Rayman 3 scores

[MandM81]

I have started looking into TOTL part 1 in more detail. It turns out that in order to get the most out of the Lums Glitch in the first Hoodlum Combo console players will have to time the Lum conversions meticulously. It leaves precious little time to take the Gems on the Stairs and kill the Hoodstormer with a Powerup.

I changed the strategy so the Gems on the Stairs are taken in combo with the Gems in the Secret Room. It’s just a variation on a well-known theme and this video shows a demonstration. I didn’t connect the Piggybank with the Hoodstormer, but since it’s known to be doable I didn’t bother to re-shoot the video. Anyway, here goes.

[1234]

Great to see that you're making progress!

Actually there are just four days left until I'll have some free days/weeks, so I think soon I'll join your search for a way to get out of the first room (even though I don't have too much hope that I'll find something).
I'm also planning to finally improve my score a little bit again, but we'll see how it turns out.

By the way, will you actually update the TOTL walkthrough? It would be quite interesting to see the currently best way to play this level. But, if you don't feel like doing this, you don't need to do it, of course.

Speaking of walkthroughs, I updated the FC-walkthrough from Maz a little bit (I included the better dwarf combo, the alternative way to play the 4-matuvu-combo and the respective videos). I hope you're all fine with it.

I also tried the gate glitch in LOTLD part 3, but I didn't quite succeed in it. RibShark wrote that you need to mash the A-button (I guess that's the jump-button?) until Rayman appears. However the only thing it seems to do, is to make Rayman fall down faster at the beginning.
So, when I hold forward and the strafe-button during the cutscene (as in the video explained), Rayman will move forward, but regardless of what I do with the jump-button (holding, mashing or nothing), the hoodblaster will still close the gate. Is there maybe something else you need to pay attention to? What buttons do you press and at what time (and for how long)?

[MandM81]

Nice to see you back and great to see an updated walkthrough for FC. I'll make use of it after TOTL.

As far as a walkthrough goes, I'll put my mind to it when I feel more comfortable with the new combos. However, I made a complete points strategy, which I hope will be sufficient for now.

The Tower of the Leptys - a points strategy

Part 1

The Hoodlum Combo (26 Yellow Gems, 9 Hoodlums + Lums, Door, 4 Yellow Gems)
Basic points: 4460
Combo points: 20380
Total points: 24840
Accumulated: 24840
Note: It’s possible to get 2 Lums on average from each Hoodlum.

The Elite Monger Combo (4 Pigs + Gems, 4 Hoodstormers + Lums, Elite Monger + Lums)
Basic points: 1840
Combo points: 8000
Total points: 9840
Accumulated: 34680
Note 1: SJ to the Lockjaw is done from the wooden path near the exit of the part to avoid the Hoodstormers spreading out over the entire room. It is necessary to weaken at least the Hoodstormer nearest the entrance to the room in order to kill it after a Pig.
Note 2: It may be necessary to skip the Lums from the first 3 Hoodstormers in order to get the Elite Monger with a Powerup. Even then it’s pretty hairy.

Lone Heckler + 2 Lums
Accumulated: 35260

The Heckler - Hoodoo Combo (4 Yellow Gems, Pig, 3 Hecklers, 2 Hoodoos, 1 Hoodmonger, Green Gem + Lums)
Basic points: 3220
Combo points: 10160
Total points: 13380
Accumulated: 48640
Note: The strategy follows the video made by Maz, but without the Green Gem to allow the full effect of the Lums conversions.

The Shoe - Slapdash - Box Combo (6 Shoe hits, 2 Slapdashes + 4 Lums, Green Gem, 2 Slapdashes + Lums, 2 Yellow Gems on Grid, 4 Slapdashes + Lums, 32 Yellow Gems with Powerup, 5 Yellow Gems without)
Basic points: 4530
Combo points: 15590
Total points: 20120
Accumulated: 68760
Note: The strategy follows video from Maz, but includes the Green Gem.

Two Slapdash Combo (2 Slapdashes + 4 Lums)
Basic points: 200
Combo points: 160
Total points: 360
Accumulated: 69120

The Secret Room - Hoodstormer - Stairs Combo (Gems in Secret Room, Hoodstormer, Gems on Stairs + Pig)
Basic points: 920
Combo points: 3580
Total points: 4500
Accumulated: 73620

Yellow Gems Combo (17 Yellow Gems starting with the 12 Gems in a Cage and ending with 2 Gems on the ledge)
Basic points: 340
Combo points: 740
Total points: 1080
Accumulated: 74700

Lose points (Pig at the entrance, 2 Yellow Gems behind cover in the first area, Door near the exit, Yellow Gem in the Pillar Room)
Accumulated: 74860

Part 2

The Lavicraft Combo (4 Yellow Gems and a Pig, 2 Lavicrafts + Lums)
Basic points: 1300
Combo points: 3620
Total points: 4920
Accumulated: 79780
Note: The Lums Glitch after the first Lavicraft may yield up to 10 Lums on conversion. I counted 9 in this combo. The second Lavicraft provides just 1 Lum in this calculation.

