Skippy B. Coyote

I already mentioned the original production Atari 2600 games that I thought were the hardest, with Jr. Pac-Man leading the pack in that category, but there's one homebrew game that I just have to mention if I'm going to be talking about the hardest games on the system: Lead. This 2008 homebrew title doesn't appear too difficult when you watch gameplay videos of it, but once you try playing it you quickly realize that some very bizarre design choices make this game just mercilessly hard in the most literal sense of the word "merciless". What I mean by this is that in most vertical or horizontal scrolling spaceship shooters (A.K.A. "shmups") you're given around three or so lives, have the opportunity to earn more if you rack up a certain amount of points, and there's no punishment for letting an enemy pass by you without shooting them. In Lead however you are given one and only one life, no chance to earn extra lives, and if you let an enemy pass by your ship without shooting them or run into any enemies or hazards you immediately lose the game. What the actual @!#[email protected]!? Even the most brutally difficult games like Jr. Pac-Man give you at least a few lives, so it's not an instant game over if you make a mistake, but that's not the case in Lead. If you make one mistake at any point in the game that's it, no mercy. Game over, you're done. There have been a few quality shmup titles on other platforms over the years that were able to get away with only giving you one life, such as 1943 and 1943 Kai: Midway Kaisen, but that was only because they gave you a health bar so you didn't instantly lose the game if you took a hit; which isn't something you have in Lead. And don't even get me started on the Scramble stages, which rapidly crank up the difficulty from "challenging" to "I want to smash the controller". To Lead's credit the game does give you infinite continues, but whenever you continue it resets your score to zero so there's not much point in continuing unless you just want to practice the stage you died on for your next play through attempt. It's a beautiful looking game with smooth controls and enjoyable gameplay (aside from those godforsaken Scramble stages), and some of the best music on the Atari 2600; but some really strange design choices (only giving you 1 life, no opportunity to earn extras, and instantly losing if you fail to shoot any enemies) make it pretty much unplayably difficult for all but the most hardcore shmup fans. If I had to pick the absolute hardest game on the 2600, counting both original releases and homebrews, Lead would be it.

eBay prices seem to be around $20 + shipping for new in box ones, though I'm hoping someone here might be willing to cut me a little better deal. If you're interested in selling yours then feel free to PM me about it and let me know what you'd like to get for it. Fortunately shipping shouldn't be too expensive if you did decide to sell, since you live just the next state over from me. If there's anything you're looking for trade wise that I might have available (Genesis, SNES, PS1, GameCube, and Game Boy/Color/Advance games and accessories mainly) I'd be happy to work out a trade as well.

Hey there everyone Just wondering if anyone around the forum has any NOS (with or without box) QuickJoy Foot Pedal controllers laying around that they'd be willing to part with for a reasonable price? I checked around online a few places and found some on eBay, but unfortunately the eBay seller was located in Greece so the shipping cost would have been astronomical. Any chance one of you stateside folks has one of these that you could spare?

It only took me 22 years of practice, but I finally 1CC'd Operation C for the Game Boy this afternoon! This has been a long time coming.

One of the things that I like the most about the Atari 2600 is that the difficulty level of almost every game is very reasonable on the standard default settings, but there are still a few that are just brutally hard. Of the couple that come to mind, I'm going to have to go with Jr. Pac-Man for the award of Hardest Game On The Atari 2600. I've spent hours and hours playing this game and only beat the first level and small handful times. Gravitar, Dodge 'Em, and Kaboom! get pretty ridiculous pretty fast too, but I don't think there's any other game I know of on the Atari 2600 that will just mercilessly kick your ass right out of the gate quite like Jr. Pac-Man.

For some reason I've just been hooked on Sprintmaster lately. The controls are really difficult to master, but it does feel like the Atari 2600 equivalent of Mario Kart and is tons of fun to play (especially multiplayer) once you get the hang of it.

This is just the weirdest thing to me. I never heard my parents or any of my friends' parents growing up ever mention anything about video game systems being harmful to a television, but this was in the late 80's and early 90's so perhaps this particular rumor ran it's course before my time. I'd be really curious to know what started it though, since it seems to be fairly widespread and I had never even heard of it until today. Snopes.com and a few Google searches turned up nothing, so if anyone knows about the origin of this myth I'd be really interested in hearing about it.

