Is Carnival the hardest classic arcade game ever released?

MaximRecoil

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Is Carnival the hardest classic arcade game ever released?

Has anyone here ever gotten past level 5? I can't get past level 5 even with the cheats enabled in MAME. There is only one cheat for this game, and it is unlimited ammunition. This makes you invincible because the only way to die in Carnival is to run out of ammunition. However, the ducks and other items you have to shoot generate faster than I can shoot them, and there is a constant steam of ducks trying to fly down to eat your ammo (not that it matters with the cheats enabled), and eventually only ducks are being generated and they start moving across the screen at like double speed.

After about 10 minutes of steady firing at the ducks, and not even putting a dent in the swarm, the game more or less crashes (no one would ever get to that point without cheats; they would've either cleared the level or died first). All the ducks stop and turn into stationary jumbled/glitched graphics on the screen. You can shoot the objects on the screen and it chips away at them, kind of like firing at the barricades in Space Invaders. Once you've cleared the screen of all that, nothing else happens. You can still move and fire, and the music continues to play, but no new objects are generated and there is no way to advance to the next level.
 
Hmm. Makes me want to go play my Carnival. I haven't played it much since I got it, but it's nowhere near as difficult as some games.

While I'm sure experts at them will disagree, some of the hardest games for casual players to walk up to are:

Defender/Stargate
Gravitar
Dragon's Lair

If you have little experience with any of those games, it can be difficult to make it past the first level. At least most people can get past level 1 on Carnival...
 
Donkey Kong makes me insane i can get to the elevator level but not past it! I have only had my dk for about a month but still i have been playing it a lot. I can play Defender for over an hour but DK drives me nuts!
 
Has anyone here ever gotten past level 5? I can't get past level 5 even with the cheats enabled in MAME. There is only one cheat for this game, and it is unlimited ammunition. This makes you invincible because the only way to die in Carnival is to run out of ammunition. However, the ducks and other items you have to shoot generate faster than I can shoot them, and there is a constant steam of ducks trying to fly down to eat your ammo (not that it matters with the cheats enabled), and eventually only ducks are being generated and they start moving across the screen at like double speed.

After about 10 minutes of steady firing at the ducks, and not even putting a dent in the swarm, the game more or less crashes (no one would ever get to that point without cheats; they would've either cleared the level or died first). All the ducks stop and turn into stationary jumbled/glitched graphics on the screen. You can shoot the objects on the screen and it chips away at them, kind of like firing at the barricades in Space Invaders. Once you've cleared the screen of all that, nothing else happens. You can still move and fire, and the music continues to play, but no new objects are generated and there is no way to advance to the next level.


I never played it [Carnival] but it is not hard to create a game that simply cannot be beaten; just make the rules impossible. This is what I like about the so called 'hard' Williams classic era games, hard, yes, even demanding, but quite possible and yielding to skill.

Saltbreez
 
Hmm. Makes me want to go play my Carnival. I haven't played it much since I got it, but it's nowhere near as difficult as some games.

While I'm sure experts at them will disagree, some of the hardest games for casual players to walk up to are:

Defender/Stargate
Gravitar
Dragon's Lair

If you have little experience with any of those games, it can be difficult to make it past the first level. At least most people can get past level 1 on Carnival...

Yes, Carnival starts out easy, and stays relatively easy for the first 3 levels. Level 4 is very difficult and level 5 is next to impossible. So, while level 1 of Carnival is far easier than level 1 of Defender, level 5 of Carnival is far more difficult than level 5 of Defender; or any level of Defender for that matter. I'm basing that on the fact that it seems that there are only a handful of people who've gotten past level 5 on Carnival; while there are many people who can reach scores in the hundreds of thousands or higher on Defender.

I never played it [Carnival] but it is not hard to create a game that simply cannot be beaten; just make the rules impossible. This is what I like about the so called 'hard' Williams classic era games, hard, yes, even demanding, but quite possible and yielding to skill.

Saltbreez

Well, the thing is, Carnival is not impossible. The top score on Twin Galaxies is 386,750 by Fred Pastore. Out of the 33 scores on Twin Galaxies, most of them never got past 67,000 though, which is probably level 6. There were also two scores from the 1980s; 221,780 and 162,000.

So there are people who can post big scores on Carnival, but I'm guessing they are few and far between; probably fewer and farther between than for any other classic arcade game.
 
I still think Ghouls and ghosts is way to hard, I to this day havent made it past level 3.. and I know once you get to the end you gotta do it again.

However people do speed runs on there, so imma say Sinistar/defender being veryyy hard
 
Is Carnival the hardest classic arcade game ever released?

Has anyone here ever gotten past level 5? I can't get past level 5 even with the cheats enabled in MAME.

Back "in the day", I would get through level 4 and into level 5 almost every time. I would clear level 5 and go into level 6 about 1 in 10. I never cleared level 6. I always wondered what the intermission bears do after clearing level 6.

Tough game, but the strategy is relatively the same on each level, stay just to the left of middle of the screen, enough that any misses shoot a flag on the top revolving wheel. That way you can quickly move a little left if a lot of bonus ammo shows up and then move back right to shoot the flags until they are gone. While staying in your home position, always make sure you shoot any duck on the top or middle row so you don't have to move and shoot them in the bottom row when they can eat your ammo.

That all said, I agree with another poster who suggested Bagman was much tougher. I think I made it through level 1 once, and that was by luck. I can't imagine what level 2 must be like on that game.

Heck I think Berzerk is tougher than Carnival. After 3-4 levels Otto comes out so fast that the game is just unplayable.
 
That all said, I agree with another poster who suggested Bagman was much tougher. I think I made it through level 1 once, and that was by luck. I can't imagine what level 2 must be like on that game.

Bagman can be marathoned. There are two people on Twin Galaxies' scoreboard with several million points. I think any game that can/has been marathoned is automatically disqualified as being among the hardest classic arcade games ever released.

Heck I think Berzerk is tougher than Carnival. After 3-4 levels Otto comes out so fast that the game is just unplayable.

So far, no one has managed to marathon Berzerk or Carnival that anyone knows of. The TG high score for both of them is in the 400,000 range. What other classic arcade games are in this category? Frogger maybe? No one has beaten George Costanza's fictional score of 860,630 yet, though someone got close recently.
 
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