Lose points in this room (1 Yellow Gem, 1 Yellow Gem, 2 Yellow Gems, 6 Yellow Gems, Door + Lever, Hoodblaster + Lum)
Accumulated: 80580

The Hoodstormer Combo (12 Yellow Gems, 7 Hoodstormers + Lums, 1 Yellow Gem, 2 Pigs with 6 Yellow Gems each)
Basic points: 1680
Combo points: 6680
Total points: 8360
Accumulated: 88940
Note1: The first two Hoodstormers are weakened with 4 hits each. The third Hoodstormer is weakened with a fully charged hit by helicoptering towards the exit of the room. A red circle will appear. The Lockjaw is acquired and the 12 Yellow Gems are collected. Make a few jumps while collecting the Gems in order to lock into the nearest Hoodstormer that hovers above. Kill it when the Gems are collected. Get the Throttle Copter and kill the second Hoodstormer, get the Lums, renew the Throttle Copter and kill the third Hoodstormer with a Powerup. The remaining 4 Hoodstormers are taken without a Powerup.
After the final Hoodstormer is killed the Lockjaw is acquired. Fall down and take a single Yellow Gem hanging in the air over a now disappeared wooden platform. Break the two nearby Pigs and collect the Gems.
Note 2: It is actually possible to trigger the Lums Glitch, so two of the Hoodstormers provide up to 10 Lums each. It’s not included in these calculations, but may be an option if the game is tight.

Yellow Gems Combo (19 Yellow Gems in the Tower with the Elite Monger)
Basic points: 380
Combo points: 900
Total points: 1280
Accumulated: 90140

The Hoodstormer Combo (8 Red Gems, Hoodstormer + Lums)
Basic points: 880
Combo points: 1420
Total points: 2300
Accumulated: 92440
Note: Get the HMF, make a well-timed jump down to the right platform. Collect the 8 Red Gems and kill the Hoodstormer with one hit. Quite often the Lums Glitch works well here. Last time I played this combo I got 7 Lums on conversion. I thus calculated 7 Lums in this combo. Patience is needed when playing this combo as the camera often acts weird.

The Piggybank Combo (Pigs and Gems)
Basic points: 980
Combo points: 3880
Total points: 4860
Accumulated: 97300

Bonus point from Hoodblaster
Accumulated: 97360

The Final Combo (Devised by Maz)
Basic points: 4540
Combo points: 15280
Total points: 19820

Maximum non-IPG score for console players (so far): 115309 points.

Points needed before the Final Combo: 99999 - 4540 + 30 = 95489. One can thus lose almost 2000 points compared to the points strategy. But it’s pretty tight and requires almost faultless play in some half insane combos. It’s beginning to look like the nightmare that was HH.

[Maz]

Nice to see some activity again! Unfortunately I'm still caught up in my studies, but I do have a few notes concerning TOTL:

Concerning Part 1: There's an alternative way which I think might yield more points. To do so, you have to include the gems on the staircase into the first combo. After finishing off the Hoodstormer at the end, instead of breaking the door and going into the next area, grab the 2 gems behind the plane. Afterwards, you can quickly drop down the hole and break the pig. That way, you'll be able to get the gems behind the plane for maximum value as well.

The door then has to be broken without giving any points. Also, the gems behind the door have to be skipped while heading for the next area.

Now for the Secret-Room-Combo: Collect all the itmes in the secret room, then drop down and kill the Hoodstormer. By going on the small plateau and jumping a certain way, you will then be able to reach the platform with the 2 yellow gems on it; take them. Now at this point, I don't exactly remember whether I jumped towards the slide and grabbed the gem at the exit (I hope I'm making clear what I'm talking about), but either way, you're supposed to drop down and finish the combo by taking the 4 gems which you have passed as you headed for the battle arena.

Doing all this will let you get 2 more gems (namely those behind the plane) in combo instead of the 1 door (should be +80 Points), and you'll be able to get 2 or 3 additional gems for maximum value instead of... well, not maximum value (+40/+80 Points).

