I played my last game of Asteroids last night. And I don't know if Bunchball went away or if they're just having problems, but the game won't even come up for me now, and I can't get to their web site.

Last night, I sat down for a quick game, and wound up playing for three hours straight. I shattered the world high score, amassing over 1,145,000 points, but after carefully typing in my code name and clicking OK, the game croaked. It sat on a screen that said "LOADING" for quite some time, then displayed nothing but a period where the list of high scores normally would be. This was about 12:30 a.m. and I haven't been able to access the game since.

Just my luck. After all, it is just this sort of thing that gave birth to this very blog. Computers are problematic even (or especially?) when you're having fun with them!

Here is a screen grab I captured almost half-way through the game. I was so happy when the game ended, that I forgot to grab a screen shot of the winning score. Too bad. At least you can see I made it half-way, with a ton of ships in queue, so at least I have some evidence to my claim. I added the "KWOODA" in the corner.



Well, at least I know that I broke the high score. I have nothing to back me up but my word, although I did send a complaint to Bunchball. If their server was up at all, perhaps there is an entry in their server log that shows my score update attempt. But I'm not very hopeful. And I'm not sitting down for another game like that - my muscles and joints can't take it anymore. It was an hour after the game before I could type again, because my fingers were so stiff and sore from playing. But, even though the score was not recorded, I accomplished what I set out to do, and I've pretty much mastered the game, so there is really no reason to keep playing it.

I have played my first game of Masteroids, and am thus retiring from playing Asteroids.

What's next?

Go ahead and play a while. I'll come by someday after you've had your fun and I'll set the high score. HA!

By the way, if you hop on over to this blog: http://9rules.com/en/browse/featured/archive/81/ and check out the high score, let me know if you see "Kwooda" in the #1 position. That's me! Can you beat that?

Update:
OW, OW, OW, OW, OW!! My fingers are killing me! I sat down today and thought I'd play a short game of asteroids (over at http://9rules.com/en/browse/featured/archive/81/) and wound up sitting down for two hours - ON ONE GAME! - and got the second highest world score! The top record holder (for this Flash version of Asteroids) is a bit over 1,007,000 points. I got 732,580! Imagine that - some 44-year-old man comes along and kicks some kids' butts! Hahaha. Oh, I know, it's not a noble pursuit, but it's the weekend, and I found something I'm good at, and I'm having fun.

Actually, if you click on the World Scores link on the Asteroids display on this page, you will see me. I go as "Kwooda". There's a story behind it, but I'll leave that for another time. But I've been using Kwooda since I got on the Internet, because it is fairly unique on the 'Net, so I'm easy to find. I wonder if the Asteroids players are wondering where this Kwooda guy suddenly came from. I just found this Flash Asteroids game last week! I guess playing real Asteroids for some time now helped, especially since this Flash version is so much slower.

Well...now you know what score you've got to beat. Bring it on!!