Skippy B. Coyote

I'm so sorry. I really wanted to like Twin Cobra but the Genesis port is just insanely, unfairly difficult. Even on Easy difficulty it's way harder than the original arcade version and just mercilessly kicks my butt every time. I do like the NES port of Twin Cobra though, since the difficulty level in that one is much more reasonable and closer to the arcade original.

I've been feeling a lot better today than I have the past couple Mondays, so it's time for a two week wrap-up post! Last Week This Week Ineligible DOOM (Nintendo Switch) - 849 minutes NES Twin Cobra (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 10 minutes Game Boy The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening - 77 minutes PlayStation Quake II - 144 minutes Sega Genesis Battle Squadron (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 8 minutes Raiden Trad - 95 minutes Twin Cobra (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 110 minutes Total Video Game Play Time This Week 1,293 minutes (21 hours 33 minutes) [444 minutes eligible] Individual System Play Times This Week Nintendo Switch - 849 minutes Sega Genesis - 213 minutes PlayStation - 144 minutes Game Boy - 77 minutes NES - 10 minutes Both last week and this week were pretty busy weeks for gaming around here. Over the last couple weeks I finished up my yearly play through of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening and the misses finally beat Tomb Raider II after having been playing it off and on since the start of the new year. In between our respective games we also played quite a few shoot 'em up games for the Sega Genesis via emulation, a few being old favorites but the majority were ones neither of us had ever played before. Most of them didn't feel worth spending the money on physical copies of (especially considering how expensive most shmups have gotten these days), but Vapor Trail and Task Force Harrier EX definitely jumped out at me as worthwhile games to keep an eye out for. I'd also be interested in getting a reproduction copy of M.U.S.H.A., but $200 for an authentic original cartridge is totally out of the question. Wrapping up last week, we also spent a fair bit of time playing Kirby's Dream Course for the SNES (via emulation once again) together on Valentine's Day which was just a ton of fun. We played three games in all and the misses won 2 out of 3, but we're going to have to do a rematch at some point in the not too distant future for sure. With last week behind us, this week turned out to be a pretty darn exciting one gaming wise. The misses started in on Quake II on the PlayStation and I got one heck of a present for my birthday this past monday that kept me busy all week. The present in question was a brand new Nintendo Switch with a travel case and copies of my two most wanted games, DOOM and Sonic Mania Plus, along with a $35 eShop gift card that came bundled in with the system. I used the gift card to download Night in the Woods and Dust: An Elysian Tail, both of which I'm really looking forward to playing, but for my first game on the system I decided to play through DOOM. I had played and beaten DOOM once already on the Xbox One during the short time that I owned one last year, and I can safely say that DOOM on the Switch plays every bit as well as the Xbox One version! In portable mode the graphics do look a little lower resolution and slightly blurrier than I remember them being on the Xbox, but when the system is docked and the game is being played on the big screen it looks every bit as good as I remember the Xbox version looking. I logged around 17 hours in DOOM in this past week and I've still got probably another 5 or 6 hours left to go, but I'm in no rush since I've been having such a marvelous time playing it. The Switch is wonderfully comfortable to play in both handheld and docked modes, and I've been enjoying each mode fairly equally. I had no idea just how convenient it was going to be to be able to play my games on the big screen then take them on the go whenever someone else in the household wanted to watch TV or in the wee hours of the morning when everyone else is sleeping. That versatility led to me being able to spend a lot more time than usual gaming this past week, and it's a feature of the Switch that I'm sure I'm going to go enjoy having for many years to come. Looking ahead to next week the misses plans on continuing her play through of Quake II and for my gaming plans I'll be finishing up DOOM then probably starting in on either Sonic Mania Plus or Night in the Woods next. I'm not sure exactly which yet, but I am sure that I'll be logging quite a bit of Switch time for the modern gaming tracker next week. Until then, and as always, best wishes and happy gaming to you and yours!

It was my birthday this past week, and oh did I ever get something good this year! Nintendo Switch DOOM - 849 minutes

Two years ago I made a promise that if DOOM ever got released on the Nintendo Switch then I would buy a Switch. Today you may hold that oath fulfilled!

Yeah, my camera isn't the greatest at photographing CRT screens. If you zoom in on the top left though you can see the pixel definition and clarity to be expected throughout the screen, and that's just over composite.