An additional idea (console only, plus I don't know if that can be realized) for the Shoe-/Two-Slapdash-Combos: Yellow Gems without a powerup give you 60 Points (10 base + 50 combo). Assuming that getting 32 gems with a powerup is the best one can do, why don't you try to play around that on console? If you get at least 2 Lums out of one of the Slapdashes, it's looking like this:

S Bl S Bl Bl | Y Y Y Y Y

... which is 20 + 40 = 60 Points for each Yellow Gem as well, the advantage being that, if you happen to get even more Lums converted, you'll be able to gain and additional 20 Points for each Black Lum (which may not sound much, but every single point is important, especially in TOTL). The problem being that intentionally leaving 5 gems requires a new route, which may also have an impact on how many gems you'd be able to take with a powerup. I guess it's one of these things which one would just have to test out and see.

This is all assuming that there's no oversights on my end, but I think it should be worth a couple more points?

Concerning the Hoodstormer-Combo in Part 2: You said you end the Combo by taking 1 yellow gem (presumably the one underneath the knaaren's statue) and breaking the 2 pigs. The ideal way to play this combo (as far as I know) is to roll off the top platform to find the yellow gem on top of one of the balloons after killing the final Hoodstormer. You can then proceed by taking the 3 gems on the wooden platforms in the same combo, drop down quickly to get both pigs, and then collect the gem near the knaaren's feet. For that to work you'll have to leave the gem provided by the second pig which is closest to the statue and take it from as far away as possible.

This should gain a few hundred points compared to what you've described, I think.

One more note to PC-Players (since console players can theoretically get enough points to reach the maximum): It's possible to use one of the 5 gems which are used to start off the Green-Gem-Combo to get the Hoodblaster in combo. This makes the final combo much harder, but is worth a whooping 40 additional Points.

That's off the top of my head, I'll let you know when I remember anything else

[Maz]

Sorry for the double post, but there's someone with 912k in the HoF, probably a cheater...

[Ray502]

That same guy messaged me about his R3 score, about adding it to the RayWiki records article as the top scorer. Though I didn't know it was of that high amount.

[PluMGMK]

Isn't that a similar score to that other guy who caused a bit of trouble a while back?

[ChromeX414]

Actually, this wasn't done by any kind of cheat, you are able to bring that score with freshly installed Windows (XP,7,10 doesn't matter) and R3 right from the box.
Doubt me, my method is 100% legit, works in most of maps, does not require external programmes or whatever. Just a trick I had found a lot of time ago. It helps me to get ~100.000 in the Fairy Council and any other episode, that's why beating old record was a piece of cake and a matter of time .

[MandM81]

Maz: Thanks for the feedback. Just a few comments.

I excluded the Gems on the Stairs from the Hoodlum Combo in order to get the most out of the Lums. In this old video you can see why. Console players have to be quite close to the Lums to convert them. Furthermore you have to wait a certain amount of time to get more than one Lum out of each conversion. All this is quite time consuming. By excluding the Gems on the Stairs I manage to get 4 or 5 extra Lums on average after conversion than with the Gems. Those 480 - 600 points are badly needed.

Good thinking on the two Slapdashes and the Gems on the boxes. I'll put it down as a 60 points improvement.

As for the Hoodstormer Combo in part 2, well, why didn't I think of that.

After I fall down from the Hoodstormer level I take just one Yellow Gem before hitting the ground area to continue the Combo with the Pigs. The lose points are thus 1 Yellow Gem on the wooden platform with the Throttle Copter, 2 Yellow Gems on the last wooden platform and the Balloon and finally the last 1 Yellow Gem under the Statue. Well, obviously I can get the Gems on the wooden plaforms and the Balloon, and I will also include the Gem under the Statue into the Combo. This is an improvement of 380 points compared to my calculations, and a total improvement of 440 points.

[PluMGMK]

Actually, this wasn't done by any kind of cheat, you are able to bring that score with freshly installed Windows (XP,7,10 doesn't matter) and R3 right from the box.
Doubt me, my method is 100% legit, works in most of maps, does not require external programmes or whatever. Just a trick I had found a lot of time ago. It helps me to get ~100.000 in the Fairy Council and any other episode, that's why beating old record was a piece of cake and a matter of time .

Let me guess… viewtopic.php?p=360021#p360021 ?

[Hunchman801]

That's what I thought as well. I believe the consensus was not to allow this trick because exiting the program like this is not part of the game, but I'm curious to hear what everyone has to say.

[Ray502]

Eh, I don't approve of this. The true scorers worked their tail off to discover and take advantage of the glitches and to practice and master the tremendous amount of difficult combos, which involves frustration but a feeling of joy when it is accomplished. That "strategy," is borderline, if not a form of cheating, and therefore is not to be considered a true R3 score. Nothing against the player, he probably thought that it wasn't qualified as cheating, and that's alright; but on the other hand, Chrome can not be called the top R3 scorer. He just can't.

