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…

Week 5 Summary

A bit of delay this week but here’s the latest update:

The most significant score updates were already reported – reaching the 100k mark on Mr Do! And surpassing 70k on Pac-Man. The only other notable improvements this week were a 15k increase on Konami’s Road Fighter and a massive improvement on Van-Van Car, pushing the score over 90k. That pretty much proves that it was a rather cheap replacement for Phoenix, but never mind!

This week my aim is to reach 100k on at least one game on my horizontally-aligned MAME cab (all the ones achieved so far have been on the Super Astro Fighter one) and also to try and surpass 35k on at least one of the troublesome ‘red status’ games…

Pac-Man Powered Up; Mr Do... Done!

Well I’m definitely having a better week! As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m focussing on the classics this week and I started with Pac-Man. After almost reaching 50k a couple of weeks ago I wondered if I’d ever reach that milestone again, and after three or four credits where I lost a life on the first level, I had as good as given up. I then had the game of my life so far, managing to last until the fifth level without losing a life and almost getting perfect points on the second stage, just missing one ghost. Ultimately I got to level 9 and was a little disappointed not to surpass 75k in the end. That said, my score of 71,330 was very pleasing!

Next I tried my hand at Mr Do! I had achieved a score of over 90k just once in the past but since then I had barely got close, with many scores barely passing 60,000. After a number of frustrating attempts I decided to have one more go last night, changing my gameplay tactics slightly, and clocked up a very satisfactory 125,200 points, thus completing the challenge for that game!

I wasn’t really expecting to reach 100k so I didn’t capture the achievement on video, but I may have another go to try and record some of the techniques I used. In a nutshell though, for the first few levels I concentrated on crushing multiple enemies with a single apple, which yields a lot of points, followed by clearing the majority of cherries and zapping the bonus letter dude from the top of the screen. On later levels when the red enemies get too fast, my focus changed to getting rid of them as quickly as possible before gathering up all the cherries. I don’t think it’s the best tactic but it certainly worked for me!

Week 1 Summary

Well, one week into my challenge and it’s been great fun! Here’s a summary of my progress so far:

I decided to focus on boosting some of the lower scores, hence the number of games moved from red to orange status. Significant improvements over the last few days include boosts of over 20,000 points on the likes of Amidar, Circus Charlie and Pac-Land, and a vast improvement on BurgerTime that does give me some hope that 100k is actually reachable. The best achievement of the week however happened late last night. After numerous failed attempts to boost my score beyond 30k on Pac-Man, suddenly everything clicked and I logged an unprecedented score of 49,750!

The full list of my latest scores is shown below along with selected photographic evidence of some of my highlights. This week my aim is to reach 100k on a couple of games, though I haven’t yet decided which ones.