BurritoBeans

I'm going to be driving all of sunday, so times it is. Arcade: Tetris: The Grand Master - 400 minutes Nintendo 64: Goldeneye 007 - 350 minutes Super Nintendo: Lawnmower Man - 100 minutes Mortal Kombat II - 45 minutes NBA Jam Tournament Edition - 20 minutes Super Bomberman 2 - 30 minutes Super Smash TV - 30 minutes Well this was a fun week for me. The biggest game of the week is TGM, and it was cool - I finally broke my mark of level 500! Well, I did it once... I keep getting stuck on 499 now. Pretty much, the way levels work is for every block placed and locked you get a level, for every line cleared you get a level. To get past the 99 in every set of 100, there's another bit - you need to clear a line. This is tough as by progressing through the 99 levels in each set of 100 the gravity goes up alongside the base gravity which is 20G by level 500. So, pretty much I sat down and grinded 499s over and over and over until I finally didn't misplace blocks - I've been focusing on being consistent at getting tetrises early on anyways, so I don't go for many single-line clears alongside just failing by that point. Goldeneye comes in 2nd, with more WR run attempts on Dam Agent and the start of Surface Agent. They're the two easy WRs, I know, but still they're being a bit tough - I have Dam Agent at a solid 00:54 or 00:55 - I've got the line down and everything. Surface Agent, while easier - no lock to shoot, just a few lines and doors with some grenade tosses if you want to get faster - is being a little bit more of a pain as said lines are being hard and looking down the whole time is a bit of a change from Dam. Still, it's going down and down.. the WR is like 00:22 or 00:23 - just run to the plane - but I'm more in the 00:32 range right now so it needs work. Past that, the SNES times were all in-school. We took a Raspberry Pi 3 in to two classes - Band and Multimedia - as we're doing about nothing in said classes. Bring out the multiplayer games, run a few tournaments, and just generally have fun - it was great. I also got to take half of a period off to practice Lawnmower Man with shumac which was awesome as a few people were interested enough to listen to us banter on about how the run works. So that's the week. Party games at school, and speedrunning at home - it was fun. Game Boy is coming out next week 'cause I'm gonna play a bit of GB Tetris, past that I have no plans past the fact that my Tetris TGM2Plus board is arriving so I'll play that (It's from 2000 though so I don't think I can track it on here...?) and Goldeneye will be worked on.

Arcade: Tetris: The Grand Master - 300 minutes N64: Goldeneye 007 - 450 minutes SNES: The Lawnmower Man - 150 minutes Well, this week has less total playtime than some of the past ones but whatever. Goldeneye is tops for time again, as I wanted to work on some running stuff - I got my Dam Agent time down to 00:54 which is just one second off of the WR pace as tied by like 100something people (not worth any points on the-elite scoreboard anyways) and started on trying Dam 00A which I have at 2:02 - not that bad considering that most peoples PBs are like 1:59-2:01 anyways. A lot of learning this has been just working on learning the level, and moving properly - I'm still using the 1.1 control style which one runner told me on Discord is probably why the best Dam Agent time I've got is 00:54 as it takes a bit more time to switch strafing, but after working on the line and doing the proper lookdown/just getting lucky with guards boosting me, I've been doing alright or so I think. In addition to just running Dam in singleplayer, I got a bit of multiplayer in with friends - it's always good fun to play GE multiplayer anyways Next up, and something just played now and then during the week, was Tetris: The Grand Master. I've always liked Tetris, I'd say I'm pretty alright anyways, but Grand Master... wow it's a challenge. My best score so far is stage 400, which is after the gravity ramps way past 1G - after level 500, TGM1 caps out at 20G where the pieces instantly spawn on top of the middle block, but I haven't got to that point just yet. I'd say I have a couple frames of hangtime anyways and then I have to slide the piece before locking the thing. It's really fun to play TGM, but dang it's a hard game - I think my goal is to see if I can make it to level 500 at least once by the end of the month. Finally, Lawnmower Man got brought up - shumac and I sat down with it and ran it three times, then I spent a little time myself. Pretty much we're just doing what we've been doing, keeping with our own strategy... the best time for the week goes to a 24:56 - not a bad run but we've done better in the past. The usual run killers did just that - killed runs - also known as the driving stage. Past that, there's nothing really to say about the game. So that's the week. Splatterhouse is coming up next week as I'm bringing the board out to screw with - I just want to have a little fun with it anyways. Past that, eh... TGM and Goldeneye, and maybe some Atari? I've got an urge to play with the 2600, so it should be on my post for the next week anyways.

Arcade: Cabal - 200 minutes Marble Madness - 20 minutes Missile Command - 60 minutes Nintendo 64: Goldeneye 007 - 1200 minutes Perfect Dark - 150 minutes Super Nintendo: The Lawnmower Man - 150 minutes If I played anything else, well, I don't remember all too well. Goldeneye takes over Lawnmower Man for the most playtime on one game straight - out of the 20 hours that I played on it, ten were from one session - the longest I think I had on Lawnmower Man was like seven or eight. Pretty much, I said "Screw it, I want to try and get a world record pace run on at least one level" - I picked Dam Agent as I know I can get one minute for the total time easily and it's the most tied WR at the moment with like 100+ people. Dump like twenty hours in, and the best I could do is 0:56 - not too bad but nothing great. I think part of my issue is my control scheme - my joystick is more reliable than my C buttons and there's no way in hell I'm doing D-Pad strafing so I stick with 1.1 or 2.2, but my thumb gets killed after a few hours. My options are either to buy a new N64 controller that wasn't abused back when my brothers and I were little (ehh, I already have six...), maybe fix up the C buttons and learn 1.2 like 99% of the GE community, or just suck up the pain. Perfect Dark was brought out as I felt like it - I ran through the game fairly quickly but not too quick anyways, then spent some time screwing around with random features. It's good fun, and I don't have anything else really to say about it. The three arcade titles were all due to me wanting to break in the trackball on the thing - we got a bunch of stuff from ultimarc anyways and one of said stuff-s was a trackball. Dad didn't even know if he had it working but eh, just plug it into the I-PAC board and the thing worked right there as a mouse. Cabal got the most playtime as it isn't too hard to just pick up and screw around with - I never got past 1-3 but I did have good fun playing it anyways. Marble Madness got brought up in a conversation with BillyHW so I played two serious games then failed hard - by serious, I mean still failed but not as hard. The first game I got to the 2nd board and then ran out of time due to not flicking the ball hard enough and taking a few bad turns, then the 2nd I made it 3/4ths of the way through the 3rd board before running out of time - it's good fun, but I suck at the game. Missile Command got a bit of playtime as I just remembered it existed, and I was surprised with it. Usually on the Atari I'll get like two or three boards then fail - I just suck at it. In the arcade version though, having the ball and all, I made it nine boards in before losing all my cities - I really outperformed my expectations anyways, and that was cool. So, next week will be a lot of Goldeneye. If I can get a 00:53 pace Dam Agent and clear it, I'll be happy with myself and then maybe chase a few more of the common WRs before I move on to attempting some of the harder stuff - I just have to remember to take time off of it and play other games. While I'm at it, maybe I'll look at buying a nice capture card... I want to record Lawnmower Man but my current device is ass and adds like half a second of input delay, so I refused to even try it on GE today - I was thinking of just getting a cheap-ish DVD recorder or something like that, but honestly having something I could stick into my PC and capture video with a low latency may be nicer and add the ability to do stuff like streaming if I really felt like it.

