thegoldenband

My times for the week: Atari 2600: Xenophobe - 2 min. NES: Ring King - 369 min. Willow - 2 min. Down goes Ring King, and good riddance to it.

So, if I were able to edit post #54 (I can ask Al to reinstate my ability to do so), the ones to add would be: Classic-era: Flag Capture (Game 1) (Dark Chambers is already listed) Prototype: Combat II Homebrew: Defend Your Castle Any others?

Isn't Xenophobe alternating too, despite the split screen?

When that surfaced, it was a really big revelation! I've never actually played the SNES Earthbound, only this one. I beat it back in 2003 with savestates, and am now doing a legit playthrough, though it may take a while as I tend to play RPGs when I can multitask, i.e. if I'm on the phone or watching trash TV with my wife.

My time for the week: GameCube: Defender - 235 min. I've been meaning to start working on more GameCube games, and this was a fine place to start. I'm about halfway through, but only playing on Rookie difficulty at the moment.

My slender time for the week: NES: Earthbound Zero - 20 min.

Happy to do it! I'm glad you posted, as I was wondering where the old site had gone to (I check your site a couple times a week). Do I understand correctly that you're, in effect, relaunching the site (with a slightly new layout) and reposting the previous reviews? And yes, "slow but steady" is definitely meant as a compliment -- so many of these efforts start out like gangbusters, but then burn out just as suddenly, and go on permanent hiatus. It's always nice when the commitment is maintained over the long haul. Sega Masters is another one that's been really good about continuing over the years; I wish his videos got more attention.

My times for the week: NES: Ikari Warriors III - 34 min. Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu - 10 min. Predator - 5 min. RoboCop 3 - 1 min. Silver Surfer - 9 min.

I've had my VCS in storage for a while, but would normally use real hardware if that weren't the case. (I need to get on that.) As it stands, 90% of my VCS gaming is on Stella, with the remaining 10% happening during holidays with my family. I have no problems to report, though I don't play paddle games on Stella -- but that's a "mice and trackpads aren't paddles" issue, not a Stella issue.

There's a homebrew game (Sea Rescue) and an unreleased/prototype game (Shark Hunter). The former apparently received a massive upgrade when it was re-released as a combo cart, High Water Patrol/Sea Rescue Voice Edition; the latter had to be fixed to run properly on NTSC systems and is found on several multicarts. When you come back to the Odyssey², I hope you're able to tackle the board games at some point. I know your focus is on the 1-player experience, but there's so little coverage out there, and they're fascinatingly strange efforts.

14. Musashi no Bouken (Famicom) I "beat" tons of games with savestates back in the 2000s, and I've gradually been working to replay them legit, including all three games in this entry. This one's a Dragon Quest clone, for which savestates offer little but convenience -- but this time I'm using a more recent and more polished fan-translation, which makes a small difference. Then again, was that constipated mermaid (no, I'm not kidding) really in the original? C+. 15. Devilman (Famicom) On paper this is a bad game in a bunch of different ways -- cryptic, repetitive, very weak in graphics and sound, and with gameplay that's unremarkable at best. Yet I enjoyed playing through it, maybe because it's such an odd duck, or maybe because I remembered just enough from my 2009 playthrough to make the game seem more intuitive than it really is. D+. 16. Ikari III: The Rescue (NES) In which our heroes gain punches and jumpkicks, while guns and grenades get left on the shelf and pulled out only for special occasions. I mean, what's the point? P.O.W. is challenging, and Guerrilla War is fun; this is neither, and certainly not worth the 1CC a purist would demand. D.

My times for the week: NES: Devilman - 235 min. Kouryuu Densetsu Villgust Gaiden - 1 min. Musashi no Bouken - 211 min. Game Boy: The Smurfs’ Nightmare - 2 min. Beat Musashi no Bouken and Devilman -- both games I savestated through in the 2000s, so it's nice to beat them legitimately. By the way, The Smurfs' Nightmare is the actual Game Boy monochrome version (i.e. not the far more common GBC release), or so the ROM file tells me. I'd like to play through it at some point, but -- at least today -- playing on that tiny GBA screen was just not happening. I guess I've gotten spoiled by the Super Game Boy 2...

My times for the week: NES: Musashi no Bouken - 172 min. Ring King - 55 min. Grind, grind, grind.

Neat! Are you using it to capture video, or just as a passthrough?

Episode 599, eh? You do know that the Odyssey² has several games with sharks in them, right? (I'll be sad when Odyssey² month is over! It's been fun to have thoughtful coverage of a system that doesn't get too much YouTube love.)

Outside of a few games of Hard Drivin', Doom, and Virtua Fighter, the N64 was my main exposure to 3D gaming in the '90s. And it nearly put me off the whole thing, as there's something in the N64's way of processing 3D graphics -- probably a combination of anti-aliasing, low or inconsistent frame rates, and whippy cameras -- that makes me feel ill more than any other console of that era. Aesthetically I often prefer the look of the 3D games that came out up to 1996 or so, as in stuff on the 3DO, Jaguar, 32X, and the earliest PlayStation and Saturn games. Somehow those games click with me, whereas with later 5th gen stuff I'd frequently rather jump forward to the Dreamcast era. And anything that uses scaling sprites instead of texture-mapped polygons tends to sit well with me: I think those Super Scaler games from Sega still look beautiful, and "real" to me in a way that a lot of other games don't.

Chuck Norris Superkicks! It's true that the game ends, but we deserved better than to just run out of time in an empty room. As for games that let you play forever, hmmm...Montezuma's Revenge comes to mind. And the military/flight sim games surely should have had a defined ending state, but I seem to recall they don't.

