To keep myself interested
and motivated in the 100k Challenge, I’m always coming up with new ways to
approach the sometimes daunting task of boosting my scores. My latest idea is
to play a single game from my list for an entire week, until I either beat my
existing score or the week runs out.
This week’s game was
determined by the latest round of the JAMMA+ high score challenge, and the game
in question is Mappy. I’ve already played the game more than 20 times and have
managed to improve my top score by just over 10k to 82,510 points, taking it
from orange to yellow status.
I’ll probably continue to
play the game for a little longer since there is the secondary aim of ranking
as highly as possible in the JAMMA+ competition, but I’ll be switching to a
different game at the end of this week for the purposes of the 100k challenge…
I’ve been back from my
holiday to the USA for a few weeks now, and it was certainly a memorable trip
for a number of reasons! Most relevant to this blog was the 15th
Annual Classic Gaming Tournament at the legendary Funspot arcade.
This year’s tournament
featured the usual line-up of 15 classic cabs, a mixture of reasonably well
known games like Xevious and Moon Patrol, and obscure but interesting titles
such as Zero Hour, Head On and Pac & Pal. This year’s manufacturers
tournament featured games from Konami, including two that I’ve played regularly
as part of the 100k challenge, albeit under their European names of Green Beret
and Shaolin’s Road.
A new addition this year was
the 30th Anniversary Tournament, which included three games celebrating
their 30th birthday – Tapper, Star Wars and Elevator Action.
Finally, there were the usual daily game challenges that included the likes of
Rally-X, Metal Slug and Video Pinball.
I’ve put together some
comprehensive video coverage of the tournament which can be seen below:
This year I finished 28th
in the main tournament and 19th in the manufacturers challenge, both
significant improvements on my 2010 placings, and I certainly credit my 100k
challenge as one of the reasons for my overall improvement on classic arcade
games.
Also noteworthy from this
visit to Funspot was my fiancée Anna’s live performance on Bank Panic. Her
score of 1,087,100 was a personal best, the greatest score ever recorded on the
machine at Funspot, and also the greatest score recorded by a female player worldwide.
Nice work!
As well as visiting Funspot,
we also managed to check out some other locations around the USA that have
classic arcade games, such as Barcade, Game Galaxy and the Pinball Wizard
arcade. These are summarised nicely in my United States of Arcadia videos on
YouTube.
New games I discovered on
this trip that I enjoyed, and have now made it on to my MAME cabs, include
Swimmer, Zarzon, Food Fight, Timber and Skydiver. If you’ve never played any of
these before then I recommend checking them out!
So now it's back to the challenge with some renewed enthusiasm...
