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...

Pooyan Gameplay Video

Here’s my recording of my 100k achievement on Pooyan from this past weekend.

As you’ll see, the key to getting decent scores on this game is accurate use of the hunk of meat that appears at the top right every so often, usually when a large group of enemies are travelling up or down the screen.

Each eliminated wolf gives a Pac-Man style score multiplier, i.e. 200 for the first, 400 for the second and so on. Also bear in mind that after wiping the wolves out with the meat, the balloons stay on-screen and can be shot for an extra 200 points each.

Road Fighter Gameplay Video

I finally got around to pulling this off the camera, so let’s go all the way back to week 14 and check out my 100k achievement on Konami’s Road Fighter. The final moments of my attempt were a bit of a disaster but I managed it in the end...

As you’ll see, the key is not to rush through each stage and focus on getting through the traffic without bumping into it, collecting all the bonus ‘fuel cars’ that give increasing scores providing you don’t crash.

Return of the Invaders Gameplay Tips Video

Finally for today, here's some tips on how to improve your score on Return of the Invaders, which I also reached 100k on in week 9.

One thing I didn't mention in the video is that to activate the challenging stages you must leave at least two of the relevant enemies until last, and the more you leave alive, the bigger and more valuable the mothership that is spawned.

Mario Bros Gameplay Tips Video

This is a short video demonstrating some of the techniques I used to reach 100k on Mario Bros back in week 9...

Mr Do! Gameplay Tips Video

Back in week 5 I surpassed 100k on Mr Do! This was rather unexpected so wasn't recorded, but this video shows some strategies that helped me reach my scoring target...

Zoo Keeper Gameplay Video

Also from week 3, here's my video of breaking the 100k barrier for the first time on Zoo Keeper...

Amidar Gameplay Video

Well it's taken some time to get these created but finally I have some gameplay videos. First up we go all the way back to week 3 and my 100k achievement on Amidar. Not much more to be said about this one so I'll let the video do the talking...