Rainbow Islands (Taito, 1987) 67,034,400 points complete (MAME)

A playthrough of Rainbow Islands on MAME, all secret rooms clear with 67,034,400 points (NO score cheat). You may already have seen Essekappa's run of this on YouTube, and thanks go to him for some tips I got from that video. The way he milks the game for points while still having the concentration to survive the hazards is amazing. My score is pretty modest in comparison, and the fact that I could complete the challenge at all suggests that it's not as difficult as is often supposed.

I first played Rainbow Islands on the Amiga about twenty years ago, and only recently returned to it courtesy of MAME. It's my favourite of all old-school arcade games. Why? Three main reasons. Firstly it's suitable for all abilities, and is fun to play right from the start. Secondly the physics are rich and varied, almost as in a real-life sport - there's just so many things you can do with rainbows. Lastly, the depth of gameplay. Once you can finish a level your interest can shift to collecting diamonds for bonuses, and then to collecting the hidden goodies. Even the early rounds remain a fun challenge to play this way, rather than a dreary chore as in many other games.

To complete the game fully you need to collect all seven little diamonds to collect a big diamond at the end of every island. Collect them in the right order (red, orange, yellow etc., no mistakes) to reveal the secret room on the boss screen. This is quite hard, but once you're confident of finishing an island you should move on to practising this task. Without the permanent power-ups the secrets give the later rounds will be next to impossible. Do this on all ten islands to get the 50M bonus.

To turn an enemy into a diamond rather than a goodie, kill it any way except a direct hit from a rainbow throw. To pick the right colour, have it land at the right distance across the screen, from red at the left to violet at the right. The easiest way to do this is to throw a rainbow under an enemy moving along a platform above, then break the rainbow at the right moment to flip him into your chosen diamond. But whichever way you kill an enemy, every third one will give a power-up instead.

A note on the "score cheat". Without this your score is limited to less than 10M until the moment you enter the final secret room, making for a maximum score of 71M (?). Using the "cheat" is a good idea, as otherwise there would be no point in maximising your score throughout the game, and competition and demos would be boring. I've never used the cheat simply because I can't score high enough for it to make a difference.

Technical details: played on MAME v0.141 with keyboard control. My PC is pretty slow making recording a video a problem. The run was originally recorded as an .INP file from MAME, then played back at half speed and recorded at 320x240, 15fps from the desktop using VirtualDub. This AVI was then resized and speeded back up to 30fps to get the file I uploaded.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• Taito
• Rainbow Islands
• retrogames
• MAME
• platform games
• playthrough
• arcade
• high score
• longplay

[nineko]

Awesome! Is the death in round 21 intentional to trigger some secret or was it a mistake?

[RetroGameDemos]

@nineko Thanks. I wish I could say I was doing something clever with that death in round 21 but it was just a mistake. I got backed into a corner, and if I'd fired a rainbow I would have picked up that green diamond, ruining everything. You can afford to lose a handful of lives.

[deemoid]

INsane! just got this on an amiga emulator and it's just like before. WHat system are you playing it on? It looks great.

That was so intense on some levels. I had no idea about some of the power ups!

Amazing game. They just don't make em like that any more!

[RetroGameDemos]

@deemoid This was played on the arcade original via the MAME emulator. It's tricky to install and run, but well worth it. The Amiga version is good, but not quite so smooth, and more importantly only has seven islands.

[chaynestuddert]

Awesome playthrough!

Would you happen to know how to play .inp files using MAMEUI?

[RetroGameDemos]

@chaynestuddert Glad you liked the demo. I don't know anything about using MAMEUI - I've always used command line versions, currently WolfMame. Some playback problems are due to trying to playback a file recorded with an older version of MAME, in which case the only option is to find and install the exact version. I've found trying to playback recordings more than a couple of years old is often not worth the hassle.

[TheRealThreeP]

Doh's Island is my favorite stage of this game.

[nineko]

@RetroGameDemos I see, thanks for the explanation. I am not familiar with the secrets of this game, and since I heard a ding-ding sound effect at that time I assumed it was some sort of signal. I also have to admit that I posted that question as soon as I noticed that death instead of watching the whole run, so I didn't know there were other deaths, and several other instances of that ding-ding sound effect.

Still, this is incredible! I usually died at the second island without the diamonds, lol

[Sharptooth100]

Maybe you should do that on Taito Legends 1 for Playstation 2 and Xbox.