laughing_gas and psychotic worm, good synopsis. The fact alone that technically I'm beating psychoticworm's video, which is itself a "highest score" run, here is a VERY indepth explanation of the difference you point out of highest score time attack and highest possible score:
This is a little tricky and something a little hard to explain. There are a large number of bonuses, making combinations of bonuses quite possible. Also, it is possible to get more bonus points with more time; however, I opted to get the most points per stage in as short amount of time as possible. This differs from a fastest time attack, where the goal is to have the opponent beaten in as little time as possible, skipping the bonuses, with the shortest final time after having beaten Master Hand. In order to make my run fast and interesting, I'm trying to make a high score time attack, to get the highest score in the shortest amount of time. While you get points for beating the opponent fast, you get more points for getting the bonuses, as is evident if you compare the final score of nico's run vs. psychoticworm's final score.
Mathematically, you get 50 bonus points for each second, so each second wasted is 50 points. However, that is offset by the bonus points that you can get if you wait for certain circumstances to occur. For instance, I calculated that, for the Arwing clear of 4,000 points (on the lower end of bonus points), you'd have 80 seconds before the time wasted to get the bonus outpaces the bonus points from Arwing clear. I decided that, making such sacrifices of time to get other bonuses was not what I wanted. I wanted a time attack of high score, because it would be more interesting, fast paced, and entertaining to see what redicilously high score can be gotten in such a short amount of time. It is totally a personal choice, and the superior one IMO at that since this is a timeattack site.
Now, let me compare it to StarFox 64, where Vidar is working on a high score run. Starfox 64 is a mostly sidescrolling game, where you can't really control your speed, besides breaking and boosting, although you have waiting periods for those; in general, it's a sidescroller, and you for the most part cannot beat the game faster than intended.
With Super Smash Bros., you have a time limit of 5 minutes per stage, and depending on your skill you can beat it in as little as 10 seconds or it could take you the whole 5 minutes. But, based on skill you CAN decrease the amount of time it takes. so therefore, scorewise you could either try to, in the 5 minute limit, try to get as high a score as possible, but unlike StarFox64 you can beat it extremely fast. It is beacuse of the 5 minute limit that two goals exist: highest score in fastest time (because, based on skill you can get a high score in a low time) and highest possible score in the 5 minute time limit. I chose the more time attack oriented goal of highest score in lowest time.
So higher scores than what I'm achieving are possible, but you must waste time to do so. Also, my run is competetive- if someone gets a higher score in a less amount of time than I do. Therefore, it is a solid goal for this game.
I hope that clears it up, sorry for it being so long and wordy but it hits the nail on the head of what my run is about.
The fact that I am going to by default get the highest score, as compared to what anyone else has got (seeing as psychoticworm holds the record of 2.4 million), is just icing on the cake. unless someone makes a dedicated run going for the absolute highest score possible without bothering about time, then it's similarly going to hold the higest score title.
when I'm done, I might consider doing this, since I proved that the two are seperate categories.
1: Fastest time
2: Highest Score in shortest amount of time
3: Highest physically possible score in any amount of time.
as I mentioned, and this is probably the most important point, so I'll reiterate, since these are all competitive, that makes each it's own category. Someone could A) try to get the fastest time possible, as antd is doing to beat nico, B) try to get the highest score in the lowest time, as I'm doing to beat psychoticworm, or C) get the highest score that the game can produce.
