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and highly frowned upon at best in other situations. The goal with a high score is not simply to find the best or fastest way to achieve the high score. Rather, it’s all about working within a rule set that the community deems a natural, legitimate way of playing the game. This can
be highly subjective and varies from game to game, but it leads to a totally different play experience than speedrunning.
For Twin Galaxies there are two main categories, Twin Galaxies Tournament Settings (TGTS), and the default category.
There is no direct name for the default category, although it is generally labeled as “NTSC – Points.” In the default category there are three main rules that need to be followed: no glitches, no continues, and no leeching. I’ll give you a little more information about what leeching
is in just a moment. In the TGTS category, the rules are identical to the default except you are only allowed a maximum of five lives. Your score at the time you lose your fifth life is then recorded as your total score, and you can’t use any additional lives. This prevents a lot of strategies from being viable and sets the skill cap for getting a high score much higher. There are also a fair number of one-life categories
on Twin Galaxies for the true score chasers, or should I say gluttons for punishment.
TGTS does not exist on LVLUPscore but the default category is identical in almost all cases. No glitches, no continues, and no leeching. There are sometimes other categories that allow you
to continue, or have other
restrictions that are game-
specific, like playing a certain
character or team. Since all of the glitches and flashy tricks are banned and the runs can last for hours at a time, this can make NES high score runs pretty boring
to watch, especially when the player is extremely skilled. Despite that, it does make routing (planning) and playing them a lot more fun for the competitor, in my opinion.
WHAT IS LEECHING?
Leeching is a scenario in a game where you can infinitely score points in some fashion. Leeching is also referred to as ‘hunting’ and ‘point scrabbing’ by both Twin Galaxies and members of the gaming community in general.
Here is the definition of leeching, according to the Twin Galaxies website:
“A means by which a player accumulates additional points in game while engaging in activities that do not contribute to progressing to the next stage, screen or level,
and while such activities are engaged, a player is not inhibited to progressing to the next stage, screen or level during commission of said activities. In general, a player should always be making a meaningful or conservative attempt towards progression within the generally accepted intended spirit and direction of the game. Unless otherwise specified in the games leaderboard variation rule set, the rules that follow governing leeching/hunting/ point-scrabbing shall apply universally to all arcade, home console, emulation, hand-held, mobile and PC-based gameplay efforts.”
This is the most ambiguous and subjective rule in the scoring world. It doesn’t always apply correctly to NES games either, and creates a lot of debate. In my experience, leeching on the NES can be framed into two broad categories: One category is if the game has an in-game timer, and the other type is if the game does not.
Let’s take a look at one of my own scoring records for
a really underrated beat ’em up game by SNK, P.O.W.: Prisoners of War. This game does not have a timer but it has a lot of sections where the leeching rule can apply. The game will not allow you to progress unless you defeat all the enemies on the screen. The number of enemies is
static except for inside doorways and during two of the bosses. This makes the scoring pretty easy to follow at first because the total number of points you can score is directly elastic to the number of enemies the game throws at you.
Towards the beginning of the game you start to encounter doorways. These come in many different forms throughout the game and allow you to take on more bad guys and acquire power- ups. The problem with these
areas is that you can enter them an unlimited amount of times. The power-ups do not give you any points and do not stack, but all the enemies are revived every time you reenter, and they give you points when you defeat them. This means that a player could enter the very first doorway of the game and defeat those two enemies over and over, until the game score was totally maxed out or they had to stop from boredom or fatigue.
These are the exact scenarios that the no leeching rule prevents. Not only is this a really boring (and lame, in my opinion) way to play a game, you are not actually playing most of the game. It also turns the high score record into a test of endurance or a record with no meaning if the score can be maxed out in this way.
Each game on the NES will typically have a specific rule as to the number of times you can re enter these types of areas. For those games that do not specifically state this
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