Out with the Crap!

I’ve made a decision - two games on my list have got to go. It’s not necessarily because they are too hard. It’s actually because having played them a bit over the last few days, I realised I utterly hate them both! If a game’s no fun then there’s no enjoyment to be had from slogging away at it, so two space shooters are being bumped off the list.

First to go is Namco’s tedious vertical scroller Xevious. I’m pretty sure that if I persevered I could reach 100k on this, but it’s such a boring game I just don’t want to waste any of my life playing it! So off it goes, to be replaced by Taito’s hack and slash platformer Rastan.

Also being dumped is Phoenix. Now given that my current top score on this is under 7,000 then I'd probably never reach 100k anyway, but again I just don’t like the game and the thought of playing it for what must be hours to reach any kind of decent score fills me with horror. In its place comes a bit of a left-field choice, Sanritsu’s Van-Van Car, chosen purely on the basis that I could get over 40,000 points on my third go so it can’t be too hard to reach the target score!

So it's two games out, two games in, and a new look to my scoresheet...

Baseline Scores

Having decided on my list of games, I thought I better start by setting some baseline scores on the games I hadn’t previously recorded ones on. Here’s my updated log:

Based on one or two attempts, it shouldn’t be too challenging to reach 100k on the likes of Contra and Dragon Spirit, but for Phoenix and BurgerTime I’m already thinking of renaming this blog The 10k Challenge! Pitfall II also looks like it will be hard work, but the 10k score was set on my second go after getting less than 3,000 on the first, so it looks like it will just be a matter of learning the layout of each screen to make reasonable progress.

So there we have it, the scale of this challenge is now fully laid out. Now I need to decide whether to try and go for ‘quick wins’ on the games that I’m already fairly close to the target score, or start plugging away at some of those lower scores to get them out of the red…