Precious Namcot games.....Precious....

Some new `pieces` for my collection: the first four games Namcot released for the Famicom complete in box!
I`ve been wanting to get a set of the first 18 Namcot releases (they are numbered) complete in box ever since Bryan over on the Gay Gamer picked up a few of them a couple years back, the pictures he put up just knocked me out. I love the boxes on these, they hit all the right buttons for me: small, cardboard, colorful and with great, evocative imagery on the front.

I already had a couple from this series CIB but they are in the kind of `B-grade` level of games - stuff like Star Luster and Pro Wrestling. These ones however include Pac Man, the one I wanted the most! YES!

I found these on Yahoo Auction in part of a larger lot of boxed games. They set me back quite a bit, but I was massively impressed when I received them. Most of the other games in the lot were in beat up condition but these Namco ones are like new:
They only have some tiny wear on the flaps but other than that they are in perfect condition and look like they could have come directly off a department store shelf from 1984. The photos in the auction weren`t close up so I wasn`t expecting them to be this nice. In fact I was in a bit of a panic when I realized how beautiful they were as these are way too good to just casually toss on a random shelf with the rest of my games where they will get all wrinkled up (what I normally do with games). I had to empty out a plastic bin to put them in for safe keeping.

So my collection now has some showy mint stuff in it. I will not be putting these into hard plastic containers for disply or anything, but I will be keeping them in that plastic bin until I find some safe way of storing them.

Next on my wantlist for this series are Battle City, Warpman, Sky Kid and Burger Time - all of which have awesome cover art. And are probably going to cost me a bit of $$.

New World Famicom Galaxian Record!!!

As I mentioned in an earlier post a couple months ago, I've been trying for ages to crack the Famicom Galaxian record. Well, at least I've been trying to break the only Famicom Galaxian record that I've been able to find, which was set in 1985 by someone named Hitoki from Gunma prefecture and reported in my Hishousakusen Mecha Guide.

That record was 85,030 points. It pales in comparison to the arcade record listed at Twin Galaxies, which is somewhere over 1,000,000 points but its still a pretty good score. I've never gotten within 20,000 points of it. Until today. Today I finally did it: 97,720 points! Yes!
I had the game of my life. I didn't even loose my first life until just after hitting 70,000.

The best part of breaking the record is that I can finally stop playing Galaxian!! Galaga is way better.

Anyway, short post but I couldn't wait to tell everyone - no point in setting a new high score otherwise:)

Oh and to end this on a petty note: IN YOUR FACE, Hitoki from Gunma in 1985! Oh yeah!

An Afternoon Trying to Break the Famicom Galaxian Record

I finally got around to watching the documentary "King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" the other day. If you haven't seen it yet, I recommend it. A very entertaining yarn about one modest man's quest to wrest the world record for Donkey Kong away from the incumbent, Billy Mitchell.

I've read that the filmmaker's took a lot of liberties with the facts, which is kind of unfortunate, but I nonetheless found it to be a worthwhile way of spending two hours, if for no other reason than to simply see a movie with a lot of retro video game stuff in it.

Watching the film has inspired me to see if there are any video game records that I might be able to challenge on the Famicom. The records at stake in the film are those kept by Twin Galaxies, which in the movie is show to be the official scorekeeper relied on by Guinness. So I thought I might start there.

In order to break a record of course the first thing you have to do is choose a game. I have chosen "Galaxian", which I have played a lot of and pride myself on being reasonably good at. Not world-record setting good, mind you, but still pretty good.

So I wandered over to Twin Galaxies' website to see what the world record for Galaxian on the Famicom is. I was greatly disappointed to discover that despite billing themselves as "Twin Galaxies International" they don't list high scores for Famicom games.

As a second best solution I looked for the NES record, but unfortunately Galaxian was never released on that one.

So I am left with a couple of options. One is ironically this blog, in which I posted a list of Famicom high scores from 1985 a couple months ago which included Galaxian. The high score there was 85,030.

The second option is to use the Arcade score from Twin Galaxies which is....hold on a second I have to look this up.....

1,653,270

OK, option one it is!

Being a rainy weekend afternoon and with the wife out for a couple hours I thought I'd give the 85,030 point record a run for its money.

My first effort yielded this:
39,200. That is almost half-way there. Not too bad actually. This is about an average Galaxian score for me, if I get over 40,000 I'm usually quite happy with myself.

Take two, however, yielded this:
Ouch. Not a good game at all. I lost my first life on the third level and it was downhill from there.

I thought about the need to alter my strategy in some way. After about 10 good hard minutes of thinking I came up with this:
Absolutely brilliant. On my next try I exceeded the half-way mark:
In my fourth and final try I had my best game of all. I was doing it all right. 20,000.....30,000....40,000....50,000...I was racking up points like a man possessed.

Then this happened:
My dog just got fixed a couple days ago so he is wearing this conical thing to prevent him from scratching the stitches. The whole experience has made him rather needy, emotionally speaking. He wanted some attention, which he lets me know by jumping up and scratching me until I give him some. I paused the game and spent a few minutes playing with him. That broke my concentration and within 1,000 points of starting up again the game was over:
55,080 is a pretty good score. Not my all time high (63,000) but pretty good and within 30,000 of the 1985 record I am going by. Looking at Twin Galaxies Arcade score ranking that would have been enough to put me at #15 there had this been on an arcade machine.

A bit more practice and I should be able to make it. When I do, I'll post something about it here.