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?