Last Week at ACAM (11/14/15-11/22/15)
Hello fellow gamers:
Had my usual fun at ACAM for my annual vacation. About 20 gamers were present including several world champions just having some fun for the week.
I managed to pull off a new personal best at "Playboy" pinball (the 1976 version) with 1.947M...unrecorded but a memorable moment for me as that is one hell of a score.
I also pulled off a new Aurcade WR on "Cosmic Alien" of 293K...getting back into the swing of things, just wishing I had more time to practice after work nowadays as this was my only game played of this title all week.
On my favourite title "Super Cobra" I managed a 187K on my second game all week after a year of not touching the game, and last November I only played it a few times so it was more like two years without serious practice for me. This was my second game played as well last week, and four of the game deaths were due to sheer stupidity and being "rusty", dying at the end of the 3rd maze. Had I not been rusty this would have had some decent potential with all those extra ships at that point thus the one that would have been awarded after the 3rd booty. Oh well...next year.
Lastly I finally managed to crank out a 4000+ score on arcade "Depthcharge"...no way near the arcade WR but a first for me even though I've scored 4000+ dozens of times on MAME including a 4420 or so as submitted to MARP. My arcade best for Aurcade now stands at 4,170.
Could not get a good game of "Pandora's Palace" going, reaching 565-585K at best. No big deal...I will go for it again next year after more practice. I've reached a 1.7M recently on MAME in practice so I am confidant that next year I will set a new mark.
On an amusing note, five times in a row no less, I beat my friends at "Daytona" on each of the three race courses, nearly finishing the "Expert" course for the first time ever. What is so amusing about this is (A) I don't even have a driver's license nor can I drive for real, and (B) I was successfully, more or less, using manual transmission as opposed to automatic, which for a non-driver is usually a problem. My friends feel that my "Daytona" success is because as a non-driver I have a lack of fear about crashing. Who knows...at least I won :)
Otherwise there were a few new records established by some of the visiting gamers, I think most being on "Death Race" from 1975.
It was a much smaller crowd this year which allowed me to focus more on gaming and simply enjoying myself. Time was back in 2003 when I first went for a week in November that I was in the arcade from around 8:45am-closing each and every night for the entire 8-day stretch. Now, nearly 13 years later, I think I spent only 1/3 as much time playing games as back then. Getting older has changed my drive to go for records...I still go for them on a few titles, but I no longer try to be good or at least better than average on every title...only so much time so I'm more choosy about how I spend my time now...a natural progression in the life of a gamer, I suppose.