Skippy B. Coyote

Kirby's Dream Land on the Game Boy was the first one that came to mind for me. Super easy, but really fun. The same could be said for Kirby's Epic Yarn on the Wii and now the 3DS. Sometimes it's nice to play a really easy game as long as the developers put enough thought and care into crafting the gameplay to be fun in spite of the lack of challenge.

This might be about it for me this week. It seems like around 250,000 points or so there's a huge difficulty spike and the meanies just start moving too fast for me to keep up with, so I don't think I'm going to be able to do much better than this. Dig Dug (Game 1, B/B Difficulty): 343,400

Before tonight my previous all time high score in Dig Dug on the 2600 was around 77,000 so I'm already pleased with my score this week, even though it's nowhere near the top of the rankings. Those tips to just focus on staying alive and collecting the pineapples by dropping the second boulder when all but 1 or 2 enemies have been cleared out really helped a ton! On a side note, how mad does someone gotta be to go around killing mother*bleep*ers with a bicycle pump? This game is kinda messed up. Dig Dug (Game 1, B/B Difficulty): 261,610

It's pretty simple for me. I go to https://www.pricecharting.com, look at the current market value for the game I'm interested in, then offer that much with shipping included. That's all there is to it for me.

With a bunch of new game pickups over the past few months the rebuilding of my former Sega Genesis collection is coming along quite nicely! I also scored a few games that were new to me while I was at it. That'll probably be it for game pickups for the rest of the rest of the year, barring the possibility of getting some games for Christmas, but I'm pretty happy with the rate at which I've been able to track down fun Genesis games with mint labels thus far.

No modern gaming time from my household to contribute for the second week in a row now (we're really falling down on the job!), but once again we did log a bunch of classic gaming time for the classic tracker.

That was a wonderfully informative post Carlsson, and a really fun read since a lot of my favorite Game Boy games growing up were published by HAL Laboratory. Anyhoo, some big times from my household this week! Atari 2600 Crystal Castles - 6 minutes Roc N Rope - 22 minutes Game Boy The Castlevania Adventure - 155 minutes Sega Genesis Alien 3 - 84 minutes Castlevania: Bloodlines - 682 minutes Contra: Hard Corps (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 51 minutes Galaxy Force II - 23 minutes Zero Tolerance - 853 minutes Super Nintendo Super Metroid - 148 minutes Total Video Game Play Time This Week 2,024 minutes (33 hours 48 minutes) [2,024 minutes eligible] Individual System Play Times This Week Sega Genesis: 1,693 minutes Game Boy: 155 minutes Super Nintendo: 148 minutes Atari 2600: 28 minutes It was a really laid back week around here this past week, and with not much in the way of real life obligations to take care of there was a whole lot of time for gaming. It also happened to be one of those rare weeks where 100% of the gaming time in my household was eligible for the classic tracker, which makes two weeks a row now. In any case, I started off the week by finishing my play through of Zero Tolerance on the Sega Genesis. As the only first-person shooter on the system and not using any special chips in the cartridge to aid in processing it's a seriously impressive technical achievement, and a heck of a lot of fun for fans of the genre. Zero Tolerance is also quite a long, 10 or 12 hours give or take, and having now beaten the game I can safely say that I will absolutely be playing through it again someday. It was just an all around great game. After finishing my play through of Zero Tolerance I spent most of the rest of the week just bouncing between games, playing a little bit here and a little bit there. I tried out Contra: Hard Corps via emulation (I definitely need to get a real copy of that game soon), played a little Galaxy Force II, then spent some time playing Alien 3 with the misses. We probably would have played a lot more Alien 3 were it not for the game constantly freezing or just glitching out on one particular level late into the game and making it impossible to finish the level. That was pretty much it for me gaming wise until Thursday, when I got a game I had been wanting for quite some time in the mail: Castlevania: Bloodlines. The spousal unit is a pretty big Castlevania fan herself, so as soon as Bloodlines arrived she popped it in the Genesis and took the first crack at it. Thanks to the handy password saves we were able to trade off playing throughout the remainder of the week and by the time Sunday rolled around we had both beaten the game on Normal difficulty, with the spear wielding Eric Lacarde in my case and the more traditional whip cracking John Morris for the misses. We both thought Castlevania: Bloodlines was easily the second best Castlevania game either of us had ever played, just behind Symphony of the Night at #1. With Castlevania: Bloodlines thoroughly conquered I spent my Sunday afternoon playing through the absurdly difficult yet still strangely likable The Castlevania Adventure on the Game Boy, which took a few hours and caused no small amount of frustration; but I did beat it eventually. Shortly before midnight I also realized that I had forgotten to play the games for the Atari 2600 High Score Club this week, so I quickly set up the Atari 2600 and spent half an hour playing Roc N Rope and Crystal Castles. Roc N Rope was surprisingly fun and if I had remembered to play it earlier in the week I'm sure I would have spent quite a bit more time with it. For her Sunday gaming the misses got back to playing Super Metroid for a few hours, though unfortunately she's pretty stuck on the Ridley boss and isn't sure whether or not she wants to spend hours searching for more energy tanks to have a better shot at beating the boss. I don't think she's had the best of luck with the Metroid series, since the same thing happened when she played the original Metroid. She played it for a dozen or so hours, made it to the final boss, then couldn't beat the boss and permanently put the game back on the shelf; and it looks like Super Metroid might be going back on the (digital) shelf as well. Well, that about covers everything for this week! Looking ahead to next week I don't think either of us have any firm plans for what to play, but that's alright. We're both going to have plenty of free time next week so I'm sure we'll find some games to keep us occupied. Until then, best wishes and happy gaming to you and yours!

