMB games. These days, you could make a competitive scene out of scoring in Super Mario Bros, but you'd have to wait for the speedrunning scene to die down first.
>>12109285Blame KojimaHe started the trend of 'movie as a game'
>>12109398He also invented the camera
>>12109285>as a kid did you ever care about score?In certain contexts, where a high score can unlock things, yes, I did. Outside of that? No. Never...Unless it was on a cabinet in some public space.
>>12109321as an (avid) fellow shmuper, score is crucial to the genre, in most cases it trumps how far you get. (world records, for example, are based on score, not how far you go.) tetris is another example where score is an important skill metric (but not the only one). but yeah, in a platformer where you can just keep arbitrarily racking up points, there's not much point to it other than the satisfaction of "seeing number get bigger," which isn't nothing. it gives a sense of continuity compared to if it wasn't there at all, quantitatively tracking all you've done so far. but no, i never really cared about it as a kid unless it was central to the game.
Score was irrelevant in early console+arcade games because none of them have score systems worth a damnWhen arcade games actually started getting good scoring systems, normalfags stopped caring or just credit fed, so no one learned how to make a good one
>>12109285There was never a point>games don't save high score when you turn it off, so any high score you get is DUDE TRUST ME unless you had a camera and took a picture of your screen (like how Nintendo Power would ask)>was a home console so nobody else sees your high score unless you invite them into your house the same day you made that high score since the game won't save it>games without a time limit and respawning enemies mean completely possible to just max out score by sitting in one place and killing easy enemies
>>12109474>>games don't save high score when you turn it off, so any high score you get is DUDE TRUST MEYou realize people also just simply try to best their own scores anon... for fun. You're brain rotted by internet competition.
>>12109285No but I care about it now and most of the games I play in my downtime are for score
Scoring is Kino but the game need a timer to make it good
>>12109475Arcade competition.
>>12109527Sure, but thats different. The context was about home consoles, and ones without score saving
>>12109398>>12109376Do tendies actually believe Nintendo invented everything about video games?
>>12109285only time i care about score is when i need an extra life.
>>12109285Score's dumb in many console games because it's often implemented wrong. SMB1's score system in particular is kind of retarded, as others have pointed out already. I love score in arcade games, though, it lets me track how good I've gotten and gives me a target to beat next time.
>>12109569Tendies believe in the nintendo millennial youtuber canon of history, where the atari crash was global and every arcade title is single screen like pacman
>>12109569if its not in smash brothers it doesn't exist to them
>>12109569Maybe, but why would the Kojima comment be relevant to that statement?
>>12109285Because early games were extremely simple so just counting score was a way to gauge a player's prowess. As games got a little more complex, this remained valid for a time, primarily in arcade and arcade-like games, but eventually you go in a certain new direction and reach a point where it's simply redundant for what you're doing.That said, experience points, levels, and money can kind of be looked at as pseudo-score when it comes to RPGs.>>12109398Nigger, games were moving away from simple score counting before anyone fucking knew who he was.Doom, 1993, is all about combat and exploration, with paper thin plot, yet it axed its score system during development because they decided it was simply vestigial to what they were doing.Keeping score didn't end with Doom either, people kept doing it for games for years after, but just the same it was widely realized to simply be unnecessary for what a lot of devs wanted to do, and that wasn't just movie games.
>>12109285>>12109321I only ever cared because of extends, still have my notebook pages to keep track of how many points until the next extra life for each game
>>12109285>As a kid did you ever care about score?Nope.I liked putting ASS in the highscore table of arcade games. I never played "for score" though, I just played to have fun and play as long as I could (and of course if there were certain things that gave more score I would do them because achieving that was fun, not because it would look better in the total).OP, do you think you'll ever come close to understanding what video games were like before you were born? Why are you physically incapable of just enjoying them on your own terms, without obsessing over begging to have history explained to you and posting an endless array of irrelevant garbage threads?
>>12109285bro hit me up with the unlisted url to your next youtube retro game video essay
>Arcade games are "too arcade"
>>12109915I played arcade games to reach the end not for score
>>12109915Where is the post you're quoting?
