thegoldenband

^Just an amazing video. You've got the gift of comic timing, at least as far as I'm concerned. The bizarre universe in which the answer to every situation is a quiz game is such a trip -- the one-size-fits-all, one-answer-to-everything contrivance of it reminds me of everything from pornography to the people who knock on my door spreading their particular beliefs. What a trip -- thanks for shedding light on it for us, I'm sure it did indeed take tons of work! How'd you manage to do it -- did you use emulation to supplement the footage, or find some way to pause the gameplay? Or did you just credit-feed, pick random answers until you progressed, and then went back and captioned the results? That's a lot of virtual 100 yen coins.

Maybe! On the forensic tip, are there any things that Crane consistently does in his Atari games that are unique to him -- signature bits of code, that kind of thing? Or, conversely, is there anything so horribly mis-programmed in Motocross that you find it difficult to believe someone as skilled as Crane would commit that particular sin?

If you'd like a far more detailed answer to this question than you ever possibly wanted, I decided to compile my Action 52 capsule reviews from 2016, clean them up a bit, and add a few entries. I've now beaten just over half of the games on there, the majority of which are the more difficult ones (someone else got to most of the easy ones before I did, since this was part of a community "beat all the NES games" effort). Abandon all hope, ye who click on this spoiler tag:

Recently traded with SegaDude, and it was a positive experience all around. Easy to work with, friendly, and the items he sent were packed appropriately, shipped quickly, and worked perfectly. Would gladly trade again! 👍👍

My times for the week: NES: Bases Loaded - 184 min. Master System: Mecha-8 - 1 min. PlayStation: Buttsubushi - 91 min. Hyper Final Match Tennis - 64 min. More butts, more subushis. EDIT: Ha, I don't believe "subushi" is a word in Japanese (and it'd be "tsubushi" anyway), but right after making that joke I just found out how Google Translate renders subushi (すぶし) -- as "fist"! LO-to-the-L.

Very old post, but interesting to see this discussion pop up at the Lost Media Wiki: https://lostmediawiki.com/Untitled_Motorcycle_Games_(lost_Atari_2600_games_by_David_Crane;_existence_unconfirmed;_early_1980s) I assume (though I'd love to be wrong!) that this was never resolved, and that there aren't any "smoking gun" Crane-isms in the program code? That Home Vision expansion of Tennis is one of the coolest things in the entire Atari 2600 library, or at least the non-mainstream library!

On the "buy games I had no intention to play" tip, this is what's kept me from striving for a complete Intellivision set, and what discourages me from attempting most any other complete set. Now, I'm pretty omnivorous as a gamer -- I'll play sports, board games, visual novels, strategy games, total shovelware, potentially just about anything. And having a ton of cheap games can be nice, in the same way that getting a pile of cheap vinyl or cheap books can be nice: options, the thrill of spontaneous discovery, etc. But the thought of spending big bucks to own Learning Fun I & II, the system's educational titles, was just not happening. Even owning them would be a drag, since I'd have an object I didn't really want, but whose monetary value forced me to take care of it. I also got rid of my copy of Triple Challenge, a very nice CIB copy at that, because who needs a game that's just a compilation of three other games I already own?

I don't actually remember wanting to "have them all" either, not as such. I certainly would have loved to have as many Atari games as possible, for example, but at the time I was most interested in getting certain specific games (some of which never came out, like LOTR or Ewok Adventure). Did I want to play them all? Basically speaking, yeah -- I wanted to beat every NES game that had an ending, even back in the late 1980s. The games that had no ending, I didn't care about. I can't imagine attempting completism of either type (ownership, "beat every game") for the library of any computer. Even if you restrict yourself to commercial or even retail releases, there's just too much, and too much of it is garbage, and magnetic media are too fragile. At least console games generally run at a reasonable frame rate and have sound hardware and sprite support, but on those 8-bit computers with no hardware sprite support or dedicated sound chip/tone generator, there are games that fall below a minimum threshold of playability. Maybe I'd consider it for the Tandy CoCo, since I grew up with it and the library is modest. My main completist project these days is to beat every tennis game released for 20th century consoles (not computers). I'm nearly halfway there, believe it or not.

My approach to arcade Double Dragon (and NES too) has always been elbow smashes. Those pretty much break the game, though not to the point where it's not fun anymore. Don't remember how that plays out in the 7800 version, nor the 2600 version even though I've beaten that one!

I knew a guy in college who used to spend time carefully managing the appearance of his magneto-optical disks -- not the physical media themselves, but the contents. He'd organize them meticulously, and supply custom icons for every folder, set it up so that the folders would spawn in geometric patterns, etc. A friend of mine used to scoff at it, and thought that the guy was just being pretentious and seeking attention (if you were in the computer lab, it was kind of eye-catching to see him at work). But then he talked to the guy and asked him, and his reply (made humbly and a bit hesitantly) was "I don't know, I guess I just like it to look nice." And my friend felt like kind of a jerk.

