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thegoldenband

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Posts posted by thegoldenband

  1. Posted

    23. Double Dragon III: The Rosetta Stone (Game Boy)

     

    Reasonable port of a terrible game. Most of the time, instead of having tactics, you simply can't hit the enemy unless you either run down an invisible clock first, or get knocked down yourself. That's not a beat-'em-up, it's couples counseling for sadists. D-.

     

    24. Snoopy's Magic Show (Game Boy)

     

    This early release got trashed by a well-known Game Boy reviewer on YouTube, but I think it's not so bad. Sure, it gets frustrating on higher stages, but usually the answer is to play better or smarter.

     

    However, there are a few stages where success or failure comes down to the RNG smiling on you. And the slowdown gets pervasive, which can be both a plus (when it gives you more leeway to execute actions) and a minus (when the game speed shifts abruptly). And the license is meaningless, with nothing at all especially Peanutty about any aspect of this Magic Show. Still, it's not every day a Game Boy puzzle game doesn't overstay its welcome. C+.

  2. Posted

    Great to see CD support up and running. Can someone give me a rundown of which retail games can reasonably be played without a Memory Track? (Googling failed to turn up a list.)

     

    I know Baldies has passwords, I think Myst does too though the passwords don't save the status of every switch (or something like that), and IIRC Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, World Tour Racing, and Primal Rage either don't use the Memory Track or don't use it for anything but high scores. Not sure about Brain Dead 13.

     

    How about Hover Strike, Iron Soldier 2, Battlemorph, Blue Lightning, and Highlander? Which of those offer an alternative (presumably passwords) to the Memory Track? My impression is that Highlander offers no other savegame option, but I'm not sure about the others.

    • Like 1

  4. Posted

    My times for the week:

     

    Sega Master System:
    Golden Axe Warrior - 18 min.

    Rambo: First Blood Part II - 114 min.
     

    Game Boy:

    Double Dragon 3: The Arcade Game - 123 min.

    Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball - 8 min.
    Mega Man II - 68 min.
    The Smurfs’ Nightmare - 67 min.
    Snoopy’s Magic Show - 112 min.

     

    Beat Rambo: First Blood Part II, Mega Man II, and Double Dragon 3, and also completed The Smurfs' Nightmare on Easy difficulty. (That last game is aka The Smurfs 3, so I guess it's a week for twos and threes.)

    • Like 4

  5. Posted

    19. Un Indien dans la Ville (Game Boy)

     

    Amazing what a simple lookaround button -- hold Select, pan the camera -- can do for what would otherwise be a frustratingly cheap Euro platformer. Instead, it's a rather decent Euro platformer, though with the "easy, but hard, but easy" problem typical of those releases. C+.

     

    20. 4 Mile Island Adventure (MC-10)

     

    Average-quality text adventure, with one or two clever moments but a disturbing lack of goodies in the game's many couches. Hard to imagine paying for something so humdrum and type-in-able, though it'd be OK if it came as part of a bunch of games on one disk. C.

     

    21. Rambo: First Blood Part II (Master System)

     

    Despite Rambo's ponderousness and inability to shoot backwards, this is vastly better than the NES port of Ikari Warriors -- of which this is essentially a clone, right down to the "stay too long in one place and get bombarded from offscreen" noodge.

     

    If a game starts out punishingly hard, but rapidly unveils itself with a methodical, tactical approach, I guess that means it's at least decent, a few minor annoyances aside. Morose but memorable tunes, too. B.

     

    22. Mega Man II (Game Boy)

     

    Everything they say about it is true. Still pretty playable, though. C-.

  7. Posted

    My very approximate times for the week:

     

    Browser-based:

    Addiction (cardgames.io) - 5 min.

    Canfield (cardgames.io) - 5 min.

    Clock Solitaire (cardgames.io) - 15 min.

    Crescent Solitaire (cardgames.io) - 15 min.

    FreeCell Solitaire (cardgames.io) - 30 min.

