Spending hour after hour on a game that never ends just to achieve a high score isn’t something I’ve ever been particularly interested in, but it has to be said that my recent dabble with pinball reminded me that occasionally such an obsession has taken a hold.

Some time ago I spent a not-unreasonable amount of time playing a game called Major Motion on the Atari ST. Although times (and games) were simpler then, it has to be said that a Spy Hunter clone with fairly dreadful graphics didn’t represent the cutting edge of 16-bit gaming and as a relatively early release, it was doomed to a life on a mail-order budget label being ordered by those happy to make a purchase based on a game’s name and a postage stamp sized picture of the box cover.

Luckily, my Dad was one such person and my obsession with driving up a never-ending road smashing evil blue cars into the grass verge was born. For years I toiled to finally knock the names of the programming team off the top of the high score charts, an achievement I was proud of until I downloaded a copy of the disk image for my ST emulator and saw my best efforts failing to register on the high-score chart, for they had easily (and repeatedly) eclipsed by whoever had owned that particular copy of the game. The bastard.

If there’s no new content from me for several weeks, you’ll know what I’ve been doing. Now, even though this journal has never been the most active (or ‘interactive’) place, I’ll ask anyway, for the hell of it: anyone out there got a favourite high-score type game? Anyone else had their feelings of supremacy on an oldie shattered by the entries on the high-score table after downloading from an abandonware site?