thegoldenband

Nice stuff! A few notes about the Mega Drive items: Ambition of Caesar - whoa, I had no idea there was an official Chinese localization for this one. It's known as Warrior of Rome in the US. Unknown Title (The "Hitler Game") - I believe this is Operation Europe: Path to Victory 1939-1945, correct? The Japanese version has a campaign/story mode that was cut from the US version, probably because you can only play as the Axis! 😮 Unknown Title - From the screenshots this looks like one of the Nobunaga's Ambition games, I believe? Three Kingdoms - I believe this is Sangokushi Retsuden: Ransei no Eiyuutachi, a non-Koei (!) strategy game based on the (Romance of the) Three Kingdoms. Considering Koei and ROTK are synonymous in the minds of many people, that's an interesting novelty. Volleyball - super-interesting, I'd never heard of this one! Phantasy Star is the most famous example of a SMS game in a MD case, but that's an official release vs. this bootleg. Unknown Title ("I forget the name of this one, but it's a bootleg of a Japanese game") - looks like Mystical Fighter aka Maou Renjishi? Also interesting about Smash Court (Asian Version) for the PlayStation. I assume this runs at 60Hz and was meant for Taiwan/South Korea/Thailand? Best of luck with your sale!

My times for the week: NES: Sword Master - 209 min. PlayStation: Buttsubushi - 2 min. Hyper Final Match Tennis - 313 min. Imadoki no Vampire: Bloody Bride - 482 min. Beat Sword Master and HFMT -- thoughts on those here -- and, with my wife, played through another 9 months or so in the life of a teenage vampire.

4. Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road (NES) I think Jeremy Parish's recent review of this one is fair: it's a total janky mess, yet it's clear the developers were trying to do something ambitious and impressive. They just didn't figure out how to integrate any of those innovations into the gameplay, as there's no reason to do anything but spam boomerangs (or grenades for the bosses) and buy health potions. The only real challenge comes from the ridiculous boss battle at the end, but fortunately there's a way to manipulate the boss's movements and make the fight nearly as trivial as the rest of the game. D. 5. Sword Master (NES) At the opposite extreme -- sort of -- we have a highly-polished game with parallax scrolling, a dynamic soundtrack, crisp graphics, and boss-heavy gameplay that requires real skill (or at least insight) and anticipates trends that became popular years later in games like Alien Soldier. And you even keep all your earned levels after a GAME OVER, which is a nice perk (also seen in the game's predecessor Castle of Dragon) that rewards the player for giving it that "one more try". The only problem is, they didn't figure out how to make the character jump in a sane way. Instead you have two glitchy options: a double-jump that only works 25% of the time even when you've got the timing down; or, you can walk off the edge of a platform and then jump. Without mastering one of those two things (and I'd suggest making it the second one: the double-jump is unusable), or using some other glitchy mechanic, you can't get past the fourth level of this game, which suddenly expects the player to engage in super-accurate platforming. Of course, even once you've got that down, there's still a chance of falling through a platform. Here's an idea, developers: what if you'd left out the platforming completely? Then you might have a borderline "hidden gem" instead of a game that may wear its jank on the inside of its coat, but is still as janky (in its way) as Ikari Warriors II. C-. 6. Hyper Final Match Tennis (PlayStation) And in the continuing saga of "games that meant well but failed to execute", we have Hyper Final Match Tennis -- the third and last game in a series whose first entry, Final Match Tennis on the PC Engine, is still cited by some as the best tennis game ever. (I haven't played it yet, though I did play the Super Famicom sequel, which was OK.) Clearly the people behind HFMT appreciated the sport, as it's full of nuances that reflect real-life tennis. Slices are good for getting the opponent to dump the ball into the net, for example, and taking the ball early or late is the key to sending your shot in the correct direction. But the game is just ugly, and epitomizes the worst sins of early 3D efforts: grainy, aliased players, lifeless backgrounds, and a bunch of camera angles, none of them quite right. (Don't try to play the PAL version on NTSC, by the way: the Japanese version jitters when changing camera angles, but at least at 60Hz, the PAL version also jitters during gameplay.) The game's World Tour mode is, for once, the right length. But it screws everything up by forcing you to play a mixed doubles tournament with an AI partner -- a partner with no sense of court coverage, who will sprint in front of you and attempt to take every ball herself. The only antidote is to run to the net as soon as possible. On top of that, the loading times are excessive, the UI is totally underdone (why can't I turn the music off or quit a match in progress?), and it does that annoying thing where you're simply not allowed to hit certain shots from certain positions -- at least not successfully. Overhead smashes are especially hard to pull off: if you're at the net, they'll always go long, and even when you're in the game's preferred location, 50% of them will go in at most. At least that means, unlike some games, the CPU in HFMT doesn't get to lob you to death but smash all your lobs. In fact the CPU is quite vulnerable to lobs, standing there gobsmacked if you hit a sharply angled lob from the correct position. Why does that AI bug show up in so many tennis games, I wonder? D.

