Flame trap

Sometimes I like to trap a flame by jumping over it and a rivet simultaneously. Here's a fun screen shot from after I trapped all five flames:

New personal high score

Today I beat my all-time personal best with a score of 283,600! After the first few levels, where I played to maximize points, I started playing to complete levels, and made it to level 9.

Score Tracking Spreadsheet

I wanted to share the spreadsheet I use for tracking Donkey Kong scores. Here is a blank template spreadsheet that you can fill in with scores as you go. I tried to make it easy to use by locking cells that shouldn't be edited, but there is no password on it if you want to unlock your copy and change the way it works. Here is a filled in spreadsheet from the "nearly perfect" game I described here. They were created in Excel 2003. At some point in the future I'd like to do an online version (perhaps an applet) or a version in a free spreadsheet program.

Each spreadsheet has three sections (I'll update this post with a screenshot later):

• Current, for tracking the current game by entering the score at the end of each level;


• Projected, which projects the final score using the actual scores for levels already completed in the current game, and using the best achieved score so far on each board type for boards not yet completed; and


• Perfect, which projects a "perfect" game based on the maximum of the best achieved score so far on each board in the current game and the best score I've ever seen on each board.

One tricky thing is the issue of losing a man during a level. The spreadsheet currently only has explicit support for multiple men on the last complete level. In general, if you play more than one man on a level and enter the final score for the level when you eventually complete it, the current game score will work fine, but the projected and perfect game scores may be inflated by the extra points you received on the level. So don't lose any men.

tags: donkey kong, steve wiebe

New low score

Just for grins, I decided to see how low a score I could get (while actually clearing levels). Here's a screen shot at the end of the third elevators:



tags: donkey kong, steve wiebe

Welcome

I was a freshman in high school when Donkey Kong came out. I played regularly at the local arcade. I was good at Pac-Man, Q*Bert, and Fast Freddie, but Donkey Kong was really my specialty. Eventually I got good enough (scores in the 200-300k range) to regularly win t-shirts for the weekly high score.

Over the years, I would play occasionally when I found a machine. In 1994, when I was in grad school, a friend bought me a machine as a birthday gift. I played more often, typically scoring in the 100-200k range. Then I started having kids and got a job, and my available play time dropped off significantly. The machine developed a short in the speaker wiring, and then started having video problems. When I moved into our new house in 2001, it finally gave up the ghost, and I couldn't afford to fix it.

Fortunately I discovered mame (mac, win), and was able to play again. The plan was to convert the Donkey Kong cabinet to a mame machine, but due to lack of time and money this never seemed to happen. My wife was pretty fed up with having a useless hulk taking up space, and when we converted our attic for our daughters, I found a loving home for the machine on craigslist.

Last month, the Alamo Drafthouse announced a Donkey Kong contest, with a Donkey Kong machine as the prize, as part of their release of King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (imdb). I went and saw the movie, which is totally great, on opening night, and qualified for the contest by playing in the front of the theater. I came back for the competition on Sunday (the Drafthouse blogged it here and here). I was the first competitor, and scored about 90k in my practice round, 109,500 in my actual game, and 170k in a game just for fun. My score remained the top score until the final competitor, Gilbert Hernandez, scored 113,500. I was disappointed, and would have been heartbroken to lose by such a small margin, but Gil and I played a head-to-head game for fun, and he got his all-time personal best score of 252,700. Steve Wiebe (the hero of the movie) was there for the movie promotion. He posed for a picture with Gil and me:


and gave us some tips. He then played "for the record" (more about that later), but told us beforehand that really he was just playing to reach the kill screen (more about that later, too). He was amazing to watch. He made the elevators (the bane of every Donkey Kong player) look really easy.

After the contest, Gil and I decided to keep in touch and share tips. I found a web page that described Steve's elevator technique (sorry no link), and started using mame to practice. Gil was practicing on his old machine, and then on the one he won in the contest.

Once completing the elevator boards became something I could do repeatably, instead of occasionally, I decided to see what kind of score I could achieve by playing my own personal style (sprint to the top) all the way to a kill screen, using mame's save and restore to allow me to undo dumb mistakes and terrible luck. I scored 865,100, which is almost 200,000 points below Steve and Billy's world records! This was terrible news to me, because it meant that not only would I have to play nearly perfectly, but I would also have to learn new strategies for scoring more points (more about those later).

I decided to try different techniques to see what strategies would maximize the score on each type of board. Once I figured that out, I decided to see what my score would be in a "nearly perfect" game in which I used save and restore to ensure that I played the best strategy, made no mistakes, and had the best possible luck. I scored 1,162,600!
The good news is that this is about 100,000 points above the world records, which means that I can at least imagine making a record score in a real game. The bad news is that the strategies required playing like a maniac, taking risks for points that would likely result in death in a real game. Additionally, some levels required multiple restores before the luck went my way. In a real game, that won't happen.

Anyway, this blog will describe my research into various strategies for scoring more points, and chronicle my quest to break the record in a real game. Unfortunately, with four kids and a job, I don't expect my progress to be swift...

tags: donkey kong, steve wiebe, mame, king of kong, alamo drafthouse