Yes, a few days ago I passed the 100k landmark on
another game, Namco’s Metro-Cross. This one came about due to the game being
the focus of the latest JAMMA+ Forum High Score Challenge. I was already
getting around 80k or more per go (with a personal best of 93k) but having
picked up some tips I soon achieved the target score.
The
screenshot shows three scores over 100k, but the first one I got was 108,050. I
didn’t record a video for this but since I’ve already managed to get over 100k
on several occasions and will continue to play this as part of the JAMMA+
challenge, I will get a video done to show off the scoring techniques.
As I
mentioned, progress has been so slow recently that I’m now doing monthly rather
than weekly updates...
So minimal
progress overall this month, but reaching 100k on two games, Flying Shark and
Pooyan, means that the games I have improved have been significant improvements
at least!
July’s
target is to reach 100k on another couple of games - I have Contra in mind
along with the usual ‘holy grail’ of Donkey Kong – and I’d also like to get a
few games from orange to yellow status.
Here’s my
recording of my 100k achievement on Pooyan from this past weekend.
As you’ll see, the key to getting decent scores on this game is accurate use of the hunk of meat that appears at the top right every so often, usually when a large group of enemies are travelling up or down the screen. Each
eliminated wolf gives a Pac-Man style score multiplier, i.e. 200 for the first,
400 for the second and so on. Also bear in mind that after wiping the wolves
out with the meat, the balloons stay on-screen and can be shot for an extra 200
points each.
Yes indeed,
there has been some serious pig rescuing done a couple of nights ago, as I
smashed through the 100k barrier on Konami’s Pooyan. My final score was
115,950...
The
video for this one will be uploaded in the next few days, but that’s two games
done in less than a week. Hopefully I’m on a roll!
Can you
tame a shark? Who knows? Anyway, after a long period of relative inactivity (at
least as far as actually increasing scores goes) I have finally achieved
another 100k score. Taito’s Flying Shark is the game in question and the score
is 100,780.
To be
honest I didn’t expect to reach this score so easily, as previous time
dedicated to this game has seen only minimal increases and usually a bit of
practice is required before I can tackle the first level. However this score
came on just my second attempt so there’s no video, but it wasn’t a
particularly noteworthy performance anyway.
Still, it’s
another game off the list with 29 still to go. Most of my recent focus has been
on Donkey Kong, on which I’ve logged several 90k or higher scores over the last
week, although none higher than my current best. It’s surely just a matter of
time though!
Given
the general lack of progress at the moment I’ve basically given up on the
weekly updates and will now just post to the blog whenever I improve a score,
and then summarise my progress at the end of each month.
Well it’s been a month since my last update due to my holiday and then running the HISCORE Classic Arcade Tournament in Manchester. During that time very little has been done on the 100k Challenge so I thought I’d kick things off again with a look back at HISCORE. Check out my video diaries of the tournament...
It was a great event both in terms of the way it ran – everyone had a good time and lots of great scores were logged – and also from a personal point of view. There were several high points for me, including taking fifth spot in the final rankings, and achieving a couple of notable scores. My score of 50,130 on Ms. Pac-Man was the best of the weekend, a personal best ‘live score’ and the only one to beat the 50k mark.
Also early on day one I got my best-ever score on Donkey Kong, almost reaching 100k with a score of 97,700. The cab in use for the event has the Japanese DK boardset which has a different level layout, so even if I had topped 100k it wouldn’t have counted towards my challenge, but I was still very pleased given it was my first (and only) attempt of the weekend!
If you’re interested in seeing how everyone got on at the tournament then do check out the results page at the official HISCORE site.
One last thing - going back to Ms. Pac-Man, the night before HISCORE I decided to have a bit of a practice on my home machine and managed to increase my score to 55,790 – obviously that practice paid off given my achievement on the day!
So that’s it for now. I’m now back trying to increase my 100k Challenge game scores when I get the chance, and hopefully will have some updates soon...