I suddenly realized that I forgot to play in the High Score Club this week about half an hour before midnight tonight, so here's my best scores from half an hour of play and having never played Roc N Rope before. I wish I would have remembered to give it a try earlier in the week because it was a really fun game and I feel like I could have done a lot better with some practice. Roc N Rope (Game 1, B/B Difficulty): 25,710 Bonus Crystal Castles (Game 8, B/B Difficulty): 12,181

Zero Tolerance (Sega Genesis) Contra: Hard Corps (Sega Genesis) Castlevania: Bloodlines (Sega Genesis)

This will probably be my last game pickup for the year, what with the holiday season putting a bit of a damper on my collecting budget and all, but it's a darn good one! I saved the best for last.

The 32X had soooo much untapped potential, and OutRun could have totally been done on it with a solid team of programmers at the helm. I'm not a coding guy so I couldn't speculate as to how big the team would have had to be or how much it work it would have taked, but the hardware itself was definitely up to the task. Personally I'm still bummed out about all the 32X games that were in development but never got finished... a port of the Aliens vs Predator arcade game, the Alien Trilogy first-person shooter, Castlevania: The Bloodletting, Darkstalkers, Sonic 2: Special Edition and Sonic Mars, and Soulstar X to be specific. I can't think of a single system that had as many cancelled games that I would have loved to play as the 32X.

Signs point to YES. That was great timing, and I'd love to see what the label looks like on the North American Genesis cart when you open it up! A lot of people have taken pictures of the Mega Drive version cart but I've yet to find any pics of what the Genesis version looks like.

You should be receiving your copy fairly soon. I've been following the Tanglewood Twitter page ( https://twitter.com/tanglewoodgame ) and the first batch for Kickstarter backers is shipping out as we speak. The second batch that I got in on is scheduled to start shipping in January, so it'll be a belated Christmas present, but worth the wait I think.

Merry Christmas to me

There is only one word for that game, and that word is "rad". That game is rad! Also, today I put the money down for...

Can you pull a Homer Simpson and say it's a present for her? Because that's totally what I'm doing with Tanglewood... except that I'm probably going to have to wait until she's done playing it before I can, because I know she's actually going to want to play it.

I've been on a real Sega Genesis game hunting kick lately, and I got 6 more great new pickups this week!

No modern gaming in my household this past week sadly, though we did log about 20 hours of time for the classic gaming tracker.

