thegoldenband

52. Bionic Commando (NES) Bionic Commando does have a few minor flaws -- the experience system is crude, the level design has one or two stumbles, and the boss fights don't amount to much. But after playing through a streak of middling-to-poor games, it's nice to switch over to a very good, even excellent one. B+. 53. U-four-ia: The Saga (NES) Appealing platformer, in the style the kids are calling "Metroidvania" these days. Other than being a bit short and easy, I really can't find anything to fault about U-four-ia. It plays and controls more or less perfectly, the stage design is refreshingly un-opaque, the music is an earworm, and I love the "switch characters to solve problems" mechanic. A. 54. Cybernoid (NES) Beaten on all three difficulties -- Easy, Hard, and Lethal. It's got some good bones, but this is like a compendium of European game design sins, the most archetypical being the trade-off of tons of extra lives for tons of cheap deaths. Buggy as hell, too. D. 55. Castle of Dragon (NES) Like Amagon, I was curious about this one back in the day and sought it out to emulate, but Castle of Dragon is a jankier affair with too many rough edges to click. However I really like the mechanic used by this game and its sequel: you don't get any continues, but when you start a fresh game, you keep your weapons and health bar upgrades from your previous playthrough. Clever! C-. 56. Rescue: The Embassy Mission (NES) I completed the Jupiter mission on Commander difficulty but got a bad "hostage was wounded" ending, so I'll probably redo this one to at least get the "dead team member" ending. As for the game, hard to grade since it's very low on content, but most of what's there is tight, appealing, and highly replayable. Still, it could have been a bit more than it is. B-. EDIT: Several days later I went back and got that "dead team member" ending, and then -- to my pleasant surprise -- I was able to get the best ending shortly thereafter. I think I slightly overrated this, as the opening level has some irritating flaws: the collision detection on the searchlights is really questionable (though maybe that's a product of being unable to do gradients on the NES); your character has to be far to the right to trigger the screen scrolling, which is obnoxious (though there's a kludgy workaround, at least when you're hiding, as going to the stage map will re-center the camera); and the searchlights start in the exact same place for every character, which is irritating as you can't make up time with your first sniper and your second sniper always has to wait 10 seconds just to get anywhere. So, let's call it a C+.

My times for the week: NES: Bionic Commando - 185 min. Cybernoid - 127 min. Renegade - 167 min. SkyKid - 46 min. Ufouria: The Saga - 189 min. Beat Renegade (on Level 3 difficulty), Bionic Commando, Ufouria, and Cybernoid (on all three difficulties).

I've been playing Assault (by Bomb) occasionally over the last few months, and it turns out to be a fairly engaging little shooter. It's hardly perfect but the gameplay uses an interesting mechanic, and it's even got a kill screen (which I appreciate since I like games with definite endings). Even among 2600 fans, I think very few have played this one. Seconded on Cosmic Swarm, Mega Force, Space Attack (aka Space Battle on the Intellivision), and especially Death Trap, which is ferociously difficult but rewarding to defeat.