I’ve been playing a lot more games over the last two weeks but haven’t made a lot of progress...
The most significant increase was a breakthrough on Lady Bug, with a new score of 83,150 taking that game into Yellow status at last!
Aside from that I’ve been focussing on some Namco classics and managed to post a 12k increase on Mappy, pass the 50k mark on Ms. Pac-Man and get a nominal increase on Rally-X. A lot of swearing took place during the achievement of all these scores!
That’ll be it for a few weeks as I’m off on holiday tomorrow and then when I get back I’ll be preparing for the HISCORE Tournament...
Due to a combination of factors (believe it or not most relate to the weather!) I haven’t been playing many games over the last few weeks, and I haven’t managed to improve scores on those that I have played, so things are at a standstill.
I’m hoping to dedicate a bit more time to improving scores over the next week or two before I go on holiday for a couple of weeks. Following that there will probably be further delays on updates as I will be preparing for this year’s HISCORE tournament in Manchester.
On the subject of which, only ten places remain in the tournament so if you’re a fan of classic arcade games and fancy your chances of winning a unique Microcade MAME cabinet from Turnarcades, head over to the HISCORE website and register now...
Another week, and I’ve finally worked my way through most of my games and managed to boost a few more scores.
Firstly you’ll already have seen that I’ve reached 100k on Indiana Jones, but I also made progress on two other games. Firstly I’ve pushed my score up by exactly 10,000 points on Pooyan, but I’m actually more pleased with my increase on Ms Pac-Man. The boost was less than 6,000 points but the circumstances surrounding it were notable – the score was achieved on my first go on a Saturday morning after consuming copious amounts of booze and only getting 4 hours sleep! Ultimately I was disappointed not to reach 50k but my new score of 46,030 was still fairly pleasing!
So I’ve now passed 90k on quite a few games so my aim for the next week or two is to push the scores on those games over the magic 100k mark...
What started as a practice session turned into another 100k completion when I completed the fourth ‘rescue the children’ stage of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for the first time and finished with a score of 108,600...
Usually I wouldn’t go back and record a video if I didn’t do it in the first place but I’m annoyed that despite breaking 100k I’m still not top of the high score table, so I aim to record that feat at some point in the future!
So after a long wait I’ve finally reached 100k on a quarter of my 40 games, so there’s just 30 left to go.
It’s been a quiet couple of weeks on the 100k Challenge because I have been focussing most of my efforts on a new blog called Mastertronic Chronicles, which is all about my efforts to collect and play a set of Mastertronic budget games for the Commodore 64. Check it out if you’re interested!
Meanwhile I have still been working through my challenge games list and have made modest progress on a couple of them, though there have been no status changes.
The first increase came on Flying Shark, whose score had been static at 87,500 since I started the challenge. I’ve now boosted this score to 94,510 so I’m pretty close to achieving my goal on that one. The second game I’ve improved on is Hyper Sports – after numerous attempts I finally managed to complete the triple jump, though I think it was more luck than judgement! Following that I also completed the weight lifting stage only to be completely baffled by the pole vault, but I still managed to achieve a new personal best of 48,120. My fingers haven’t quite recovered yet!
This week I have some friends coming to stay over the weekend and we’ll certainly be playing some arcade games, so the presence of some healthy competition might help me improve a few more scores.
As mentioned last week, I’ve been working through my list alphabetically and having five credits on each game to try and increase the score. Well I managed to get as far as the letter D, and specifically Donkey Kong Jr...
Unfortuantely I only managed to boost my score on two games, both from the Run & Gun genre as it happens. First up I managed to finally knock VULGUS off the top of the high score table on Commando, with a new score of 52,500. Then with the very next game on the list, Contra, I pushed very close to the target with a score of exactly 96,000 points. I’m not sure how I did it because progression-wise I actually didn’t get as far into the game as my last attempt that yielded around 78k, but there you go!