Well, there's barely any variety from me this week compared to last - only three games. Arcade: Splatterhouse - 1750 minutes Game.com Centipede - 100 minutes Nintendo 64: GoldenEye 007 - 600 minutes So, pretty much I decided to sit down with one of my all-time favorites this week (Splatterhouse) which I honestly haven't put good time into at all this year apart from last week - I like the game enough that I own a board of it and pretty much all the variants anyways. So, the big issue was that last weeks time on Splatterhouse was more screwing around, showing off, etc. and I didn't actually give a serious run to the thing - stuff like dancing around in-front of the mirrors and running bits without touching any enemies. So, this week I picked it back up seriously... well first thing first, I'm a good bit out of practice on some of the bosses - I must've forgot all the Jennifer patterns as I found myself losing a few lives on her, and Captain Mozzarella got to be an annoyance, as I finally got a game over there for the first time in maybe two years. Still, it didn't take a ton to get back what I used to know, so I've got the game running mostly solid again. Goldeneye took 2nd for playtime from me this week, and it was good fun. Pretty much, I tried running the thing on Agent as fast as possible a few times (the best was like 35-45ish minutes, not that great but not horrible) and then for a good 200 minutes or so of the time a few friends and I sat down and played multiplayer... I haven't done that in years anyways, so that was a lot of fun. One thing about Goleneye I've always loved is watching the speedruns - Goose was a bit of a troll but a really nice guy to meet in the past/I love his streams, and if you don't mind hearing some guy go nuts then go look up Ryan Lockwood Streets 112 as it shows you how excited these guys get over this stuff. Still, I'm nowhere near the level of people like Rayan Isran, Marc Rützou, Ryan White, etc. so while I can get speedy on some levels, I'm nowhere near that good. Finally, Game.com shows up for some more Centipede on the go - I can't say I've taken too much of a liking to Game.com Centipede, but I can say that it's the one reason that I come back to the system over and over. Right now I'm just beating high scores - I always sucked at Arcade Centipede, but I'm getting a little better on Game.com. I'd love to be able to clear more than like five boards on the arcade machine without having to drop a bunch of credits in, but that'll be a while anyways - if we get the multicade working properly, that may be a new goal of mine is to practice trackball centipede. So, that's the week - three games and a good bit of fun. I'm going to stick with Splatterhouse for a while and retire Lawnmower Man to the sideline - expect to see time, I'm not giving up on it yet and I want to keep improving, but I need something else as I'm starting to get frustrated with where I'm at. Past that, maybe I'll work on the trackball a bit myself in the multicade? Now that I've got my mind on it, I'd love to see it work - Centipede would be good fun - and it's right there anyways. The thing is running off an Ultimarc interface anyways, it doesn't seem too hard and I remember we at least set up the connections so just a bit of configuration and I think I can get it after school or work one of these days.

Yeah, you pretty much hit the nail on the head of "Playing two rounds and giving up" - I don't exactly know what to do in the game and didn't read the manual. Maybe some other day I'll figure it out if I ever get my own copy, but for now it was just to see what the game looked like as I've never really played it before. A good few of the games, especially on any of the stuff I brought, I just didn't put a ton of time into - I guess the big example is that some of the PC games were just RPGs that people brought because they have nice graphics or sound or whatever to show off the system. When there's so much stuff and not a ton of time anyways, it's hard to get too into the things.