47. Cybermorph (Atari Jaguar) Whether Cybermorph was an appropriate pack-in -- or a 64-bit showcase, or a Star Fox killer -- has no bearing on whether its methodical, slow-paced gameplay struck a chord with me. And, despite a host of minor flaws and a couple of major ones, it did. C+. 48. Kasumi Ninja (Atari Jaguar) This, on the other hand, is utter trash whose only saving grace is its camp value and/or cheese factor. The controls lag or fail to respond, while the gameplay offers no challenge once you figure out how to jump kick (and occasionally crouch-kick) your way to success. D-. 49. Jaws (NES) Surprised to realize I'd never actually beaten this, but dealing with the final battle against Jaws made it clear why, since the timing required is neither intuitive nor logical. Too bad it squanders so much goodwill, as the first half of the game is kind of fun, but the second half gets jellyfish-stung into joylessness. D+. 50. Amagon (NES) I'd always been intrigued by this action-platformer ever since it got a mixed review in Nintendo Power. When I discovered emulation in the late 1990s one of the first things I did was to download a ROM of Amagon and, later, savestate my way through the game. Then in the late 2000s, when I started collecting real cartridges again, it was one of the very first NES carts I bought, for all of 50 cents at a yard sale outside a firehouse. However, I didn't sit down with Amagon for a proper playthrough until now, with a Blinking Light Win to keep the gremlins away. And I find it as interesting as I could have hoped back in 1989, because Amagon is a very flawed but somehow charming game that's not quite like anything else I've played. It goes from punishingly hard to comically easy at the drop of a hat, and to some degree that depends on how well you play or how much you grind. It's full of cheap shots and unfair enemy spawns, yet as Megagon you can blow through the entire game (including the bosses), held back only by your luck in finding the transformation items. Or you can wind up totally destitute, without bullets and on your last life, with your ability to continue the game hanging by a thread -- and have that become your winning run, as I did. Anyway, Amagon is one of those games whose existence enriches the NES library, even if it's hardly a masterpiece. It only took me a couple of hours to beat, and I'm not sure when I'll want to do so again. But the bright, colorful graphics and odd-duck vibe make it clear that, had I bought Amagon back in the day, I wouldn't have regretted the purchase. B-. 51. Renegade (NES) A quirk of mine: when evaluating a game, I think we should factor in all difficulties it offers, not just the defaults. If a game has a hard mode, it should be designed to offer a tough but fair challenge that requires mastery of the game's mechanics without wasting the player's time. If a hard mode doesn't do that, it should count against the game, because no game should include challenges -- even implicit ones -- that make poor use of the player's time. It's better, in other words, to have one perfectly-tuned difficulty than to include three and have the hardest one be a cheap, time-wasting, RNG-dependent bastard. Renegade fails this test. Difficulty 1 is a fairly easy but vaguely amusing romp with a few interesting quirks, while Difficulty 2 is a challenging but manageable task that turns things up a notch. Difficulty 3, though, is an offensively stupid waste of time. 80% of it is easy, repetitive crap that serves no purpose except to tire out the player's hands -- it's not harder, it just takes longer. The next 10% is a series of cheap shots that require exploits more than gameplay, though once you've got those exploits down, no challenge remains. However, the remaining 10% is a right bastard. The game requires you, on two separate occasions, to beat six copies of a previous boss while dealing with a tight time limit, controls that mysteriously become non-responsive (probably thanks to slowdown), and an AI that actively seeks to avoid engaging your player except on its own terms. The only way to clear these rooms is to get lucky and have two of the enemies group together so that you can hit them both at once; otherwise you're certain to run out of time. And the only move that does enough damage also guarantees a lot of hit-trading with the AI, with skill becoming essentially irrelevant: you're at the mercy of the game's RNG. Worst of all, this comes as part of a massive, confusing maze -- something present on earlier difficulties, but not nearly on the same scale. I worked out the mazes for Difficulties 1 & 2 myself, but for 3 I simply used a walkthrough, because I no longer trusted Renegade to offer a rewarding use of my time. A maze like that, in a game like this, is nothing short of video game busywork. I want to like Renegade: I like beat-'em-ups, after all. It's got secrets, and a helpful manual that even gives out stage select codes and tells you how the item drops work (sort of). But by deliberately wasting the player's time, and pairing that with some of the ugliest spritework I've ever seen in any NES offering, it becomes a game you're glad to see in the rear-view mirror. D.

My times for the week: NES: Amagon - 130 min. Cybernoid - 2 min. Renegade - 446 min. SkyKid - 267 min. Beat Amagon, and completed Renegade on difficulties 1 and 2 (out of 3).

