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 11 and 12 Summary

A summary of the last two weeks here, as by the time I got around to writing the summary for week 11 it was already halfway through week 12!

The first major highlight of the last two weeks was breaking 100k on Crazy Kong, but there have been several notable score increases since then as well. The one I was most pleased with was finally getting BurgerTime out of red status. I have been plugging away at this for a while and after getting so close with a score of 34k, I finally broke the 35k threshold in style with a new top score of 57,100! A lot of that was brought about by a fluke of trapping 4 or 5 enemies on one burger with a single pepper spray and then dropping them down, which yielded over 10,000 points. Whether I’ll ever be able to do that again remains to be seen but that is clearly the way to amass the big points.

Another status change occurred on Taito’s Rastan with an increase of nearly 50k to a new score of 86,600. To be honest that wasn’t too difficult to achieve and I think this will eventually go down as a fairly cheap game to get 100k on.

While there weren’t any other status changes, I have managed to boost scores on quite a few other games too, including a 30k increase on Indiana Jones and modest boosts on Pitfall II, Ghosts N Goblins and Ms Pac-Man.

Last but not least came a major breakthrough on Donkey Kong. I negotiated the third elevator stage for the first time, which yielded a new high score of 95,100. Frustratingly I had lost a couple of cheap lives on earlier stages which meant I couldn’t capitalise on my progress, but having done it once I’m sure I can do it again now, so 100k is suddenly within reach!

So, with all the above in mind, my aim for the next couple of weeks is to reach 100k on three more games, meaning I will have completed 25% of my challenge by Christmas...

Out with the Crap!

I’ve made a decision - two games on my list have got to go. It’s not necessarily because they are too hard. It’s actually because having played them a bit over the last few days, I realised I utterly hate them both! If a game’s no fun then there’s no enjoyment to be had from slogging away at it, so two space shooters are being bumped off the list.

First to go is Namco’s tedious vertical scroller Xevious. I’m pretty sure that if I persevered I could reach 100k on this, but it’s such a boring game I just don’t want to waste any of my life playing it! So off it goes, to be replaced by Taito’s hack and slash platformer Rastan.

Also being dumped is Phoenix. Now given that my current top score on this is under 7,000 then I'd probably never reach 100k anyway, but again I just don’t like the game and the thought of playing it for what must be hours to reach any kind of decent score fills me with horror. In its place comes a bit of a left-field choice, Sanritsu’s Van-Van Car, chosen purely on the basis that I could get over 40,000 points on my third go so it can’t be too hard to reach the target score!

So it's two games out, two games in, and a new look to my scoresheet...