>>12109915Who are you addressing?
Scores aren't irrelevant. Some devs will figure out how to re-implement them in a way that's more appealing to new generations. It just takes time. But I know this will happen because a lot of gamers are interested in speedrunning, and in some games, no-hit runs. These are just ways to implement scoring systems in games that don't have them. The children yearn for the scores.
>>12109295In SMB 3-2, you can keep grinding for points by dying after you get a 1-up from the Koopas. If it were arcade and you couldn't get 1-ups that way, it might have a point, because paying more money = higher score.
>>12110024Speedrunners are human garbage. The entire concept is abomination.
>>12110024Minecraft did it pretty good
>>12109285Never noticed the score, until I got a switch. As a kid it never registered.
>>12110032Games with scoring system frequently reward you for playing fast. Speedrunning is downstream from that.
>>12110024i like you anon, and hope you're right>>12110032hard disagree. while i personally prefer to take my time in games, there is absolutely legitimate appeal (i've dabbled in Mega Man X and Doom speedruns -- picrel, tho i don't claim to be good). i wouldn't normally recommend a youtube channel but in all seriousness, check out Summoning Salt. completely enamored me to the speedrunning world (as a spectator). it's a fun, super-challenging, and legit genre, but not for everyone.
>>12110059Games with scoring systems were either designed with the scoring system in mind, in which case it's fine, because that's the game, or else they were a holdover with little thought put into it (like Mario games, even as an extension given how easy and frequent it is to be served 1-ups). "Speedrunning" a game that is DESIGNED for a more engaging and connecting experience is positively nauseating. This is the problem, it's an abomination that destroys the experience that is being offered to the player. It's repulsive.
>>12110073Or is it finding a new experience that's already in the game but wasn't known to the developers? Speedrunning doesn't eliminate the intended play method, it's just an alternate way of doing things.
>>12110079>Or is it finding a new experienceNo, it isn't. It's human garbage and it's very dramatically something only zoomers are into because they lack the capacity to form an emotional connection to a game. They can only view games as commodities and scorecards. It's the most soulless thing imaginable. Abomination.
>>12110082>tell us more about your irrational hatred of speedrunning and how little you know about it
>>12110082>form an emotional connection to a gameSuper gay. What's your high score in Defender, bro?
>>12110024>Scores aren't irrelevant. Agree, they have their place, it's just that they stopped being this endemic feature of near every single type of game, when in reality they are best suited for only certain ones.>Some devs will figure out how to re-implement them in a way that's more appealing to new generations.Maybe.
>>12110082>something only zoomers are intoYou are intellectually detached from the world, speedrunning began in earnest before zoomers were born.>they lack the capacity to form an emotional connection to a gameYou sound like the biggest and most pretentious faggot saying that. Do you make video essays in your spare time?
>>12110082Speedrunning started with Quake and Doom
>>12109830>That said, experience points, levels, and money can kind of be looked at as pseudo-score when it comes to RPGs.The game Guardian Legend uses score like EXP points in a way, in that when you reach certain thresholds you gain an extra health unit.
>>12109285nobody ever cared, there were there because the only experience/inspiration console devs had were from arcade games. It's also why the difficulty was often bullshit, it's not that they hated you but that's just what they knew from arcade games.
One petty and stupid thing i thought was dumb in SMW was that getting coins that were floating got you 0 points. Seeing numbers go up as you run through coins feels better.
>>12109285>Why did score become irrelevant?It's probably still a thing in any game with online leaderboards, but otherwise it was always a self-imposed challenge (think "no death" or "no hit" or "beat the game by only using X" challenges) and in many cases you don't really need a visual indication for such challenges.>As a kid did you ever care about score?No, and it's probably why I wasn't a big fan of Rayman 3 back in 2003 - the entire game is built around score system and it's not about collecting lums like in Rayman 2.But as years went by I actually started to appreciate Rayman 3's score system because it added a lot of replayability to the game.Like, you can casually achieve pretty impressive stuff just by chaining combos properly:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaZX6dfhGK0And if you want to go full exploit mode and abuse every tool at your disposal (beyond the stuff that would make chaining combos trivial, like infinite duration for combos) then you can achieve some truly impressive stuff:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGFpXZZwAvQ
>>12109285Kind of always irrelevant. Anyone who doesn't talk about how you only looked at scores with your friends when trading discs for 95 don't get it.