For orders not fulfilled by SainT, is there a mechanism through which our pre-order queue status will be transmitted to resellers? Or is it essentially irrelevant unless you're in the very next batch that's coming directly from SainT? I have a very low pre-order number (11 in front of me) and am not sure whether to expect to receive a JagGD in the next batch, particularly given that I'm in the United States and international shipping is involved. I'll happily switch my pre-order to AtariAge if that'd be easiest for SainT. That said, with such a low number, I'd love to preserve my status near the head of the queue if it's possible to do so? If not, no worries.

My times for the week: NES: Front Line - 4 min. Jaws - 74 min. SkyKid - 413 min. Atari Jaguar: Cybermorph - 153 min. Kasumi Ninja - 103 min. Beat Cybermorph, Kasumi Ninja (on Ninja God difficulty with the best ending), and Jaws. Then got back to work on SkyKid, aka Sky Kid, aka quite a challenging game. On my final attempt of the week, I reached Level 21 of 26, so I'd like to think I'm getting close.

Yeah, that campy self-awareness is sort of the game's saving grace -- without that, it'd be playing in the absolute basement with the likes of Shadow: War of Succession for 3DO, which is probably the worst fighting game I've ever played. Kasumi Ninja is a tier or two above that, and if nothing else supplies a few chuckles. I just wish they'd made the controls more responsive and the special moves more relevant! But a character like Angus removes any doubt that they were goofing around on some level, and that helps (somewhat).

Yeah, comparable time line here -- once I sat down to learn the game, it was less than 24 hours from my first match on Easy to my win on Ninja God. I'd messed around with it for fun a couple times but had never really tried to get anywhere with it until yesterday. Alaric is definitely the toughest CPU foe of the playable characters! I suppose it's some small compensation for the absurdity of his costume design and hair...

I beat Cybermorph this month and had a decent time with it. Having played through and enjoyed Hover Strike, it was pretty easy to get on Cybermorph's wavelength, and I appreciated that it's more forgiving about things like fuel consumption and energy use. Decent selection of special weapons too, though they should've been accessible via the keypad, as in Hover Strike. On the other hand, having to clear eight planets at a time (plus a bonus planet and boss fight) is too many, and the EEPROM could have been used in a smarter way. The selection of enemies is also pretty uninspiring, and the enemy AI rather dim (except when it's cheap, like getting instakilled by a worm you couldn't see coming because "your scanner is jammed"). But I did enjoy the aesthetic of Cybermorph. The simplicity of the graphics is more attractive to my eye than a lot of early texture-mapped games were, and cruising around the planet can be a pleasantly mellow experience... ...as long as you're not being harangued about pods in danger that you can't possibly have found yet. That is an annoyance -- the whole "you need to know the level layout in advance in order to have a good chance of clearing it" thing -- though I expected the level design to be a bit more sadistic than it generally is. Conversely, if a level goes badly the pods offer an easy way to cheese the game, i.e. by letting pods get destroyed so that you can restart the planet with no penalty. Also, kudos to the programmers that the game only really chugs in one area of one planet -- the water planet in the last area, as I recall, where for some reason they decided to spawn a bunch of stationary objects that reduce the framerate to a crawl. BTW did the AVGN hear "Where did you learn to fly?" so much because he was playing the cut-down 1MB version? I have the 2MB cart -- courtesy of Austin, IIRC -- and it says "Avoid the ground" more frequently, though I didn't hear either comment much after the first 15 minutes or so.

