Zombies, Crashes and Building Burgers

As mentioned a couple of weeks back, my progress on the 100k Challenge has been limited during August. The main reason for this is the acquisition of two new arcade machines that I have been playing or tinkering with...

Firstly I picked up a Sega House of the Dead cabinet, in fully working condition (though there is some cosmetic damage) for £300 including delivery. This is currently resident in my garage, which will eventually be knocked down and replaced with a brand new games room designed to hold 10-15 machines. It was a bit impulsive to buy it so soon but at that price it was too good to resist!

The second machine came from Martin, the excellent deliveryman who is relied upon by many arcade and pinball collectors in the UK, and delivered the HOTD cab. The machine is Exidy’s Crash, a 1979 black and white release that cost me £125 with no charge for delivery since it came along with the Sega machine!

The Exidy cab has an interesting back story, as it came from the Duke of Lancaster ‘Fun Ship’ in North Wales, as part of a large scale operation to remove all the machines from that location last year. This is well documented on a number of sites including JAMMA+ and Dragon’s Lair Fans. This machine needs some work as you can see from the picture, but is complete and should make a nice project.

I did manage to get a little bit of gaming in for the 100k Challenge too, setting a new high score of 58,800 on BurgerTime. More importantly I am now at the level where I can get over 40k on every game, so can hopefully increase the top score more significantly in the future.

That rounds things up for August. It’s not really worth showing a summary as there have been no significant changes since July, but here’s the current state of play with each game…

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 3 Summary

Here’s the summary for the past seven days…

Last week was generally a bit of a slow one, with not a lot of progress made on many games. The main reason for this was my focus on reaching 100k on Amidar and Zoo Keeper, which was finally achieved on Saturday night.

Aside from that the only notable increases occurred on Dragon Spirit and Contra, though I’ve also managed to surpass 30k on both Donkey Kong Jr and BurgerTime, something I thought was impossible just a couple of weeks ago!





I’ve realised that since I started the challenge there are still around a dozen games from my list that I haven’t even tried to better the scores on, such as Lady Bug, Commando and Scramble. So my aim for this week is to try and improve my scores on at least a few of those.





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…