Return of the Invaders Gameplay Tips Video

Finally for today, here's some tips on how to improve your score on Return of the Invaders, which I also reached 100k on in week 9.

One thing I didn't mention in the video is that to activate the challenging stages you must leave at least two of the relevant enemies until last, and the more you leave alive, the bigger and more valuable the mothership that is spawned.

Mario Bros Gameplay Tips Video

This is a short video demonstrating some of the techniques I used to reach 100k on Mario Bros back in week 9...

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.

Invaders Return... Invaders Repelled!

For the second time this week, what started out as a practice session resulted in reaching the 100k scoring target. This time it was Taito’s Return of the Invaders, and my score was 103,500.

The key to scoring highly on this one is to trigger the Galaga-esque Challenging Stages, which it would appear can be done on every level by simply leaving a cluster of specific enemies to last. These then morph into a mothership that launches enemies towards you to be picked off at will. However, you can also target the mothership itself to score thousands of points. Once again there’s no video of my 100k achievement but I will definitely record one sometime to show how to trigger the bonus stages.

A Plumber with a Sore Head: Mario Bros. Completed!

I decided to focus on reaching 100k on Mario Bros. last night and after a couple of scores in the 70 to 80k range, things came together nicely and I just managed to reach the 100k threshold witha  score of 101,120! I did lose a couple of cheap lives in a row around the 90k mark which left me with just one life remaining, so it was a bit hair-raising at the end.

Once again I was just practising and wasn’t really expecting to reach the target score, so there’s no video, but to be honest it was hardly a perfect performance anyway. I may record a quick video just to show a couple of scoring techniques, but in all honesty this is a game where concentration and mastery of the controls are far more important than point pressing.

So finally I have reached 100k on one of the games on my horizontal MAME cab. Not sure what I’ll be aiming for next but it’s already been a good week!