>nobody ever ca-
>>12110613uh, zoomersbros...
every person that doesn't like scorekeeping doesn't like objectivity
>>12110613>most girls only played the Lolo game >some chad made his girlfriend play the Arabian game with him
>>12109285High scores rewarded the arcade players with extra lives and bragging rights. Home systems used high scores to award extra lives and achievements like trophies and other bragging rights. Eventually games evolved beyond of that.
>>12110613>9 out of 14 games just say "finished" even though most of them have recordable scoresThis literally proves OP's point, retard.
>>12110693>same last name>girlfriendBased Alabaman retard.
>>12110024Time Attack and No Mistakes naturally emerge for basically any task universally.Scoring system meanwhile cannot due to the system itself having to be designed by a human (either the software dev make one deliberately or the player themselves come up with one)
>>12109285>As a kid did you ever care about score?I tried to get into nintendo power on a few games I was really good at, you could take a picture of your high score and send it in. Never made the cut though.
>>12109285Score games of the time often failed to provide meaning to the scores.You wouldn't get rewards or acknowledgements for high scores, and they'd disappear when you turn the game off. There was no benchmark to aim for in many games, including many with a default high score table that was designed to be emptied quickly.Fast completion often became the preferred metric for proficiency at a game, rather than wracking up the highest scores. In SMB1 specifically, it was trivial to achieve the maximum possible high score if you knew about the infinite 1-up trick and farmed lives and points, or even without that trick if you noticed there's a level where you could kick one koopa shell to knock over a bunch of enemies, get lots of point and extra lives, and take a death to repeat this process.Games like Metroid also rewarded faster completion times, and item completion percentages became an alternative scoring system that eliminated hard to control variables like abusing respawns and enemy kill farming.Mega Man also started with a scoring system, but had bizarre choices like randomizing the points reward for defeating a boss when you select your stage, instead of awarding points based on your performance (e.g. fewer lives lost, more enemies defeated). Mega Man Zero would later implementing a ranking system with metrics like these, and is a highlight feature that encourages replayability effectively.Kid Icarus is notable for having a very meaningful score system.By earning points through defeating enemies, you extend your life bar, get bargaining power at shops, enable the use of enchanted weapons, and factor into which ending you get. Your gameplay performance via some hidden metrics also determines whether or not gods bless you with additional strength (shown as 1-5 arrows with 4 upgrades possible).
>>12110638Make no mistake, when I play games like Wild Guns, watching my score counter climb as I blast away, that's a nice little addition which just makes that exact kind of game feel more "right," and that's before accounting for me getting extra lives or screen clearing bombs for it.Even though I consider Doom a superior game, I actually like that Wolfenstein 3D and Rise Of The Triad have a score counter, and there's items you collect solely for increasing score. I just wish for games along those lines but with more tangible purposes for the score, like unlockables or upgrades or something.You get lives in those games for score, but lives don't particularly mean much because you can save and load whenever you want anyway.
The virgin high scoreThe chad kill screen
>>12109285the only time I've cared about score was when me and my friend were playing the same game around the same time and we'd compare our scores
>>12110150Nintendo employees/testers were speedruning SMB levels.
This game has a score system
>>12111043kill screens change scoring from points to time
>>12109285I never consider it, personally.
>don't ever reach the end of the game>still get hardcapped at 999999 by stage 9Love scores when they reward the player with a 1up, more so in 1cc's, but by that point it's no longer the score but the resources it gives you what really matters
only when it mattered
>>12114143
>>12109285>Why did score become irrelevant?It never did, it just changed. I'd argue they're more relevant now than ever. Before we had the issue of communication, how to tell others that I'm good at this game if they can't see my score when I turn off the console? Well, nowadays multiplayer games have ranked modes that award you with things like badges and profile icons for reaching a certain Elo or rank. Single player games let you share achievements. People care about those and they're the modern score IMO.
