Donkey Kong Forum
Blogs => Player Blogs => Topic started by: johnbart on November 20, 2013, 02:18:32 pm
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I've re-found my love for classic arcade gaming and decided to catch a big of Kong fever. I'm stuck with only a laptop and Mame for the next few months so I'm going to see if I can finally get better at this game. This forum is another reason that I chose to focus on the game. The rest of the CAG scene has kind of dispersed to the four corners and there are a lot of familiar faces hanging out here.
I've started by setting up a number of saved states for all levels through 6-1 and a special one for the 4th elevator with jumpman already at the top so I can practice going from safe spot to safe spot. After the first couple of weeks I have a new PB of 194,100 making it to 7-1. It's far from a good score but it's a start for me.
http://www.myhighscores.net/scores/267 (http://www.myhighscores.net/scores/267)
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Go Johnny... Go Johnny...
Welcome aboard!
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I've been getting into a practice routine where I spend most of my time looping through boards on level 5 to improve my chances on being able to run those boards cleanly. While I've been doing that I've noticed something strange happening.
I'm actually enjoying playing Donkey Kong!!
I've played the game on and off for years but I never really had a tonne of fun playing it due to the frustration factors with it. I have reached a point where I'm starting to understand the levels a bit more and see some of the beauty in the frustration. I honestly wasn't sure I was going to get to this point. :)
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You have to bang through that wall with any game; but once you start making progress, learning new stuff, it's the most fun you'll ever have in CAGing, imo. Learning the nuances of games new to you, and learning that you like the game in the process, es muy bueno.
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I've been doing a lot of just practising individual board types and I finally have started to get a bit more comfortable with each and cutting down on the blatantly stupid deaths. I still have plenty of stupid deaths but they aren't as ugly as they used to be. The biggest boost was when I started playing around with barrel boards, not for the sake of running them quickly, but to see how I can control barrels better and practice all kinds of different jumps.
The practising is fun to do and it's finally starting to show dividends. Tonight I bumped up my PB a good chunk in a breakthrough game with 264,300. Next stop is 300k!
http://www.myhighscores.net/scores/270 (http://www.myhighscores.net/scores/270)
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I started reading the Beginner's Manual put together by the guys here and I think it helped me solidify some ideas in my head for the barrel boards. This led me to a mini-breakthrough game today for a new personal best of 386,100. Most importantly I didn't have any obviously stupid deaths. Most of them were just due to my lack of skill and not a complete goober on my part.
Watch out Ken, I'm catching up.
http://www.myhighscores.net/scores/271 (http://www.myhighscores.net/scores/271)
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Most importantly I didn't have any obviously stupid deaths.
I only wish that I could report similar progress. I honestly cannot recall a single game I've played in the past 2 years with fewer than 2 deaths resulting from "cement head syndrome". If it's located above my neck and between my shoulders, it must be a cinder block. ;)
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I started reading the Beginner's Manual put together by the guys here and I think it helped me solidify some ideas in my head for the barrel boards. This led me to a mini-breakthrough game today for a new personal best of 386,100. Most importantly I didn't have any obviously stupid deaths. Most of them were just due to my lack of skill and not a complete goober on my part.
Watch out Ken, I'm catching up.
http://www.myhighscores.net/scores/271 (http://www.myhighscores.net/scores/271)
Glad the manual is helping you out! Feel free to PM me with any other questions you may have, and I'd be happy to help! :)
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It's good to have goals even if I never end up getting them all taken care of in a given calendar year :)
My Classic Arcade Gaming Goals for 2014
- Finish the Battle of the Arcades website in time for the actual event. I have a good chunk of the site already done and ready to go. I should have that up for the public in the next couple of weeks so hopefully this is an easy goal.
- Break 500k on Donkey Kong.
- Break 250k on Centipede. Unfortunately I can only play this on MAME with a mouse.
- Find a way to support/highlight the live gaming events to better the hobby as a whole. I believe that the social aspects of the hobby are more important than high score lists that can be divisive. I want to help support them in any positive way that I can.
- Stay away from the drama in the hobby and just have fun playing the games.