Based on my experience over the last 3 years or so gaming on a Sony KV-20FS120 WEGA Trinitron I would say yes. Yes they are.

I tried out a ton of different Genesis shoot 'em ups that I don't own yet using emulation this past week, and you might be pleased to know that Task Force Harrier EX was one of the two by that I decided I liked enough to buy real physical copies of. That and Vapor Trail were the two that I really enjoyed.

Ugh, Mondays just haven't been my days lately; and today is my birthday of all days! Both the housemate and I woke up about 1:30 this morning with food poisoning, we must have gotten it when we went out to lunch together yesterday while running errands. So thus far my birthday this year has mostly been feeling queasy, trying to sleep, and running to the bathroom every hour or so. No picture or writeup this week on account of that, but here's my household's times for the week: Game Boy The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening - 122 minutes PlayStation Tomb Raider II - 91 minutes Sega Genesis After Burner II (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 15 minutes Arrow Flash (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 14 minutes Burning Force (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 51 minutes Galaxy Force II - 23 minutes M.U.S.H.A. (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 28 minutes Sol-Deace (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 10 minutes Space Harrier II (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 4 minutes Super Thunder Blade - 15 minutes Task Force Harrier EX (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 39 minutes Vapor Trail (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 30 minutes Wings of Wor (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 15 minutes Sega Master System Space Harrier (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 5 minutes Super Nintendo (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) Kirby's Dream Course - 132 minutes Total Video Game Play Time This Week 594 minutes (9 hours 54 minutes) [594 minutes eligible] Individual System Play Times This Week Sega Genesis: 244 minutes Super Nintendo: 132 minutes Game Boy: 122 minutes PlayStation: 91 minutes Sega Master System: 5 minutes I'll make it through today though, as cruddy of a day as it might be, and with any luck tomorrow will be a better day. Accepting that life just sucks some days sure isn't easy though, especially when you've been planning on that day being a great day. I'm just trying to remind myself that we all need to have bad days now and then so we'll know when the good days arrive. I'm waiting on the good days right now lol

The first video game I ever played was Ms. Pac-Man on a cocktail cab in a pool hall, I think I was 4 years old at the time. After that I spent a year or so playing games on my older brother's ColecoVision with an Atari 2600 expansion module (Venture for the CV and the Atari 2600 port of Ms. Pac-Man were my favorites) but it wasn't until the Christmas of 1990 that I got the first game system I could really call my own. It was an original Game Boy that came bundled with none other than Tetris, so Tetris for the Game Boy was the first video game I ever actually owned.

Rise from your grave!

Today I ended up getting a free copy of Super Thunder Blade due to an eBay seller accidentally sending me the wrong game. They've shipped the right game out to me now and said that I could keep this one, which I suppose only leaves the question of, "Do I actually want a free copy of Super Thunder Blade?" Guess I'll have to sit down and play it to find out! Edit: After playing 15 minutes of Super Thunder Blade my distinct impression is, "This game is awful!" The frame rate is so painfully slow and choppy that it's nearly unplayable. Space Harrier and Galaxy Force on the Master System played better than this! So nope, don't want it lol This game is going back up on eBay for $5 or so.

Just one game for the modern tracker this week, but you can find a large update covering the full list of all the games played in my household over the past three weeks here in the classic gaming tracker thread. Nintendo Wii Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles - 215 minutes

My Sega Genesis game library just hit 30 games this past week so I think it's about time for cartridge collection update pictures! A lot of these games are ones I had previously owned and have been recollecting, but a little over a third of them are games that have been brand new to me and were titles I had never played prior to this year. There's still a couple dozen Genesis games that I plan to hunt down near mint condition cartridge copies of over the course of the rest of year and I'm hoping to hit 50 games by the end of 2019, but for now I'm pretty darn happy with how well I've done building up my Genesis library with games that I've genuinely enjoyed playing over the past 6 months. Every one of these games has seen a good bit of play since I picked them up and I feel very fortunate to have all of them in my humble little collection.