Well, turns out Penelec got power back while I was at school - I have to say, I'm impressed... usually it drops, we report the outage, and it takes a few days at least - so this was a nice change over the usual, especially with the amount of downed power lines in other nearby areas. So, here's the massive amount of times - it's not a lot of time (well not compared to my Lawnmower Man sprees...) but it's a lot of different times. Also, note - sorry that the formatting sucks, I just have no good way of doing this that I know of as I can't completely BBCode the thing, pasting it into word and then into here doesn't work, etc... System Game Playitime (Minutes) Arcade 1943 10 Arcade Area 51 15 Arcade Beast Busters 45 Arcade Beast Busters: Second Nightmare 60 Arcade Lethal Enforcers 15 Arcade Moon Patrol 25 Arcade Space Invaders 20 Arcade Splatterhouse 115 Arcade The Simpsons 20 Arcade Time Crisis II 15 Arcade X-Men 20 Total Time: 360 Atari 8-bit Asteroids 15 Atari 8-bit Ballblazer 20 Atari 8-bit Montezuma’s Revenge 10 Atari 8-bit MULE 10 Atari 8-bit Star Raiders 10 Total Time: 65 Atari 2600 Astroblast 5 Atari 2600 Beamrider 5 Atari 2600 Combat 5 Atari 2600 Demon Attack 5 Atari 2600 E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial 10 Atari 2600 Laser Blast 11 Atari 2600 Phoenix 5 Atari 2600 Picnic 5 Atari 2600 Pitfall 22 Atari 2600 Pitfall II 30 Atari 2600 River Raid 5 Atari 2600 Stampede 5 Atari 2600 Tennis 5 Total Time: 118 Atari 5200 Bounty Bob Strikes Back 20 Atari 5200 Centipede 5 Atari 5200 Defender 5 Atari 5200 Dig-Dug 5 Atari 5200 Pac-Man 5 Atari 5200 Star Raiders 20 Total Time: 60 Atari 7800 Centipede 5 Atari 7800 Choplifter 5 Atari 7800 Donkey Kong 5 Atari 7800 Food Fight 5 Atari 7800 Galaga 5 Atari 7800 Ninja Golf 10 Atari 7800 Xevious 5 Total Time: 40 Atari Lynx Batman Returns 5 Atari Lynx Blue Lightning 5 Atari Lynx California Games 5 Atari Lynx Hard Drivin’ 5 Atari Lynx Paperboy 5 Atari Lynx Rampage 5 Atari Lynx Xybots 5 Total Time: 35 Fairchild Channel F Videocart 3 – Video Blackjack 15 Fairchild Channel F Videocart 5 – Space War 15 Fairchild Channel F Videocart 9 – Drag Strip 15 Fairchild Channel F Videocart 15 – Memory Match 15 Fairchild Channel F Videocart 21 – Bowling 15 Total Time: 75 FM Towns Chase H.Q. 10 FM Towns Galaxy Force 10 FM Towns Loom 10 FM Towns Operation Wolf 10 FM Towns Puyo Puyo 15 FM Towns Raiden 10 FM Towns Samurai Showdown 15 FM Towns Splatterhouse 106 FM Towns Super Street Fighter II 10 FM Towns Tale of Alltynex 10 FM Towns Truxton II 10 FM Towns Twin Cobra 10 FM Towns Viewpoint 10 Total Time: 236 Game.com Batman & Robin 5 Game.com Centipede 5 Game.com Duke Nukem 3D 5 Game.com Fighters Megamix 5 Game.com Mortal Kombat Trilogy 5 Game.com Resident Evil 2 5 Total Time: 30 MSX Alien 2 15 MSX Vampire Killer 55 Total Time: 70 MSX2 Aleste 10 MSX2 Comic Bakery 10 MSX2 Dix 10 MSX2 Dynamite Bowl 10 MSX2 Metal Gear 30 MSX2 Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake 45 Total Time: 115 NES Castlevania 25 NES Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest 25 NES Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse 25 NES Double Dragon 10 NES Double Dragon II: The Revenge 10 NES Double Dragon III: The Sacred Stones 10 NES Duck Hunt 10 NES Hogan’s Alley 10 NES Super Mario. Bros 3 10 NES Super Off Road 20 NES The Magic of Scheherazade 10 Total Time: 165 PC-8000 Deep Scan 20 PC-8000 Flicky 20 PC-8000 Soko-Ban 20 Total Time: 60 PC-88 177 10 PC-88 Alice: Adventures in Wonderland 10 PC-88 Hydlide 25 PC-88 Ice Climber 10 PC-88 Lode Runner 10 PC-88 Night Life 10 PC-88 Snatcher 25 PC-88 Tenshitaci no Gogo 10 PC-88 Thexder 10 PC-88 Xanadu 10 Total Time: 130 PC-98 Brandish 20 PC-98 Brandish 3: Spirit of Balcan 40 PC-98 Desire 15 PC-98 Pac-Man 10 PC-98 Policenauts 20 PC-98 Popful Mail 10 PC-98 Steam-Heart’s 10 PC-98 YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World 45 Total Time: 170 SNES ActRaiser 20 SNES ActRaiser II 20 SNES Mega Man X 5 SNES The Lawnmower Man 212 Total Time: 257 Vectrex Armor Attack 15 Vectrex Berzerk 15 Vectrex Mine Storm 15 Vectrex Pole Position 15 Vectrex Rip-Off 15 Vectrex Star Castle 15 Total Time: 90 X1 177 10 X1 3-D Bomberman 10 X1 Battle City 10 X1 Door Door 10 X1 Elevator Action 10 X1 Mappy 10 X1 Spy vs. Spy 10 X1 Super Mario Bros. Special 20 X1 Xevious 10 Total Time: 100 X68000 Akumajō Dracula 70 X68000 Alien Syndrome 10 X68000 Bubble Bobble 10 X68000 Cameltry 10 X68000 Daimakaimura 84 X68000 Fantasy Zone 10 X68000 Gradius 10 X68000 Gradius II 10 X68000 R-Type 10 X68000 Salamander 10 X68000 Sol-Feace 10 X68000 Space Harrier 10 X68000 Strider 10 Total Time: 264 Overall Time: 40.6666666666667hrs So how'd I get so many times? Well, there's two reasons: I didn't really have school last week... it was more "just go to work for the eight hours school takes and then stick after a bit because the co-op program thing and all my teachers were out" We had a bunch of parties at work so I brought some crap in alongside coworkers to mess with And I don't want to type for a million more words because I did it right before power went out and this is the 2nd time I've typed this. So, for thoughts on random stuff: The Japanese PCs were big hits with people, be it coworkers or random people walking around the arcade I still suck at 3/4s of NES games Vectrex is a good bit of fun - the controllers were kinda dying on the stick but past that the games were a lot of fun... I just love the graphics And past that I don't remember crap, it was a few days ago at least this all happened, so that's it. Next week will be some Game.com and SNES - I'm taking the Game.com to school and Lawnmower Man may have a new skip we found, so I'll see what happens.

NES Ninja Gaiden II - 27 minutes I have a whole spreadsheet of times but can't post until (hopefully) the middle of tomorrow as a massive storm knocked power out everywhere up here and there's no way I'm typing it up again on a phone. I put Ninja Gaiden up as this one was silly - it's my cart and it worked fine on my NES but everyone else who brought a NES to this party couldn't get the stupid cartridge to work - past that it was fine though... I just got stuck on the third stage and called it quits, but it's always good fun.

My current "favorite" track goes to You Goddamned Bathead! from Akumajō Dracula on the X68000. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBivx9iZY1A The youtube link is to the stock FM version, then in my opinion the GS version is 2nd and the LA version is the worst-sounding to me - they're all alright though. I'm a sucker for a ton of the old japanese PCs, and a ton of them have good music on their games. And for other mentions: -The credits, and the Captain Mozzarella tracks from Splatterhouse - I think for Cap the Arcade/FM Towns version is referred to as the Requiem, while the TG16/PCE is referred to as the Ballad. -Pretty much anything done by Ryu Umemoto -The entire soundtrack to Ragnarøkkr, we threw this together in Band class and it was a lot of fun to play Oboe on our sheetmusic-ed version. -The DOOM soundtrack. The PC one is classic, the 3DO one is just cool, and the 32X is silly little musical farts. -The Tempest 2000 soundtrack. First soundtrack I owned on a disc, and still one of my favorites. There's probably a lot more, but I don't want to dig through my memory all too much. Edit - changed up a little bit of wording

