ONE MILLION!!!

Only just, but I made it. The score - 1,005,030.

It came at the end of a weekend where I played a total of seven games. On the Saturday, I managed just three - with scores of 308,920, 621,400 and 413,000. The last one, which was going quite well, ended a little involuntarily as we (Zackomba, Lolcakes123 and me) were politely ushered out of the museum on closing time.

No risk of that happening today, as I got there in plenty of time to see where today’s installment of this quest would take me. It started with an appalling 144,250, followed by an inauspicious 267,410. The next game was a more promising 439,170, with the one million marathon being the last.

I happened to be jotting down some additional scores and other bits and pieces as I was going along for all of these games. On the one million game, I was 160,100 after the first set of 16 Acts; 285,270 (and one Pengo down - in Act 10) after the second set; 430,500 after the third set; and 559,350 after the fourth set - still with only one Pengo lost.

By the end of the fifth set, I was 714,290, but had lost another two Pengos during it - one as the result of complacency in Act 7 and another during Act 15. The machine also ‘clocked’ at 655,310 - the same high score it had clocked at during my 900K effort a couple of weeks back.

With the final Pengo battling away, I cleared the sixth set with a score of 865,780 (655,310 + 210,470). And then somewhere in Act 13 in the seventh set, when I noticed the accumulating score had just clicked past 345,000, I knew I’d broken the magical seven figures. The loss of the final Pengo during the next Act (14) was almost an anti-climax, and probably pay-back for managing to escape a few very close shaves along the way.

In terms of individual sets during that game, I did feel I was getting more and more defensive as the game wore on and not worrying too much about the 10,000 bonuses. On the basis that a reasonable, or par, score for a set is 160,000, my ‘splits’ for each set were (1) 160,100, (2) 125,170, (3) 145,230, (4) 128,850, (5) 154,940, (6) 151,490, and (7 - up to Act 14) 139,250.

For those of who you are very careful readers of this blog, you will also have noted that the one million score also represented my 10^th score over 500,000 since this comeback - all achieved using just four penguins, not the regulation six (as explained in an earlier post on the rules that need to be complied with before a high score can be officially recognised).

And as icing on the cake, over the course of the weekend, I also equalled my fastest clearance (12 seconds, on an Act 1) and my fastest clearance with a 10,000 bonus (25 seconds on an Act 3, during the million point game).

Onward and upward.