My times for the week: NES: Solar Jetman - 62 min. PlayStation: The Curling (SuperLite 1500 Series) - 7 min. Imadoki no Vampire: Bloody Bride - 518 min. Simple 1500 Series Vol. 24: The Gun Shooting - 2 min. Simple 1500 Series Vol. 100: The Uchuu Hikoushi (The Astronaut) - 5 min. Spent almost all of my gaming time this week playing a goofy vampire-themed dating sim/RPG hybrid with my wife. It's a fan translation, and unfortunately crashed at a key point in the game, but we were able to run the original Japanese disc for long enough to get past that bit.

1. Tower of Doom 2. AD&D: Cloudy Mountain 3. Utopia 4. Championship Tennis 5. Frog Bog 6. Pitfall 7. Space Battle 8. Thin Ice 9. USCF Chess 10. Bump 'n Jump

You're very welcome! The PS1 game is pretty affordable and some people like it quite a bit; I wasn't a huge fan but my first impressions, at least, were that it was somewhat better than I'd expected. I think you'd enjoy replaying the NES game with savestates. Without them, it's likely to be frustrating and stressful, but with them you can enjoy some of the best music and stage design on the NES. There's also a well-known pause trick that makes several boss fights trivial, though it doesn't work on every boss.

I grew up playing the 5200 version (don't remember if you've viewed that one or its 8-bit equivalent?), which I quite enjoy -- so I think I'd have a hard time adjusting to this stripped-down take, especially if the controls are as bad as you note. The music is impressive for a game from the era, though.

Blaster Master on the NES is an excellent game hampered by its lack of a password system: repeatedly replaying early levels, just to get a crack at the difficult later levels and bosses, is simply too much to ask (as is any game that expects a 3-4 hour playthrough on a system as crash-prone as the NES). It's also lousy that you lose weapon power for getting hit, as it's not a mechanic that makes the game more fun, and the later bosses are too cheap to make it justifiable. In almost every other respect, it's great. Blaster Master 2, sadly, stinks. It looks and plays like a low-tier Amiga game, and the stage design is especially poor -- the kind of thing where you get hit as soon as you enter a room, or where enemies spawn at the edge of the screen and give you no time to react. I'm planning to play through it but don't expect to enjoy it much. Haven't played the Game Boy game or any other games in the series except the PlayStation entry, which is okay (or seemed that way after an hour or two of play).

My times for the extended week: NES: Dragon Warrior III - 9 min. Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road - 178 min. Krion Conquest - 220 min. Magical Doropie - 90 min. Marvel’s X-Men - 115 min. Sword Master - 54 min. Genesis: Blaster Master 2 - 101 min. PlayStation: Block Wars - 8 min. Brave Prove - 3 min. Cyber Egg: Battle Champion - 8 min. DamDam StompLand - 2 min. Imadoki no Vampire: Bloody Bride - 141 min. Lucifer Ring - 3 min. The Smurfs - 2 min. Snow Racer ’98 - 4 min. Stahlfeder - 8 min. Two-Tentaku - 3 min. Beat X-Men, Magical Doropie, Krion Conquest, and Ikari Warriors II. BTW Magical Doropie is the Japanese version of Krion Conquest, but Krion has had big cuts and changes made to it, so it's certainly worth counting them separately. I played the fan translation of the former game. Regarding the question of systems "aging into" the classic gaming tracker, I still like the idea of this as a tracker for 20th-century systems (or more accurately years that begin with 19xx, since 2000 is technically and irritatingly in the 20th century). There really was a sea change in gameplay around 2000, and differentiating between the two is potentially useful. But ultimately the people who were most vocally against the inclusion of anything newer than 198x haven't even participated for a long, long time, so it doesn't matter too much!