It's going to be a big post this time around since I have 3 weeks worth of gaming in my household to cover, but I'll try to keep it short and to the point. Two Weeks Ago (01/28) Last Week (02/05) This Week Ineligible Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles (Nintendo Wii) - 215 minutes PlayStation Tomb Raider II - 192 minutes Sega Genesis NBA Jam: Tournament Edition - 252 minutes Paperboy (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 54 minutes Raiden Trad - 145 minutes RoadBlasters (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 16 minutes Zoop - 12 minutes Total Video Game Play Time This Week 886 minutes (14 hours 46 minutes) [671 minutes eligible] Individual System Play Times This Week Sega Genesis: 479 minutes Nintendo Wii: 215 minutes PlayStation: 192 minutes Looking back over the past few weeks around here, they were all actually fairly similar. I've been playing through two longer games in particular over the last 3 weeks, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on the Game Boy and Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles on the Nintendo Wii. They've both been a lot of fun and I still have a ways to go in Zelda, but I am getting pretty close to the end in Darkside Chronicles. I've beaten both many, many times in the past but this time around I'm playing Darkside Chronicles on Expert difficulty so it's taking me quite a while longer than usual to beat. The bosses get really hard towards the end so I keep having to go back to replay previous levels in order to earn more money to upgrade my weapons enough to take on some of the later bosses. In addition to those two games I've also been playing a wide variety of Sega Genesis games, mostly new pickups from eBay that arrived in the mail over the last few weeks. The most notable of the bunch was Splatterhouse 2, which I finally got a mint condition authentic cartridge of. The misses and I both spent an afternoon on the couch playing that one together and after a few attempts and learning what to do to defeat all the bosses we each managed to beat the game without too much trouble, and it was an absolute ton of fun. I can't think of any other game that was nearly as gruesome and gory as this in 1992 and I'm honestly surprised that Splatterhouse 2 never came up in the 1993 congressional hearings on violence in video games, because every level in Splatterhouse 2 is way more grotesque than anything in games like Mortal Kombat or Night Trap that the hearings were so fixated on. I love it! I also spent some time with a few Genesis fighting games as of late, including the original Mortal Kombat and Samurai Shodown (which are by far my top 2 favorite fighting games on the system) and one I picked up a few months ago but had never tried before; Eternal Champions. There's a lot of good things that can be said about Eternal Champions, from the pretty awesome graphics and music to the gory finishing moves and... well, that's actually pretty much it. The control feels clunky and the game is absurdly difficult beyond all logic or reason. After an hour of playing the game and memorizing all the special moves for my characters of choice I still couldn't beat the first opponent in the tournament, and there's no way whatsoever to turn down the difficulty. It's utterly ridiculous and infuriating. I can see Eternal Champions being a fairly enjoyable game for two players, but playing against the computer is little more than an exercise in frustration. Speaking of exercises in frustration, I had a lot of "fun" trying to fix the corrupted save system in my newly acquired copy of NBA Jam: Tournament Edition working over the past week; which you can find more info on here. Unfortunately I never managed to get it working. Lastly in the Genesis department, this week I finally reacquired a copy of what may be my second favorite vertical scrolling shoot 'em up on any system: Raiden Trad! I always regretted selling my old copy in my great collection liquidation of 2016, so it's been high up on my list of games to buy again for a long time. I love the music, graphical styling, challenging gameplay, and just everything about this title. The only complaint I could make isn't so much about the game, but about my most recent experience playing it. I think I'm just getting old and my reflexes are slowing down because I'm nowhere near as good at Raiden Trad as I used to be. I remember being able to clear the game on Easy difficulty on just one or two credits without too much trouble, but when I went back and played it again this week I ended up using all 9 credits then running out of lives and getting a Game Over on the final boss after a couple hours of play. It was pretty disheartening to have the game hand my butt to me so badly, but I'm sure I'll come back to it and play Raiden Trad again before too long. As far as my wife's gaming times went for the last week, she's been pretty well focused on Tomb Raider II most of the time and I think she's on the second to last level at this point. She did take a few breaks here and there to play Splatterhouse 2 with me when that game arrived in the mail, and we had a little high score competition in Paperboy on the Genesis last Saturday. She got the high scores on Easy St. and Hard Way, but I did manage to take home the gold on Medium Road. Well, I think that about covers everything for this week! Looking ahead to next week I plan on continuing my play throughs of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening and Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, and it seems pretty darn likely that the spousal unit will be finishing up Tomb Raider II. It should be a lot of fun, so until then and as always, best wishes and happy gaming to you and yours!

