Billy Mitchell Holds Donkey Kong Record Again!

Billy Mitchell on Aug. 7th cracked the top score on both Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., the very day he was inducted into the International Video Game Hall of Fame. Scoring 1,062, 800 on Donkey Kong and 1,270,900 nabbed Mitchell the ultimate in bragging rights.

Mitchell held the top score over Steve Wiebe which was documented in the King of Kong but lost his place on the throne when Hanks Chien netted 1, 061, 700 in March. Billy apparently stopped playing the game as soon as he bested Chien's high score. Mitchell is quoted as saying about his actions, "Some say I'm being cocky. Some say I'm being lazy. I say, I'm being Billy Mitchell."

I'm not quite sure how I missed this news but a big thanks to Twin Galaxies for the info and photo above, as well as to Kotaku.

I'll try to post some more info from the celebration last week at Ottumwa, it certainly sounds like a very big deal for those of us that love video gaming and its history.

This Looks Familar - Paul Williams

Gorillas. Nintendo.

There is a general rule that I like to live by and that is if I drop any electronic equipment into an enclosure for Gorillas they can keep it. Especially if they seem to enjoy playing the Nintendo DS.

The story for the photos posted above comes to us from Christina Spicuzza's Flickr page, she was at the San Francisco zoo when a little boy dropped his DS into the habitat, the gorillas confiscated the device and did their best to examine it but decided to trade it for an apple from the keeper. The DS suffered no harm, just a little slobber and some minor scratches...however it has been reported that the youngest gorilla pictured has taken to calling himself Caesar...

Retroist Podcast #49 -Happy Days

Saturday Supercade!

Just the one post this Saturday Supercade...enjoying the very last minutes of my vacation...but the above picture, which you need to click to really Embiggen, is pardon the pun Mega Awesome!

Marvel Characters transformed into 8-bit Mega Man versions of themselves. There is just so much to enjoy about the artwork above but I believe my two favorite characters that I would have given a Power Pellet to actually play are Doctor Strange and Machine Man. Now that would be an epic Marvel Two-In-One comic, eh? I do wish the Sentry hadn't been included though.

A big thanks to Suzuran from DeviantArt for the above picture as well as to Kotaku for giving me the heads up!

Update-For a better look at it go to and click the pic: www.blogcdn.com/www.comicsalliance.com/media/2010/08/marvelmegasbysuzuran.png

Bring The Hammer Down - Hammerfall

Friday Flyers.

Click the pics to make 1994 sized!

I've only seen one of these arcade games pictured above, Eagle Shot Golf (The golf game where you can hit a ball so hard that an eagle shoots out of it!), but I cannot decide which game I would have wanted to play more...Fighter's History Dynamite/Karnov's Revenge or the China exclusive arcade title Deadly Sport.

What to know about Fighter's History? Well, Data East had itself a chart topper in Japan when it was released and became so popular that another company known as Capcom realized the fighting system was a little too familiar to their own Street Fighter series. A lawsuit gauntlet was thrown down but the Judge determined that the 'copied' elements were scenes a faire and Capcom lost, Data East also cited that their classic Karate Champ was responsible for the fighting game genre to begin with.

Now doing a little more research tells me that Fighter's History Dynamite/Karnov's Revenge was the second offering for the franchise and for some reason Karnov is the bad guy of the game...how could my beloved Karnov from the NES have gone to the dark side? I just do not know the answers to that, my friends.

Deadly Sport was released only in China and by the looks of it was a digitized fighting game in the vein of Mortal Kombat. But it sure looks awesome! Just how could you pick one person as favorite from that flyer...you have a viking...a guy in a shirt and tie with a shoulder holster that appears to be a robot...a vampire as the main bad guy possibly...and is that woman really a woman? I can find nothing on this title beyond a mention on a message board for a MAME request.

Eagle Shot Golf was a staple in at least three gas stations in my neck of the woods. I just included it in today's post because I loved that picture of a very, very angry Eagle. We here at the Victory Pellet Vault are easily amused.

Exploration - Bruno Coulais (Coraline Motion Picture Soundtrack)

It Must Be Thursday.

Darn you, Dragon Age: Origins. I was so wrapped up in this title that I almost forgot to post the above World of Warcraft wedding cakes! These are awesome, I'm not complaining though, I had a Nightmare Before Christmas wedding cake.

Handle With Care - The Traveling Wilburys

Box Art Wednesday.

Loyal reader, Jon, inspired today's post as I watched him deal with a communication breakdown at my local Vintage Stock with three teens who might have been building Yu-Gi-Oh decks. Let me stress that Jon was using something that I like to refer to as the English language while the teens were not.

So Jon, this post is for you, sir. For the rest of you readers allow me to explain, as I was picking up the Max Headroom box set in the store today we began to speak about how games these days are a bit easier to finish than those in my youth. Not all games of course but can you compare the difficulty of Halo to that of the original Castlevania? No, no you cannot.

Space Quest was originally released on October 1986 and by the end of 1995 had spawned five sequels. In the games you take on the role of, well, the first game doesn't actually name the hero it allows you to enter your own, but the default name is Roger Wilco, which became the hero's name starting with the second title. Roger is no ordinary hero, oh no, he is a janitor upon the starship Arcada. After waking up in a broom closet you find that the ship has been taken over by the hostile Sariens. Using a pass key from a dead shipmate you enter an escape pod and find yourself jettisoned on the planet of Kerona. The rest of the game finds you having to locate the Sarien vessel and destroying the "Star Generator", a device stolen from aboard the Arcade, a machine that is capable of creating a planet within a matter of days...that sounds familiar some how...and once he has done so he returns a hero and is awarded with a golden mop!

A lot of the fun of playing Space Quest was watching all the hilarious ways you could perish. The creators, Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, decided to break the mold of graphic adventure games of the time when they pitched the idea.

From Scott Murphy over on Wikipedia: "Sierra was in a mindset where everything was medieval and it was all fairly serious. I wanted to do a game that was more fun. We even liked the idea of 'fun death'! I mean, if the player is gonna die or fail, they should at least get a laugh out of it. So we came up with the idea of making death amusing. Let's face it, most adventure games involve a good deal of frustration for the player. But we felt that if we made failure fun, to an extent, you might have players actually going back and looking for new ways to die, just to see what happens!"

While these types of graphical adventures still exist, Monkey Island, Sam and Max, etc. we could use a new Space Quest game to hit the shelves. Roger Wilco is missed. Of course if you have Gametap you can revisit the first five games...

Rylos - Craig Safan (The Last Starfighter)

I Am The Heavy.

So besides playing some World of Warcraft, a bit of Mission Impossible for the NES, and vault work...my vacation has been spent getting in touch with my inner Heavy. I've talked a bit about Team Fortress 2 before but after playing a couple of days with this wonderful PC game..."I am Heavy Weapons guy."

I really like the Engineer and I am pretty good as the Medic but I've been able to cut a swath of cartoonish pain and violence as the Heavy above all the other classes. I just wish that darn Sniper would leave me alone. As for the worst class for myself? That's easy. The Scout.



Ivan's Metamorphosis - John Debny (Iron Man 2)