See, I thought it was nerves, but it's been so consistent that I suspect something's going on under the hood. If nothing else maybe slowdown is changing the required timing of the move in some subtle way. Ranzou is underrated! His shuriken are nearly useless, but the attack where he flares out his arms can be pretty effective against the mummies and even Noiram.

1. Marvel's X-Men (NES) I've beaten this six times now (!), so no need to rehash past comments. Oddly I found myself playing a lot more as Cyclops this time around, though Colossus is still the gold standard for his ability to endure the game's penchant for inflicting massive, unavoidable damage. 2. Magical Doropie (Famicom) [aka Magical Kids Doropie] 3. The Krion Conquest (NES) This is a textbook case in ruining a game when you localize it for a different region. Magical Doropie, the Japanese version, is a second-rate Mega Man clone with anime cutscenes and humdrum boss fights. Though it's got some major flaws in the controls, programming, and overall design, it's forgiving enough to be playable, with unlimited continues and reasonably frequent health drops. Let's call it a C, which is a bit generous; I used a nice fan translation from 2002. The NES localization removes all of the story, the game's original title screen, its ending sequence, and the transitions before and after each level. Furthermore, it takes away all continues (why not allow 3, at least?), diminishes enemy item drops to near-zero, gets rid of 1UP drops completely, tweaks some hit boxes to the player's detriment, and turns one of the bosses into a ridiculous damage sponge that takes 4-8x longer to beat than in the original game. The underlying, decent game is still there, but now its flaws are just about unforgivable, because The Krion Conquest is holding the player to a standard of quality that it doesn't itself meet -- all in the name of combating the rental market. D.

I find the main trick is timing my jumps to avoid her attacks through the floor. With that in place, plus some Iron Claw attacks from Chin, it becomes doable, but she's still a tough fight. The other things I always noticed is that the controls mysteriously become less responsive in the final area. Not sure why -- maybe the game is eating inputs when the playfield is overcrowded and slowdown kicks in? Whatever it is, suddenly my spin kicks become much less reliable. Up until then, it's not that tough of a game at all, and certainly far from a bad game. For one thing it's vastly superior to the Genesis port of the arcade game, and probably the arcade game as well (since I'm told the Genesis port is relatively faithful). I'd go so far as to say I rather like it, were it not for the problems in the last level, and a mild tendency toward laying the number of enemies on too thick -- but then again that's a DD "thing".

Thanks for that! And with that, hopefully all's well that ends well on that front. @Omegamatrix Thanks again for your research into this. I find this kind of forensic investigation of data (if you like) really fascinating!

Are you saying there's another NTSC dump besides the Jone Yuan, or what exactly? Omegamatrix's work seems to indicate that the Jone Yuan is an extremely low-effort hack that does the literal minimum possible to put out a NTSC-compatible signal, whereas the Artkaris is the real deal and has large, meaningful differences from the PAL versions. The difference is several orders of magnitude in the literal sense, right? So if "that one" refers to the Jone Yuan release, I would think you'd be enthusiastic about the prospect of superseding it with a proper NTSC version that might even have originated with the original programmers (per Omegamatrix). It seems to me that "hoopla around this particular dump" is very much called for, if one cares about the history, playability, accuracy, and preservation of Atari 2600 games -- as I know you do! So what's going on? What's the purpose of choosing not to be enthusiastic and supportive here?

To answer the original question, as someone who got a brand-new 5200 for Christmas 198x that was practically DOA (controller-wise) fresh out of the box: The sticks weren't as bad as people say, but the buttons were much worse, and the ergonomics stank. If I still owned a 5200, I'd probably look for a Jaguar-to-5200 controller adapter. Back in the day we eventually got an Electra Concepts Masterplay 5200 Interface, and that turned the 5200 from a near-doorstop into a fun system.

My time for the short week: NES: Krion Conquest - 87 min.

I would also like to be on the list (for the regular edition). Thanks!

My times for the week: Atari 2600: Snail on Squirrel [aka Snail Against Squirrel] - 1 min. NES: Action 52 - 59 min. Bases Loaded - 658 min. Beat Bases Loaded -- thoughts here. I also cleared 5 more of the individual games in Action 52.