I just want to know why there wasn't a cool looking NES styled handheld to commemorate the occasion! For the NES and Famicom's 20th anniversary, Nintendo fans got these: What did we get this time around? A home console Mario game that requires fans to make levels for it because Nintendo didn't feel like making a new Mario game themselves? I was kinda hoping for something a little more… I don't know, commemorative.

With the weather starting to get colder and not much in the way of real life obligations to attend to, this week brought with it not only the first frost but also our household's biggest week for gaming since we started participating in the tracker! Inteligible Tetris Worlds (Game Boy Advance) - 29 minutes Arcade Arkanoid - 82 minutes Centipede - 21 minutes Dig Dug - 15 minutes Dig Dug (played on Namco Museum for Game Boy Advance) - 12 minutes Donkey Kong - 27 minutes Donkey Kong Junior - 9 minutes Frogger - 33 minutes Galaga - 10 minutes Ms. Pac-Man - 84 minutes Ms. Pac-Man (played on Namco Museum for Game Boy Advance) - 42 minutes Ms. Pac-Man (Speed-Up Version) - 7 minutes Pac-Man - 40 minutes Scramble - 6 minutes Space Invaders - 25 minutes Space Panic - 2 minutes Super Breakout - 224 minutes The End - 5 minutes Xevious - 20 minutes 1942 - 58 minutes Atari 2600 Asteroids - 46 minutes Breakout - 14 minutes Brik (played on Stella for Nintendo Wii) - 5 minutes Frogger - 22 minutes Joust - 40 minutes Kung-Fu Master - 27 minutes Lady Bug (played on Stella for Nintendo Wii) - 16 minutes Millipede - 49 minutes Mouse Trap - 37 minutes Ms. Pac-Man - 36 minutes Pac-Man - 10 minutes River Raid - 14 minutes Super Breakout - 86 minutes Titan Axe (played on Stella for Nintendo Wii) - 12 minutes Game Boy Double Dragon - 34 minutes Operation C - 42 minutes Pipe Dream - 15 minutes Space Invaders - 12 minutes Super Mario Land - 81 minutes Game Boy Color Frogger - 22 minutes Ms. Pac-Man: Special Color Edition - 21 minutes 1942 - 71 minutes NES Double Dribble - 69 minutes Duck Hunt - 28 minutes Freedom Force - 46 minutes Hogan's Alley - 33 minutes Mechanized Attack - 39 minutes Metroid - 296 minutes Operation Wolf - 24 minutes Pinball Quest - 26 minutes Super Mario Bros. - 58 minutes Xevious (played on Classic NES Series: Xevious for Game Boy Advance) - 21 minutes Total Play Time This Week 2,103 minutes (35 hours 3 minutes) Individual System Play Times This Week Arcade: 722 minutes NES: 640 minutes Atari 2600: 414 minutes Game Boy: 184 minutes Game Boy Color: 114 minutes Game Boy Advance: 29 minutes Whew! What a week! As you can see from the enormous list of games above, the bulk of this household's playtime was a few minutes here and a few minutes there spread a across a large variety of games on our multicade and several different 8-bit systems; but there were some big standouts that ended up consuming a lot more of our gaming time than the rest. Brick breaking games were a big hit around here this past week, with the misses and I both logging some pretty substantial chunks of time in the arcade versions of Super Breakout and Arkanoid as well as the Atari 2600 port of Super Breakout. We ended up having a little high score competition in the arcade version of Super Breakout, taking turns playing each game mode and seeing who could get the highest score, and while my wife still holds the top scores in the Progressive and Cavity modes (with scores of 363 and 575 respectively) I did manage to snag the top spot in Double mode with a score of 607. We both had so much with it that we're currently looking into adding a Ultimarc SpinTrak spinner to the newly revised control panel of our multicade that should be here in a few weeks, to use in place of the trackball (which still works surprisingly well) for Super Breakout and Arkanoid. Other big games of the week were the arcade version of Ms. Pac-Man, which I played about as much as usual, and Metroid on the NES which my wife is continuing to play through. I did take some free time earlier this weekend to do play throughs of all my favorite NES Zapper games as well, and ended up actually beating Mechanized Attack and Freedom Force in the process! I still need to beat Operation Wolf at some point, but it might be a while until my trigger finger is up to that task. In other shooting news, I've been really enjoying my recently acquired copy of 1942 for the Game Boy Color. The household multicade got me hooked on the arcade version of 1942 so I decided to pick up a handheld version to play on the go, and I've been really pleased with the accuracy of the GBC port (aside from the slightly grating music). The somewhat reduced difficulty level has allowed me to get through about 2/3 of the 32 levels so far, and the password save system has made it really nice for playing in short bursts here and there. I'm sure that with a little practice I'll be able to beat it before too long, but I'm just having fun playing it so I'm in no rush on that. Anyway, that's all the gaming news that's fit to print for this week!

