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...

Green Beret Goes Green…

…and of course Green means I’ve reached 100k on the game! Following the progress reported in my last update, I progressed past the target more quickly than anticipated and finished with a score of 102,120. As I wasn’t expecting to get 100k quite so quickly, I didn’t record the achievement, but I do intend to record a few hints on this one soon.

That brings the total games with 100k attained to 15, with hopefully more to come in the next few weeks before I head off to America.

Triple Score Boost – Hacking, Stabbing and Clowning Around!

I’ve been playing a few different games from my list this week and with a  bit of persistence have managed to make some progress on three of them.

First up is Taito’s hack n’ slash platformer Rastan. This is quite a tough game, especially with those annoying bats, but I have been learning the level layout and can now make it mid-way through the castle stage. The result is a score increase to 97,500, so I expect to push this past 100k pretty soon, and will be videoing all future plays.

The other two games are both from Konami. First, I’ve posted a modest increase on Green Beret, with my latest score being 82,900. I’ve finally worked my way through the second level and on to the third, so with a little more practice I should be able to push that score up quite quickly. The second Konami game is Circus Charlie, and after some infuriating practice, I’ve finally worked out how to negotiate the challenging fifth stage, which involves riding a horse and jumping over trampolines, and push my score to 73,280.

I’d call that a pretty good week’s work!

Week 20 Summary

It’s probably not really Week 20, but 20 is a nice round number and since the last month or so has been fairly inactive, let’s call it Week 20!

It’s fair to say progress is slowing down as my scores on a lot of games get closer to 100k. Inevitably it’s more difficult to push the scores higher beyond a certain level, so don’t expect to see a lot of difference on some scores from week to week.

That said, I have managed to push one more game into yellow status with a score of 77,900 on Green Beret. Aside from that the most significant increase was on Joust, with my new score being 57,850.

I also posted a modest increase of just over 6k on Lady Bug and an even more modest one on Asteroids, which along with Scramble continues to frustrate me as they are the only two games remaining in red status.

This week I’m taking a more structured approach by working through my list alphabetically and having five credits on each game to try and increase the score. I don’t imagine I’m going to be playing every game on the list this week, but let’s see how I get on...

Week 4 Summary

Here’s the update for the past week…

Frankly last week was underwhelming to say the least. While I did make moderate progress on games like Commando, Pac-Land and Green Beret, there were no status upgrades at all. Added to that was the frustration of failing to improve scores on Nibbler, Lady Bug, Ghosts n Goblins and Joust despite several attempts. Pants!

In my defence I spent a lot of free time last week proof-reading the programme for the imminent Replay Expo. Also, I did have a heavy night out drinking followed by having to look after a broken girlfriend at the weekend, so my gaming time was significantly reduced!

This week I hope to put a few more hours in, especially as we’re having an 80’s themed gaming party next weekend where I can show off some skills! My intention is to try and reach a consistent performance level on the classic games such as Dig Dug, Donkey Kong and Pac-Man.