No time for anything pre-2000 on the weekend for me - I've got work, then a trip to Pittsburgh, then back up after a day to more work anyways, so here's my two times. NES: Milon's Secret Castle - 30 minutes SNES: The Lawnmower Man - 1320 minutes Well, I'll start off with Milon. Pretty much, I never understood this game in the past - I just shot stupidly-moving bubbles and then stuff broke or appeared, and I got stuck on like the 2nd level. I did the same exact damn thing, got frustrated, and quit. The game's just stupid to me, probably because I don't understand it at all. That's it - nothing else to say. For Lawnmower Man, shumac and I just kept trying to practice with a capture card... we forgot to put the SD card back into the capture card, so nothing got recorded. Our lowest time was like 39:56, which we actually just got like 20 minutes ago as-of posting, was based off of pure luck - pretty much, we got really screwed between losing a few lives on a jump trick in the warehouse-like bit with all the computers, the driving stage, and the final fight. For the jump trick, pretty much you sit there and overflow the game with sprites and then do a sorta pixel-perfect jump to a platform while it's at it's lowest point - you're not supposed to be able to make the jump, but with the whole "shooting and jumping at the right time makes you go higher bit" and the slowdown due to sprite overflow, you can push yourself past an open gap and land on this platform while it goes up leading you towards the exit. Well, instead of hitting that, we both failed twice cutting four lives off of our count and making it so we had to play it safe for the rest of the level. The driving stage was just the game being a jackass, it kept giving patterns of cars which would force one of us to eat a life and we had no say in it - I got close to giving a nice "screw it" and giving up at that point but we kept with the run. The final fight, well, between dodging crap and shooting we just couldn't move at the right times due to still not being used to the delay from the cards passthrough so we kept hitting the little walls and losing lives. I did do fairly good on the segment where you fly through cyberspace or whatever the crap it's supposed to be though - there's a few tricks based off of moving at the right time, and by just hitting the controller a tad bit earlier we were able to skip some of the moving walls by flying around them faster than they could expand which was satisfying to say the least. Next week is going to be like last week but a bigger list - pretty much for this semester in school, I have nothing to do for the first half of the schoolday so alongside my business classes I'm in this co-op program with some of the technical school people where I just go to work for like four hours in the morning then come for my core classes in the evening. Well, turns out due to the teachers for said core classes being out for some science competition thing for the whole week (essentially making the classes a glorified studyhall) and the office approving it, I'm just going to go from 6-4 at work and pop home like it was a usual schoolday with an hour and a half added. We have parties to host - two for birthdays and a party for all the employees - so alongside my boss I'm going to pretty much just sit down and manage that crap instead of having to do front desk work (woohoo!) so it'll be fun. I'm planning on bringing more random japanese PCs (PC66,88,9801,9821,X1,X68K,FM Towns?) as people absolutely loved the odd hardware last time alongside a good variety of games for 'em for the employee party, and we're going to set up a room of consoles in an unused area next to the arcade so I should have a huge list of games. I'm looking forward to it anyways, it'll be a lot of fun and I'll get paid so I may pick up a new title or two and some new albums to listen to.

Here's a lot of games. Apple II: Castle Wolfenstein - 20 minutes Centipede - 20 minutes Lode Runner - 20 minutes Moon Patrol - 35 minutes Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar - 40 minutes Wasteland - 20 minutes Aquarius: Astrosmash - 20 minutes BurgerTime - 30 minutes Night Stalker - 20 minutes Snafu - 20 minutes Utopia - 20 minutes Atari 2600: E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial - 15 minutes Kaboom - 15 minutes Laser Blast - 15 minutes Pac-Man - 15 minutes Pitfall - 15 minutes Pitfall 2 - 15 minutes RealSports Tennis - 15 minutes Tennis - 15 minutes Xenophobe - 20 minutes Yar's Revenge - 15 minutes Atari 5200: Centipede - 10 minutes Joust - 10 minutes Jungle Hunt - 10 minutes Pole Position - 10 minutes Qix - 10 minutes Star Raiders - 10 minutes Space Invaders - 10 minutes Compucolor II: Blackjack - 10 minutes Chess - 10 minutes Lunar Lander - 20 minutes Sharks - 10 minutes Star Trip - 10 minutes DOS: Battlezone - 10 minutes Captain Comic - 10 minutes Day of the Tentacle - 10 minutes Duke Nukem 3D - 30 minutes Hexen - 10 minutes Rise of the Triad - 10 minutes Wolfenstein 3D - 30 minutes Gamate: Baseball - 10 minutes Dinosaur Park - 10 minutes Mini Golf - 10 minutes Robin Hood - 10 minutes Tennis - 10 minutes NES: Castlevania - 55 minutes Castlevania II: Simon's Quest - 30 minutes Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse - 15 minutes Duck Hunt - 15 minutes Hogan's Alley - 20 minutes Sweet Home - 10 minutes Tetris - 10 minutes PC-8801: Balloon Fight - 10 minutes Cruise Chaster Blassty - 10 minutes Gradius - 10 minutes Ice Climber - 10 minutes Inindo: Way of the Ninja - 10 minutes Snatcher - 10 minutes Super Mario Bros. Special - 10 minutes Thexder - 10 minutes PC-98: Adventure of Liena - 10 minutes Armist - 10 minutes Asuka X - 10 minutes Battle Queen - 10 minutes Beast Breeders - 10 minutes Blood Seed - 10 minutes Mime - 10 minutes Noriko - 10 minutes Policenauts - 10 minutes Smell of Blood - 10 minutes XIX - 10 minutes PC Engine: Bonk's Adventure - 10 minutes Bonk's Revenge - 10 minutes Magical Chase - 20 minutes R-Type - 10 minutes Splatterhouse - 45 minutes Sega Game Gear: Columns - 10 minutes Earthworm Jim - 10 minutes Tails Adventure - 10 minutes Sega Genesis: Earthworm Jim - 10 minutes Sonic The Hedgehog - 10 minutes Sonic The Hedgehog 2 - 10 minutes Sonic The Hedgehog 3 - 10 minutes Super Hydlide - 10 minutes Wonder Boy - 10 minutes Sega Master System: Alien Syndrome - 10 minutes Fantasy Zone - 10 minutes Ghouls 'n Ghosts - 10 minutes Ninja Gaiden - 10 minutes Space Harrier - 10 minutes Sega Saturn: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - 10 minutes Daytona USA - 10 minutes Nights Into Dreams - 10 minutes Street Fighter Alpha 3 - 10 minutes Sonic R - 10 minutes Virtua Fighter 2 - 10 minutes SNES: The Lawnmower Man - 572 minutes Vectrex: Cosmic Chasm - 30 minutes Spike - 30 minutes Pretty much, I had the whole week off from school - it was just work this week where we had three parties involving games from all over, horribly dubbed animated stuffs, soda, and movies. I brought a good chunk of stuff with me for people to try alongside coworkers bringing bits of their collections and just dragging stuff out of the back that we haven't messed with in a while/haven't been able to sell. So, we cleared up the party room in the arcade and set up in there using every damn CRT in sight - it was a mess of cables anyways. For stuff not played at work, it was just Lawnmower Man and the Castlevania games. With Lawnmower Man, shumac and I sat down to practice - we did six runs, with a low of 22:34 and a high of 28:11 - I'd say we're doing fine, but we're by no means consistent on the short runs due to either failing tricks or being careful because the stupid driving stage eating lives. We also tried to play with a capture card in the line again - we were able to beat the game, but the one out of seven attempts that did work was like 49:14 on the run which is more than double where we want to be - pretty much we lost a good few lives, had to play cautiously, and missed 3/4ths of the skips and tricks making it a PITA. For everything else, here's a list of my few thoughts: Ultima on the Apple II sounds beautiful with the Mockingboards. We used my Laser 128 setup which has dual Mockingboard Bs in the expansion box, and that game has good music. Vectrex is really cool. I guess I've known this - I've messed with them at conventions - but knowing that a coworker has one that they're willing to bring for people to play with is neat. I just really enjoy the graphics to the thing and the games were fun... if only they weren't so dang expensive. Random Japanese games like the PC-88/98 stuff is a great conversation starter with people. A good half of our staff knows how to at least read Japanese, three of them knowing how to speak it fairly well, due to everyone having a thing for imports here so it was good fun having people sit down with the old NEC boxes. The Nintendo ports on the thing are pretty nice, too - most people know the games from the NES anyways so showing the ports, and then other versions like Super Mario Bros. Special, is fun to do. Daytona USA on the Saturn isn't all that impressive. I know there's later versions which are a lot better, but compared to the arcade it just seems so botched and silly - I get that it couldn't be like the original, but if I buy myself a copy of Daytona USA I want one of said later versions. The stick on the 5200 really gets frustrating. Trying to play something simple like Qix turned out to be a pain trying to get the stupid thing to go where I want, when I want. I think we killed three joysticks, they're on my desk here to work on... Duke Nukem 3D is good fun for LAN. So yeah nothing really special, it's all stuff I've played before and most of the fun was playing the games with other people anyways. This next week is going to be a tad bit boring for me - I've got a bunch of movies I need to watch through so I'm going to cut back on gaming apart from maybe a bit of Lawnmower Man here and there... maybe I'll try to beat Milon's Secret Castle again, I dunno.