I get to join the list! Beat Hard and Ninja God modes today, getting the best ending in both (i.e. by beating Gyaku's second form). Sayton's videos seem to be gone, but the advice in post #8 was helpful, and Chagi is definitely the character to use. His jump kicks have great reach and shred the AI pretty much every time. I alternated between neutral jump kicks and jump-kicking forward, and that worked well to suffocate the opponent completely. Alaric would occasionally try to counter, but if you trapped him in a corner, he was too slow to break out. Danja can teleport away, but as long as you don't walk into her projectiles she has little else to fight back with. To earn Chagi in the first place, I found the ninja's crouching kick -- the name doesn't name it specifically, but you press Down+Away to do it -- was the key to defeating him, as it's an effective counter to the jump kick (as long as you get the timing right) and Chagi would jump into it over and over again. Or he might get caught in an infinite loop of spamming projectiles, which was just fine if I was up on health, since I could just crouch down and run out the clock. For Gyaku's first form, a combination of jump kicks and crouching kicks did the trick for me, though jump kicks were risky as his fireball was an effective counter. He had a special move with a flurry of kicks that I couldn't counter with a crouching kick; I should've tried a punch. Like Chagi, he'd sometimes get caught in an endless loop of teleporting on either side of me, which let me run out the clock. His second form was easy to overwhelm with jump kicks. Silly game, by the way. The special moves end up being pointless, the limited-continue thing is a cheap tactic to conceal the extremely limited content, while the controls are laggy and don't respond to a lot of standard input timings. I often found myself pounding the kick button and getting nothing, because I needed to kick within a split-second of jumping or crouching or it wasn't going to happen. In a weird way it reminds me of Spelunker, where if you're trying to jump from a ladder or rope, you have to press the jump button a split-second after the move button or your character will walk off the rope and die. Oh well. At least the ending screen for Ninja God difficulty was fun, and pleasantly complimentary.

My times for the week: CoCo 1/2: Downland - 53 min. NES: Marble Madness - 20 min. SkyKid - 20 min. Atari Jaguar: Cybermorph - 763 min. Started out the week by beating Marble Madness, but I needed a change of pace after spending a lot of time on the NES over the past few months. So, first I beat the old CoCo game Downland, which I'd been meaning to do for ages; and second, I decided to take on Cybermorph, and completed the first 4 of the game's 5 levels. Not a bad little game, despite its reputation.

40. Street Fighter: 2010 (NES) I know this game has its defenders, but I found playing it to be a largely miserable experience. Inconsistent controls, tons of slowdown, claustrophobic stage design, infinitely respawning heat-seeking enemies, and an approach to power-ups which offers you precious little chance to enjoy them...what's to like, really? Is it just the graphics and the license that convince people that this has anything to offer? D. 41. DuckTales (NES) Not quite as fun as it should be, and one of those games where learning the location of a few cheap deaths is the only thing standing between you and a cakewalk. I also don't like mandatory secrets, and never have. That said, there's enough TLC here to make it a good game on the whole, and of course there's the Moon theme. B. 42. Spelunker (NES) It's such a tragedy that they mangled the controls on this port, because I really like cave exploration games in this vein, and I don't even care that much about the Action 52-esque "fall 3 feet and you're dead" mechanic. But when a task as routine as jumping from a rope leads to numerous unintentional deaths, something's gone badly wrong, and no amount of stage design can fully compensate for that. D+. 43. Puss ’n Boots: Pero’s Great Adventure (NES) Undercooked shovelware with an unexpectedly cheap final boss. D. 44. Gumshoe (NES) Gumshoe deserves a lot of credit for pulling off the world's unlikeliest gameplay mechanic and having it basically work. But you can't substitute timed enemy spawns for actual stage design with thoughtful enemy placement, and that leads to a lot of unfair deaths. Plus Zapper games constantly overestimate the responsiveness of the screen's edges: couldn't one QA tester have spoken up about that, somewhere along the way? Still, I won't deny that the overall experience is essentially fair, and that beating Gumshoe was one of the more challenging and satisfying wins I've pulled off in recent memory. But it'd be nice to enjoy it a bit more, and have some feeling of progress and being rewarded for skillful play -- by which I suppose I mean the ability to earn extra lives, and persistent power-ups that show up more than once in a blue moon. C. 45. Marble Madness (NES) Did a quick playthrough just for fun. Great port, though it's amazing how easy it seems now, after dealing with the punishing difficulty of the Mega Drive version. A. 46. Downland (CoCo 1/2) Speaking of cave-exploration platformers, I think I've had this one in my life for at least 35 years, but only today did I finally beat it on real hardware. Unfortunately they ran out of room for an ending and just looped the game, which robs the win of some satisfaction, but so it goes. Anyway, for a 1983 effort on a sprite-less machine, this has some uncommonly skillful stage design, and tries to be scrupulously fair, though cheap deaths do crop up here and there when an acid drop decides to spawn in your head. (Groovy, man -- like the rainbow patterns of the RF interference on my CoCo 2.) B+.

