Small Update

Over the past two weeks, the Defender has had a working set of buttons. Today, they decided to not work, so I swapped over to Stargate.

Some details I haven't posted: After the New Year, I've had a ton of distractions. All of them were good, so no real complaints. I wound up taking a week or so off in the middle and just started again a couple of days ago. The break made a difference.

I suppose it's like "training" for everything else. You start to dissect your training and begin to eliminate anything that may be a waste of your actual practice time. It's damn precious, so you want to get the most out of the time you're actually doing the work.

Most of the time when I'm considering the 'game,' I am thinking of strategies that have worked for me in the past. I am trying to take those and meld them in with a couple of new ones. Right now, I'm having the most luck with not spending so much time worrying about losing humans to landers. Heck even killing them to prevent a mutation is becoming less shocking. Sorry guys, it's the survival of the species, not individual blood lines. :\

So the results of adding some new strategy (letting more of 'em die) for Defender hasn't yielded anything extreme yet. I am now easily making 100k+ on each game. That's a good sign. Trouble is that I haven't broken 200k yet. I believe this is just the next barrier. Then we'll start aiming for 300k. What's weird is that these plateaus are never easy to predict. The game's difficulty advances pretty evenly, but it is relentless. Combine that additive difficulty with the randomness inherent in this game and it's just brutal.

Stargate is another story entirely. Today I was able to top 180k, which in my opinion is really within striking distance of the record.

This was made possible by having a good couple of starting waves, where I racked up all the pickup points I could on wave 1 and 2, and then warping from 3 to 6, 6 to 9, and 9 to 12. That left me in pretty good shape to do some good. I made it through a few waves there before I had to start using Smartbombs and Inviso. I fricking hate Firebombers! However, there is one trick I've been using that relates to the not caring about the humans at the bottom. I just blast the FBs even if they are around the humans because I am not trying to save 100% of them all the time - I'm trying to NOT LOSE SHIPS. It's a whole new mindset. I think I'm getting my head around it.

I even tried to stay in wave one just picking off Baiters and Phreds, etc. as they tried to rush me. That lasted for about 1000 points. There may be something about trying that later as I start trying to squeeze every point out of this machine.

More later!
bjc