It was the single hardest thing I've done in a long time, and my nerves are shot.
Been practicing almost every day since I got the machine in July.
It can be a very relaxing game that sharpens your mental ability (I play it before meetings and events to ensure that my mind is alert and that I'm thinking on the ball).
But it gets incredibly difficult very quickly, and is very hard to master.
I've been using an old VHS camcorder to record gameplay to see how I can figure out missile explosion spreads for different patterns (while keeping to the maximum of 8 concurrent missile shots on the screen).
This works well, but the game throws you new stuff all the time. So it's raw skill + ability to watch the whole screen and predict "unpredictable" attack patterns within a split second.
It baffles me how the guys like Bill Carlton from the documentary "High Score" (http://www.highscoremovie.com/), Victor Sandberg, Roy Shildt, or Tony Temple get such high scores.
All I'd like to do is get good enough to get to 810,000 so that the bug that gives you 176 bonus cities kicks in and I can get some really high scores....