My times for the week: Arcade: Gain Ground - 71 min. Passing Shot - 80 min. Atari 2600: Assault - 71 min. Stone Age - 10 min. NES: Back to the Future II & III - 14 min. Crash ’n the Boys - 7 min. DuckTales 2 - 5 min. Gumshoe - 347 min. Gyruss - 10 min. Kid Icarus - 19 min. Loopz - 40 min. Puss ’n Boots: Pero’s Great Adventure - 24 min. Spelunker - 130 min. While recovering from (very minor) surgery, I beat Spelunker (the first loop, anyway), Puss 'n Boots, and Gumshoe. The latter made for one of the tougher challenges I've ever overcome in a video game. Earlier in the week I also played a couple of arcade games, and made a run at getting to the kill screen in the overlooked VCS game Assault. I made it to Level 12 and the kill screen's at 13, so I'm close, but that twelfth level is brutal. Otherwise I fished around for what to play after Gumshoe. I'd like to take on Gyruss, but it seems crash-prone on my EverDrive N8, so instead I've gone with Loopz for now.

My times for the week: NES: Captain Skyhawk - 63 min. DuckTales - 151 min. Spelunker - 37 min. Street Fighter: 2010 - 162 min. Mac OS Classic: Bugdom - 37 min. This week I had wins over Captain Skyhawk, Street Fighter: 2010, and DuckTales. All were games I'd beaten before, but with asterisks: a possible level skip code for Captain Skyhawk, savestates for SF2010, and the likelihood that I only completed DuckTales on Easy and may not have gotten the best ending. I say "possible" and "likelihood" because, while I still have the savestates from when I cleared SF2010 in 2007, I'm not 100% certain about Captain Skyhawk and DuckTales -- those wins were 30 years ago! Regardless, all three are now legit clears (with the best ending on Difficult mode for DuckTales), and off my "games I need to beat again" list, which is steadily shrinking. Later I futzed around with Spelunker (another entry on the aforementioned list). Finally I installed and fired up Bugdom, a Mac OS game I had a couple sessions with around 2001-2002, on the iMac of my girlfriend at the time. My memories of that gameplay were fond, and I've wanted to get back to the game for ages -- but so far, the memories are rosier than the reality of a fairly basic 3D platformer with very repetitive music and an acute need for a map. Ah, well.

37. Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! (NES) I wasn't sure if I'd ever actually done the Super Macho Man - Mike Tyson double without using the password to skip directly to Tyson directly, so I ran through the whole game. I beat everyone on my first try up until Macho, but I couldn't remember the timing for his Super Spin Punch, so I ended up losing to him 3x. Then, when I replayed the final circuit from the start, I beat Macho and then Tyson on my first try, so I somehow got an undefeated record for Little Mac. As for the game, isn't it obvious? A+. 38. P.O.W. (NES) I don't much like this game -- it's one of those that's 90% easy and tedious, 10% bizarrely punitive. (And of that remaining 10%, half becomes easy when you learn the pattern, and the other half stays random and cheap.) I'd forgotten that it had infinite continues, though, so it wasn't too tough to claw my way through. A 1CC holds little appeal, but could be done. C-. 39. Captain Skyhawk (NES) And this game, I actively dislike. Yeah, Captain Skyhawk has flashy graphics and presentation, but who cares if the gameplay is hot garbage? The main isometric mode largely becomes trivial when you realize flying next to the mountainsides allows you to avoid most enemies and their attacks, while the other modes are basically a stunted version of Top Gun and the mini-est of minigames. It's a short, shallow game whose challenge mostly comes from not being able to see what hit you. Thanks, sprite breakup; thanks, whoever thought an isometric game where the enemies only shoot straight ahead was a good idea. D.