Cause, no; facilitate or encourage, I'd say yes. I certainly don't read e-text the same way I read a book, and I don't treat an MP3 player the same way I treat a turntable. The medium and its access methods do affect us, though to be clear I've also put 30 hours into a game I only have as a ROM on a flash cart, without changing games once. If you're really into a game, you'll be really into it in whatever form, but the means through which we access it definitely have a psychological effect -- even the ceremony of taking the time to get it affects the experience. In a way, the taking of time is the point -- the thing that slows us down, the obstacle that's organic to the process but also serves a function in terms of our experience. (It can also be annoying as hell, of course, especially if you're loading a game from cassette on certain 8-bit computers, or from disk drive on others...) I think it's the things that don't grab us right away -- the potential slow burners -- that sometimes suffer the most from being another ROM in a list, MP3 in a folder, movie in an omnibus torrent. "Engage me now or go away", but of course that very feeling is a vice.

Naah, the North American NES library doesn't even come close to that. It doesn't even come close to getting or watching every movie released on laserdisc. And consoles like the N64 are a fraction of that. You might be underestimating how prolific certain composers and (to a lesser extent) directors are. Still, the complete works of Bach would take about 180 hours to listen to, which seems low to me but I guess must be correct, vs. 3435 hours for TMR's NESMania (though that included a lot of chatting, taco breaks, songs, raffles, and other interludes). No idea where Telemann, Vivaldi, Hovhaness, Milhaud, et al. would fit into the picture...

Oh, man, that makes me think of The Amazing Spider-Man on the Game Boy. It got absolutely savaged by a certain well-known YouTube reviewer (someone whose work I generally enjoy) as totally unplayable, impossibly difficult, and one of the worst on the GB. Meanwhile, I fired up my cart, played it, and beat it within 2 hours of first trying it. Yes, the game had frustrations, but it's basically a straightforward platformer with one annoying quirk in the controls, and I enjoyed it. My point isn't that I'm better at video games than the reviewer, or even that I'm more willing to wade uphill. It's that treating each game as though it had meaning and value -- rather than viewing it as yet another obstacle to the Greatest Hits that are the only games we "should" be playing -- comes more easily when you have the physical object, because the physical object replicates the experience of what owning games was actually like at the time of release, and provides a kind of structure that encourages self-discipline. (And conversely, most reviewers don't really know what the hell they're talking about, and stick to the most superficial aspects when reviewing: does it look nice? Is it already popular? Does it make me feel heroic and like I'm "in charge"? If so, it's a good game. Bonus points if it's Japanese in some obvious way.) By the way, one big reason I don't emulate much anymore: lag. I used to roll my eyes at people complaining about lag; then I went from playing a game on an emulator and struggling, to playing it on real hardware and beating it immediately. I play better without lag, ergo I enjoy it more, as simple as that. The funny thing is that I've almost completely stopped collecting since about mid-2017. All I buy any more are new releases and, very occasionally, a real cart for an NES game that crashes on my system (since my EverDrive N8 seems to draw a bit too much power for some games to be 100% stable). Outside of the Intellivision and 32X I never wanted a complete set, just cheap games to play whenever I got around to it...since to paraphrase one of Harlan Ellison's characters, “Who wants a library full of [games] you've already [played and beaten]?" I did like the idea of having a comprehensive understanding of the relatively small libraries for those systems, though -- to play the hell out of (i.e. beat) every single game -- and in fact I still do.

Back in 2016 I beat 24 (I think) of the 52 games in the collection -- and by "beat" I mean "played them until they either loop or always crash". I've forgotten a lot about them, though I had an extensive set of reviews that were lost when NintendoAge changed hands (though I can probably get them back with some effort). The one that really sticks out in my mind is Silver Sword, a kind of gauntlet through three levels of brutal overhead run-'n-gun-ish action. I practiced that one for hours and hours before I learned the levels, and it was satisfying as hell to get the win. Billy Bob and Haunted Hill had some decent animation and/or sprites, and beating them was a formidable challenge. But to be clear, none of the games are "good", though I agree some had real potential. There were several programmers involved, and one of them churned out some really dreadful, 100% RNG-based efforts like Storm Over the Desert and Sharks, where there's no meaningful strategy at all and enemies can spawn directly on top of you, so the only way to win is for RNG to smile upon you. Those are the games that are absolute trash beyond redemption; most of the others had something going on, even if it was only a thin thread.

