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Hank Chien Reclaims Donkey Kong High Score

Posted by Soulskill on from the barrels-of-fun dept.

An anonymous reader writes "If you can say anything about Hank Chien, it's that he evidently doesn't take defeat very well. Sure, he knew not so deep down that his Donkey Kong World Record score wouldn't last forever, but he couldn't have foreseen that it would have been toppled so quickly. Twice, even. But he also knew that more Kong competition would be coming his way; namely Richie Knucklez Kong-Off in March. So Hank had something to prove, and prove he did. Scoring a massive 1,068,000 points in less than three hours, Hank has officially reclaimed the high score in Nintendo’s 1981 arcade classic."

23 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. My Hero by Danzigism · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I can't help but to admire people like this.

    --
    *plays the Apogee theme song music*
    1. Re:My Hero by Dunbal · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I guess it was on like Donkey Kong (tm)...

      Anyway, goes to show that even if you're an old geezer, you still have the reflexes to beat some young punks...

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    2. Re:My Hero by arth1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      With Donkey Kong, it's not about reflexes but rather the opposite: anticipating, so you don't run yourself into a situation you can't get out of, and pixel/frame precision, so you jump at exactly the right time and spot.
      For high score chasing, judicious use of the powerup is also rather important, and this has to be planned, not done by reflex.

      I'm personally not too impressed with Donkey Kong, Frogger and Pac Man scores, cause it's mostly repetitive action.
      I'm much more impressed with masters of Defender, which requires reflexes, precision steering, and being able to handle a boatload of buttons. It's fiendishly difficult in its simplicity.

  2. The King of Kong 2: Kong Harder by Buggz · · Score: 4, Informative

    I actually feel a bit bad for Steve "The King of Kong" Wiebe. Such a lovely film/documentary. I reckon he'll flex those Kong muscles once again and beat that score before summer.

    1. Re:The King of Kong 2: Kong Harder by lordkuri · · Score: 3, Informative

      He actually already had a big meet and greet along with 3 world record attempts scheduled for this coming Saturday here in Chicago.

      http://www.logan-hardware.com/

  3. Well done!!! by bazmail · · Score: 2, Informative

    I think its a shame that he was omitted from "The King of Kong" movie. Wiebe took Hanks score and there wasn't so much of a mention of Hank. He's a good guy and Im happy for him. Also it there a theoretical maximum score for donkey kong? Just wondering what the asymptote is.

    1. Re:Well done!!! by gazbo · · Score: 3, Informative
      Well there is a theoretical limit because of the time limit per board and the kill screen, but figuring it out would be very hard (and achieving it practically impossible). It would first involve figuring out the optimum strategy assuming that the various enemies behaved in certain ways - e.g. the fireballs on the pie factory all respawning and immediately heading towards you while you have the mallet, the fireballs and blue barrels all being worth 800 points, etc, etc.

      But the odds of this happening are probably on a par with winning the lottery many times over. If the PRNG decides a blue barrel is worth 300 then that's 500 points lost and nothing the player can do about it. And the optimum strategy for a theoretical perfect game is probably very different to the optimum strategy for a typical game.

    2. Re:Well done!!! by HiChris! · · Score: 2

      He wasn't mentioned in the movie, since it was watching the movie that inspired him to start playing.

  4. This why Rome fell by Madman · · Score: 4, Funny

    Rome had bread and circuses, now we have contests for old games. When a civilization has the time to waste on things like this it's the beginning of the end.

    1. Re:This why Rome fell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Rome had bread and circuses, now we have contests for old games.

      And thus we prove that any civilisation with both bread and circuses is pretty much over. They should build that into Civ VI but it might be a bit TOO much realism - "three people in your empire are playing Donkey Kong excessively, you have three rounds to stamp it out or lose the game".

    2. Re:This why Rome fell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

      Are we talking about civilization or U.S.?

    3. Re:This why Rome fell by krou · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Uh ... bread and circuses was not the reason Rome fell, just one of many reasons.

      And I think you quite miss the point of the effect of "bread and circuses" contributing to the fall of Rome. It was because millions in taxpayer money were being spent on bread and circuses (like a form of dole) for the non-working poor, and this had economic effects (obviously) when combined with other factors.

