To keep myself interested
and motivated in the 100k Challenge, I’m always coming up with new ways to
approach the sometimes daunting task of boosting my scores. My latest idea is
to play a single game from my list for an entire week, until I either beat my
existing score or the week runs out.
This week’s game was
determined by the latest round of the JAMMA+ high score challenge, and the game
in question is Mappy. I’ve already played the game more than 20 times and have
managed to improve my top score by just over 10k to 82,510 points, taking it
from orange to yellow status.
I’ll probably continue to
play the game for a little longer since there is the secondary aim of ranking
as highly as possible in the JAMMA+ competition, but I’ll be switching to a
different game at the end of this week for the purposes of the 100k challenge…
I’ve been back from my
holiday to the USA for a few weeks now, and it was certainly a memorable trip
for a number of reasons! Most relevant to this blog was the 15th
Annual Classic Gaming Tournament at the legendary Funspot arcade.
This year’s tournament
featured the usual line-up of 15 classic cabs, a mixture of reasonably well
known games like Xevious and Moon Patrol, and obscure but interesting titles
such as Zero Hour, Head On and Pac & Pal. This year’s manufacturers
tournament featured games from Konami, including two that I’ve played regularly
as part of the 100k challenge, albeit under their European names of Green Beret
and Shaolin’s Road.
A new addition this year was
the 30th Anniversary Tournament, which included three games celebrating
their 30th birthday – Tapper, Star Wars and Elevator Action.
Finally, there were the usual daily game challenges that included the likes of
Rally-X, Metal Slug and Video Pinball.
I’ve put together some
comprehensive video coverage of the tournament which can be seen below:
This year I finished 28th
in the main tournament and 19th in the manufacturers challenge, both
significant improvements on my 2010 placings, and I certainly credit my 100k
challenge as one of the reasons for my overall improvement on classic arcade
games.
Also noteworthy from this
visit to Funspot was my fiancée Anna’s live performance on Bank Panic. Her
score of 1,087,100 was a personal best, the greatest score ever recorded on the
machine at Funspot, and also the greatest score recorded by a female player worldwide.
Nice work!
As well as visiting Funspot,
we also managed to check out some other locations around the USA that have
classic arcade games, such as Barcade, Game Galaxy and the Pinball Wizard
arcade. These are summarised nicely in my United States of Arcadia videos on
YouTube.
New games I discovered on
this trip that I enjoyed, and have now made it on to my MAME cabs, include
Swimmer, Zarzon, Food Fight, Timber and Skydiver. If you’ve never played any of
these before then I recommend checking them out!
So now it's back to the challenge with some renewed enthusiasm...
Nothing
much to report in the way of score updates from the last couple of weeks. The
only improvement was on Nibbler around a week ago, pushing my score up to
82,080.
Just
one more week remains until we head off to the USA, and my preparations for
competing in the Funspot tournament have been variable to say the least. I’m
still hopeful of a good placing though, as many of the games in the competition
are likely to be quite obscure, giving all players a similar chance of
achieving decent scores.
So with a month gone since I restarted my efforts on this challenge, here's a look at the latest stats...
…and of
course Green means I’ve reached 100k on the game! Following the progress
reported in my last update, I progressed past the target more quickly than
anticipated and finished with a score of 102,120. As I wasn’t expecting to get
100k quite so quickly, I didn’t record the achievement, but I do intend to
record a few hints on this one soon.
That
brings the total games with 100k attained to 15, with hopefully more to come in
the next few weeks before I head off to America.
While I’ve
been plugging away on my games, big congratulations are in order to a couple of
people this week for increasing their personal best scores on their respective
favourite games.
First up we
have my friend and Pac-Man master Jon Stoodley, who edges ever closer to
becoming the first British player to obtain the perfect Pac-Man score. His
new record is 3,317,480 and you can see the video of his marathon six and
a half hour video of this achievement by clicking here.
Second, and
closer to home, my girlfriend Anna posted an astonishing update to her existing
Bank Panic score this weekend, breaking the one million points barrier
and surpassing her previous record by almost 500k in a single game, to 1,081,000
– mightily impressive!
Congratulations
to both of you, and hopefully we’ll see both records broken again when we meet
up at Funspot next month…
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.
Well then,
it’s been nine months since my last update. There are numerous reasons for this
which I won’t go into, but as of this past weekend I am officially restarting
the 100k Challenge!
In the last
nine months I have not done a lot of arcade gaming, but I’m now focussing back
on the MAME cabs for the next couple of months because we are heading off to
the USA for the annual Funspot tournament at the end of May, so I need the
practice!
My initial
preparation for the tournament has been to play games that are available at
Funspot (and therefore might be in the competition) but are also on my 100k
Challenge game list. This practice had reaped almost instant rewards, as I’ve
now passed my target score on Konami’s Contra, with 126,500 points!
Interestingly,
this score was achieved on what seemed to be one of my worst-ever games. I lost
two lives before I even reached the enemy base on the first level, but then
proceeded to get through the base and past the first boss without losing
another life, which was a first. I then got to the second base before meeting
my demise, but by then the 100k was well secured. There’s no video for this one
(it was just a practice session) but it was hardly a vintage performance anyway
and most players should easily be able to pass 100k after a few attempts.
Since my
last update, the only other game I’ve made any improvement on is Donkey Kong,
pushing my score up by a little over 2,000 points to 97,300 – that 100k is
getting painstakingly close now!
So as a
reminder, the current state of play is shown below. Hopefully there will be
some more updates soon!
