karokoenig

Favourites: Breakout - because paddles. Demon Attack - one of those "get into the flow" games. Surprises: Gingerbread Man - more than meets the eye. Private Eye - never played it before, pretty "sophisticated" Worst: Track n Field - can't stand to do this to my poor historical joysticks Decathlon - see above. It was a great season. Tough competition - for a mediocre player like me it gets harder every year to stay in touch with the top 24. And that'S exactly how it should be. Thanks, Mr. V for making this possible.

Amstrad/Schneider CPC Bruce Lee: 30 min VIC 20 Avenger: 7 min Rat Race: 5 min Vectrex Mine Storm: 5 min Armor Attack: 7 min Vector Pilot: 10 min Sharp 68000 Chourensha: 10 min Philips G7000 Gunfighter (#14): 3 min Atari 2600 Frogger: 10 min Mario Bros: 10 min Atari 800 Mashed Turtles: 6 min A ton of variety this week. The reason is that yesterday, I was at the DoReCo in the Heinz Nixdorf Museums Forum in Paderborn/Germany. Lots of geeks soldering, lots of systems ready to play, lots of fun conversations. Noteworthy among the games are Mashed Turtles on the Atari 8-bit (a Freeway-like game for 8 players - simultaneously) and Vector Pilot (an excellent and very hard port of Space Pilot) for the Vectrex. I also had the opportunity to play through the Bruce Lee port for the CPC twice, which is one of my all-time favourite games on the C64. Took me a while to get used to the slightly different mechanics. It was very helpful that the guy who had set up the CPC had hacked 99 lives into the game :-).

58,100 for the moment. It's totally not my game, but I think I have a few more points in me. Let's see if I find the time :-).

Atari 2600 Fatal Run: 5 min Frogger: 20 min Mission 3,000: 3 min Moon Patrol: 8 min Commodore 64 Bruce Lee: 8 min A shame that I had so little time that week. We played Frogger on difficulty A in the HSC, and I love that game. Only had time to squeeze one quick session in, leaving me about 2k points short of my previous personal best. The 8 minutes of Bruce Lee were played on original hardware. Even while visiting my dad over the weekend, I just had time enough to fire up the C64 for one playthrough.

First blood - and it's green. Frogger A: 3,395. I think I can do a little better, but probably not much.

It's 122 all in all. Sorry for the imprecise phrasing.

Got a last-minute game of Super Breakout in and everything fell into place. Very happy with the result: Game 7: 2,106. A new personal best. Beat my previous highscore by almost 400 points.

All Atari 2600 this week: Enduro: 4 min Freeway: 4 min Marauder: 3 min Pitfall!: 3 min Space Chase: 3 min Super Breakout: 102 min (edit: + 20 min, in a last-minute Sunday entry) Tac-Scan: 8 min Super Breakout and Tac-Scan for HSC, the rest was a little "try-here-and-there" session with my son. New personal best for Game 7 in Super Breakout. Finally crossed the 2k barrier.

Participation score for Tac Scan: 27,100. Shame I had to play this with touchpad on my laptop. Got to hunt down a physical cart. (edit): Nevermind. Went to ebay right away and found a bin offer for a reasonable price.

Slight improvement on Super Breakout: 1,682.

Super Breakout 7: 1,615

Atari 2600 Bank Heist: 8 min Centipede: 1 min Gangster Alley: 10 min Millipede: 2 min Missile Command: 12 min Outlaw: 4 min Star Wars – Jedi Arena: 3 min Super Breakout: 35 min A little more above detection limit this time. I played Missile Command, Centipede and Millipede to test the trackball controller I scored in an ebay lot recently. Predictably, it doesn't work all that well, even if it works. Mine has one direction broken. It seems like one of the magnetic clicky switches triggered by the rotating magnets is kaput. The longer playtime for Missile Command is a result of me plugging in the Joystick after testing the trackball and playing a decent round just for fun. Most played: Super Breakout for the current Paddle Weeks in the HSC. We are playing Game 7, which I love. Here's hoping that I find some more time to play. I am still around 300 points short of my previous highscore for that game variant.

I love the original Atari cover artwork, so picture for me. The later red ones I don't like that much, though. Imagic: Text. Absolutely lovely: all Parker Bros labels.

Super Breakout: 1,438

Bank Heist: 1,060 Gangster Alley: 18,220 Bonus: Outlaw Game 16: 21 seconds Rather busy recently, so just some participation points. I like Gangster Alley. Wish I had more time to play that one.

Atari 2600 Demon Attack: 3 min Fatal Run: 4 min Pele’s Soccer: 1 min Pitfall!: 5 min Real Sports Tennis: 2 min Space Invaders: 2 min Spider Fighter: 4 min Star Wars Jedi Arena: 3 min Time Race: 2 min Yars’ Revenge: 2 min Testing some carts that came along in a lot, including a trackball controller and an Atari Jr console. Those will be tested when I find the time.

Game Boy Megalit: 12 min A puzzle game I grabbed off a flea market for € 1.50. Nothing to write home about... Pong 5 min Well, kind of. Last week, I was invited to an official event, where they had a mechanical Pong Coffee Table on display. It is intended to be coin-op, and it looked utterly awesome, with a colourful and futuristic attract mode and a very high quality feel to it. I didn't have a camera with me, but I did grab a flyer. See attached photos. They also had cubic Atari style seats to go with it, which were super-awesome and also felt high-quality. But - and that's a huge "but": the gameplay... the game works magnetically. There seems to be a mechanism under the playfield that moves the bats and the ball (i.e. white blocks) along. The huge heavy paddle wheel feels great at first, but it's extremely laggy, has lots of inertia and feels altogether mushy. The ball doesn't follow a straight line, but does little zig zag movements. Borderline unplayable if you are used to the instant pixel-perfect paddle controls of Pong and the 2600. And certainly not fun. So how does their slogan "Lets bring back the Magic" hold up? Very well - as long as you don't play it. A price point of roughly € 3,500 apiece doesn't help either: https://pinball-universe.de/694-pong-table-classic The seats... now those are tempting, I must say. The price is high, but they really do look and feel great. You can see them if you scroll down the page.

Exactly 20 years ago, on February 20, 1999, an awesome website was started to collect and preserve solutions, maps, stories and everything else around good old text adventures, or Interactive Fiction, if you will. The site is still online, ist still being maintained, and still being contributed to by different users. It is, as far as I can see, one of the best, if not the best archive for anyone who is into this flavour of gaming. Here is a little reminiscence written by the fine fellow called Jacob Gunness, the owner: https://solutionarchive.com/casa_20_years/ I highly recommend the text, and the whole site, to anyone who has a soft spot for text adventures.

Well, Happy Birthday to you indeed!

Atari 2600 Infiltrate: 18 min Mr. Do!: 12 min Private Eye: 15 min PC (DOS) Silent Hunter: 36 min Some High Score Club, and a test game of my new acquisition in the collection - Mr. Do. Also, I finished a patrol in Silent Hunter.

For the bonus: Infiltrate (1-6): 2,925

Infiltrator 1BB: 17,075 Private Eye 2BB: 47,200

Habemus Papam!

Atari 2600 Robot Tank: 12 min Talk about detection limit.

Here's my entry. Can't say I like the game too much. It is, however, quite a technical achievement. Robot Tank 1BB: 42 tanks. Fastest 12 tanks bonus: 1d 01 hrs