    Golf Solitaire (cardgames.io) - 25 min.

    Scorpion Solitaire (cardgames.io) - 35 min.

    Solitaire (cardgames.io) - 7 min.

    Tri-Peaks Solitaire (cardgames.io) - 15 min.

    Yukon Solitaire (cardgames.io) - 10 min.

    • Like 4

  8. Posted

    2 hours ago, wongojack said:

    And a note about 3D Tic-Tac-Toe . . .  I don't think I have ever seriously tried to play this game before.  I found it quite good and had a hard time beating the computer even on level 3 (out of 9?).  I think I will probably go back to this one.

    I have never, ever understood why this cart gets the hate it does. It does exactly what it says on the package, and does it well! What's to fault?!

     

    Now if someone doesn't like the idea of the game, well...there are plenty of games I don't like the idea of either, but that doesn't invalidate them -- it just means they're a bad fit for me, personally, and the fault may well be mine.

    • Like 4

  10. Posted

    32X vs. Jaguar? In terms of the game library I'd call it a draw, myself. The 32X doesn't have anything quite as unprofessional as the worst Jaguar games, but it also had a slightly lower ceiling, with nothing quite as forward-looking as the strongest, most-polished games on Jaguar.

     

    On the other hand Mortal Kombat II, Virtua Fighter, and Virtua Racing have a relevance, for want of a better word, that Jaguar games didn't often match (with the exception of Rayman, and probably Doom too).

     

    And on the third hand, a game like Skyhammer is kind of astonishing and nothing on the 32X matches it...but I'm not sure about the gameplay yet, and its propensity for crashing is non-trivial.

     

    And on the fourth hand, the 32X's killer exclusives, Blackthorne and Kolibri, kind of stink IMHO, whereas some of its most-maligned games are better or at least more fun than their reputation. I genuinely enjoyed Motocross 32X, for example, and I think Metal Head is an actually-good game.

     

    (Blackthorne, OTOH, is a deadly-dull, dumbed-down, bro version of a cinematic platformer -- not in the same universe, quality-wise, as a game like Out of This World or Abe's Odyssee -- while Kolibri has fundamental flaws in the controls and scrolling that mess the whole thing up. And yes, I've beaten both.)

     

    And on the fifth hand (have I mentioned I'm an octopus?), I enjoyed some of the Jaguar's maligned games like Hover Strike, Cybermorph, even Trevor McFur. Others, like Kasumi Ninja, are irredeemable trash -- amusing trash, to be sure, but still trash. It's also got too many slow, methodical, Gouraud-shaded polygon games that blend into one another, even if I like that type of gaming.

     

    All told, I get the urge to play each one about the same amount as the other. 32X is more of a hassle to set up but has nicer controllers. The 32X feels like a beefed-up Genesis that went wrong somewhere along the way; the Jaguar feels like a consolized computer that has a lot of power, but also has bizarrely unprofessional aspects more typical of a shareware game than a polished console title.

     

    Personally, if I'm going to mess around with failed 5th gen systems, I prefer the 3DO! But I'm pleased to own all three.

    • Like 2
    • Haha 1

  12. Posted

    My times for the week:

     

    NES:
    Sky Kid - 69 min.

     

    Game Boy:

    Double Dribble: 5 on 5 - 107 min.
    Elevator Action - 1 min.
    Un Indien dans la Ville - 129 min.

    Monster Truck - 88 min.
    Shaq-Fu - 20 min.

    The Smurfs’ Nightmare - 156 min.

     

    Beat a bunch of Game Boy games: Shaq-Fu on Normal and Hard difficulties, the latter without losing a round; Double Dribble, on the middle and top difficulties, with a larger margin of victory on the harder setting; and Monster Truck and Un Indien dans la Ville, two out-of-region games with varying amounts to offer.

     

     

    • Like 7

  14. Posted

    16. Shaq Fu (Game Boy)

     

    The thing people usually say about Shaq Fu -- i.e. that all you have to do is crouch and kick your opponent to death -- isn't actually true. Or at least, it's not true when you play the Genesis version on Expert difficulty, when the game becomes a highly tactical fighter that'll hand your ass to you if you attempt anything so crude.

