Well, that was fun!
Now that I’m safely back in the country, and fully recovered from a 30+ hour flight from San Francisco to Sydney (via Charlotte, New York and Abu Dhabi), I need to bring you up to date on one of the highlights of my three week USA trip - my visit to the wonderful Galloping Ghost arcade in the suburbs of Chicago on Easter Sunday, 27 March 2016.
There’ll be a little more colour in the next post, but for now, I’ll just run through the details of how it went on the day.
I arrived at the arcade shortly after opening time (around 11:30am) and paid my $US15 fee for the day - after having established that their Pengo machine was in fact working. In the first session of play, my game scores were as follows:
86,990 - dying in Act 12
232,540 - Act 11 (a new Galloping Ghost arcade record - the previous being c.160,000)
227,180 - Act 9
348,080 - Act 12 (another new Galloping Ghost arcade record)
103,230 - Act 13
108,790 - Act 13
After that, I thought I needed a break, so I went across the road to Tony’s Diner for a bite to eat. It turned out to be a multi course feast with mountains of food accompanied by half a dozen bread rolls, a bottomless cup of coffee, and a huge slice of carrot cake with icing which I had to ask them to bag up so I could try and eat it later. Assuming, of course, I’d one day be able to finish digesting the food I’d just consumed. No complaints, though. It was an excellent meal at an even more excellent price.
After I waddled back to the arcade, the games went as follows - pretty much without a break:
130,930 - dying in Act 15
186,370 - Act 7
122,890 - Act 14
115,000 - Act 14
118,440 - Act 14
314,590 - Act 5
256,850 - Act 14
261,130 - Act 12
112,400 - Act 14
385,620 - Act 12 (a third new Galloping Ghost arcade record)
455,340 - Act 9 (a new Aurcade world, and Galloping Ghost arcade, record).
Evidently, the previous Aurcade world record for Pengo was around 425,000 so it was a particular relief to get past that mark while I was in town. Happily, the record-breaking game finished around 8:30pm, which gave me just enough time to catch one of the last trains back to Chicago.
Regular readers of this blog will have noticed some significant discrepancies between these scores and the ones I’ve been clocking up at the Milk Bar café in Newtown, Sydney over the past couple of years. I noticed it, too, in the very first game.
For one, the Galloping Ghost machine only has a maximum of four Pengos, not the six I’m accustomed to playing with. There are also several differences in the detail and timing of the game which really took me some time to adjust to. I probably should have played an extra day or two to really get all the kinks ironed out, but as I’ll explain next time, that didn’t happen.
Apart from the GG machine being a stand-up machine where I usually play the table-top version, some of those differences were quite odd. For example, the GG machine refers to each “Act” as a “Round” - or “Rd” - instead of Act in the bottom left corner of the screen. It also doesn’t play the familiar Popcorn tune as the game is underway. In its place, there is some equally irritating, but lovable, tune which I wasn’t able to identify.
The gap between each Act (or ‘Rd’) is also shortened considerably by not having the frame's pattern traced out as the prelude to each Act. The screen just pops up and away you go. The dancing Pengo sequences are still there after each of the even numbered Acts, but even they seemed shortened. All in all, it made it almost impossible to unscrew the top off my waterbottle, take a sip, and then screw the top back on in between Acts. Stuff like this, or unwrapping a starburst chewy, had to be done over two or three Acts.
I also noticed little things that took a long time to get used to. Like a slightly longer time to get past chewed ice-blocks. You seem to stumble on the remnants of them as you move over them, causing a slight reduction in speed. On the plus side, the sno-bees almost never take evasive action when fired at. Even in the later Acts, if you fired at them from a distance and they were in line, they just stopped dead, waiting to be flattened. On the machines I’m used to, they’re just as likely to go into hyperdrive for a short period to evade being squashed.
There’s also no doubt that the GG machine just felt generally faster than the ones I’m used to playing. It’s hard to explain it, but my Act average was consistently much less than the 10,000 points or so I would normally score. It might have had something to do with my caution at playing on the world stage where each game was being recorded. Or maybe it was the jet lag I was still struggling to recover from. Whatever it was, I just felt I had that fraction of a second less time. Mind you, the more I played on the day, the more I was able to adjust and so maybe a 600,000 or 700,000 score might have been a possibility with another couple of days solid play.
As it was, I’ll settle for the 455,340 - and a place in the Aurcade world record books!
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