      All these expenditures had to be recovered from the taxpayer. To compound the difficulties, there was an adverse balance of trade. Roman currency, for example, poured into India and the East to pay for luxuries. Even in the time of Nero, Seneca estimated that it cost Rome five million dollars a year to import its luxuries from the East. In a word, though seemingly prosperous, in the second century AD the Roman empire was overspending to such an extent that it was moving to an economic crisis. When in 167 AD Marcus Aurelius was faced by the attack of the Germanic Marcomanni and Quadi, he was forced to sell, is it were, the crown jewels as well as the household furnishing of his palace to finance the war.

      When the US government starts spending millions of taxpayer money on Donkey Kong contests, then we can worry about it the role old computer games have on the destruction of modern civilization.

      The only thing you could say here, really, is that this may be a symptom of overall decay, not a reason.

      --
      'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
    4. Re:This why Rome fell by ledow · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sod contests for old games. We have popularity contests beamed to your own personal section of the planet so you can judge people remotely using buttons without having to get out of the chair. We have people who've never touched soil eating nutritional balanced, rich, processed food every single day. We have people who spend most of their time tapping buttons to post ignored opinions on global virtual messageboards that nobody ever reads again.

      There are any number of ways of not being productive. The better we are at doing things like growing food and producing things that save time, the more time we have to deliberately do nothing at all. 100 years ago, nobody had TIME to spend 8 hours a day updating their friends about what they did that day, even if those friends lived in the same house.

      People doing nothing is actually a sign of how easy it is to stay alive with modern equipment and infrastructure and how little knowledge is required to survive in that atmosphere (I have absolutely no idea/experience about how to grow enough food to feed my family... do you?).

      That said, I do think that this is hardly "news" even for a geek. So the guy got a new highscore in an old game. Good for him. And he probably spent months dreaming about the damn game, destroying his muscles and turning his mind to mush in order to achieve that "fame". That's his problem. In my entire life, I can't imagine it ever taking more than a second to acknowledge, even if I *was* interested in the exact area we're discussing. But yet I can afford five minutes to say what a waste of time it is. Modern life, eh? Truly wonderful. :-)

    5. Re:This why Rome fell by ledow · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Good illustration. That's 34,000 man-years. 34,000 men for a year, or one man for 34,000 years (i.e. about 500 lifetimes). The pyramids didn't need that. The Apollo missions probably didn't need that. Most of modern physics and mathematics could have been discovered in that (it's like Archimedes still being alive and just as productive right through to the current day, and still only one-sixteenth of the way of the way through his useful working life).

      To put it in context, though, going to the toilet takes much more time than that, per person, over the course of a single life (so multiplied by 6 billion, it's quite a lot of total "wasted man-hours"). We waste inordinate amounts of time doing silly things that aren't strictly necessary, too. Productivity can only be measured on a personal level, not a numerical one. Was Alexander Fleming productive enough (or incited enough productivity in others through his discoveries) even if he was also an accomplished glass-blower? (And that actually helped him make further discoveries in unrelated fields). How do you measure something like that? And how much do we waste in actual wars? I bet it's orders-of-magnitude more, given the budget allocated to it (and thus the tax etc. used to generate it, and the work used to generate that, etc. etc. etc.).

      Adding it up, it's a waste of time that could theoretically be used doing better things. On a personal level? Fuck off, I want to play Counterstrike sometimes to rest and actually have a life, not be a machine. Both points of view are equally valid. Neither will ever change except in small details. And posting on Slashdot to complain about it, like the OP did, is probably the *greatest* hypocrisy ever. Let's take five minutes to hit buttons to send a comment over thousands of km of copper and infrastructure so that lots of other people can ignore it and nobody ever benefit from it.

    6. Re:This why Rome fell by e70838 · · Score: 3, Funny

      I take my sudoku when I go to the toilets.

    7. Re:This why Rome fell by Stooshie · · Score: 2

      Bread and circuses wasn't a reason at all. It was a symptom.

      --
      America, Home of the Brave. ... .and the Squaw.
  5. Sorry to break your bullshit bubble... by Moraelin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sorry to break your bullshit bubble, but Rome had its first gladiatorial combats in 310 BC, according to Livy, and yes often accompanied to distributing food to the poor. Not only it wasn't the beginning of the end, but it was followed by its most rapid expansion centuries. In the couple of centuries after those, Rome went from being a debatable leader of a leader of city states spanning barely half of Italy to an empire sprawled all around the Mediterranean, not to mention most of modern France and half of Britain.