I don't generally like double posting, but I've got another game to add to my Games Beaten In 2015 list and this is one that I'm particularly excited about! 45. Freedom Force (NES) For the longest time, and I by that I mean the better part of two decades, Hogan's Alley (Game B in particular) was always my favorite NES light gun game. That remained true up until last month, when I stumbled on a copy of Freedom Force for the NES and decided to give it a try. In short: This game is awesome! It's got great graphics (for the NES), killer music, a good variety of power-ups and weapon upgrades, mini-games between stages, plenty of hidden secrets to find, and a smooth difficulty curve that ramps up to a "Zapper masters only" level by the final stage. It also happens to be the only NES game I can think of to actually have blood in it when you shoot an enemy. Freedom Force took me a good month or so practice a few times a week to beat, but I'm sure it's a game that I'll come back to play again and again. Once you beat the game—after you're awarded with a neat ending cutscene and some well earned congratulations—the game loops back to the beginning on a higher difficulty level and with the graphics changed up a bit to make it look like a different time of day, so there's definitely some good replay value here that I'll be looking forward to enjoying.

I don't think any of those plushies are worth $70, but kudos on your choice of which to go for!

My biggest mistake was one that I'm sure many people out there have made, and I made it long before I was a retro game collector. Back in the year 2000 I was a teenager and desperately wanted one of the newly released PlayStation 2 systems, so in an effort to gather enough money to buy one I took all of the old video games and systems that I used to play as a kid but didn't care about anymore (at the time) to a local game store and sold them off for store credit. Little did I know that the perfectly functioning and complete R.O.B. the Robot that I got $7 or $8 for would be worth so much one day, nor did I know that the complete boxed copies of Kid Dracula, Stop That Roach, and Mega Man IV for the Game Boy would ever be worth more than the $2 or $3 that I sold them for back then. Now those three CIB games go for around $800, $200, and $500 respectively. I try not to beat myself up over it though, since it's totally normal for a teenager to want the latest and greatest technology and at the time I had no idea that some 15 years later I would come to consider the Game Boy one of my favorite systems and find myself collecting for it. You live, you learn.

Your Vision is our Vision: Col... wait wait! No, that's a different Vision I was thinking of. They're all good Visions though. Heck, pretty much any 8-bit gaming system or computer is good in my book. Glad to see Albert diversifying his video game interests.

My wallet is ready! Or at least it would be if there weren't so many other fantastic Atari 2600 games coming out right now and I didn't need to shell out $80 to have a spinner installed in my multicade. It's probably for the best (for my bank account at least) that Scramble isn't ready for release just yet, but it definitely looks like it's going to be a "buy the moment it's released" title for me. Thanks for sharing the tantalizing video preview!

It's been the better part of a month since I updated this thread, so I figured I'd update it with what may be the weirdest news of all. After having the RF modulator go out of tune every night for the first week or so that I owned my latest Atari 2600, one day it just suddenly stopped going out of tune and has worked perfectly every day since then. For the last three weeks I've been playing the Atari every day with zero problems whatsoever, so my best guess is that something in it just had some dust buildup or needed to get broken in again after sitting in someone's closet unused for the last 30 years. Either that or it was ghosts. When all else fails, "ghosts" is always a plausible explanation. Either way, everything seems fine now and I'm not complaining.

Woah! And here I thought I was going to make thegoldenband's life miserable with the enormous list of games that I played a few minutes here and a few minutes there this week! Suddenly I feel aa little better about the size of the list that I'll be posting Monday morning, though something tells me that we may be waiting until Tuesday or Wednesday for this week's statistics post. I think our friendly record keeper might have his work cut out for him this week.