Posting now... I may get more playtime in with the hours I have left today, but I'll see - I may just get lazy and listen to albums again. Atari 2600: Pitfall II: Lost Caverns - 80 minutes Game.com: Centipede - 200 minutes NES: Castlevania II: Simon's Quest - 249 minutes SNES: Lawnmower Man - 1450 minutes Well, this week was pretty fun. I started off the week with the Game.com, as friends wanted to mess with the thing due to having never seen one. I just played Centipede myself in downtime, but I brought Res. Evil 2 and Duke Nukem 3D for them to mess with as they wanted to check those titles out - I love seeing the look on peoples faces when they try those big-name titles and realize "Holy crap, there's nothing exactly like the original in these..." and I got a lot of "Well this thing is a load of shit"-s as responses, but hey, it was enjoyable. I haven't been keeping track of my score in Centipede, but I did clear a good few boards so I was happy with myself - I just need to play the actual one with a trackball sometime, maybe when we get the arcade going again... The 2600 got me some time with Pitfall II. I always wanted to love the Pitfall series, and I like them for what they are but I really suck at them. So, I took II and just sat down and ran it. Really simple gameplay, really simple objectives, etc. but I didn't remember the whole balloon bit for a little so I got confused - maybe I should read manuals more often, I dunno. Dad ended up picking the game up and halving my time at the very least as he loves Pitfall games. I do suck at these, but whatever - it was fun. Lawnmower Man was constantly played through the week, and let me say I feel good about this one. I'm still struggling to find a good video capture system though, I may need something like an RCA splitter so I can have the capture card not in the line generating issues? I just can't do as well because my card adds so much delay to the stupid thing that it breaks my runs, and I'm not learning to play it again with a stupid capture card in the line if I can get past that issue. The other Andrew and I got together and since we were doing nothing in Multimedia class, we got to run it in there due to the teacher bringing in his NES and SNES to play in downtime - it was really cool to play it on the projector, mind you a bit tougher due to not being able to see some projectiles. We got a time of 24min12sec though, so that was really good. Castlevania II was an impulse in my mind this morning. Pretty much, I woke up at like 11AM because I stayed up too late last night and the first thing I thought was "I want to actually beat something". So, I sat up and I just took the game off the shelf and played the stupid thing - started at 11:38AM and got the ending screen at 4:47PM, taking an hour break in the middle to check my PC and eat a Reuben. With this game I do have two questions - first off, is this game really short or something? I don't have a great idea of the game, but I do remember where you need the blue and red gems which probably made it a lot easier. Still, even with that, I feel like I used to take a lot longer to beat this, and I kept getting the B&W ending... maybe running Lawnmower Man helped me with reflexes on games or some crap instead of game over-ing over and over and over like I used to? It's just that four hours seems real short compared to the past - maybe it is the game overs, I think I only got two this run. Second, what's up with the endings? I remember getting two endings in the past - one where the screen was grey and it said peace was restored but both Dracula and Simon passed which I thought was alright as at least Transylvania restored peace, and one where Simon apparently beat Dracula and peace and all that jazz but then Dracula pops his hand up like some cheesy horror movie. This run, basically all I got on the endings was that Dracula wasn't defeated, Simon died of his wounds, and Transylvania needs a new savior or some crap. I decided to look up the endings, and apparently what I got was the normal/not so bad but not great ending? I mean I'd say this one was the worst of them all, in the other two Simon ends up at least defeating Dracula which is good - in this one just kind-of kills him off and Dracula still exists anyways. Eh, if that's the "alright" ending then all I can say is "alright, I guess I'll just have to accept it" and play a different game. Overall though, I seriously enjoyed this run for what it was. The game had a challenge but wasn't really that hard, the story does exist/isn't too horrible, and I didn't have any major gripes with it anyways - it definitely went up on my list of NES games that I enjoy. So, that's my week in games. I may post more times for tomorrow as I have a serious urge to play Rolling Thunder, but I'll see if I get around to that after I go eat some food.

