Beating the buzzards!

No, it’s not a euphemism; it’s a comment on my progress with the Williams classic Joust over the past week. Actually, to be more precise, I managed to narrowly beat my previous score of 57,850 on my very first attempt last Sunday, and then just two games later I upped the score to 69,400 points.

The rest of the week has been spent trying to better that, but despite several scores of 65k or more, I haven’t topped the score I set a week ago. Probably should’ve quit while I was ahead!

Next week I’m going to focus on one of the later releases from my selection of games – Namco’s vertical scrolling shooter Dragon Spirit…

The heat is off and the scores are up!

Finally there’s been a drop in temperature this weekend that has allowed me a little more gaming time in the evening. As I mentioned in my last update, I was focussing on Donkey Kong Junior, and after almost losing the will to live with the game, I finally managed to better my score, albeit only by a thousand points or so. The new score is 40,300 so at least I’ve surpassed the 40k mark!

I then had a couple of quick games of Rally-X to round off my evening, and managed to improve my high score after just two attempts. Again, not a major increase but the new score is 54,960 and every little helps!

My focus for next week is Joust. So far I’ve succeeded on every game I’ve tried to increase a score on – will this one continue the trend?

Heatwave Stops Play!

There’s been very little activity on my MAME cabs over the last couple of weeks due to the heatwave we’re all experiencing. My cabs are located in our conservatory, which means it is too hot to play on them until after 9pm at the moment!

That said, I did manage to increase my Ms. Pac-Man score a little more during my week of play – the latest is 58,200.

Next on the list of games to focus on is Donkey Kong Junior. My current score stands at 39,200 and having played odd games over the last few days, I’ll be ecstatic if I ever best that score!

She has a bow on her head!

Last week’s exploits on Mappy didn’t yield a bigger score, but did see me finishing third in the JAMMA+ challenge, which I was happy with.

This week’s focus is on another game from the Namco/Midway partnership from the early 80’s - Ms. Pac-Man. I’ve played a few games already and last night managed a slight improvement (less than a thousand points) to take my high score up to 56,780.

This was a strange game. I survived to level 6 before I lost a life, and yet at that stage my score was far lower than on previous attempts. I can only put this down to missing the high-scoring ‘roaming food’ items on stages 4 and 5. I then made a complete mess of level 6, losing three lives, before finishing on level 7, which is as far as I’ve got in the game to date.

I’m starting to learn a pattern for some of the levels which seems to make them easier to clear, so if I can improve that and also pick up those roamers (and a few more ghosts) then I should be able to push this score higher. Stay tuned...