My times for the week: NES: Back to the Future - 79 min. Battle Chess - 30 min. Castelian - 48 min. Gradius - 55 min. Musashi no Bouken - 98 min. Ring King - 75 min. Super Jeopardy! - 109 min. Game Boy: Taikyoku Renju - 5 min. Beat Back to the Future, Gradius, and Super Jeopardy!, as well as Battle Chess on a lower difficulty.

10. The Smurfs 2 (Game Boy) I liked this platformer on the Master System, but this Game Boy port wasn't adjusted to compensate for the smaller view (which was already a problem in the Master System version), and the great SMS soundtrack was ditched in favor of one that's not as good. That said, the game's fundamentals are otherwise intact. C+. 11. Back to the Future (NES) I could almost start to forgive this game's sins since -- despite the ridiculous music, cheap-shot heat-seeking enemies, lack of stage design, and bizarre mangling of the license -- it's playable enough that I had little trouble getting to the final stage with the DeLorean. But having that last stage be a one-and-done affair, where after a perfect run you can lose everything because the RNG decides to screw you over? That's inexcusable. F. 12. Gradius (NES) There's a reason they call it "Gradius syndrome", but oddly enough I somehow finished Stage 7 despite losing all of my upgrades. A game made with TLC and one that set a template for the genre, even if a few points of the stage design don't hold up well. B+. 13. Super Jeopardy! (NES) Four players on stage, no Trebek, and a lot of repeated questions and categories. Functional, though, and at least they included a password system to allow you to play each of the three matches separately (but I did it in one sitting). D.

I just discovered Dugongue's NES Completion Challenge, which is very close to completion, and have added it to the list. He's got 689 games done as of this writing, so there are only a handful yet to go. I'm surprised I overlooked such a successful effort! If anyone knows of any other projects that should be in this thread, please let me know. (P.S. I wonder why there's never been a "Can AtariAge beat every Lynx/Jaguar/Atari 7800 game" effort here? No, I'm not offering to run it, though I would participate.)

My times for the week: Atari 2600: Porky’s - 22 min. NES: Back to the Future - 17 min. Musashi no Bouken - 194 min. Solstice - 4 min. Game Boy: Alfred Chicken - 4 min. Smurfs 2 - 272 min. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan - 71 min. SNES: Dig ’n Spike Volleyball - 10 min. Power Piggs of the Dark Age - 6 min. Super Punch-Out - 66 min. Beat TMNT (no-death), Porky's (perfect score), and Smurfs 2 (on Hard).

7. Quarth (Game Boy) Nothing wrong with the basic mechanics of this game, but I dislike the fact that some sections are essentially impossible to complete with normal gameplay, and have to be cleared with a screen-clearing power-up. That seems cheap to me. Worst of all, to beat the game, you have to beat Level 3-9 to unlock Levels 4-1 through 4-9; play through all of those to unlock Levels 5-1 through 5-9; and finally complete all of those to get the game's ending. No password, no battery, no game-provided code: you just have to marathon the whole thing, on a portable, battery-operated system. That's completely unreasonable, inexcusable, and downright sadistic. But hey, at least I got to play as a flying wang, aka "FICKLE SAVIOR". Somewhere Garry Kasparov is ducking. C-. 8. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan (Game Boy) Another one with a weird win condition, as you can select any level you want from power-on, but you have to start at Level 1 and go consecutively to get the real ending. As for the game itself, it's a repetitive beat-'em-up with very little "flow" -- though if I'm correct and Michelangelo is the "right" choice against Shredder, it's cute that the preceding cutscene hints at it. C-. 9. Porky's (Atari 2600) A game where you can't lose -- you just give up. But me, I got a "perfect" score (7402, though it's supposedly possible to get more) by making it unscathed through that opening gauntlet of traffic! Dreadful controls and thin gameplay, but I appreciate that they tried to do something a little different. D+.

"Intellivision Voyage"?

My times for the week: NES: The Chessmaster - 6 min. Overlord - 13 min. Palamedes - 197 min. Spot: The Video Game! - 20 min. Game Boy: High Stakes Gambling - 3 min. Nangoku Shounen Papuwa-kun - 36 min. Operation C - 170 min. Outburst - 5 min. Quarth - 510 min. The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Juggernauts - 62 min. SNES: Art of Fighting - 23 min. Family Dog - 3 min. Beat everything I played for more than 5 minutes, with the exception of Nangoku Shounen Papuwa-kun. Thoughts on all of them here, except Chessmaster (since it was on a low level of difficulty) and Quarth (since I only just finished it). BTW Outburst is the Japanese version of Raging Fighter, which I didn't know until after I'd tried it out.

4. Overlord (NES) 5. Palamedes (NES) 6. Art of Fighting (SNES) I've beaten Overlord and Art of Fighting before (I think this is the fifth year in a row for Overlord!) so no need to talk about those, except to note that both are easily beaten with trivial exploits. Alas. But Palamedes is a nice find -- a dice-shooting action-puzzle game that I'd dismissed in the past because the controls are slightly obscure, and who wants to play a game with dice? But learn the game's ropes, and go head-to-head with the CPU in Tournament mode (which is what I completed), and you'll find a rewarding challenge. Only a few minor complaints, e.g.: I played it in an emulator and my inputs occasionally got eaten, but that might be the emulator's fault. And I think the controls could have been tweaked: B and A to rotate the dice in opposite directions, and Up to fire them, would work fine. Finally, I don't really understand how sending lines to your opponent works: sometimes it seems like you have to have the lines you send, and at other times it doesn't. B+.