[High Score Challenge 03] Glypha: Vintage, Glypha III v1.0.1 and Tetris (Spectrum Holobytes)

[Mu0n]

SCOREBOARD (submit screens or photos between May 15th 2023 00:00 PST to June 14th 2023 23:59 PST

Glypha: Vintage SCORE - NAME - DATE	Glypha III v1.0.1 SCORE - NAME - DATE	Tetris (Spectrum Holobytes) SCORE - NAME DATE
1,122,200 - Seirea - May 27th 2023	126,500 - Daxeria - June 14th 2023	7,253 - 3lectr1c - May 16th 2023
215,350 - Seirea - May 26th 2023	124,400 - Mu0n - June 14th 2023	6,429 - Daxeria - June 14th 2023
54,100 - Mu0n - May 21st 2023		5,632 - retr01 - May 15th 2023
37,950 - Gruz - May 15th 2023		4,363 - Mu0n - June 14th 2023
10,700 - Mu0n - May 15th 2023

This is challenge #3 with 3 new game selections. Don't know what this is about? Then check out the previous threads:

Challenge #01 (Glider v4.0, MAC•MAN, Flappy Mac)
Challenge #02 (Mouse Stampede 2.0, Crystal Quest v2.2, Crab Attack II)

You can only submit 3 scores PER game. We'll have none of hyperfocused spam from one player, discouraging others to participate. Knowing this, what will you do? Do a quick valiant effort as a first submission to set the bar high? Keep practicing silently so you can come in late and shatter everyone else's notion of a good score? Oh, the drama that will unfold if we get into it!


Need help running these?
If you're here, chances are slightly higher that you have a real vintage mac capable of extracting and running these games just fine from Mac Garden. However, you might not have such a useful setup, and may want to resort to emulation. That's more than fine!
Here are some good tutorials to get an emulator setup. It's a pain, but it's well worth the effort and you'll be glad for all future usage of old mac games and apps.

Here's Macintosh Librarian's tutorial on the Basilisk II emulator (great for color, Performa-type 68k machines)
Here's Classic Mac Gaming (Gruz)'s tutorial on the mini-vMac emulator (great for black and white, Mac Plus era machine)


nifty EASY to download .DSK volume that's compatible with both Baslisk II and mini-vMac. Just download the attached file


GAME 1 - Glypha: Vintage (2023) - Recommended emulators: None! It's a modern day game available on Steam (for Windows, Mac OS or Linux)
I realize it requires a purchase but it's 1) CHEAP and there's 2) a rebate until May 22nd and it's 3) a way to support legend mac creator John Calhoun, who's still around and passionate about mac gaming! Think of all the occasions you didn't (*yarrr*) support gaming when you were young! Time to help rectify things!

GAME 2 - Glypha III v1.0.1 (1995) - Recommended emulators: Basilisk II

The version options were:
Glypha I either v2.0 (more rare) or v3.0 (more common) for Mac Plus, 512x342 play area, feels cramped, not as fluid, in B&W only.
Glypha II v1.1, requires 16 colors, bigger play area, will run in Basilisk II, plays in a 68k color mac
Glypha III v1.0.1, requires 16 colors, bigger play area, will run in Basilisk II, plays in a 68k color mac
I'm not against someone playing a version earlier than III v1.0.1 but please state which and I'll put a special mark under it

GAME 3 - Tetris (1987-1989) - Recommended emulators: Basilisk II or mini-vMac

any version goes here, it's Tetris! Start at whichever level you want to start at.

For funsies, I added Gruz' personal best score that he mentions in his May 15th public video about Glypha: Vintage here:

Here is the pure gameplay run with his high score of 37,950:

 

[retr01]

Here you go, my comrades! Highlighted in yellow are the high scores I have for today on May 15.

 

[Mu0n]

Here you go, my comrades!

View attachment 12324

You made all these today? I'll submit the highest for now only?

 

[retr01]

You made all these today? I'll submit the highest for now only?

Sure! Just those two yellow highlighted scores I did today. See updated screenshot above. I may do more later.

4520 is my highest for now during this time frame of the current challenge.

 

[Mu0n]

Sure! Just those two yellow highlighted scores I did today. See updated screenshot above. I may do more later.

4520 is my highest for now during this time frame of the current challenge.

I'll just write the 4520 one tben

 

[retr01]

I'll just write the 4520 one tben

Got it up higher. Now it's 5632 Updated screenshot. That's enough for today.

 

[Mu0n]

Got it up higher. Now it's 5632 Updated screenshot. That's enough for today.

I'll swap the last one with this one.

Everyone: please strive to make my job easy and not submit tons of scores in a short time period. If you iterate often and increase your score, wait until it stabilizes.

You were not doing that retr01, I'm just doing a PSA for others.

 

[retr01]

What we could do is simply post with screenshot of our "current" highest score a maximum of three times during the time period of this challenge? We will let @Mu0n review regularly and update the first post of this thread?

 

[Mu0n]

Gave the new game a spin tonight:
10,700 while watching Ron's giveaway stream (giving away copies of it!)

