incoming wall of text!
First of all I want to say thanks as always to Ken House for hosting the PNW location again, not only the weekend of the tournament but all the practice sessions over the last couple months, we all needed to put in the time to make sure our crown was successfully defended again. I love the camraderie, with everyone cheering and congratulating each other when we get new scores. It's always a really fun weekend even if some of us have... uh, certain rage issues at times.
I was very happy finishing 2nd in the overall ranking, when this gamelist was announced I thought I would end up around 5th again like last year. Seeing that I finished just 4 points behind Mike Kasper made me wish I had put in just a liiiiiiittle more practice on some games, but he definitely earned it since he puts in more practice for this tournament than me. This is also the first time I've finished ahead of Steve Wagner
Shoutouts to the Galloping Ghost team for a very strong showing in their first year! There were some really good scores that came out of them, admittedly I wasn't too familiar with most of the players other than like... Ben Falls, but there is obviously some real talent there. Hope they participate again next year.
Now for some thoughts/my experiences on the games themselves...
Donkey Kong 3 - A game I've never really played much, but after a little practice I found I could definitely play for an hour on... on Easy difficulty, lol. The Medium difficulty used for the tournament gets really ridiculous on the later levels because DK keeps scurrying down the poles very quickly. Later on it felt like doing the third level of each loop without a super spray was impossible because I just can't move him up there fast enough. I had a good start and lost maybe 4 or 5 lives on one level, it was crazy. Still, 729k was good enough for 3rd place.
Elevator Action - geezus christ Steve Wagner! Seeing a 135k score before we'd even started playing on the west coast is soul-crushing! I had a couple bad games the first day but managed to end up with 115,500, which eclipsed the 112k I got last year, so I'm satisfied.
Frenzy - I like this game a lot. When it was decided that extra lives would be at every 15k, I knew it would make things harder because otherwise a lot of players would do an hour on it. In one of our practice sessions I got 81k and joked "What if I can do an hour on this at the tournament?". Day 1 came, I barely got 70k and Sam McNear topped me by a few hundred, and before the end of the day Tim Vermeulen from Galloping Ghost broke 110k. That gave me extra motivation to try again on day 2, even though it wouldn't change my overall point ranking much I really wanted to do this (plus I was relatively satisfied with a lot of the scores I got on day 1 anyway). I had a few bad starts, then finally got a game where I stopped choking and managed to stay consistent enough to play for a full hour. I actually had two extra lives in reserve at the 59-minute mark, and I noticed that I had just reached the board which has the computer in the center of the screen that when shot makes all the robots commit suicide. I ended up sacrificing two lives here after making the robots suicide since I figured it was the fastest way to get some points, and then finished the board up on my last life right as the hour limit was reached. So otherwise, I still could have kept playing for a while unless I made some stupid mistakes very quickly. Definitely the score I was happiest with.
Gravitar - Gravitar has some neat concepts, but I just can not get used to the control scheme. Never been a fan of games that use buttons to rotate AND thrust, especially since the rotation feels so slow. I ended up barely breaking 100k which was a personal best at least.
Mappy - NO, FUCK THIS.
Millipede - I always have way more fun playing Millipede than I do playing Centipede, just because there's a bigger variety of stuff going on. In 2013 I got 140k on it, but in practice sessions this year I had managed to get a 175k and a 174k (one of those games having a 128k first life followed by a spectacular meltdown). For a while I could not get a good game started until I managed to do 187k, another personal best I was happy about.
Pole Position - Got 64,910 in 2012, this year I got 65,100 (exactly 1 second faster, minus the phantom 10 points). Alright.
Q*Bert - my worst performance by far. This game just doesn't click with me, I was astounded by the number of people that could play this for an hour (or close to it). I could have been 1st in the overall rankings if I didn't suck at this. Oh well!
Rally-X - This game is ridiculous on Medium difficulty. I got a 58k on my first official attempt of the tournament, then didn't play it again until day 2 where I finally managed to reach the blue stages and ended up with 73k. Never want to play it again.
Robotron 2084 - The 875k I'd gotten back in 2012 was my personal best and I knew it was going to be hard to top. My goal was to get at least 700k but the Robotron Gods had not been smiling on me. I'd had ~645k after day 1 which did put me in 1st, but I wasn't satisfied. Luckily persistence paid off on day 2 and I eventually ended up with 818,100. Again, probably not the most productive use of my time when I could have been improving my ranking on other games, but it was another pride thing.
Super Pac-Man - Not really a fan of Pac games in general, and didn't really know much in the ways of patterns. Ended up with 161,300 which was better than I did in any practice sessions, but I do kind of wish I'd made more of an effort to figure out what to do on the higher stages.
Zaxxon - Ugggh, those space stages! I felt like I was making progress on this one but I feel so helpless once ships start randomly divebombing you, and ships coming out with no warning at varying height intervals... enraging. For a while I felt like I was making progress but I just couldn't figure out the space scenes. Oh well, 179k was still a good placement.
This is long enough so let me wrap this up with my two demands for next year's event -
1. No Mappy. Never again.
2. Pleeeeease don't schedule this the same weekend as Daylight Savings Time AGAIN! It is a killer for us west coast folk! (or maybe we need the handicap, ehehe)
Matt Hall