    If anything, historians from the era tend to agree that sponsoring lavish shows to boost morale actually served well to do just that, and helped Rome rebound after such massive defeats as Canae and emerge more powerful than ever before.

    It would be more than 500 years after that, or still almost three centuries even after the peak of the popularity of gladiatorial combats in the 1st century BC, that Rome even started to decline. And almost 800 years after that, in 476 AD that the Western Empire fell.

    Even if you want to go for a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy to associate the two, actually Rome fell shortly after they _stopped_ holding gladiatorial combats. So, hmm, maybe actually the bad sign is when you can't even afford to have fun any more?

    So, sorry, but linking such shows to Rome's decline is fucking idiotic. If you want to make a historical case, do read some history first.

    --
    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
    1. Re:Sorry to break your bullshit bubble... by Moraelin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So, like, if the Superbowl in the US gets canceled, they are going to Hell in a handbasket?

      It's certainly more supportable than the opposite "OMG, we're going to hell because some people have fun" theory. Though still in a fallacious way.

      But mostly it just shows that if you just hand-pick a pair of events connected only by chronology, you can argue just about anything. E.g., Rome expanded the quickest after they introduced crucifixion (learned from the Carthaginians actually, with the cross-bar being a Roman twist) and imploded the fastest after Constantine abolished crucifixion. So, hmm, maybe that's the real key to building a successful empire ;)

      This is Slashdot. We don't read, we just post. Read history? Hell, most of us don't even bother to read the article summaries.

      I'm ok with that too, actually, but then really I expect such people to not use pseudo-history for their canned moralizing points.

      --
      A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
  6. Is there a maximum possible DK score? by Junior+J.+Junior+III · · Score: 2

    From watching King of Kong I learned that it has a killscreen (a level that is impossible to beat). Based on that, I've assumed that there is therefore a theoretical maximum score in Donkey Kong.

    There are a lot of variables affecting how many points can be scored on each level (bonus timer, how many of Pauline's trinkets Mario picks up, how many hazards he jumps or hammers, etc.) so this isn't as easy to calculate as the maximum possible score in Pac Man is.

    Does anyone know what the highest possible score on DK is, or have a rough estimate for how close this new record is to that score?

    --
    You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
    1. Re:Is there a maximum possible DK score? by gazbo · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I've partly answered this in a previous comment, but as an illustration of how much higher the score can go, take a look at level 1-1 (the first barrel round). In Wiebe's highest scoring game, he scored ~8000 points on that level. Twingalaxies opened a track for who could get the highest score on that level, and although the site is slashdotted, from memory it was well in excess of 12000. The barrel rounds are by far the most common in the game so that suggests a huge margin for improvement.

      Of course, the 1-1 barrel round is quite different from the 5-1 barrel round. In the latter the timer counts down far faster, so there's less time to points press. On the other hand, you have far more control over the barrels, which makes higher scoring easier (if you ignore that whole 'death' thing).

      If I had to make a guess, I'd say there's theoretically hundreds of thousands more points to score. Maybe even break 2 million if the game cooperates?

  7. The economic aspects of Rome are more complex by Moraelin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The economy of Rome is even funnier than that, actually.

    For a start, it a right-wing paradise of sorts, in that the Senatorial class -- which was non-elected and hereditary by now in the Empire times that you mention -- paid no taxes, although they owned most of the land. Although many also set up merchant enterprises in the name of their freedmen, with them owning most "shares" so to speak and taking most profits... and again paying no tax whatsoever for that either.

    As the rich quickly gobbled up more and more of the former free men's farms, essentially more and more of the Roman economy didn't contribute a cent any more to the state.

    I would say that the spending of private coins to import stuff from the East was a much more minor factor than the fact that none of those coins would go into taxes anyway.

    Imperial Rome almost at no point actually had a sustainable economy per se. It was a robber economy, simply put. They _had_ to keep expanding and plundering new countries, even to keep paying their legions.

    Heck, they plundered even their own citizens, as essentially they paid all the wages in overvalued silver coins and demanded the taxes only in gold.

    --
    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
    1. Re:The economic aspects of Rome are more complex by rla3rd · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Sounds like corporations here in the US

  8. Re:Awesome! by Tetsujin · · Score: 2

    Honestly, I don't care who has the high score as long as it's not Billy Mitchell. I hate that guy with a passion.

    Based on King of Kong?

    Documentaries lie. In fact, in general, editing lies. It'd probably be best to base hate on first-hand impressions instead of being swayed by drama.

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.