The optimism you may have detected in my last post on the back of a very strong 1.6 million point game in mid-September turns out to have been badly misplaced, with that score remaining as the only real highlight over the last 3-4 months of Pengo play.
Between then and now, there have been a paltry three million-point games with many more games not even reaching the 500,000 mark.
All up, this has probably been the leanest scoring period since I started documenting this quest all those years ago. I’m not sure what’s happened. Maybe it’s just a let-down after securing the world record back in April. Maybe I’ve just lost my touch. Who knows?
But there was some wheat among the chaff so let’s just concentrate on that for now. Otherwise I’ll probably just get depressed.
At the end of September, I managed to clock up two million point games. The first, on the 26th, was a solid effort with the final death on Act 15 at a score of 1,175,800. I had three Pengos left just before the one million mark with one dying as it was clicking over. It was a great start and it probably deserved a better final score. The second was on 29th September with a not especially memorable 1,118,490. I managed to scrape past the million point barrier but it was a very average game.
And on 11th October, I finished with a score of 1,207,020 following a heroic effort by the last Pengo to get the game into seven figures.
As it happened, that turned out to have been my 73rd, and last, million point game. And my 22nd million point game of the year.
Along the way, there were a couple of games that got into high 900,000-point territory (including one on 9th October, where I equalled my record for the fastest 10,000 point Act, with a 23 second completion on Act 6) but I don’t really want to think about those too much.
So there we have it. Not a pretty picture, but I suppose it’s the sort of scoring drought that all us elite arcade video game players will experience from time to time.
And that’s it from this blog for a few months. I’m off to Europe again tomorrow to spend some more time on the Camino in Spain and then a few weeks wandering around England and other parts of the continent. My schedule is reasonably flexible, so any information from Pengo-questers out there about the location of any Pengo machine in that part of the world will be gratefully received. But failing that, I’m anticipating a Pengo-free three months. Which might not be such a bad thing really.
In the meantime, I wish you all a happy Christmas, a wonderful and meaningful New Year, and Buen Camino!
See you in 2017.