So this week I’ll continue to work through the list and hopefully boost a few more scores – maybe I’ll even break 100k on something!
I finally got around to pulling this off the camera, so let’s go all the way back to week 14 and check out my 100k achievement on Konami’s Road Fighter. The final moments of my attempt were a bit of a disaster but I managed it in the end...
As you’ll see, the key is not to rush through each stage and focus on getting through the traffic without bumping into it, collecting all the bonus ‘fuel cars’ that give increasing scores providing you don’t crash.
It’s probably not really Week 20, but 20 is a nice round number and since the last month or so has been fairly inactive, let’s call it Week 20!
It’s fair to say progress is slowing down as my scores on a lot of games get closer to 100k. Inevitably it’s more difficult to push the scores higher beyond a certain level, so don’t expect to see a lot of difference on some scores from week to week.
That said, I have managed to push one more game into yellow status with a score of 77,900 on Green Beret. Aside from that the most significant increase was on Joust, with my new score being 57,850.
I also posted a modest increase of just over 6k on Lady Bug and an even more modest one on Asteroids, which along with Scramble continues to frustrate me as they are the only two games remaining in red status.
This week I’m taking a more structured approach by working through my list alphabetically and having five credits on each game to try and increase the score. I don’t imagine I’m going to be playing every game on the list this week, but let’s see how I get on...
It’s been a few weeks since my last update, during which I haven’t really been focussing on the 100k Challenge. I was participating in a few JAMMA+ Forum high score competitions, and I also spent last weekend in Margate at the GEEK expo, but the main reason for being otherwise occupied was my preparation for this year’s HISCORE event.
HISCORE is a 2-day classic arcade game tournament modelled on the famous Funspot annual competition. This year’s event will take place on the weekend of 2nd/3rd June at The Lass O’Gowrie in Manchester, home to several classic arcade machines and a favourite location for retro gaming events over the last few years.
The main tournament will pit 50 of the country’s most competitive players against one another on a selection of the greatest arcade classics of all time. Last year the first prize was £100 cash but thanks to sponsors Turnarcades this year’s top prize is even more impressive – a one of a kind custom-designed Minicade MAME cabinet worth £350!
Alongside the tournament games there will be a selection of arcade machines and consoles for casual play, and these will be available not just for tournament entrants but anyone who wants to come down and enjoy the fun…
Places in the tournament are on general sale and the entry fee is £12 - you can enter via the website at http://hiscore.cgeu.info
Expect more updates on the preparation for this great event over the coming weeks, but in the meantime I intend to get back to trying to boost scores on the 31 remaining games in my challenge!
Well I’m already half way through week 16 but the following does all relate to last week…
The biggest improvement of the week came on Nibbler, with a boost of 20k taking my score to 78,450. This was a bit strange because I’d had several sessions last year where I’d tried to top my score of 58,250 and seemed to have reached a plateau that I couldn’t get past. However this time around, as you can see from the high score table, I was able to beat that score several times over. Maybe my gaming skills are seeing a general boost!
The other score increases were not particularly notable but do give me hope for bigger improvements in future weeks – I passed the 40k mark for the first time on Ms Pac-Man, and posted a nominal increase of 670 points on Lady Bug that shows that I am getting a better understanding of the game mechanics. So I guess you could say it was an a-maze-ing week (groan!)
On the more frustrating side I had several attempts to increase my scores on Mappy, Scramble and inevitably Donkey Kong, all of which resulted in a lot of swearing but no improvement! Maybe this week...
Well I've had a week or so off after my holiday but it's now time to start up the 100k Challenge again. I've rather lost track of which week number I'm up to though so I'm just going to call this Week 15!
I'm going to start where I left off in 2011 by trying to crack 100k on Donkey Kong, but I'll also be looking to push up some scores on the games that I've failed to do so on thus far - games like Nibbler, Lady Bug, Rolling Thunder and Scramble.