My guess is that a comprehensive overview of the NES's baseball library might come out with one of the Baseball Stars games on top, but it's been too long since I've played those. Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball was also a quirky good time, but of course then we're talkin' softball (Ozzie and the Straw). The RBI Baseball series bloomed nicely on the Genesis -- those are some of the better baseball games on the system, though a couple things are broken in the AI. But most console baseball games have no idea how to handle runners on 1st and 3rd anyway; if you keep feinting at stealing home, a lot of them will let you plop your runner down on 2nd base without resistance. MLB I found kind of...disturbing? It's hard to pinpoint why, but -- speaking of the The Simpsons -- the beanball routine always reminded me of the scene where the crash test dummies aren't really dummies, and "This exhibit is closed!" I replayed it recently, this year or last, and found it playd fine for a one-and-done game. I always liked sending foul balls so far back (and to the left/right) that all you see is crowd. I'd have to go back and play Blades of Steel again -- it's on my to-do list of "games I never quite beat as a kid". I never really had a copy of Ice Hockey but it seems to hold its own in the nostalgia department. Too bad the Hit the Ice hockey/RPG hybrid never came out!

84. Bases Loaded (NES) Nice-looking, nice-sounding baseball game that plays very well and set a new standard for baseball games on home consoles. Unfortunately it's also totally broken, has a career mode that goes on about 4 times as long as it should (and with a lousy ending to boot), and offers no challenge once you know the key tricks. Still, it was a classic in its time. B.

My very small modern time for the week: Browser-based: Tetris.com - 10 min.

My times for the week: NES: Action 52 - 14 min. Bases Loaded - 158 min. Sega CD: Fatal Fury Special - 108 min. Stellar-Fire - 357 min. PlayStation: Buttsubushi - 1 min. Hyper Final Match Tennis - 60 min. Beat Fatal Fury Special on Easy and Expert (the latter being the highest difficulty level). I also beat Stellar-Fire on Easy difficulty.

Enjoyed reading this one. The topic may have been done a dozen times over, but it's still interesting to be reminded of games I'd forgotten about, and conversely to chuckle when people name some of my favorites (like Death Trap and Chuck Norris Superkicks) as the worst on the system. I tend to agree that many (though not all) of the absolute worst games are to be found in the PAL exclusives -- people underestimate those. I've kept a running list as I read the thread, and right now mine looks like this: Bi! Bi! (ROM Hunter makes a good case that this is the worst -- it's broken out of the box) I Want My Mommy (just 2 levels of garbage gameplay) Walker (the most depressing Atari 2600 game, with a weirdly East German vibe) Sssnake (the first game that made me think "This is garbage" as a kid) Custer’s Revenge (not just offensive, but a horrible game) Fire Fighter (pointless) I might throw a Swordquest game in there, maybe Waterworld. That entry has no nostalgia value for me, the gameplay has no appeal, and the abandonment of the contest -- the Swordquest games' only reason to exist -- was so cynical (and predictable). I'll always have a soft spot for Earthworld, though. Beyond that I'd have to refresh my memory of the PAL exclusives, though Nightmare rings a bell as disastrously poor. One of the word games, maybe Glib or Words-Attack, might have a place as they're just kind of pathetic. I'd want to give the Mythicon games another shot with the game variations/difficulty settings in mind; good tip earlier on that. Froggo loses points for reissuing games and hiding it with a name change, of course, and Cruise Missile is a "maybe it should be in the bottom 10" game. But Karate's ambition keeps it out of my bottom 10 -- at least they were trying to do something different. BTW I genuinely like a bunch of maligned games, like Artillery Duel, Airlock, Star Wars: Jedi Arena, and especially Bugs which is one of my favorite twitch games on the system -- sort of my Kaboom, I guess. I also enjoyed Donkey Kong as a kid; it was limited but at least it was playable, and had those ridiculously memorable sound effects that still get used in TV shows.

83. Fatal Fury Special (Sega CD) A lot of people talk about how this is a bad port because the Sega CD could have done so much more, animations were cut, the sound's not great, etc. And all of that may be true -- but when I can stand there, spam fireballs with Ryo, and win every match even on Expert difficulty, there are far deeper issues. I don't mind it when ports of SNK fighting games have holes in the AI, but does this one have to be so obvious? Nice music, though. D.

You've got it exactly -- it adds an extra sound chip and more RAM. Maybe more, since the sound chip is actually an ASIC that handles I/O too (as I recall), but those are the big things.