Right, and I agree that quantity is half of the equation and can happen with a big ibrary of any kind. The other half (with ROM sets and flash carts) is just the...detached meaninglessness of a bunch of files. Ultimately I think the issue is one of investment, in the literal and figurative sense: as with everything else in life, what you put into something tends to correlate with what you get out of it. I'm not sure why it's necessary to use pejorative words like "preposterous" in what ought to be a civil and pleasant discussion: why go there? This isn't a point-scoring competition or even a debate. That said: is there a big picture? Of course there is. There's zero doubt that TheMexicanRunner has a more comprehensive perspective on the NES library thanks to having played through every game on it. To take one example, he knows what the hardest games actually are, as opposed to what the hardest games are claimed to be (and it ain't Mega Man, Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden, etc.). More generally he's had the opportunity to form his own opinions, rather than rely on received YouTube wisdom and the like, because by actually playing a game at length you learn things about it that aren't obvious from superficial, 5-minute sessions. Sometimes a really impressive-looking game turns out to be hot garbage, unfair and joyless, under the hood; sometimes a really ugly, janky game with weird controls turns out to be a pleasure to master. Who said anyone "has" to "play it all"? I certainly wouldn't say that anyone has to. But firsthand knowledge usually has more substance than secondhand "everyone knows" stuff, so I appreciate it when someone takes time to actually experience the art form itself, especially on its own terms and with goodwill. I value their perspective more, that's all, in the same way that talking to someone who knows the complete works of Beethoven is a different experience from someone who just knows the greatest hits. People in the former category can make unexpected connections, and see large-scale phenomena, that people in the latter category can't. And if the point is that video games aren't deserving of this kind of care, scholarly attitude, or whatever, and that it's a waste of time or "aberration" to apply those things to video games? Well, I'd simply note that -- as a wise musician once noted -- everything is a waste of time. Ultimately we're all going to die, and everything that makes us who we are will be utterly destroyed and forgotten. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. In the face of that, one of the few things that makes life seem worthwhile is when we come to understand new things -- when we grasp them through experience, or by acquiring new skills, and grow as a result. For me, playing games has done that (as part of what I'd like to think is a reasonably well-rounded life), and the games that people dismiss as "garbage" have often given me more of that than the alleged AAA titles that bore the crap out of me because they look nice, sound nice, and play like a guided tour whose purpose is to kiss the ass of bored teenagers with wispy mustaches who want to feel important. Now you could, I suppose, argue that video games don't deserve to take up that kind of space in our lives. But then, if we use that as our standard, we really can't justify spending even a minute playing video games, and should instead dedicate our every waking hour to things like helping others. So in that regard, I see no difference between playing video games at all and playing them with the kind of mindfulness I described -- it's just a question of degree, and no one here is in a position to throw any stones, ever.

This conversation has taken a rather strange turn, but I want to point out one thing: for those of us who actually play our games, and buy them in order to play them, the idea of a complete set can be a totally different thing, and has more to do with playing than collecting. Among other things it's a way to experience the entire library for a console, ideally with an open mind and with each game on its own terms, rather than via someone else's idea of what we "should" play. That's what I love about people who try to beat a system's whole library, like TheMexicanRunner, Goati, and others like them. They understand the big picture in a way that few do -- in the same way that you can understand a director by watching all their movies, or a composer or band by listening to all of their works -- and they seem to develop a deeper appreciation for everything they play, rather than leaping to typical, off-the-cuff YouTube hot takes. Of course the counterargument is that you can have the same experience with a ROM set, and in many ways you can. But we all know the pseudo-ADHD condition many of us get from ROM sets, in which we can't settle on any one game to play -- and it's not just a question of numbers, but also of the way that ROMs can start to feel meaningless, divorced from the context offered by the game's packaging, manual, etc. I recently got a Jaguar Game Drive cart and found myself having that experience: on a console where I could only play the 7 games I actually owned, and had been able to focus enough to beat the majority of them, now I could play anything...and didn't really want to stick with anything. Having the real thing helps me focus, at least. Also, I can't tell you how many times I've played a game and discovered that some non-obvious gameplay element was only detailed in the manual or other packaging elements. (The puzzle in Marvel's X-Men for NES was pretty obvious to me as a kid, but impossible to deduce without the physical cart or a scan of it!) And tons of games still don't have full manual scans online, let alone the maps and other things that sometimes came with the games. That said, I've only really tried to collect complete sets for two consoles with small libraries, 32X and Intellivision. Came very close with the 32X, with only one game left, but didn't want to pay big bucks for Spider-Man; Intellivision, I've got all but a few games. In both cases I got almost everything on the cheap.

Very interesting! And since the Voice is (IMHO) what elevates the game from "pretty fun" to "a blast and hilarious", it was effort well spent.

