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.

Week 9 Summary

What a week it was! It seems the break I had was a good thing because after a couple of unspectacular weeks I am definitely back with a bang…

The early 100k achievements on Return of the Invaders and Mario Bros were followed by big increases on two of the toughest games in my challenge, taking both out of the red status. First was a 20k boost on Ghosts n Goblins – multiple playthroughs of the first level revealed some high value secrets that pushed my score up to 48,600. As if that wasn’t satisfying enough, I then played a few games of Sinistar and managed to get to grips with the asteroid mining, gather enough bombs to dispatch the first level’s Sinistar and push my score up to 62,730 which was an increase of nearly 40k! Annoyingly the game won’t let me enter my initials on the high score table so I’m just known as ‘A’ on that game.

On top of those achievements I also managed to boost scores on Mappy, Dragon Spirit and Hyper Sports by varying degrees, so I’m very happy with the last week’s efforts.

This week I’m hoping for more of the same. I’d particularly like to raise my score on Asteroids, which I have been practicing on for the last few weeks with limited success. It would also be nice to see some movement on the games where I haven’t yet increased the score since the challenge started – the likes of Lady Bug, Flying Shark and Joust spring to mind.