Week 13 and 14 Summary

Last update of the year as I’m off on holiday this afternoon and won’t return until 2012…

I’ve been focussing on reaching 100k on a few games so other score updates are few and far between. As you’ve seen, both Road Fighter and Van-Van Car are now done but unfortunately my aim to reach 100k on 25% of the 40 games fell one short. The third game I was aiming for was Donkey Kong but after playing around 25 games and not getting past 72k, I’ve given up for now – I think the game just hates me!

The only other notable score updates were on Ghosts N Goblins, which I reached level 3 on for the first time and moved into yellow status with a score of 83,500, and Rally-X that saw an 11k boost to 50,200.

So that’s it for this year. Overall I think it’s been good, with my skills and knowledge of some classic games vastly improved, but there’s still a long way to go…

Two more 100k achievements - Merry Christmas!

Never let is be said that I’m not committed to this challenge – on Christmas Day and Boxing Day I put a few hours into playing and managed to reach my target score on two more games…

First up on Christmas Day was Road Fighter. I only just managed to reach the target with a score of 100,250 and annoyingly I grabbed my camera to take a photo the high score table defaulted my name to ‘A’, but it’s another one crossed off the list!

Thanks to tips from JAMMA+ forum member muddymusic on this one - his MAME score on Road Fighter is over a million points so mine pales in comparison to that! The main tips I’d share are that you shouldn’t try and race to the finish line but instead take it a bit slower, avoid hitting any other cars for a large and of stage bonus, and make sure you collect all the bonus cars which increase in value each time you get them.

The second game, completed on Boxing Day, was Van-Van Car and the score achieved was 138,000. To be honest there’s no tips to be shared here – the game is simple enough and there don’t seem to be any secrets to score boosting, so it’s just a case of making your way through the levels without making any mistakes. I quite enjoyed playing the game but it’s certainly not a classic!

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…

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...