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...

HISCORE 2012 Review

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...

Click here for Day 2

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...

Week 28-29 Summary

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...

Week 24 Summary

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...

Week 15 Summary

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...

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...