A few years back, my gracious employer bought an Ultracade machine with a couple dozen games on it ranging from Frogger to Street Fighter, with several classics and many games that I simply had never heard of before. At the generous rate of four credits per quarter, I’ve dug through and found several outdated games that are really quite good. My habit has been to play a game several times, generally until I’ve filled up the high-score board. On some games (e.g. Donkey Kong), I’ve had a competitor or two exchanging places on the top-score list back and forth until we lost interest. On others (e.g. Robotron or Joust), others in the building surpass my skill so greatly that a high-score run is simply unthinkable. On several, there simply hasn’t been any competition. Nobody else plays these games. Truxton II is one of these. Penguin-kun Wars is another.

After months of having no back-and-forth competition for the high score on any of the games, a challenger as finally appeared. One of my coworkers started playing Truxton II recently. Apparently he used to play it when it was new (1992, I gather). He quickly knocked the rust off his game and got all the way to the second boss fight. I’ve never seen anything past the second boss, having never defeated the thing. In doing so he beat my high score by six thousand points, somewhere in the neighborhood of 355,000 total to my 349,000. That’s a pretty close margin, so it’s time to roll up my sleeves and have another go at it.

Anybody with tips on how to make the best use of the blue, red, and green power-ups at various stages of the game, please let me know. I’ve found that the blue auto-aim guns work great on the 1st level, and the red rolling-thunder guns work very well in the mid-to-late 2nd level, but have never found a compelling use for the green scatter-gun.