 

[3lectr1c]

Rats. The one day I don’t check this forum thoroughly! Now you’ve got a head start on me. I’ll get on Tetris tomorrow though just you wait! Will have to give game 2 a shot as well. Would have to be an absolutely killer game to get me to buy a modern version but we’ll see

 

[3lectr1c]

Alright. Scores marked “3lec-challenge” are from today. You can also see my all time best there… forget when I got that but hopefully I can get back there soon. Also I don’t know who Sean is. That score was there when I downloaded the copy from the garden. Doubt it’s @Action Retro

your move retro1!

 

[eric]

Still stuck below 5k for Glypha... I'm using an xbox controller just because the left/right seems faster than a keyboard. I do find it odd the official mapping doesn't map A as jump, easy to remap, just an odd choice. Maybe I should switch over to Tetris so I don't feel so defeated every time I play

 

[3lectr1c]

I've still yet to get glypha 3 onto my powerbooks. gotta do that. Have been playing a LOT of tetris though, got a higher score but I'm not posting it yet because of the 3 entries thing.

Edit: heyyy, 400th post!

 

[Patrick]

i've been playing glypha on my steam deck. and yeah i also added A as jump.

but then i ended up just using X for jump anyways. lol.

scores are super low tho

 

[Crutch]

Wow this is awesome. Glypha III was my favorite shareware Mac game of all time (I much preferred it to the one I wrote https://macintoshgarden.org/games/beamwars). I have to get in on this.

I just tried Glypha Vintage on Steam (thanks for making me aware of it!) and instant reaction: it is MUCH harder than the original. I could play classic Glypha until I got bored of not dying .... not true of this remake.

 

[Mu0n]

There's a now a direct pathway from John Calhoun himself from Steam's discussion page of Glypha:vintage, linking to this here thread!

 

[Mu0n]

I joined in Daves Vintage Apple Mac Sunday stream to play a game of Glypha: Vintage and this is what happened:

-shattered the 25k barrier I had
-shattered the 30k barrier
-beat Gruz' score of 37,950
-crossed over 40k
-crossed over 50k!!!!

it's all captured in real time over at Dave's:

timestamp when I join in: (around 9900s or 165m)

Even got a reaction from Maccy (Macintosh Librarian)

 

[Patrick]

i'm happy when I beat 10k

<--- feels small

 

[Mu0n]

i'm happy when I beat 10k

<--- feels small

I had a real hard time breaking 5k at first too.
I just kept practicing, not overextending myself on any given day, let my brain sort it out during sleep and come back fresh and having a higher baseline on the next day!
I can never factor out time when I want to become better at a video game.
I doubt I can repeat getting over 30k often, for now.

 

[Seirea]

Hey, all. Admittedly, I made this account mainly to post in this thread, but I promise that I have good reason for this.

First, I'd like to toss thanks to Ron's Computer Videos for including a link to this cool contest, Mu0n for putting it on, and John Calhoun for making and preserving these fun games.

A few days ago, a friend pointed me to the release trailer for Glypha: Vintage, knowing that I've had extensive fun with speedrunning Joust NES and Arcade. She intended me to see it and say "oh that's cool" and that would be that. But she underestimated my hunger to make bird things flap above other bird things.

I'd never heard of Glypha, having never owned a Mac. And it's been a learning curve to translate Joust muscle memory into Glypha mechanics, but I've had more and more fun as time goes on. It's a sweet game; I'm sad that it hasn't come up at all in my dealings with Joust, though perhaps exclusion from discourse isn't the worst thing.

My first play session, I focused on loosely speedrunning my way to 5K and 10K Points, as that seemed to be the closest equivalent to the speedrunning categories I'd put tons of work toward with Joust. Several times I tried going past 10K (which itself was fiercely difficult to achieve). I was quite proud to scrape out a 24K score before being DEVOURED. I could not begin to imagine how it could be possible to achieve 50K points or more. It reminded me of Tetris NES's Level 29 kill screen VERY early on.

So when I stumbled upon this thread, I peeked at Mu0n's high score run captured in the livestream, wondering if there were any special tricks to last much longer into the game. I quickly saw that...basically you do pretty much just have to glue yourself to the top and pray for kills. A freeing discovery, but also...OOF.

I figured I'd start my second livestream of the game last night, see how much I could improve my personal bests for 5K and 10K, then try my hand at a score for your leaderboard, inevitably giving up very quickly on surviving past 20K.

What happened instead, on the session's last speedrun attempt and first high score attempt, I cannot explain.

(NOTE: Shortly past Level 15, I start making comments to my chat which may sound disparaging toward the game's difficulty, or pessimistic about the amount of strategy involved in Mu0n's run. This is purely because I truly believed there was no way to play the game consistently, and I deservedly looked like a total idiot very soon after saying these things. Let it be clear that I give full admiration and props to Calhoun and Mu0n both, and I still felt that way before this high score run happened.)

My Current High Score (Livestream VoD)

There are a few dropped frames here and there, but I locally recorded, so I'll post both the full run and a highlights edit to YouTube sometime.

I'm very curious about how this ranks among known high score runs, and beyond that, simply glad to have found the game and all of you who are passionate about these things. Feel free to try to beat this in the remaining contest time; if I could achieve this score on my second ever session of play, I believe that anyone out there can thump it.

But yeah hopefully this isn't weird or anything.