Slashdot Mirror
After 27 Years, a New High Score For Asteroids
blair1q writes "In a marathon 3-1/2 day session, John McAllister, of Portland, Oregon, has broken the 27-year-old high score for Asteroids, set in 1982 by Scott Safran. The attempt was broadcast via webcam."
For those too lazy to read the article, he scored 41,338,740, with the previous high score being 41,336,440
It took approximately 58 hours, not over 72.
LESS THAN TWO AND A HALF.
When you repeat old news, it might help to GET IT RIGHT.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
For anyone who hasn't seen The King of Kong, a documentary about shooting for the world record in Donkey Kong, I highly recommend it. It's a bit disturbing to see what goes on in the minds of these types of gamers, and at some points it's hard to believe it's a documentary. However it's an excellent movie, and a lot of fun.
That said, it's easy to criticize someone like this. But hey, we all have our hobbies and talents right?
In the game the score wraps around to zero again so the "score" in this case is calculated by taking note of the number of times the score wraps.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The strategy behind the game is to clear the playfield of all bar a handful of small asteroids, and then wait for the flying saucers to appear. If you're moving fairly quickly up or down the screen you can avoid the saucers with practice. As the game awards 1000 for the small saucers and a bonus life every 10,000 points it's a somewhat easy task to rack up many extra lives. Once the last asteroid was eliminated, the game would restart, increasing the number of large asteroids at the start up to a limit of around 12.
Early versions of the game were even easier as broken game logic resulted in an area of the screen that rendered the player immune to attacks. There wasn't even any means for making the game harder by setting the game's dip-switches - these only controlled the initial number of lives and other sundry settings such as language and coin count. Suffice to say experienced players could easily play the games for hours at a time.
Atari later released Asteroids Deluxe which was somewhat harder. This included a second type of saucer that split into components which homed in on the player, as well as amendments to other parts of the game logic.