Funspot Report

I’ve been back from my holiday to the USA for a few weeks now, and it was certainly a memorable trip for a number of reasons! Most relevant to this blog was the 15^th Annual Classic Gaming Tournament at the legendary Funspot arcade.

This year’s tournament featured the usual line-up of 15 classic cabs, a mixture of reasonably well known games like Xevious and Moon Patrol, and obscure but interesting titles such as Zero Hour, Head On and Pac & Pal. This year’s manufacturers tournament featured games from Konami, including two that I’ve played regularly as part of the 100k challenge, albeit under their European names of Green Beret and Shaolin’s Road.

A new addition this year was the 30^th Anniversary Tournament, which included three games celebrating their 30^th birthday – Tapper, Star Wars and Elevator Action. Finally, there were the usual daily game challenges that included the likes of Rally-X, Metal Slug and Video Pinball.

I’ve put together some comprehensive video coverage of the tournament which can be seen below:

This year I finished 28^th in the main tournament and 19^th in the manufacturers challenge, both significant improvements on my 2010 placings, and I certainly credit my 100k challenge as one of the reasons for my overall improvement on classic arcade games.

Also noteworthy from this visit to Funspot was my fiancée Anna’s live performance on Bank Panic. Her score of 1,087,100 was a personal best, the greatest score ever recorded on the machine at Funspot, and also the greatest score recorded by a female player worldwide. Nice work!

As well as visiting Funspot, we also managed to check out some other locations around the USA that have classic arcade games, such as Barcade, Game Galaxy and the Pinball Wizard arcade. These are summarised nicely in my United States of Arcadia videos on YouTube.

New games I discovered on this trip that I enjoyed, and have now made it on to my MAME cabs, include Swimmer, Zarzon, Food Fight, Timber and Skydiver. If you’ve never played any of these before then I recommend checking them out!

So now it's back to the challenge with some renewed enthusiasm...

Week 2 Summary

Time for a look at how I’ve got on over the last week...

I only managed to reach 100k on one game, Shao-lin’s Road, but last night came agonisingly close to crossing Taito’s Zoo Keeper off the list. Hopefully I can beat that score of 98,420 very soon.

There was some decent progress on other games, with more moving from red to orange status – I now have over 35k on 75% of the games. Significant increases this week include nearly 30k on Return of the Invaders and boosts of over 10k on Centipede, Donkey Kong Jr and Rally-X, not to mention the previously reported updates on Amidar and Donkey Kong.

This week’s aim is to pass the 100k mark on both Amidar and Zoo Keeper, recording a gameplay video for both, and it would be nice to push some more of those red status games into orange...

One Down, 39 To Go!

Well, I was intending to record all my achievements and upload them to YouTube, but this one just kind of happened! The first game to be checked off the list is Konami’s Shao-lin’s Road with a score of 126,400. I’d played a few games and got scores around 60-70k as you can see from the photo below, but suddenly everything seemed to click and I racked up nearly 90,000 points before losing a life. From there reaching my target score was inevitable.

Clearly this isn’t the most challenging of games to get 100k on since it only took a few attempts, but if you’re looking for gameplay tips then the best advice I can give is that eliminating enemies with a flying kick gives 500 points rather than the 200 you get for a standing kick. You can also rack up more points for killing multiple enemies with one hit. On the later stages I found it easier if you head to the top level of the screen - these areas are usually smaller and less enemies spawn there, plus you only have to worry about them jumping up to that level rather than landing on you from above.