[Maz]

Too tired to check right now, but I'm assuming he's talking about the glitch where you can Alt+F4 on PC during the ending scene of each part and it will save the score once you re-enter the game.

Way back a consensus was reached and the glitch was banned because, appearently, it was exclusive to PC-players. He's right in that he's not really cheating though and - in his defense - the posts concerning that are really old, so he probably didn't see them; he probably meant no harm, but I think that the Score should be removed anyway for above reason.

[ChromeX414]

Of course I didn't find that as a cheating, I thought that it is still a kind of glitching and couldn't find any information about that in forum, so I thought it wouldn't be illegal to use that one

HOWEVER, saying that this trick is PC-exclusive is untrue, with a perfect timing it might be also performed on Xbox console, no idea about the others tho.

EDIT: Else, I think that somebody like Mand could use this method to achieve maximum of 999.999 and I would be fine with it

[1234]

I'd also say that the score should be removed from the HoF for the same reasons which were already mentioned and also simply because the glitch is completely over the top (I mean with the glitch everyone could get 900k points without the slightest effort).
I hope you'll agree on that Chrome?
I can also encourage you to try to improve your score without using such extreme glitches. Even though sometimes it might be quite frustrating, after all it's great fun.

@MandM: Thanks for the overview. That'll help a lot to bring myself up-to-date.
One question though: Why don't you take all 27 yellow gems in the first combo?
Also, in the Heckler-Hoodo-Combo I guess you break both piggybanks on top of the boxes?

I think tomorrow or the day after I'll calculate the points PC-Players can get in TOTL to see where we are at the moment point-wise.

By the way, I tried playing R3 on a new PC and one of the first things I noticed (besides that it has much better graphics and runs much smoother compared to my old PC) is that it ran too fast. I'd say it was about 1.1 or 1.2 times faster.
However then I downloaded RibSharks widescreen patch, which seemed to fix that issue. But after a while a got a feeling that the game might be running too slow now, so I played the first teensie highway level (FC 6) and measured the time until I reached a specific place (on both PCs). On the old PC it took me always 1min27s (and ~200ms), on the new PC it took me always 1min28s (and ~400ms), so there actually is a tiny difference. I then watched Harukas video and measured the time. She needed 1min27s (and ~0ms) (of course the ms are not too accurate). Now I wonder what's actually the "right" speed. For normal playing it doesn't matter at all, but for scoring it sometimes could make a difference I guess.
For speedrunning it should be also important, so maybe some speedrunners know something more about this?

Also, as expected, unlike on the old PC, now I can't kill the Heckler in the Hoodlum-Combo in HH2 in only two cycles anymore.

[MandM81]

Interesting notion on how the game is running on new vs old pc's. One should think it would be an advantage to play with old pc's?

Yeah, I should do the calculations with 27 Yellow Gems. I have become so accustomed to playing with 26 that I didn't give it a thought. And I do break both Pigs in the Heckler - Hoodoo Combo.

Now the big challenge in my points strategy is connecting the 4 Pigs with the Hoodstormers in the Elite Monger Combo. I came up with a possible solution that carries a bigger success rate but provides less points. Here goes:

1. Weaken the Hoodstormer closest to the four Pigs below.
2. Get the Lockjaw.
3. Kill the Hoodstormer on the left as you face the room from the pit. Immediately break three Pigs with Yellow Gems and get the Gems.
4. Run towards the boxes leading to the room above.
5. Turn around and break the last Pig on time to continue the combo.
6. When you reach the boxes, if timed correctly, the Lum from the killed Hoodstormer will fly by you and you can convert it.
7. Convert the Lum to keep the combo going and immediately jump the first box and kill the nearby Hoodstormer.
8. Continue the combo and finish off with the Elite Monger and the Lum.

I have tried it yesterday and almost made it work. Challenges:

1. You have to keep your eyesight towards the area where the Lum will appear, a bit like the last Lum in the Green Gem combo in HH4 (console players).
2. You have to break the Pigs really fast and look towards the Lum area. So far I have managed to do it right with two Pigs.
3. The timing must match the Lum.
4. The Hoodstormers may move around or the may be killed by the Heckler.

One may lose around 1000 points, but for a console player there is a 2500 points margin.

[Hunchman801]

Alright, ChromeX414. I've removed your score from the HoF for the reasons stated above, but we appreciate you didn't try to cheat and you're welcome to submit another one as long as it doesn't use the same trick.

[ChromeX414]

Not a problem, at least you have an evidence for future that I'm not here to cheat but compete!

[Ray502]

Haha well you do have some mighty good Rayman M scores! Keep on doing your best and don't give up on whatever the score is that your aiming to get!

[ChromeX414]

And when I find some portion of time, I will try to dominate the RM section