Yeah, if you didn't care for the original 32X version of Doom you're probably not going to care for this one. It fixes the two biggest issues with the game, adding in the 7 missing levels from the Atari Jaguar version and the previously absent BFG 9000 weapon, but it still has all the other more minor issues that the 32X port of Doom is known for. It still runs in a bordered screen and still has some graphical glitches like the sprites for the rockets coming out of the rocket launcher backwards and Doomguy's hair randomly flipping around in the portrait at the bottom of the screen, but those were always pretty minor to me. For reference, the new levels included in JagDoom 32X are: Level 16: Tower of Babel Level 17: Hell Keep Level 18: Pandemonium Level 19: House of Pain Level 20: Unholy Cathedral Level 21: Mt. Erebus Level 22: Limbo There is one thing that was cut from the original 32X version of Doom to make space for all the new levels and keep it within the 4.2 MB cartridge size limit though, and that's the ending screen after the credits where you get a little congratulatory message then get to see the death animations for all the various enemies in the game. Now after the credits roll upon completion of the last level the game just shows a C:\ prompt at the bottom of the screen. It would have been cool if the programmer could have left in the ending message, but such is life and something had to go to make room for the added content. To play the new levels you'll have to select Level 16 as your starting level from the title menu, which while not ideal was the best the programmer could do without rewriting a lot of the game's base code since 32X Doom was originally programmed to end after 15 levels. All in all it's not a perfect hack and you'll definitely find areas of complaint, but I'm still pretty thrilled with it and feel like JagDoom 32X really vindicates the 32X and gives it's owners the full Doom experience that they should have gotten back in 1994.

Since the site this hack was was originally hosted on is no longer in existence and this game definitely deserves to be preserved, I give you JagDoom 32X for NTSC Sega 32X systems. It takes the original 32X Doom and adds in all the previously missing levels from the Atari Jaguar version of Doom as well as the BFG 9000 weapon. To check out the new levels ported from the Jaguar version of Doom just select Level 16 from the title menu and enjoy! You can play JagDoom 32X with an EverDrive on real hardware and if you have the skills to burn it to a 32X PCB then this hack will fit, since the game was kept to 4.2 MB in size. If anyone here does have the equipment to burn the ROM to a PCB then please let me know, since I'd love to have a real physical copy of the version of Doom that 32X owners should have gotten back in the day. Anyhoo, here ya go! JagDoom 32X (NTSC).zip

Edit: Nevermind, the post I was going to make here deserves it's own thread.

Ditto to all of that. When I ordered my copy I specifically requested a red Genesis label version, but you can get a black Mega Drive style version if that better suits your fancy.

It's been a while since I purchased a game brand new, but the only game in my Sega Genesis library with a ratty condition label was Zoop so when I saw a new/sealed copy of Zoop for $6.50 I had to pick it up. No more games with cruddy labels in my collection now!

Sadly this is indeed a real thing, ridiculous as it is. There's no info about it in the manual because this problem was a bug discovered after the whole run of 250,000 carts, cases, and manuals were produced. There's an interview with one of the game developers on the subject here on The Cutting Room Floor, but I'll quote it below for reference: I was working on NBA JAM TE for the Genesis, which used a flash chip to store game data. The game had been tested for months, and everything was ready to go, so the publisher ordered 250,000 copies of the cart. But it soon became apparent that no one, for months, had reset the flash chips on the test carts to make sure the flash init routines worked correctly. Nor did anyone order any carts for testing. It was only after all the carts had been ordered that we discovered the flash init code was dead, and that the carts could not save games properly! The studio went into meltdown trying to figure out how to ship 250,000 broken carts. Suggestions of production lines adding extra resistors and other hacks to every cart were tried and failed. When all seemed lost, someone figured out if you played the games in an odd, and very specific order, the flash memory would sort of work. So an extra leaflet was added to every box explaining how to use this "feature." - Chris Kirby As far as the aforementioned leaflet goes, I actually got my copy of NBA Jam: Tournament Edition complete in box and guess what was hiding in the box tucked behind the manual? Now are you ready for the truly diabolical part? I opened the cart up and there is no battery on the board, just an EEPROM chip for saving data, which I'm feeling pretty confident is corrupted since the save files necessary to initialize it were deleted. I'm hoping someone here familiar with the coding of this game has an idea for how to reinitialize it, but I'm guessing that this one is just dead now and I'm probably going to have to buy another copy of the game with a beat up label for cheap and swap the boards.