Even as a kid, I could just intuitively tell when score is relevant and when it isn't, because you naturally find yourself caring or not. I guess you could say there's 3 categories: score that's completely irrelevant to your experience, score that's kind of like a gate, and score you actually care about as it's the whole point. I'll give an example for each. Super Mario World is an example where the score is completely irrelevant. I could not give a single fuck about my score, it's the furthest thing from my mind. Sonic Adventure 2 (Battle) is an example of a game where the score is like a gate. I'm conscious of the score only in as far that I get just enough for an A rank. After getting an A rank in any one mission, I wouldn't be interested in ever trying to get another A on that mission but with an even higher score. And finally, Crazy Taxi is an example of a game where score is the whole point. Every time I play Crazy Taxi, my goal is to try and earn more cash than I've earned before, and the cash is essentially the score.
I always thought score was odd in Sierra games. I guess it's to offer some semblance of replayability, but come on.
>>12114637That's an interesting way of viewing things. My response to the thread was going to be something along the lines of>home releases are much more designed around completion than score>even compared to arcade games you can complete>so it's often hard to say if the in-game score accurately reflects you interacting with the presented challengeand I hadn't really thought about the fact that achievements are the direct answer to that. Games that focus more on milestones would of course have a more milestone-centric way of gauging skill and accomplishment.
>>12109591the Result Screen says Kiss My Ass
>>12109524bonus timer is better
>>12109285It's called XP now, after the gamification of games
>>12116398>the gamification of gamesAre zoomers really this retarded?
>>12116428Obsessed with 30 year old family menAlso, gamification was heavily astroturfed in universities and the like a few years ago, the inclusion of experience and leveling mechanics (mobile game tier design) in pretty much every game these days can definitely be called gamification
>>12116436I suppose that it can. I like RPGs, but I don't want all of those same mechanics in all of my games, often they are better off different.On the flip side, I hate how Bethesda took out more and more RPG elements from their games as they went, Morrowind was such a perfect balance to me.Things like these is why I kinda stopped paying attention to AAA games much after 7th gen, it felt like everyone was just doing increasingly inferior and more boring versions of 7th gen games that I actually liked.
>>12109285Ironically SMB1 sabotages any real reason to care about its score. You get an extra life if you get enough points but the abundance of 1-up mushrooms undermine that. You get points when you collect coins but you're more focused on the coin counter going up and being closer to another 100 coins not the score count.
>>12109962When you get good enough on a game to the point where reaching the end becomes par for the course, you'll start to look for a different way of measuring your prowess and comparing yourself with people of similar skill, what's the point of caring about score in a game like Dodonpachi when you are yet to be good enough to reach Hibachi?
>>12110032Never played a racing game, bro?
>>12109285>Why did score become irrelevant1.) high score only had practical use in arcades2.) games for home consoles started getting endings so people gave even less of a shit about scores and more about just "beating the game"
>>12116428Yes. In the context of modern games I've seen people complain about having to play "without any reward" when some gamified progression mechanism is not working properly. The game company is trying to get you to play as much as possible, long past the point when the game itself is actually fun, and RPG-like progression is a proven way to achieve that.
>>12117190No I'm a huge pussy
shit. I'm making a game that's retro-inspired (i know, i know) and have a score system simply for the nostalgia... I'm seriously considering scrapping the score system after seeing this thread though because it does seem a bit redundant. The only benefits i could see of it are so people could compete in co-op mode and also when you die, your score resets to zero so it adds replay value for someone who wants a better score, but who really cares? Should i keep it?
>>12110613>Castlequest>FinishedMan, I wish. I lost my patience with that game.
>>12118523Make the score a currency to buy upgrades/consumables for future runs.
>>12118523Shop currency. Game seems to have zombies and tentacles so im guessing demons or cthulu. In that case>actual score is x>spending puts you in "debt" for as long as current score value is lower than x>while in debt you get hell/insanity monsters aka extra enemies>as long as they are on screen harassing you your debt ticks down>can let them build in number to pay faster>can kill them for safety but obviously slows down debt recoveryI dunno, im rambling.