     

    But, on the other hand, it is true of this Game Boy version. Within 30 minutes of picking the game up, I beat Normal difficulty without losing a match, and then beat Hard difficulty without even losing a round, all by crouching and kicking/punching (more punching, actually). So, it's a sad affair, with decent controls, nice animation, and no meaningful gameplay. D-.

     

    17. Double Dribble: 5 on 5 (Game Boy)

     

    Turn the NES game up to its highest difficulty level and it cheats in every possible way, stealing the ball at will and always outrunning your players. The answer in that version is to pound 3-point shots from unlikely locations, and win a war of attrition.

     

    The Game Boy version, by contrast, plays a bit fairer: instead of beating it with glitchy field goals, I beat Level 3 (the max difficulty) with simple passing and dunking. But it's still a weirdly unsatisfying game with a cluttered playfield, and while I eventually adapted enough so that I wasn't constantly getting dinged for back passing or going out of bounds, I never did figure out how to pick up a stray ball. C-.

     

    18. Monster Truck (Game Boy)

     

    This Japan-only release got savaged by a well-known YouTube reviewer, who deemed it unplayable because he didn't actually figure out how to play it -- though in fairness the "rules" are obscure: you have to approach obstacles at slow speed (under 40kph), and deal with opposing cars in your lane by tucking your nose under them and flipping them to kingdom come.

     

    Of course, it's still not very good, with a speedometer that lags and gameplay that drags -- at least until you get the better engines, whereupon you begin hauling ass across the countryside. A bad version of Excitebike, sure: but it is playable. Easy, even. D.

    • Like 1

  15. Posted

    I've been trying to declde whether to post browser-based implementations of board, card, and/or puzzle games that can be played offline, and have no AI opponent. For instance, over the past two weeks I played:

     

    Browser-based:

    LightsOut (LogicGamesOnline version) - 40 min.

    Netwalk (LogicGamesOnline version) - 25 min.

    Solitaire (Google version) - 110 min.

     

    My instinct is that Google's implementation of Solitaire might count because it involves some kind of animated manipulation of on-screen objects in an app-like context, whereas the LGO stuff feels sketchier -- though then again, Netwalk really requires a computer interface for its implementation.

     

    Obviously playing chess online against humans doesn't count; playing chess against my Intellivision does. Solving chess problems with a browser-based interface feels like it shouldn't count, but (hypothetically) solving chess problems that came bundled with a console chess game feels like it should, somehow.

     

    I'm at a loss!

    • Like 4

  17. Posted

    Forgot to post my time earlier:

     

    iOS:
    Romance of the Three Kingdoms Touch - 753 min.

     

    Beat Easy, started Hard. The core tactic is, starve your opponent out as much as possible -- if necessary by provoking battles with no intent to win, but with the sole aim of depleting his food supply. However it takes ages and I worry everyone in the game will die of old age before I get anywhere!

    • Like 2
    • Haha 1

  23. Posted

    20 hours ago, Nintendo64 said:

    That is an amazing achievement. I didn't even know you could actually beat that amount of games on Action 52. I always thought allot of them were broken, like Cheetahmen, and that some of them couldn't even be completed to the end.

    Thank you! Action 52 is almost always a case where "beating" the game means looping back to Level 1, but there are some exceptions like The Ooze. A lot of the games that were thought to crash or be unplayable turn out to work if you get the right ROM variant.

     

    Unfortunately the games that are left are a real murderer's row, with the exception of Meong which shouldn't be too bad, and maybe Beeps N Blips which is probably doable. But otherwise it's basically the worst and most punishing games on the cart: Sharks, Storm Over the Desert, Spread Fire, and Micro Mike. I can imagine beating the first three with unlimited patience, but Micro Mike I don't know that I'll ever be able to beat.

    • Like 2
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