Baseline Scores

Having decided on my list of games, I thought I better start by setting some baseline scores on the games I hadn’t previously recorded ones on. Here’s my updated log:

Based on one or two attempts, it shouldn’t be too challenging to reach 100k on the likes of Contra and Dragon Spirit, but for Phoenix and BurgerTime I’m already thinking of renaming this blog The 10k Challenge! Pitfall II also looks like it will be hard work, but the 10k score was set on my second go after getting less than 3,000 on the first, so it looks like it will just be a matter of learning the layout of each screen to make reasonable progress.

So there we have it, the scale of this challenge is now fully laid out. Now I need to decide whether to try and go for ‘quick wins’ on the games that I’m already fairly close to the target score, or start plugging away at some of those lower scores to get them out of the red…

The Games

I’m tracking my progress on each game via an Excel spreadsheet. A snapshot of the first version is shown below. I’ve created some fairly arbitrary colour-coded levels to show my progress on each game – RED means I’m under 35% of the way to achieving 100k, ORANGE means I’m under 75% and YELLOW means I’m on the ‘home straight’ so to speak.

The games include some of the most beloved arcade classics such as Pac-Man, Centipede, Phoenix and Mr Do! There are also a few personal favourites in the form of Dig Dug, Zoo Keeper and Mario Bros, and finally a few games that I’ve rarely invested any time into such as Contra, Pitfall II and Dragon Spirit – I truly have no idea how easy or hard it will be to achieve my target score on these games!