A diamond in the rough

991,350!!

Not a bad outcome, considering the handful of otherwise quite ordinary games over the weekend.

Up until that quite monumental final game, I was thinking the main topic of this post was probably going to be a new best time for completing an Act while getting the 10,000 point bonus. It happened in an otherwise forgettable game during Act 7, where I managed the feat in just 25 seconds - 2 seconds quicker than my previous best which occurred in Act 6 a week or so ago.

It would also have covered my two youngest sons - as comparative novices - both achieving some decent scores, especially Lolcakes123 who broke the 5,000 barrier in one of his first attempts. Zackomba also got close, albeit both had the disadvantage of being player 2 with me, and by the time their turns came around each time, they could hardly remember where they were up to.

The other interesting happening was a glitch in the game I was playing just before the 900K game. My last Pengo was doing quite well and on track to break 500K, when all of a sudden the glitch appeared. It resulted in the game continuously producing groups of 4 sno-bees, which hovered all together in a corner and which I kept squashing and repeatedly getting 6,400 points. Once I worked out it wasn’t going to fix itself, I decided just to clear the screen by eating all the non-diamond blocks. The only remedy was to unplug the machine and plug it in again.

I was half intending to leave it at that and put the weekend’s efforts down to experience. But I had a bit of time before I had to be somewhere else and decided to give it one last go - a bit like the desperate punter at the racetrack who puts it all on the last to try and recover the losses they’ve accumulated during the day.

It didn’t start well, with a death in Act 9 in the first set and another in Act 13 in the second. Both those Acts seem to punch well above their weight in terms of being the setting for the demise of my little penguin battlers. But the third Pengo proceeded to play his little heart out, clearing the third set and then the fourth without too many scares. In the fifth set, we managed to clock the high score at 655,310 - fractionally higher than when I’d done it a few weeks back (654,990).

Later in the fifth set also saw the loss of that brave little soldier, at just on 700K. With one Pengo left, my previous high score beaten, my appointment elsewhere (involving an airport) closing in, and the need for a nature break looming, I started throwing caution to the wind.

The 800K mark seemed to flash by and I’d reached 900K by the end of the sixth set with the fourth and last Pengo still going strong. I had to roughly calculate my score each time by adding 655,310 to the score that was on the clock, which became a bit frustrating.

By the time I was closing in on the magic 1,000,000, I was running later and later for my appointments - both with the airport and the gents. And so it was that in a reasonably benign Act 8 on the seventh time around I ended up almost throwing away the game at 991,350 - as Zackomba had calculated when I was entering my initials in the leaderboard.

At many times through that game, it felt like the old magic returning. It wasn’t by any means a chanceless innings though, with the odd dropped catch and near run-out along the way (for those who appreciate cricketing analogies), but it wasn’t a bad effort either. I’ll certainly take it.