Funspot Report

I’ve been back from my holiday to the USA for a few weeks now, and it was certainly a memorable trip for a number of reasons! Most relevant to this blog was the 15^th Annual Classic Gaming Tournament at the legendary Funspot arcade.

This year’s tournament featured the usual line-up of 15 classic cabs, a mixture of reasonably well known games like Xevious and Moon Patrol, and obscure but interesting titles such as Zero Hour, Head On and Pac & Pal. This year’s manufacturers tournament featured games from Konami, including two that I’ve played regularly as part of the 100k challenge, albeit under their European names of Green Beret and Shaolin’s Road.

A new addition this year was the 30^th Anniversary Tournament, which included three games celebrating their 30^th birthday – Tapper, Star Wars and Elevator Action. Finally, there were the usual daily game challenges that included the likes of Rally-X, Metal Slug and Video Pinball.

I’ve put together some comprehensive video coverage of the tournament which can be seen below:

This year I finished 28^th in the main tournament and 19^th in the manufacturers challenge, both significant improvements on my 2010 placings, and I certainly credit my 100k challenge as one of the reasons for my overall improvement on classic arcade games.

Also noteworthy from this visit to Funspot was my fiancée Anna’s live performance on Bank Panic. Her score of 1,087,100 was a personal best, the greatest score ever recorded on the machine at Funspot, and also the greatest score recorded by a female player worldwide. Nice work!

As well as visiting Funspot, we also managed to check out some other locations around the USA that have classic arcade games, such as Barcade, Game Galaxy and the Pinball Wizard arcade. These are summarised nicely in my United States of Arcadia videos on YouTube.

New games I discovered on this trip that I enjoyed, and have now made it on to my MAME cabs, include Swimmer, Zarzon, Food Fight, Timber and Skydiver. If you’ve never played any of these before then I recommend checking them out!

So now it's back to the challenge with some renewed enthusiasm...

High Scoring Friends and Loved Ones

While I’ve been plugging away on my games, big congratulations are in order to a couple of people this week for increasing their personal best scores on their respective favourite games.

First up we have my friend and Pac-Man master Jon Stoodley, who edges ever closer to becoming the first British player to obtain the perfect Pac-Man score. His new record is 3,317,480 and you can see the video of his marathon six and a half hour video of this achievement by clicking here.

Second, and closer to home, my girlfriend Anna posted an astonishing update to her existing Bank Panic score this weekend, breaking the one million points barrier and surpassing her previous record by almost 500k in a single game, to 1,081,000 – mightily impressive!

Congratulations to both of you, and hopefully we’ll see both records broken again when we meet up at Funspot next month…

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!