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I HEART JOHNBART
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I've managed to take care of the first of my gaming goals for 2014. The website for the Battle of the Arcades is now live. You can find it at this convenient link:
http://www.battleofthearcades.net/ (http://www.battleofthearcades.net/)
The site has all of the info on the upcoming event along with the past two events including games, settings, scores, players, standings, etc. It will hopefully also have real-time scoring for the 2014 event when it's live.
Long live live arcade events!
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Love it.
Thanks John!
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Like a boss! Thanks!
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I've been working on the final details for the BotA site to get it ready for the event. I just pushed out the first cut of the streaming page which allows you to watch a couple of streams at a time while chatting in a global chat room. A couple things to note:
1. I only have a couple of streams setup as potential channels. For the event I'll have all of the cameras from the various sites but for now there are just a couple in there for testing.
2. Only online channels will show up on the left side of the screen. To save the page from being crazy slow to load I currently only check the online status of channels every 5 minutes. I'll be tweaking as I find out how that works.
3. To view a channel you just grab it from the left hand side and pull it into one of the two available slots.
4. The Twitch.TV chat embeds are messed up. I couldn't get them to consistently work well and I couldn't find any other site that had them working flawlessly. Instead I opted for a simple IRC embed that puts anyone watching in an IRC channel called #battleofthearcades.. This means a unified chat room no matter what stream you are watching and you don't need to login with a twitch account. Just pick a username and you go.
http://www.battleofthearcades.net/Streaming (http://www.battleofthearcades.net/Streaming)
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Nice work, JB!
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One thing that I think would be awesome for the site is a description of how the tournament actually works. For spectators (or potential future participants) this is needed.
The Rules section of the site reads more like clarification/specifics for the players who already know the underlying procedure. Any newbies won't understand how the tournament is actually structured, the details of the scoring system, how teams are set up, etcetera. There's no primer for the uninitiated, in other words.
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I've been meaning to revamp the wording of the rules page anyways so I'll see if I can come up with a way to work a better description into it at the same time. I agree that as it is right now you really need to be involved with the event to really know how it fully works.
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That looks really cool JB. 8)
<Pigger> was a fool not to jump on your offer to help him.
It may have ended up being a waste of your time anyway? So it's probably just as well?
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Thanks Dave.
I ended up registering the domain address onehourhighscores.net that I will hopefully start building after taking some time off when BotA is done. Even if <Pigger> doesn't want to move into the modern web world doesn't mean that we can't.
Ideally I'd like to build something along the lines of MARP where people can submit scores via an INP on MAME or a Twitch.tv video clip for Arcade and then have people verify the score by voting. That might include the existing scores from the CAGDC scoreboard or not. If they were included I'd come up with a way to mark them as "grandfathered" in. It'll take me a while to get there but I hope to come up with a way to merge it with the work I've already done on http://www.myhighscores.net/. (http://www.myhighscores.net/.)
As long as I keep enjoying these side little CAG related web projects and keep them drama free for me then I'm happy to build what's best for the community.
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I've been in hibernation for a while during my move back to North America but I'm finally getting to the settled in point and want/need to get back into CAG a bit. I've decide that I want to really apply myself to Robotron. It's a game I love and am alright at but I've never gotten to the point of being able to marathon the game.
For me the real sign that you can properly marathon Robotron is to be able to roll the levels so that is going to be my goal. Level 255 or bust. My current PB at Marathon settings is 2M+ so rolling is a fair way away. I plan to try and play everyday with some streaming. This post is just to motivate me to follow up on my goal :)
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Nice John!
If I may ask, where are you living now?
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I'm back north of the border in Hamilton, Ontario. We decided that we wanted to move closer to family when we moved back so we packed up our things in Seattle and drove east. It sucks that I'm not near the PNW crew anymore but I'm closer to some of the east coast events. I'm hoping to make a road trip out to KO4 to watch the action. :)
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I managed to cross the 2M barrier last night for the first time. In the past I was always topping out around 1.5M. It's amazing how much more of the game I'm seeing just by playing on a daily basis. I also managed to get the new tie-die roms working in Mame so I have the fancy lives counter in action. Now I just need to get up to 10M so I can see the new digit in the score :)
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Once I hit 2M the advances came fairly quickly. Next was 2.5M, then in successive sessions it was 4M, 6M, 10M. I quit playing the game after that. Have played only TGTS for BOTA since then.