Amiga: Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight - 130 minutes Atari 2600: Pitfall - 30 minutes Reactor - 30 minutes Game.com Centipede - 30 minutes Duke Nukem 3D - 30 minutes SNES: ActRaiser - 190 minutes ActRaiser 2 - 270 minutes The Lawnmower Man - 500 minutes Well, a bit more variety this week, wouldn't you say? SNES gets the most playtime from me as I was carrying my RDP again - Lawnmower Man was the staple anyways. I was screwing around with the game, and ended up blasting through runs - I got one down to the 25 minute mark so I'm improving. Really though, there's no real breakthroughs being made on this - I've just been watching other runners (usually just PJ DiCesare since he has a really good run and I love his stuff) and using any tricks that I'm not running, alongside just practicing frustrating segments. For other SNES, I ended up running the ActRaiser games again - they're some of my favorites anyways. ActRaiser ended up being fairly smooth, but ActRaiser 2 was a bit of a mess. With 2, of course people know it for being a PITA as you either start on the wrong level and get screwed over or just get screwed by the enemies. Pretty much, I ended up not remembering anything from the past time I played so I ended up not remembering enemies and dying a bunch of times to the things. This got frustrating and I ended up quitting, then coming back two days later - it was fun in the end I guess. Atari got a little bit of playtime with Pitfall and Reactor. Pretty much, these are just two games that I want to figure out but never do. Reactor was just confusing last time I played it as I never got that you had to use the walls and bounce the enemies, and Pitfall I could never really get more than a few treasures in. After half an hour on each, well eh, I got a bit? Reactor started to make more sense but I still don't get it and Pitfall I just figured out how to jump over stuff. Nothing exciting there. The Amiga 1200 got brought out for Moonstone, probably the only Amiga game that I can remember by name if you asked me "What Amiga games are there?" apart from It Came From The Desert. I think I went over this one in a past post, but whatever - it's a little fighting game where you play as a Knight and have to fight monsters and other Knights, while building up your knight with treasure and better gear and holding off the other knights. Bit of a beat 'em up and RTS combo, really. The game is tough and pretty bloody for stuff around when it came out, but it's a lot of fun to play. There's a modern port for Windows if you're mildly interested which is a couple MB at most in size, so give it a shot - you may enjoy it. Finally, Game.com got played. Game.com is something that I always make jokes about but never mess with that often, so I brought out two games that I knew were "alright" - DN3D and Centipede. Centipede I have no issue with at all - it's a lot of fun anyways, just in black and white with a screen that needs a frontlight and a bit of mild ghosting. I wouldn't say it's the best port of Centipede ever made, but it's certainly one of the better games for the system as it's the arcade classic. Duke Nukem 3D is the opposite, and is nothing like the original - it's more like a confusing slideshow. Movement is confusing, sound effects are dumb at best, shooting makes me wonder "How did I even hit them?" and the levels are just easy. But, it's Duke, and everyone likes Duke, right? So yeah, playing more than just Lawnmower Man paid off - it was fun anyways. More Game.com to come for next week as I feel like it, alongside a bit of SNES - that's what I've got in my bag of camera and audio gear for Multimedia anyways for when I'm bored.

Agh, almost forgot to post again SNES: The Lawnmower Man - 2000 minutes Well, it was pretty much just Lawnmower Man. This time though, it's in school - I have a Multimedia class turned to "Film Class" where we just either do nothing or watch movies and are planning to have one project involving the whole high school, so in all the downtime I have I decided to take the Retro Duo Portable with me and Lawnmower Man sat in the top. Being that my partner for the game, Andrew, and I are both in that class alongside two seniors and the teacher, we decided we'd just hook it into a computer monitor via a Composite to VGA adapter and we brought controllers to play - it's been pretty fun. Best bit is, the teacher doesn't care at all - he's fairly young and grew up with NES/SNES so he likes to sit down with the RDP and play some of his old games when we're not messing with it. So, for gameplay, not a ton happened - we mainly just practiced the speedrun over and over and over and over and over. I may bring in a capture device so we can record the run, but I'm worried about input lag if I have to run into the capture device and then out (that's how all my cards work anyways) as the RDP seems a bit slower than the actual SNES input-wise and adding in that capture card in the line may screw us up on some of the tricks due to delay on the controllers. Past that though, it's just having fun I guess - the only stage we have issues with now is the driving stage, but that's because if the game feels like being a dick to you then you lose all your lives and have to play it safe for the rest of the run. So yeah, nothing crazy to write about - just working on the run. I'm bringing my Genesis into class as we can't work on the project due to half of the class (the seniors) being out, so the teacher wanted to play Genesis as he said he always thought they looked cool when he was in grade school but never got to play one, so I've got the system, CD, 32X, some games, and controllers set up in his room - it's good fun.

Bought a bunch of new games on Steam (Sold a CS:GO Knife skin for $60 to pay for 'em) so this is all the playtime on old games that I have ​Apple II: ​King's Quest - 400 minutes ​PC-98: ​Purple Cat: Volume 1 - 120 minutes Purple Cat: Volume 2 - 120 minutes Tokio Twilight Busters - 400 minutes Wedding Bell ha Takakara ni - 400 minutes ​SNES: ​Lawnmower Man - 400 minutes Well, more randomness. I started the week off with Lawnmower Man - friend and I got together and decided to run through the game multiple times. The first run was pretty bad, 43 minutes, as we ended up getting screwed over hard on the Driving segment and had to play it safe for everything afterwards so we ended up taking it slow. Past that though we got around 30 or less as we were able to conserve lives through it. One big issue though, my one good 1st party controller died so all I have is my MadCatz 3rd-party which is a bit squishy to use and has a chip taken off the side so I really need to buy new controllers now. King's Quest makes an appearance from me as while raiding my bookshelves, I found a neat little book - The King's Quest Companion Vol. 3 - or something like that which has fiction versions of the stories, maps of the game, and guides on how to beat them. I ended up using this 3/4s of the way through as I couldn't remember what to do... King's Quest on the Apple II is pretty cool, I only ever really played the IBM versions and this one played smoothly anyways, so I enjoyed it. PC98 wasn't anything exciting this week. I started with those Purple Cat games, which are short little scenarios that involve a guy going after a girl or something like that. It wasn't anything exciting to read, but hey it was something to do so I went with it - at least the drawings spliced into the thing were fairly well-done. Tokio Twilight Busters was cool, it's an adventure game about four people who are investigating and fighting a supernatural force. There's cool graphics to it, the game played smoothly, and had a good plot anyways. Past that, there was Wedding Bell ha Takakari ni... I couldn't figure this one out but kept screwing with it anyways. It had some gameshow-esque thing involving a board, turns, etc. but all the questions were Japanese knowledge things which I could never get right more than 1/3 of the time. I ended up just guessing stuff, and if you got whatever right occasionally you'd get an image of someone - it could be neat, but, only if you know a lot of Japanese stuff. So yeah, not a ton of exciting stuff (or at least much to talk about). I'm thinking of pulling out more Apple II stuff for next week, but I really don't feel like sifting through a ton of disks... anyways, yeah I got new games on Steam so I'll probably just do that.

