There seems to be a flaw in the scoring system, imho, and the top replay for goldnax1 exploits it mercillessly.
You get a certain score per stage for killing each class of enemy, and this score is double if you make it fall off screen, and triple if you make it fall off screen with zero life. This is killing the same enemy twice. Make a note of this.
stage one has no pits. so all enemies are killed by reducing to zero life.
On stage two, you can get many of the red enemies to fall into pits. if you do that to all of them and the kiling blow knocks them off you have all the points for stage two. I count four, maybe five.
Stage 3 it MAy be possible to make one or two fall off at the begining, IF you are really clever. I haven't done it yet.
Stage 4 you can knock two skeletons off. knock them both off with the killing blow, and you get all points for stage 4.
Stage five is a whole new ballgame. every enemy up to and including
the red knights can be knocked off the edge. In theory anyway. in practice it's damn hard to do it to all of them.
I have not worked out the theoretical max, but i know it is probably between 3 and 4 hundred (mulltiplied by 10 for our rules)
But apparently there's a loophole!
You can use magic to strike additional fatal blows on dying enemies to tack on extra score! And this can make enemies float off screen to their death when it woudl otherwise be impossible, tacking on the equivlent of three more kills. (one for the magic blast, and tow for it taking the enemy into a pit)
You see, magic can actaully hit enemies even when they are in a death fall. and the game credits you with another fatal blow. and it knocks the enemies BACK up in the air again!
To be fair this takes amazing skill to actually pull off (you have to group the enemies, strike a final blow on them all at the same time, then zap with magic, pick up potion, zap with magic, pick up poition, zap with magic all befoer they hit the ground.) but OMG! This is taking advantage of a game bug to score mucho extra points, exceeding the theoretical max by killing enemies that are already dead many times over.
In fact killing an enemy and making the corpse fall off a pit is also killing the enemy twice. 1x value+ 2x value=3x value, you see.
When i saw that 5000+ score i went "WTF?!?!" because i know that my all clears on one life have been under 300, and this with knocking most enemies into pits that can be knocked into pits.
Is this a cheat or not? On the one hand it's not infinite leech. this would suggest its okay. Yet this is clearly a bug in he game's scoring code. I'e yet to see another game that lets you leech ponts off a dead enemy!
Most unsual.
The theoretical max WITH magic assisted multi-ko has been worked out, i think. 617 points (6170 by marp scoring)
It apparently works in every revision too. Could this POSSIBLY have been intended???
Golden Axe 1 leech bug?!?!
Moderator: BBH
Probably not intentional, but certainly is still limited as there are a set number of times you can use magic, and a set number of enemies, and so on. Now, if an enemy could be killed an undefined number of times, over and over and over, then you'd have a problem.
- Barry Rodewald
MARP Assistant Web Maintainer
MARP Assistant Web Maintainer
