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...

Kong Conquered!

Late last night just before heading to bed I decided to try and increase my score on Crazy Kong. Having reached 73k last week I figured it was worth trying to surpass 75k and move the game into yellow status. As it turned out, I did that and much more!

Having only managed to get past the third elevator stage once, on this attempt I reached that level without even losing a life, and got past it without any issues. At that point my score was around 8,000 points less than my personal best so I wasn’t expecting much more, but things just got better and better as I went on to reach the fourth elevator stage before losing my first life...

On my next life I got past that stage and the following rivet level without further loss of life. I finally met my match in the form of some aggressive random barrels on the fifth barrel stage but not before squeaking past my target score with 100,100 points - how close was that?

So that’s an unexpected surprise and another 100k achievement. On to the next one!

Week 10 Summary

Well compared to last week, this was a bit of a disappointment…

I’ve decided to add a new stat to the summary which is my average score across all 40 games. This way I can see how close I’m getting to my target and hopefully this will increase each week of course!

With my focus this past week on boosting scores I hadn’t improved since the start of the challenge, progress was expected to be modest, and so it was. I did play quite a lot of other games such as Dig Dug, Asteroids and Flying Shark, but failed to improve my scores on any of those games. Consequently the only notable achievement of the week was boosting my score to 44,600 on Joust, taking it from red to orange status.

The only other score boost was Crazy Kong, with an increase of 5,200 points. While this doesn’t seem particularly special at first glance, in terms of gameplay it was quite important as I managed to get past the third elevator stage for the first time. Unfortunately the following rivets level saw me lose three lives to some insanely angry fireballs!

You may wonder why Crazy Kong even appears in this challenge as to many people it is just a poor clone of Donkey Kong. However the truth is that unlike many bootlegs of Nintendo’s classic, Crazy Kong is actually an officially licensed version and offers different scoring challenges due some of the hammers being inaccessible.

Anyway, this week I’m not setting myself any targets - I’m just going to play the games I most feel like playing and see what happens. Next week’s update could therefore be really good or really bad!