Apple II: Choplifter - 30 minutes PC-98 Blood Seed - 200 minutes Cosmic Psycho - 200 minutes Ikazuchi no Senshi Raidi - 200 minutes Kotetsu no Daibouken - 300 minutes Phantasmagoria of Dim Dream - 30 minutes Queen of Duelist Hyper Edition - 30 minutes Reserve - 13 minutes Reserve 1/2 - 10 minutes Rusty - 200 minutes Satyr - 300 minutes Sela - 300 minutes Silent Movers - 200 minutes So yeah, a lot of random stuff. Pretty much this whole week I've had to stay at school until about 10PM due to musical being a thing and I was in the orchestra (It went well) so I took a laptop-based PC98 to mess with some disks that I got as every day from noon to 6PM I got to just sit around with the 98Note, so I played through a bunch of this stuff. I'm just going to do a list with my thoughts on all these games as most of them I did run through and there was some interesting stuff Blood Seed - It's frustrating but a neat concept I guess? The plot revolves around a spaceship which gets a hull breach by some red pod which ends up sprouting tentacles and attacking the crew. You play as said "pod with tentacles" thing, going around hallways (which are in 3D, kinda cool, but really just textured square blocks) trying to find the crew while fighting little robots that are trying to take you out. The game has some cool animation to it (be it a bit letterboxed and lo-res) but the enemies are a pain in the ass as they have way too much health, the combat log is always like five turns behind, and the map barely functions when you want it to Cosmic Psycho - I have this one on X68000 and MSX so I figured I'd try this port for the hell of it. You play as this dude Kazuyuki who has a dream where a girl is calling him from space, and he wakes up to find that he's on a spaceship where the girl exists and she explains how they fight aliens that are just called "EX" but that she screwed up and got Kazuyuki on the ship instead of someone else so he's stuck with them. It's a standard adventure game which has a sidescrolling portion now and then in which you get to be in a mech suit and fight through a stage. Graphics are a bit lo-res all throughout the game but there's usually animation on everything so it's really cool to see, but stages are super short and I can't say I could get too into the adventure portions. Ikazuchi no Senshi Raidi - I think I tried this one out before as it's familiar, but maybe it's because there's a modern re-release (Lightning Warrior Raidy) which I heard a good bit about from a coworker. Pretty much the game is supposed to be a spoof on some of the AD&D adventure games for what I get, where you play as a warrior named Raidy who has to find out why women from her village are being taken and imprisoned in a tower nearby and rescue them. The game operates on floors which have random encounters alongside stuff you can interact with, then at the center or in a special room or something there's a boss. Combat is a bit limited/boring but eh, it's interesting enough. Kotetsu no Daibouken - Another adventure title, this time based on some anime series. You're some girl nicknamed Kotetsu who runs away from her master and goes to a detective agency in Tokyo. You have to just do whatever by using a menu to interact, with choices just changing maybe one or two little things in the game. Battles are just a guessing game and really silly and the plot wasn't anything great, but the art looked pretty alright so that's a plus I guess. Phantasmagoria of Dim Dream - It's a Touhou game. I don't much like Touhou games so this one just got turned off fairly quickly. Queen of Duelist Hyper Edition - There's really little to say about this one. It's a clunky fighter where damage just strips the opponents clothes off. The controls were a bit "eh" at best and the graphics weren't all too great as that's how the PC98 is with animated stuff most of the time. Reserve and Reserve 1/2 - I'm grouping these together as they're super short. Reserve is based around a girl who while going to a date with her boyfriend just happens to slip into another dimension where there are monsters who want to rape her, so you have to fight your way to the exit of the world to get back with your boyfriend for your date. Reserve 1/2 has you play as one of these monsters (a bat girl) and try to deliver three female humans to Satan so you can be turned into a real girl. Both games operate on a very very small map where there are set encounters which you get through by beating the enemies via attacking two of their four listed parts and reducing their health to 0 before you're beat. In Reserve you end up getting raped and set back to the beginning if you lose, in Reserve 1/2 you just get some little scene of another monster waking you up and you get reset to the beginning. Each game is beatable very very quickly and combat is silly at best although the graphics look neat enough (More in 1/2) so they weren't anything too crazy. Rusty - I think I've talked about this one way too many times, but here it is again - a Castlevania clone where you play as a girl (Rusty) who fights monsters and all that good stuff. Gameplay is tight, graphics look real nice for the PC98, controls are solid, and the game has a pretty good soundtrack to it - I enjoy this one every time I run it. Satyr - A simulation game revolving around you commanding a bunch of fairies who want to get a demon girl to submission. Gameplay is a bit slow and most of the work you can tell is put into the graphics - you just pick out a bunch of activities for the fairies to do, they do them, and then you get CGs of the fairies with nothing on. Again, graphics are done well but it's pretty much boring past that. Sela - Probably the most annoying game I played out of the lot. There's no plot at all past "You're a dude and you fight stuff", so pretty much the entire game revolves you fighting monsters to get money so you can have sex with girls using the money you earned. Combat is just simple choices on what to do, you have to hit enter for every single line of text making you think you'll break the stupid key except for the last line in which if you do push enter you select the top action - in the end you overspam the damn key and then you hit the thing you don't want to every single time. I got through the stupid game and I think this will be one I just put on the shelf and never pull off again until I forget how stupid it was. Silent Movers - Now this is a cool game. The game is a RTS where you fight a CPU on this giant board by building units and sending them off to attack the CPU. It sounds simple at first, but this game is in 3D and it actually looks great for the 98 - yes it's a bit blocky, but you don't see many titles like this on the system anyways. One thing I really enjoyed was the fact that you can actually control your units from a first person perspective, moving and shooting and all, which is a bit ahead of its time for the system its on. The game is pretty much fully in English for everything that matters so anyone can pick it up and play, and I ended up sitting down and playing a good few rounds as I really enjoyed this one. Oh yeah, and the Apple II got played - I'm trying to get my Micromodem II to want to work again, so when I got frustrated of waiting for dial up I ended up playing Choplifter. As usual I have no joystick for my II+, so I use two paddles - Paddle 0 raises and lowers the chopper while also rotating it, and Paddle 1 does horizontal movement based on how far you rotate it from center to the left/right and shoots - it's probably the most clunky form of control but it's really fun for some reason. So yeah, that's my week. I'll get back to the usual "play a couple games for a long time" thing and some Lawnmower Man for the next week maybe, but for now at least this was really fun to do.

