Week 25-27 Summary - Nothing to report!

Due to a combination of factors (believe it or not most relate to the weather!) I haven’t been playing many games over the last few weeks, and I haven’t managed to improve scores on those that I have played, so things are at a standstill.

I’m hoping to dedicate a bit more time to improving scores over the next week or two before I go on holiday for a couple of weeks. Following that there will probably be further delays on updates as I will be preparing for this year’s HISCORE tournament in Manchester.

On the subject of which, only ten places remain in the tournament so if you’re a fan of classic arcade games and fancy your chances of winning a unique Microcade MAME cabinet from Turnarcades, head over to the HISCORE website and register now...

Week 24 Summary

Another week, and I’ve finally worked my way through most of my games and managed to boost a few more scores.

Firstly you’ll already have seen that I’ve reached 100k on Indiana Jones, but I also made progress on two other games. Firstly I’ve pushed my score up by exactly 10,000 points on Pooyan, but I’m actually more pleased with my increase on Ms Pac-Man. The boost was less than 6,000 points but the circumstances surrounding it were notable – the score was achieved on my first go on a Saturday morning after consuming copious amounts of booze and only getting 4 hours sleep! Ultimately I was disappointed not to reach 50k but my new score of 46,030 was still fairly pleasing!

So I’ve now passed 90k on quite a few games so my aim for the next week or two is to push the scores on those games over the magic 100k mark...

Triumph in the Temple of Doom!

What started as a practice session turned into another 100k completion when I completed the fourth ‘rescue the children’ stage of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for the first time and finished with a score of 108,600...

Usually I wouldn’t go back and record a video if I didn’t do it in the first place but I’m annoyed that despite breaking 100k I’m still not top of the high score table, so I aim to record that feat at some point in the future!

So after a long wait I’ve finally reached 100k on a quarter of my 40 games, so there’s just 30 left to go.

Week 22 and 23 Summary

It’s been a quiet couple of weeks on the 100k Challenge because I have been focussing most of my efforts on a new blog called Mastertronic Chronicles, which is all about my efforts to collect and play a set of Mastertronic budget games for the Commodore 64. Check it out if you’re interested!

Meanwhile I have still been working through my challenge games list and have made modest progress on a couple of them, though there have been no status changes.

The first increase came on Flying Shark, whose score had been static at 87,500 since I started the challenge. I’ve now boosted this score to 94,510 so I’m pretty close to achieving my goal on that one. The second game I’ve improved on is Hyper Sports – after numerous attempts I finally managed to complete the triple jump, though I think it was more luck than judgement! Following that I also completed the weight lifting stage only to be completely baffled by the pole vault, but I still managed to achieve a new personal best of 48,120. My fingers haven’t quite recovered yet!

This week I have some friends coming to stay over the weekend and we’ll certainly be playing some arcade games, so the presence of some healthy competition might help me improve a few more scores.

Week 21 Summary

As mentioned last week, I’ve been working through my list alphabetically and having five credits on each game to try and increase the score. Well I managed to get as far as the letter D, and specifically Donkey Kong Jr...

Unfortuantely I only managed to boost my score on two games, both from the Run & Gun genre as it happens. First up I managed to finally knock VULGUS off the top of the high score table on Commando, with a new score of 52,500. Then with the very next game on the list, Contra, I pushed very close to the target with a score of exactly 96,000 points. I’m not sure how I did it because progression-wise I actually didn’t get as far into the game as my last attempt that yielded around 78k, but there you go!

So this week I’ll continue to work through the list and hopefully boost a few more scores – maybe I’ll even break 100k on something!

Road Fighter Gameplay Video

I finally got around to pulling this off the camera, so let’s go all the way back to week 14 and check out my 100k achievement on Konami’s Road Fighter. The final moments of my attempt were a bit of a disaster but I managed it in the end...

As you’ll see, the key is not to rush through each stage and focus on getting through the traffic without bumping into it, collecting all the bonus ‘fuel cars’ that give increasing scores providing you don’t crash.

Week 20 Summary

It’s probably not really Week 20, but 20 is a nice round number and since the last month or so has been fairly inactive, let’s call it Week 20!

It’s fair to say progress is slowing down as my scores on a lot of games get closer to 100k. Inevitably it’s more difficult to push the scores higher beyond a certain level, so don’t expect to see a lot of difference on some scores from week to week.

That said, I have managed to push one more game into yellow status with a score of 77,900 on Green Beret. Aside from that the most significant increase was on Joust, with my new score being 57,850.

I also posted a modest increase of just over 6k on Lady Bug and an even more modest one on Asteroids, which along with Scramble continues to frustrate me as they are the only two games remaining in red status.

This week I’m taking a more structured approach by working through my list alphabetically and having five credits on each game to try and increase the score. I don’t imagine I’m going to be playing every game on the list this week, but let’s see how I get on...