>>12110178Wonder Boy 2 as well. Since your score resets to 0 when you game over, this results in the game giving you more health the longer you're able to play on a single credit.
>>12115375Score in adventure games were a thing since literally the original Adventure. And people absolutely compared scores with each other in those games.
>>12109285never cared about it, the end screen was all that mattered
>>12118523>>12118545Seconding that. Tyrian used its score as currency for its story mode, you could purchase upgrades, weapons and even ships between stages. (Though it also had Arcade modes where the score was just score and upgrades had to be picked up during the levels.)You could also make it more interesting by having some degree of strategy to earning big points (a score system), ranks that unlock stuff, or what >>12118606 suggested, but in the end you'll just have to figure out if it works to make the game more fun. Good luck anon.Also since you're shooting monsters in the streets, you could call the score "street cred(its)"
>>12109285I didn't care about score as a kid but now I do
>>12110028>because paying more money = higher score.How? In almost all arcades when you use a continue your score resets back to 0
>>12119578Bullets shifting side to side as you move filters me
>>12109285When I was a kid playing SMB for the first time I asked my dad what the numbers in the corner meant. He said it was the score. I asked what a score was. He said it was all my points. I asked what points were.So no, I never cared.
+1up
>>12109285It didntNintendo games just had bad score systems that they only kept because they were expected until they finally got rind of themI love score systems when they are good so nothing of value was lost when nintendo stopped bothering
>>12122750I have to say it wasnt just nintendo, sega also had horrible score systems like in sonic games and in sega's case is more damning because they should had known better as they made arcade games with good score systems.
>>12122754Yeah I have to assume it was a case of the console division being too separate from the arcade division. Nintendo made decent score systems in arcades as well, but then you look at their first party NES games and it's like the scores are some foreign thing they don't know how to employ
>>12109285Not for a game like this. Even for arcade games I cared more about clearing boards than racking up points, if I made it into the top list that's cool but I was just playing for fun. During covid lockdowns I played 2600 with my parents a lot and we'd play for high scores. We stayed up drinking one night and were getting into the 75k-85k range pretty consistently on centipede but I have no idea if that's close to a high score or not.
>>12119618Truly it is the most mature scorekeeping method.
>>12109285>Why did score become irrelevant?Not retro>As a kid did you ever care about score?Of course. On many early games that was one of the most important aspects of the game.
I play for score in games like Bomberman where score is really the main appeal in single-player mode. Some late retro-era games like SA2B also made score really important, since 100%ing the game requires high scores.
>>12123649Spore become irrelevant by the third generation which is retro
>>12110024it makes more sense for the average player to be tested on individual segments with letter grades rather than some intractable overall number. that sort of thing was cool way back in the quaint days where scores had an actual social presence inside a spot rather than hundred of thousands of gamertags.
>>12123687>Sporelmfao. Zoom zoom has not retro on the brain.
>>12109285>As a kid did you ever care about score?nope text adventures don't have scores and in arcades it was for me about playing for as long as possible for a coin or seeing new levels not the score
>>12124760>nope text adventures don't have scoresImagine trying to pull off such a pseud larp without having ever even finished any text adventures that have scores.>in arcades it was for me about playing for as long as possible for a coin or seeing new levels not the scoreImagine larping about playing so long on a single coin and seeing all these new levels and not having your name at the top of ever high score list. Imagine being so ignorant of arcade game mechanics that you aren't even aware that's the inevitable outcome of what you're larping about doing.
>>12124760>text adventures don't have scoresjesus christ what is this board, why are we cursed to suffer forever
>>12124760Yeah even as a kid I wanted to see the next level not get some high score
>>12125332>even as a kidSo right now and for the next several years
>>12125497kek he's never gonna recover from that
>>12124760How did you manage to be this misinformed? I'm impressed
>>12124760This, when I went to arcades i would just put aaa on the high score screen because who gives a fuck? I wasn't even the only one.
>>12126660>who gives a fuck?No one gives a fuck about things that only happened in your pathetic posturing larp
>>12126660translation: mediocre scores
>>12123687it was always irrelevant
Huhuhuh huh huhScoreHuh huh
