Back with a Bang!

Well then, it’s been nine months since my last update. There are numerous reasons for this which I won’t go into, but as of this past weekend I am officially restarting the 100k Challenge!

In the last nine months I have not done a lot of arcade gaming, but I’m now focussing back on the MAME cabs for the next couple of months because we are heading off to the USA for the annual Funspot tournament at the end of May, so I need the practice!

My initial preparation for the tournament has been to play games that are available at Funspot (and therefore might be in the competition) but are also on my 100k Challenge game list. This practice had reaped almost instant rewards, as I’ve now passed my target score on Konami’s Contra, with 126,500 points!

Interestingly, this score was achieved on what seemed to be one of my worst-ever games. I lost two lives before I even reached the enemy base on the first level, but then proceeded to get through the base and past the first boss without losing another life, which was a first. I then got to the second base before meeting my demise, but by then the 100k was well secured. There’s no video for this one (it was just a practice session) but it was hardly a vintage performance anyway and most players should easily be able to pass 100k after a few attempts.

Since my last update, the only other game I’ve made any improvement on is Donkey Kong, pushing my score up by a little over 2,000 points to 97,300 – that 100k is getting painstakingly close now!

So as a reminder, the current state of play is shown below. Hopefully there will be some more updates soon!

Flying Shark Tamed!

Can you tame a shark? Who knows? Anyway, after a long period of relative inactivity (at least as far as actually increasing scores goes) I have finally achieved another 100k score. Taito’s Flying Shark is the game in question and the score is 100,780.

To be honest I didn’t expect to reach this score so easily, as previous time dedicated to this game has seen only minimal increases and usually a bit of practice is required before I can tackle the first level. However this score came on just my second attempt so there’s no video, but it wasn’t a particularly noteworthy performance anyway.

Still, it’s another game off the list with 29 still to go. Most of my recent focus has been on Donkey Kong, on which I’ve logged several 90k or higher scores over the last week, although none higher than my current best. It’s surely just a matter of time though!

Given the general lack of progress at the moment I’ve basically given up on the weekly updates and will now just post to the blog whenever I improve a score, and then summarise my progress at the end of each month.

HISCORE 2012 Review

Well it’s been a month since my last update due to my holiday and then running the HISCORE Classic Arcade Tournament in Manchester. During that time very little has been done on the 100k Challenge so I thought I’d kick things off again with a look back at HISCORE. Check out my video diaries of the tournament...

Click here for Day 2

It was a great event both in terms of the way it ran – everyone had a good time and lots of great scores were logged – and also from a personal point of view. There were several high points for me, including taking fifth spot in the final rankings, and achieving a couple of notable scores. My score of 50,130 on Ms. Pac-Man was the best of the weekend, a personal best ‘live score’ and the only one to beat the 50k mark.

Also early on day one I got my best-ever score on Donkey Kong, almost reaching 100k with a score of 97,700. The cab in use for the event has the Japanese DK boardset which has a different level layout, so even if I had topped 100k it wouldn’t have counted towards my challenge, but I was still very pleased given it was my first (and only) attempt of the weekend!

If you’re interested in seeing how everyone got on at the tournament then do check out the results page at the official HISCORE site.

One last thing - going back to Ms. Pac-Man, the night before HISCORE I decided to have a bit of a practice on my home machine and managed to increase my score to 55,790 – obviously that practice paid off given my achievement on the day!

So that’s it for now. I’m now back trying to increase my 100k Challenge game scores when I get the chance, and hopefully will have some updates soon...

New Year, Same Challenge

Well I've had a week or so off after my holiday but it's now time to start up the 100k Challenge again. I've rather lost track of which week number I'm up to though so I'm just going to call this Week 15!

I'm going to start where I left off in 2011 by trying to crack 100k on Donkey Kong, but I'll also be looking to push up some scores on the games that I've failed to do so on thus far - games like Nibbler, Lady Bug, Rolling Thunder and Scramble.

Week 13 and 14 Summary

Last update of the year as I’m off on holiday this afternoon and won’t return until 2012…

I’ve been focussing on reaching 100k on a few games so other score updates are few and far between. As you’ve seen, both Road Fighter and Van-Van Car are now done but unfortunately my aim to reach 100k on 25% of the 40 games fell one short. The third game I was aiming for was Donkey Kong but after playing around 25 games and not getting past 72k, I’ve given up for now – I think the game just hates me!

The only other notable score updates were on Ghosts N Goblins, which I reached level 3 on for the first time and moved into yellow status with a score of 83,500, and Rally-X that saw an 11k boost to 50,200.

So that’s it for this year. Overall I think it’s been good, with my skills and knowledge of some classic games vastly improved, but there’s still a long way to go…

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 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...

Mario Moving Higher

Further progress has been made on two Nintendo games from my list that feature early incarnations of Mario. Firstly I’ve now pushed my Donkey Kong score up to 87,300. I reached the third elevator screen for the first time and spectacularly failed to time my climb up the ladder to complete the level. More practice of that is certainly required! Secondly I’ve also made further progress on Mario Bros, pushing my score beyond 90k for the first time.

I wish I could report similar progress on the other Nintendo game, Donkey Kong Jr. Although I have increased my score beyond 27k I’m still struggling to get to grips with this game – I thought the original Donkey Kong was one of the hardest games ever made but there are so many ways to die in the sequel it’s untrue!

Kong Goes Yellow

Quite a significant score improvement on one of the most difficult games in my challenge, the legendary Donkey Kong. My latest attempt saw my score jump by nearly 8,000 points to 75,100, changing the colour on my spreadsheet from orange to yellow. Frustratingly I actually struggled to get past the first two rivet levels, finishing the first with only 600 points bonus remaining, and the second with just 100 points left! Had I completed these quicker then I’d probably have passed 80k. I also lost a cheap life due to a mistimed jump on the second elevator level. My big problem with Kong is that occasionally I will log a good score, but more often than not I struggle to even get 50k. Those damned unpredictable barrel levels mean consistency is very hard to come by!