Ach...
Around the time of the last post in this thread prior to this one I was still messing around with my web cam. VERY difficult trying to get a clear image of a Vectrex on a live stream.
My first game was TERRIBLE. I couldn't get comfortable, I couldn't get in a groove, I wasn't hitting my marks and then my dog walks in and starts licking my water bottles filled with Shaklee Performace Energy drink which killed off my last two lives. 78,000.
I was going to scrap the whole deal. I was tired, much like if I was wiped out from the flu but I gave it a go anyway.
I broke the game down into "checkpoints" which for me is a way of dicing up the job into smaller tasks.
48,000 - Eclipses TGI's top score
306,000 - my personal best
460,000 - Brandon Ross' score posted on the Retroboards
800,000 - top score on Vectrex.co.uk
1,000,000 - Goal
I knew I was getting in the groove when I had more than 10 ships in reserve by the time I topped the Twin Galaxies top score. From that point on it was all out on this game or bust.
Getting to 306,000 was not a concern since it was familiar territory. I was hitting my marks and I never dropped more than the XXXXXXXXX ships in reserve up to that point.
Going into this, I thought the most challenging part would be the points between 460,000 and 800,000. But really the challenge started at 850,000 when fatigue started to set in. I'm guesstimating that this was around 3:15 AM. Because of the flight pattern used to survive in the game and repeating that over and over for hours on end, my mind saw the screen rotate about 5 degrees to the right, the controller started to feel like jello in my hands and then there were bugs flying around the room.
I took a few breaks just to drink some more, crack my knuckles, eat another Shaklee Energy Chew and took my first bathroom break at the 900K mark (since you don't know exactly how many ships you have in reserve, I waited until my bladder was about to bust to minimize loss of ships). I almost choked at 950K because I was "thinking too much." But, I prevailed and finished with 1,005,310 around 4:30 AM.
Now, before some hot shot wants to start trash talking and say how they'll crush this score: go for it! I'm done. My goal was to be the first to do a live stream of 1,000,000 on Star Castle and I achieved that. I have no reason to EVER play this game again.
I use my middle and index fingers of both hands to control all four buttons. For me anyway, the game is too fast to use a joystick with precision. Index finger on the right hand stays on thrust full-time while the middle finger fires off the shots.
There are three parts to the stream. About half of the footage was lost because, unbeknownst to me at the time, there was a maximum amount of time for a recording. When I saw the message pop-up on the computer, the only words I saw were "delete" and "continue." At another point my desktop disconnected from the access point so there are parts lost there as well.
Here's the link to the last 100,000 points of the performance:
www.ustream.tv/recorded/19529455
