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.

Pooyan - First Attempt

Looks like I made a good choice with this one!

Kong Goes Yellow

Quite a significant score improvement on one of the most difficult games in my challenge, the legendary Donkey Kong. My latest attempt saw my score jump by nearly 8,000 points to 75,100, changing the colour on my spreadsheet from orange to yellow. Frustratingly I actually struggled to get past the first two rivet levels, finishing the first with only 600 points bonus remaining, and the second with just 100 points left! Had I completed these quicker then I’d probably have passed 80k. I also lost a cheap life due to a mistimed jump on the second elevator level. My big problem with Kong is that occasionally I will log a good score, but more often than not I struggle to even get 50k. Those damned unpredictable barrel levels mean consistency is very hard to come by!

Sport Out, Pigs In!

I’ve decided to make a minor change to the line-up of games in my challenge. While I really enjoy playing Konami’s Track & Field, I have never got to grips with the high jump stage. So since it will take numerous button-smashing attempts before I even get to that stage, I’ve decided to drop the game from my list for the sake of my MAME cab control panel… In its place I have chosen another game developed by Konami - Pooyan. I have never really played the game before but the world record is over 1.6 million points so I figure 100k shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve!

Baseline Scores

Having decided on my list of games, I thought I better start by setting some baseline scores on the games I hadn’t previously recorded ones on. Here’s my updated log:

Based on one or two attempts, it shouldn’t be too challenging to reach 100k on the likes of Contra and Dragon Spirit, but for Phoenix and BurgerTime I’m already thinking of renaming this blog The 10k Challenge! Pitfall II also looks like it will be hard work, but the 10k score was set on my second go after getting less than 3,000 on the first, so it looks like it will just be a matter of learning the layout of each screen to make reasonable progress.

So there we have it, the scale of this challenge is now fully laid out. Now I need to decide whether to try and go for ‘quick wins’ on the games that I’m already fairly close to the target score, or start plugging away at some of those lower scores to get them out of the red…