An Old Score Settled... and a Minor Improvement!

Since I started this challenge nearly two years ago, my scores on some games have remained unchanged. A couple of nights ago, that finally changed for two games – Dig Dug and Qix.

Firstly, my score of 83,360 on Dig Dug has been unattainable, let alone unsurpassable, with my next best score being around 68k. That was until Sunday night, when I had just one attempt, and had the game of my life so far! Everything seemed to click, all the bonus items were collected and I not only surpassed that long-standing score but smashed through the 100k barrier in style with a score of 110,460! Whether it was a fluke or not, I’ll not find out until I next play, but that’s another game crossed off the list regardless…

The second score improvement was not quite so impressive, but to be honest I never thought I’d surpass my best score of 55,906 on Taito’s challenging Qix. I may have only beaten that score by a few hundred points to give me a new best of 56,348, but at least I know progress is actually achievable after nearly two years of trying!

So that’s a great start to September, and 100k now achieved on 16 of the 40 games. Let’s see what happens next!

Zombies, Crashes and Building Burgers

As mentioned a couple of weeks back, my progress on the 100k Challenge has been limited during August. The main reason for this is the acquisition of two new arcade machines that I have been playing or tinkering with...

Firstly I picked up a Sega House of the Dead cabinet, in fully working condition (though there is some cosmetic damage) for £300 including delivery. This is currently resident in my garage, which will eventually be knocked down and replaced with a brand new games room designed to hold 10-15 machines. It was a bit impulsive to buy it so soon but at that price it was too good to resist!

The second machine came from Martin, the excellent deliveryman who is relied upon by many arcade and pinball collectors in the UK, and delivered the HOTD cab. The machine is Exidy’s Crash, a 1979 black and white release that cost me £125 with no charge for delivery since it came along with the Sega machine!

The Exidy cab has an interesting back story, as it came from the Duke of Lancaster ‘Fun Ship’ in North Wales, as part of a large scale operation to remove all the machines from that location last year. This is well documented on a number of sites including JAMMA+ and Dragon’s Lair Fans. This machine needs some work as you can see from the picture, but is complete and should make a nice project.

I did manage to get a little bit of gaming in for the 100k Challenge too, setting a new high score of 58,800 on BurgerTime. More importantly I am now at the level where I can get over 40k on every game, so can hopefully increase the top score more significantly in the future.

That rounds things up for August. It’s not really worth showing a summary as there have been no significant changes since July, but here’s the current state of play with each game…