Yes, it was the #2 game of 2016! I wonder what strange, inscrutable weirdo could have played Action 52 that much? He'd have to be an odd duck indeed...

That's a pretty slick checkmate to pull off, especially given that you were down a Queen and Rook (for a Knight and Pawn), and with Black about to launch its own mating attack after 1...Qd1+ (though I don't see an immediate checkmate after 2. Bg1 Bf2 3. Nh3). Well done!

82. Mega-Bug (Tandy CoCo) I don't usually think of arcade-style games as something to "beat". But the win condition on this one is so clear-cut (empty the maze of pellets), and the reward for doing so is such an unambiguous victory cutscene ("We'll get you next time!" say the ants), that it's hard not to feel as though one beat the game even though it loops afterward (without any increase in difficulty, I don't think?). As for the game itself, it's a nice technical achievement and plays well, though the combination of having only one life + a randomly (procedurally?) generated maze with dead ends = a recipe for unavoidable GAME OVERs, which is a minor downer. Great speech sample and music, though, and a classy presentation overall. B. EDIT: Oops, there's a higher difficulty level I need to beat, per the manual. Well, I'll still count the win for now, but I plan to return to this game!

My times for the week: CoCo 1/2: Androne - 20 min. Mega-Bug - 20 min. NES: Bases Loaded - 188 min. PlayStation: Buttsubushi - 227 min. Hyper Final Match Tennis - 156 min.

Yeah, I vaguely remembered that there was some sort of code or exploit to that effect. But I think those kinds of things should be built into a game like this (i.e. one that constantly trolls the player), not hidden away. If, instead, TT had a level select that gave you a "NOW DO IT WITHOUT THE LEVEL SKIP!" ending, that'd be great!

I think the lack of an ending really hurts Dark Chambers, or at least makes me massively less inclined to play it. In fairness, that issue affects Gauntlet too (except the NES port), but that game manages to be more fun and dynamic; even so, I have no interest anymore in playing arcade Gauntlet, NES Gauntlet II, etc., since I know they just go on forever despite employing a kind of gameplay that implies an end goal. Anyway, in the case of Dark Chambers, the lack of an ending just makes the game feel cheap. I like Tower Toppler in many ways, and it's a nice-looking game that sits well on the 7800. It's pretty easy to understand why it's loathed by so many people, though; the controls are needlessly frustrating and opaque, while the stage design is sadistic and depends on deliberately unfair, trial-and-error gameplay that doesn't suit a game without unlimited continues. (I generally don't like the idea of a game "aging poorly", but if that label applies to anything, it's to a game that wastes the player's time in order to artificially extend its shelf life.) The Japanese release on the NES, Kyoro-chan Land, includes a password system that makes the game a lot more fun since you can learn the later levels without wasting hours of your life replaying levels you already know. I played through that version to practice for a legit run of the password-less NES version (Castelian), which I did earlier this year. My plan is to replay the 7800 version on real hardware sometime in the next year or two (I did play through it in emulation with savestates many years ago).

My times for the week: NES: Bases Loaded - 327 min. Sega CD: Third World War - 27 min. PlayStation: Buttsubushi - 145 min. Dreams to Reality - 75 min. Hyper Final Match Tennis - 185 min. Missland - 10 min. Dreamcast: 102 Dalmatians - 16 min. 18 Wheeler American Pro Trucker - 7 min. Bangai-O - 6 min. Boku no Tennis Jinsei - 6 min.

It's tricky, but I'd personally count GBC games that are GB-compatible under the Game Boy Color category -- pretty sure that's what I did in the past? Otherwise you potentially get the same game counted in two different contexts. You can also tell visually: the charcoal GBC carts are monochrome-compatible, while the clear ones aren't. But then you get curveballs like the Pokémon games with their solid-color carts -- not to mention that a few games were issued both as GB and GBC carts, and when you play the GBC version on a monochrome GB, the gameplay is indistinguishable from the GB cart. Quite a mess, but if memory serves, the monochrome GB releases of those games are rare European ones. (Montezuma's Return and Smurfs' Nightmare are two that I know of.) I'm trying to think of what other cart-based systems pose this issue. Neo Geo Pocket Color and Wonderswan Color might, I can't recall what their backwards compatibility is like. One console example that occurs to me is the SuperGrafx, where I think there's one game that will run on a vanilla PC Engine, and another is the Videopac+ G7400 aka Odyssey³ -- all but three of the G7400-enhanced games will also run on the older hardware. And a few CoCo 3 carts will switch to a CoCo 1/2 mode if they're on the older system. These hardware devs sure didn't plan to make a tracker's life easy! EDIT: Hoo boy, this gets complicated.