Some months ago, a Vectrex tournament was held. KLS demonstrated wild skills to win that one easily, so it was time for a rematch. This time, we would play this:
The players would be the same: Jim, KLS and myself. The rules were simple: we’d play every single game on the system that was single player and had a score. Only one go at each game, with winner of previous game going first (since this was a disadvantage). The highest score in every game would take a point.
The action was nonstop and relentless, and the competition was fierce. Since we’re all old, we remembered some of the games as if we had played them yesterday. But of course we hadn’t, and we were bad. More so at some than others.
The graphics and sound occasionally left us slackjawed in disbelief, but our spirits of competition were high. The fact that many games had not been reprogrammed for joystick and were virtually unplayable since we lacked a paddle controller was irrelevant: we played on!
All told we played 29 different games over two days. The flashback system emulates games from various Atari consoles (the above is, I believe, the 7800 Space Invaders for instance) meant we were jumping generations every other game. It was a thrill-a-minute ride.
And then we were done, and it was time to tally the scores. Without further ado, the final results:
16 wins – RS
10 wins – KLS
5 wins – JBF
Amazing! Finally I have regained the crown of ultimate gamer from my wife 🙂
You may note that the final score includes 31 wins from 29 games. How is this possible? There were actually two ties, and in that case both were given the win. In fact I spent quite some time analyzing the scores with the help of Numbers (the Apple spreadsheet app) on my iPhone, and I can present some more in depth results.
Here, for instance, a plot of total score across the entire tournament:
Or the score percentage breakdown per game:
Yes, I did score 100% of the total score in Desert Falcon, since my measly 700 points beat Jim and KLS’s 0 points 🙂
These TV game systems can be a bit of an iffy proposition these days, but in my opinion take on a whole new appeal when used for a tournament. I already look forward to the next, which is planned for about a month for now in Casa Williams where I will defend my crown against AW and BS 🙂
