Mr Do! Gameplay Tips Video

Back in week 5 I surpassed 100k on Mr Do! This was rather unexpected so wasn't recorded, but this video shows some strategies that helped me reach my scoring target...

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!

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...