Double Dragon (Game Boy) Operation C (Game Boy) Super Breakout (Arcade)

Thank you very much for that link to your blog post Dauber! That was exactly what I needed to confirm that the difficulty settings on my 60-in-1 PCB were working correctly and that any difference I was perceiving in the ghosts' movement speed and tactics was just due to going from playing Ms. Pac-Man on the small screen of the Game Boy Advance SP to a full 17" vertical monitor. It turns out that playing on the larger screen was making it appear that the ghosts were moving faster even though they really weren't. And playing on a smaller screen just let me take the whole maze in and track/anticipate the ghosts' movements more easily. I still can't score half as well on my arcade cabinet as I can on the Game Boy Advance, even though the game plays exactly the same on both, but at least now I know why.

43. Super Mario Land (Game Boy) This is another one of those games that I like to go back and play through a few times a year, when I've got 30 minutes or so to kill and I'm not sure exactly what to play. The platforming action is great, I love the horizontal scrolling shoot 'em up stages too, and the is just wonderful. 44. Mechanized Attack (NES) When most people think of NES light gun games they think of Duck Hunt and maybe Hogan's Alley, which is a darn shame because SNK's Mechanized Attack really deserves just as much recognition in my opinion. The graphics are great for the time, the action is fast and intense, there's a huge variety of power-ups to collect, and the branching paths you get to choose from between stages allow for a whole lot of replay value. Did I mention there's also some seriously awesome boss fights at the end of around half the levels? This game will give your trigger finger some serious exercise, but the difficulty curve is very reasonable and it's just an all around fun and polished light gun game with a distinctly SNK style. I had to use one continue to beat it, but I think with a little practice I should be able to do a 1CC play through before too long.

The timing of this thread getting made is kinda funny for me, because I had a similar experience this week. I've had a copy of Joust for the 2600 for a good two years or so but never really played it since I remembered not liking it all that much as a kid when I played it on my older brother's ColecoVision with an Atari 2600 expansion module. But, this week I was bored and looking for a new game to play on the 2600 so I decided to pop in Joust and give it a try. Needless to say I quickly realized that the game was awesome and that I had no idea what the childhood me was thinking. I played it for a good hour or so, always dodging the pterodactyls because I didn't think you could kill them, and then one time I slipped up and ran into one head on. Much to my surprise the pterodactyl went "pop!" and I didn't die! I spent the next half hour attempting to recreate this feat with no success, and I still have no idea how exactly I managed to kill the thing. I'm pretty sure I landed right on the tip of it's beak when it's mouth was closed, but even after dozens of attempts I haven't been able to do it again.

Changing the dip switch settings on the 60-in-1 board is as simple as powering it on while holding down the Test button, then using the Test and Service buttons to cycle through the menus until you find the game you want to change. From there you use the joystick and first fire button to change settings and the Player 1 Start button to save any changes you've made. I've triple checked the dip switch settings for Ms. Pac-Man and it's definitely set to Easy, so who knows. Maybe I am just imagining it or maybe the Namco Museum ports that I'm used to are actually a little easier than the original arcade version.

Hey there everyone. I'm writing this post because there's been something bugging me for the last month or so ever since I got my 60-in-1 multicade setup, and that's the difficulty level of Ms. Pac-Man. Every review I've read on the iCade PCB says that Ms. Pac-Man is emulated flawlessly perfect, and it certainly looks and sounds perfect to me, but I feel like the difficulty level is way harder than I'm used to when playing Ms. Pac-Man on the Namco Museum ports for the PS1 and Game Boy Advance. Both Namco Museum ports are supposed to be, from everything I've read at least, perfect ports of the original arcade version of Ms. Pac-Man with the difficulty dip switch set to Easy. They play really well and seem identical to the Ms. Pac-Man game that I've played so many times on the official Ms. Pac Man / Galaga 20th Anniversary Reunion machine at a local pizza shop. But when I play Ms. Pac-Man at home on my iCade 60-in-1 multicade I swear it seems like the ghost AI gets way smarter and the ghosts start moving much faster than usual beginning on level 3. I've never heard anyone else mention this though, so I'm really wondering if it's just playing Ms. Pac-Man on the larger 17" vertical monitor compared to the smaller screens of the Game Boy Advance or the 20" Trinitron CRT TV that my wife's PlayStation is hooked up to making it seem like the ghosts are moving faster and using smarter tactics when they're really not. So, what I'm wondering is if anyone else has noticed any difference in difficulty level between the iCade 60-in-1 board version of Ms. Pac-Man and the official Ms. Pac-Man PCBs or any of the officially licensed home console ports? It might be all in my head, but I swear the iCade version feels way harder than this game is supposed to be.

Free throw!