This is going to be too long, but I'm gonna talk through my Donkey Kong hangover.
Obviously this tournament wasn't my finest hour. In fact, my performance was so weak that I would actually use the word "surprised" before "disappointed."
- I started a total of 21 games.
- I had 10 false starts (aborted before L5)
- Of my 11 full games, my top 3 were 647,700, 583,700, and 461,100
That's bad!
I chopped all of my streams into individual games. My total in-stream time was 10 hrs and 45 minutes. In fact, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I played longer than anybody else. Which makes my sub-par performance even more bewildering.
All I wanted from this tourney was to knock out a simple 850-875K kill screen. Based on the last tourney, I thought that might be good enough for top 3. And based on my results over the last year, I thought I could do it without incident.
Since my first MAME kill screen in December 2011 up until the start of the tournament, I'd played just under 30 full "top hammer only" games, and three of those were kill screens. So it seemed to be a roughly 1-in-10 proposition.
Yesterday showed otherwise! 11 full games and I came up way short. Oh well.
What was great about this tournament were all of the things I learned from it.
Lesson 1: I need to PRACTICE before one of these. On two occasions in 2012, I walked up to the machine and got a kill screen after not having touched the game in months, and made some erroneous conclusions because of it.
I'm going back to the more common-sense approach of erring on the side of preparation. I wasted all of the Friday night session just getting back into the swing of things (dying on springs, not "thinking right" on the rivets, etc.), and it continued when I started the afternoon session. I feel like I finally got all the rust knocked off right around the time I was starting to get fatigued. D'oh!
Lesson 2: Speaking of fatigue, mental factors aside, a long session on the arcade machine is actually *physically* exhausting! I'd never played for more than 2 or 3 hours at a time on the cab. By the end, my body (arms and back mostly) was actually more tired than my brain. Maybe I get into it too much, but when I'm completely tensing up my upper body and knocking the joystick left or right with all of my strength, it's almost like a workout.
Lesson 3: The field is becoming better and better, and I'm not. You know things are getting real when a one-day tournament, one that excludes the top 10 players, nonetheless produces six 900K+ scores. I mean, holy crap! So I'm going to need to decide whether I want to try to shape up and get serious again or let this game pass me by. (I could go either way on that, honestly. I don't know if I'm willing to put in the time and effort I'd need to get as good as even the medium-tier players of today.)
Lesson 4: I hate, hate, HATE the freaking pie factory!!! The fireballs on my machine just happened to schedule their Bottom Conveyor Dance Festival for March 16th. It was merciless. Even L3 pie factories were beastly, and my second-best play of the tournament came during one of them. I saw them coming and said "bite my crank, I'm NOT going to let you kill me like this again, and definitely not on L3":
The mythical double jump!This was number one - the "play of the day" for me. I generally start panicking and do something stupid when a fireball climbs onto my girder, but I managed to remain calm and work through this situation. I definitely got lucky, but I think I took decent advantage of the luck:
Sassy bottom fireballThanks to everyone who stopped by to say good luck!