I always like weeks like this one, when I get to use the whole slew of Sega Genesis controllers I've collected over the years. Atari 2600 Kangaroo - 32 minutes Popeye - 14 minutes Game Boy Dr. Mario - 49 minutes Game Boy Color Shanghai Pocket - 28 minutes Sega Genesis Alien 3 - 258 minutes B.O.B. - 256 minutes Galaxy Force II (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 29 minutes Golden Axe II - 39 minutes Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure - 30 minutes Primal Rage - 122 minutes Sonic Spinball - 100 minutes Zero Tolerance - 189 minutes Super Nintendo Super Metroid - 90 minutes Total Video Game Play Time This Week 1,236 minutes (20 hours 36 minutes) [1,236 minutes eligible] Individual System Play Times This Week Sega Genesis: 1,023 minutes Super Nintendo: 90 minutes Game Boy: 49 minutes Atari 2600: 46 minutes Game Boy Color: 28 minutes With a whole bunch of new Genesis game pickups arriving in the mail this past week we ended up breaking out just about every Genesis controller we own; the only one that stayed in the drawer was the Konami Justifier light gun since I didn't have occasion to play any Lethal Enforcers or Lethal Enforcers II. The rest saw a lot of action though, with my favorite classic 3-button controller getting put to good use playing B.O.B., Golden Axe II, Sonic Spinball, and Zero Tolerance. I had a great deal of fun playing all of them, though the first-person shooter Zero Tolerance was definitely my favorite for the week since it's just such a unique game for the Genesis and a really astounding achievement from a technical standpoint. The 6-button joypad was put to use playing one of the few Genesis games that support the extra buttons, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, and I also had rare occasion to break out the 6-button arcade stick for Primal Rage; since there's not really any other controller that game can be effectively played with due to the need to hold down all sorts of odd button combinations to perform special moves. I spent just about all of my free time on Thanksgiving day playing Primal Rage and beat it a few times over. I also busted out the Wii Classic Controller to try out the Genesis game Galaxy Force II via emulation early in the week before I decided to put down the money for a real physical copy, which should be arriving in the mail later today. For the misses' gaming time this past week she put her 3-button Genesis arcade stick to good use playing the ever living daylights out of Alien 3, and while she wasn't able to beat the game she still had a great time playing and said that it was probably the closest thing there is to the Aliens arcade game on a home console and just an all around excellent arcade experience. Her only complaints were being restricted to 9 credits max and no continues, since even on Easy difficulty it's not hard to burn through all your credits rather quickly and Alien 3 is a surprisingly long game. She also logged a bit more time in Super Metroid via emulation and is getting pretty close to finishing it I think. The only other games that were played around here this past week were Kangaroo and Popeye for the Atari 2600 High Score Club, and a couple Game Boy / Color games that I had some free time to enjoy while I was on the bus. Looking ahead to next week I think I'll be trying to beat Zero Tolerance on the Genesis and the spousal unit will likely be finishing up her play through of Super Metroid, but past that I don't think either of us have any firm plans for what to play. I should probably get back to Metroid Prime on the Wii, since it is one of my all time favorite games and it would be nice to log some time for the modern gaming tracker next week, but we'll see how the week goes. Until next time and as always, best wishes and happy gaming to you and yours.

By George I think I figured it out! After thoroughly cleaning the cartridge port I spent most of the afternoon and evening enjoying various Genesis games with no sound problems at all. I played Zero Tolerance, Alien 3, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, Golden Axe II, Primal Rage, B.O.B., and Sonic Spinball. They all played perfectly with the exception of two, those being B.O.B. and Sonic Spinball. They both had issues with the music cutting out and sound effects distorting in the exact same parts of the game I had experienced them before. With that in mind I did a bit more research on what could be causing the sound problems those particular games but not others and I ended up stumbling on a thread on a Genesis / Mega Drive development forum describing just the problem I've been experiencing with B.O.B. and Sonic Spinball. From what I gather the way a few particular Genesis games were coded can cause sound issues in early Model 1 systems like my VA6 that have a Discrete Yamaha YM2612 sound chip when the game sends too many write instructions to the chip at once, causing an FM BUSY flag to occur and making the music play out of tempo, cut out momentarily, or distorting sound effects as the YM2612 tries to cope with the information overload. This problem does not occur in later revisions of the Sega Genesis after the VA6 that have an integrated ASIC Yamaha YM3438 sound chip. On the upside, there aren't many games known to not play nice with the Discrete Yamaha YM2612 sound chip in VA6 and earlier revision Genesis systems, just Sonic Spinball, Earthworm Jim, Hellfire, and (from what I've experienced at least) the later levels in B.O.B.. So, good news and bad news I suppose. The good news is that there's nothing wrong with my VA6 Genesis at all, the bad news is that I probably shouldn't have sold my spare Genesis (a Model 2 VA3) a few months back and will likely pick up another one at some point for when I feel like playing Earthworm Jim, B.O.B., or Sonic Spinball.