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.

Week 22 and 23 Summary

It’s been a quiet couple of weeks on the 100k Challenge because I have been focussing most of my efforts on a new blog called Mastertronic Chronicles, which is all about my efforts to collect and play a set of Mastertronic budget games for the Commodore 64. Check it out if you’re interested!

Meanwhile I have still been working through my challenge games list and have made modest progress on a couple of them, though there have been no status changes.

The first increase came on Flying Shark, whose score had been static at 87,500 since I started the challenge. I’ve now boosted this score to 94,510 so I’m pretty close to achieving my goal on that one. The second game I’ve improved on is Hyper Sports – after numerous attempts I finally managed to complete the triple jump, though I think it was more luck than judgement! Following that I also completed the weight lifting stage only to be completely baffled by the pole vault, but I still managed to achieve a new personal best of 48,120. My fingers haven’t quite recovered yet!

This week I have some friends coming to stay over the weekend and we’ll certainly be playing some arcade games, so the presence of some healthy competition might help me improve a few more scores.