Week 13 and 14 Summary

Last update of the year as I’m off on holiday this afternoon and won’t return until 2012…

I’ve been focussing on reaching 100k on a few games so other score updates are few and far between. As you’ve seen, both Road Fighter and Van-Van Car are now done but unfortunately my aim to reach 100k on 25% of the 40 games fell one short. The third game I was aiming for was Donkey Kong but after playing around 25 games and not getting past 72k, I’ve given up for now – I think the game just hates me!

The only other notable score updates were on Ghosts N Goblins, which I reached level 3 on for the first time and moved into yellow status with a score of 83,500, and Rally-X that saw an 11k boost to 50,200.

So that’s it for this year. Overall I think it’s been good, with my skills and knowledge of some classic games vastly improved, but there’s still a long way to go…

Week 11 and 12 Summary

A summary of the last two weeks here, as by the time I got around to writing the summary for week 11 it was already halfway through week 12!

The first major highlight of the last two weeks was breaking 100k on Crazy Kong, but there have been several notable score increases since then as well. The one I was most pleased with was finally getting BurgerTime out of red status. I have been plugging away at this for a while and after getting so close with a score of 34k, I finally broke the 35k threshold in style with a new top score of 57,100! A lot of that was brought about by a fluke of trapping 4 or 5 enemies on one burger with a single pepper spray and then dropping them down, which yielded over 10,000 points. Whether I’ll ever be able to do that again remains to be seen but that is clearly the way to amass the big points.

Another status change occurred on Taito’s Rastan with an increase of nearly 50k to a new score of 86,600. To be honest that wasn’t too difficult to achieve and I think this will eventually go down as a fairly cheap game to get 100k on.

While there weren’t any other status changes, I have managed to boost scores on quite a few other games too, including a 30k increase on Indiana Jones and modest boosts on Pitfall II, Ghosts N Goblins and Ms Pac-Man.

Last but not least came a major breakthrough on Donkey Kong. I negotiated the third elevator stage for the first time, which yielded a new high score of 95,100. Frustratingly I had lost a couple of cheap lives on earlier stages which meant I couldn’t capitalise on my progress, but having done it once I’m sure I can do it again now, so 100k is suddenly within reach!

So, with all the above in mind, my aim for the next couple of weeks is to reach 100k on three more games, meaning I will have completed 25% of my challenge by Christmas...

Week 9 Summary

What a week it was! It seems the break I had was a good thing because after a couple of unspectacular weeks I am definitely back with a bang…

The early 100k achievements on Return of the Invaders and Mario Bros were followed by big increases on two of the toughest games in my challenge, taking both out of the red status. First was a 20k boost on Ghosts n Goblins – multiple playthroughs of the first level revealed some high value secrets that pushed my score up to 48,600. As if that wasn’t satisfying enough, I then played a few games of Sinistar and managed to get to grips with the asteroid mining, gather enough bombs to dispatch the first level’s Sinistar and push my score up to 62,730 which was an increase of nearly 40k! Annoyingly the game won’t let me enter my initials on the high score table so I’m just known as ‘A’ on that game.

On top of those achievements I also managed to boost scores on Mappy, Dragon Spirit and Hyper Sports by varying degrees, so I’m very happy with the last week’s efforts.

This week I’m hoping for more of the same. I’d particularly like to raise my score on Asteroids, which I have been practicing on for the last few weeks with limited success. It would also be nice to see some movement on the games where I haven’t yet increased the score since the challenge started – the likes of Lady Bug, Flying Shark and Joust spring to mind.