Hints, tips, tricks.

[Ithaca]

Also, on Star Trek , if you travel diagonally constantly the enemy ships will appear and track diagonally up towards you and you can then hit the joystick down and fire quite accurately and kill them each time more easily

[ithica]

I have just caught 26 creatures on web wars . It may even have been 27 because I got excited and lost a count. Several of the creatures are invisible in the trophy room .some
Are just dots and there is one that blinks in and out and looks like music notes. I believe it’s possible to catch even more if you don’t die. I can share how it is possible to catch the initial 20 quite easily . As we all know , the last ones are hard when you collide with them even with the capture rod out . Unfortunately after 40 years of playing it , I’ve discovered a fairly simple technique to make the capture almost fool proof on the harder creatures . If I tell you guys you may regret it as I do now as it’s too easy when there was some
Mystery to it before lol . The bonus is I can now try to catch many more after the 20th and see how far it goes .

[Chainsaw]

Hi ithica.

Oh that's very interesting with capturing more than 20 creatures. I also did this a long time ago.

-> I noticed a long time ago, that more than 20 creatures existing, and some are invisible, or drawn as dots or weird lines.

-> Not long time ago (and not found time yet to figure it out) I noticed, that the 22 until 25 creatures are looking different on my European Vectrex with the European game version, than on the US / GCE Vectrex. Or this possibly also happened, because I tried it with the endless life version on the "Vectrex Multi Hacked" cartridge. I think it's depending of the ROM and possibly also RAM. Because if you captured the 20 official creatures, I think the game code will continue reading "scrap data" out of the ROM, and depending of the version, the scrap data "scrap data creatures" will look different. Because with the hacked version, I was not able to capture more than 24 or 25 creatures with the hacked version, because some strange lines were drawn then in the trophy room, that cause very strong screen flickering and slow downs. And in the normal version, I was not able to capture more than 25 creatures, because I died too often :-)

In my very old Youtube Video (very low and poor quality) you see the 22-24 creatures on my European Vectrex:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nezRHjqKPjk

Also on this picture here: 

Are "your" captured 22-24 creatures also like this? (The 21rd is invisible)

Will also try again to reach more than 26 again in the normal / unhacked version.

And yes: I also have a simple technic that is very easy, maybe you recognize on my video if it is the same like yours, or if you want, I also can tell / share here how I'm doing it :-)

Edit: Had in the past somewhere an article, about a lot of similar interesting stuff and unknown bugs and tricks in Vectrex games. Found the old articel, but the embedded videos are not working anymore. Will post some of them soon here, because I'm sure, some of them are completely unknown :-)


PS: Very important: Of course I did not want to belittle or devalue your performance. Capturing 27 creatures is awesome, and I think I only got 25 (?), so you are still the Web Wars king! :-) And great to see, that other people go beyond the scope of the original games or go beyond the limits of these games :-)

[Chainsaw]

Hello All.

This is some kind of bug or strange behavior (or useless knowledge) in the game Mine Storm, only tested with an European Vectrex. I think nobody ever found this, otherwise it occurs only in a situation that normally does not happen. I also cannot remember, how I found this.

- Start a new game ans loose all ships, except one / the last one.
- Try to fly on one of the big mines that are opening during the level start. Do this before all four mines are open.
- Until the four mines are open, it seems that there is no collision detection yet - you will fly into / over the mines.
- If your last ship is directly on a mine, it will explode after the last mine has opened.
-> And what happens then? The "UFO" appears during the game over screen, that normally only appears after all big and medium size mines have been shoot.

Difficult to explain: Better watch the video. (Very old and very poor quality.)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSCo6Z_r6TA

Sure you can find reasons for this game behavior in the code, but anyway, I wanted to share :-)

[Chainsaw]

Hello All.

In the game Solar Quest, if you don't shoot any enemies for a while (time dependent of the "phase") a ghost ship appears, that gives you 3500 points if you shoot it.

But did you know? You also can just fly over it / ram it, and "collect" it, similar like the survivors of the enemies, and this gives you 1000 points. In higher phases, in hectic situations, it can be helpful to know this, and just ram the ship instead of shooting it... I think it is a bug, but maybe it was intended as hidden feature, because the ship is named "ghost ship" in the manual.

youtu.be/Q4hTxP_b0QI?t=30

[VectorX]

^Yeah, it's always best to shoot it for more points. But when things start going quickly sometimes it'll appear and you'll fly right into it before you can change course. As long as you collect your points and it doesn't shoot you it's all good though

[ithica]

How do you paste a picture from your iPhone in a thread ?

[ithica]

I couldn’t figure out how to paste a picture of the 30 creatures but I was able to make my avatar picture the Jpg I was trying to upload . Lol not techie at all im afraid . But you can see the new creatures there

[VectorX]

^You can't unless you post a picture from a remote site and then link to it, like Photobucket. Every new Proboards forum has a limit for a certain number of attachments and this one hit that limit years ago. This site has had gift cards donated to it to pay for extra storage, which I've wanted to use for the Vector War contests but Proboards won't accept them. So it's not you.

[ithica]

thanks you. here is a link to a youtube video of the trophy room and 30 creatures. there are 4 that are invisible.

www.youtube.com/shorts/-PPoifm7CpE

[Chainsaw]

That's awesome ithica, I think 30 is a world record!

[Chainsaw]

I continue a bit to share my bug/cheat/tricks etc. knowledge, this time about "Spike"... Please note, that I'm showing here my very very old Youtube videos, and these are in an awful quality, but I don't want to make new ones at the moment.
Sorry for any spelling mistakes, especially wrong tenses, or weird descriptions, my English is not bad but it is difficult for me to describe such things.

1) I think this first thing is already well known, that you can do high scores (up to 40000 at once) when you place the cage / lattice bars at the leftmost place on the screen and then jump into them. (The vertical lines that you have to jump in to rescue Molly.) It can be necessary, to press several times the button 1, until the lattice bars are at the correct place. If they are not left enough at the screen border, the trick does not work. If they are, you will die / loose a life (because you are jumping out of the allowed area) but during you die, you earn a lot of points. You can do this two or three times during a game, but it is difficult to do it a second time, because increasing the score, increases also the difficulty. (I use this trick not to earn a lot of score, but to increase the difficulty level, because the game is pretty boring at the beginning, if you know it well.)

youtu.be/0qdX-R0-M6U?t=30

The second bug, I discovered purely by chance while playing, and was then able to reproduce it. There is a glitch: If you rescue Molly, and die in the same time, because there is an enemy at the same place than the cage / vertical lines. Then you die, Spike says "Darnit" - but the game routine continues with "oh Spike" and the game starts again. But then with the "end" screen and zero lifes. And you cannot jump (pressing button 4 will quit the game) but fall down to the ground without dying. There you can walk around. Difficult to explain what I mean, so watch the Youtube video. Also it really makes no sense to reproduce this, it's just to show the bug in the game.

youtu.be/oZZ9Kct05ok?t=21