Well you already know it Grim after we dialed each-other and all, but yeah I'm in. Got the Apple II and Micromodem II, I think my IBM 55SX has a dial-up modem I never played with before, and I have random SmartModems and all laying around to mess with so I think this would be fun.

Missed last weeks posting by an hour, bleh Sega Saturn SimCity 2000 - 1200 minutes Sharp X1 Romancia - 300 minutes Super Mario Bros. Special - 100 minutes The Tower of Druaga - 200 minutes Super Nintendo Lawnmower Man - 600 minutes Eh, not a ton compared to the usual but it was all I wanted to do. Pulled the Saturn up for SimCity 2000 as it's one of the two US titles I own and I like SC2K. Apart from the stupid long loading times, I do have to say that the Saturn version is pretty awesome - not much different from the PC version anyways. The big gripe right now is that I have no cart for my Saturn, so I can only hold like one save which really sucks - sometime here I'll buy an Action Replay cart. Pretty much I just started a city, took it really far, and then blew it up - not much to say other than that it's a fun game and I think it was worth the $10. Lawnmower Man was more of the same... The run is getting shorter and shorter. We haven't found anything new to the run yet which is sad as I'd think with the amount of glitchieness there's got to be something I can abuse in it, but without going in and looking at it like a TAS I doubt I'd be able to find any more elements I can abuse. Just like Simcity, there's really not much I can say here as I've said everything there is so far. Finally the X1 shows up for me which is something a bit different but hey, I like the X1. Super Mario Bros Special was first for me... it's alright but nothing great. Pretty much, the colors are a bit screwed up due to the PC-8800s/X1 color palette (The 88 can only do like eight colors but Special only runs with four), all the levels are different, the difficulty was raised, and the screen scrolls when you hit the edge instead of a constant scroll. It's a fun game, but it's tough and looks a bit rough. Tower Of Druaga was next, which is an arcade port. Imagine Pacman but with RPG elements and combat... it's strange. You have to go through 60 floors with a sword and shield, defeating monsters and finding a key in the maze to get to the next floor. The game gets tough, but hey I enjoy it. Finally, Romancia was up. Romancia is a sidescroller which is kinda fun and really sucks the rest of the time. Pretty much based off the bos statement of "Very cute, 100% difficulty" you can get what it's like. First off, controls just suck. The game world is super small with just a town, a giant maze, and another town which is fairly boring. The game is on a timer (30 minutes), there's no save system, if you talk to a king more than like two times the timer is cut in half, and it's really freaking difficult. It's a neat little RPG that's way too hard, so play the Famicom one with the "fixed" elements yet still frustrating if you want to play it as it's the best out of them all. So yeah nothing crazy this week but I liked it. I've got Orchestra practice from 6:30 to 10PM every night as we're doing a musical performance of Into The Woods which is going to be interesting, so I'm taking a 98Note and some random games with me on the hard drive to mess with which should be fun.

If you don't get the Japanese it's a PITA, but if I'm right an english translation exists over on the 3do zone forums if you're interested.

Atari 2600: Maze - 4 minutes Reactor - 30 minutes SNES: The Lawnmower Man - 2500 minutes Well, with work being a thing and going to the girlfriends place to mess around on some co-op games with her, yeah this was all I could get in that fits. Of course the main game was The Lawnmower Man... isn't that pretty much expected at this point? This week pretty much turned into a shouting fest and a controller was thrown so hard it broke against a metal pole. Pretty much, we found that if you jump while doing a charge shot at just the right time, your jump height actually goes up... strange, right? So my partner and I, we used this to our advantage... turns out you can just skip the entire 2nd platforming segment by doing one of these jumps onto the building where the exit is, and a couple of the autoscrolling bits in The Factory where you have to sit around can be skipped with this. The only issue though is that this caused a good bit of frustration, so with us repeatedly failing jumps when we'd play together we got fairly angry and he ended up finishing off one of my sketchy SNES controllers that was kinda bad from mistreatment when I was little/being thrown before, so I'm kinda happy that piece of crap is gone and I have an excuse to replace it with a nice clean 1st party controller that doesn't have a bunch of chips taken out of the shell. Progress is being made anyways - with the new skips combined with all the old tricks, we've got the run around a sub-40min thing which is nice to see but it's so frustrating when you can get the run as I'm just nervous I'm going to screw up the whole time, then I do and I get set back a couple lives. Also, the stupid driving stage is more and more of a run killer - I think we've only actually got to and beat Jobe a few times at this point because of it. Also, I got a 2nd cartridge... this one works better but when I turn the system off it makes this strange squealing noise for a second - can't say it's very appealing or gives me any sense of "this thing works" but hey, it works? Atari shows up very briefly this week as last night I ended up buying boxed copies of Maze and Reactor. I could swear I didn't have Maze, it's not on my spreadsheet thing, but turns out I do have it already... well at least I got a box and manual for $1.50? It's not in the best shape by any means but I do like it. Reactor looks clean on the box and the cart is nice, it was like $5 so I got it... I can't figure the game out at all and the manual/back of the box didn't help too much, but whatever I'll get it someday here. So yeah, nothing really exciting from me but hey, I was happy I we found a couple little skips... I'm assuming someone else has already found them, but it's a first for me. I would say playtime will slow down as I've got to go into work until like 8 after school for 3 of the 4 days I do have school, but I found that Lawnmower Man works on my little handheld SNES that I forgot I got as a gift a year or two ago so I'm going to be taking it with me. If I can find some way to consistently get past the driving stage (doubt it) and figure out exactly how to do the charge shot/jump combo thing, I think I may be able to get the run time even lower.

Dr. Hauzer Preface to the whole thing: Yeah I can't come up with many good 3DO titles that are truly exclusive. I wrote this post a few times before now - my first pick was Lucienne's Quest (Sword & Sorcery on the Saturn exists (Which is the same name as the JP version of the 3DO version) which is an upgraded port from the year after so I can't count it as an exclusive), then Total Eclipse (Exists on PS1), then Monster Manor (It's fun but definitely at least a bit repetitive) so this got my pick. The game is actually a really cool one, being a survival horror title that's 3D 'n all that from '94. You've got a solid plot, solid gameplay, and some pretty cool stuff. Here's a list of stuff I like: You can swap from a 1st person, 3rd person, and overhead view while playing The graphics look nice, kinda cel-shaded? I like the style The enemy isn't generic enemies, it's the house where you're in - the house is sentient, so it throws stuff at you to stump you which was cool The music and sound works really well with the gameplay So yeah, it's just fun. I'd say pick up a copy, if you can't then just burn one - it's good fun. Edits - forgot the M in Many and wanted to change a little wording.