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