My times for the week: NES: Captain Skyhawk - 12 min. Double Dribble - 25 min. Gumshoe - 13 min. Life Force - 73 min. Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out - 81 min. P.O.W.: Prisoners of War - 103 min. Super C - 63 min. Beat Double Dribble (on Level 3), Life Force, Super C, Punch-Out, and P.O.W., in that order. Life Force was a 1CC, and in Punch-Out I only lost to Super Macho Man -- three times, because I couldn't get the timing right when dodging his Super Spin Punch or whatever it's called. However I had to reinput the third circuit password and replay the circuit, so when I got to SMM for a fourth time and beat him, then beat Tyson on my first try (!), I ended up earning an undefeated record for Little Mac. These wins are all over games I beat with cheat codes as a kid (Life Force, P.O.W., Super C), or didn't beat on the highest difficulty (Double Dribble) -- or in the case of Punch-Out, it's that I wasn't 100% sure that I did the Super Macho Man-Mike Tyson double properly, i.e. without using the famous "007 375 5963" skip-ahead password. So, now I have.

Nice! Though the system's library is less familiar to me, I've enjoyed these Atari 8-bit reviews. Any chance you'll review Beach-Head or Bruce Lee?

34. Double Dribble (NES) My notes say I beat this as a kid, but I don't know on what difficulty level, so I cleared all three difficulties playing as New York. It's a slick game for its time, but I have to admit that the CPU's cheapness on Level 3 -- stealing the ball at will, always running faster than you -- is a bit irritating. B-. 35. Life Force (NES) Also beat this as a kid, but I used the Konami code to do it, so I wanted a legit clear. I was kind of shocked to do so in under 90 minutes of gameplay, and 1CC to boot. It's an excellent shooter that's only marred by its fondness for cheap death traps -- and that's not a trivial flaw. B+. 36. Super C (NES) And once again, a childhood win that was probably beaten with the aid of a cheat code, so a code-free replay was in order. Playing Operation C recently helped me to get in the right mindset for this one quickly, but I was still a bit surprised by how fast it went down. Nonetheless, a fun and well-designed game with no real flaws, except maybe a slight lack of inspiration in the boss department. A.

Awesome -- I love finding out about projects that weren't on my radar at all. Thanks for the link!

I've done a few updates over the last few months and added a few things, but some nice news today, as Dugongue becomes the second (ever?) streamer to beat every NES game. Always good to see these projects get completed!

My times for the week: NES: Double Dribble - 49 min. Gumshoe - 254 min. Beat Levels 1 & 2 in Double Dribble, with Level 3 yet to beat. And I got to the final boss once in Gumshoe -- over the course of about 100 attempts at Level 4 -- but the game crashed before I could reach him for a second time.

I have a loose VIC-20 cart, a boxed Atari ST game, and two Memorex VIS games. For none of those do I own the corresponding system. For systems I actually own, I might have an Apple II game kicking around somewhere, in which case that would be the winner. Otherwise I think it's the Lynx, with 6 games.

31. An Adventure in Williamsburg (Tandy MC-10) A BASIC type-in game (I think?), so there's no need to rate this text adventure. It provided an hour of amusement, though much of that was spent banging our head against the wall of one particular puzzle. Turns out we just needed to wait for a character to die spontaneously! n/a 32. Barker Bill's Trick Shooting (NES) By reaching Round 11 in the Fun Follies mode, I saw every type of stage at least once, so even though it has no ending per se I'm calling this Zapper game done. Barker Bill's could have been a decent game, but it's too RNG-dependent, throwing nasty curveballs at you in one playthrough while treating you with kid gloves the next. And that parrot is just infuriating -- it's one thing to forbid shooting the dog, but the damn bird is an adversary and ought to be subject to summary execution. D. 33. Freedom Force (NES) Beat the first loop, though I used pause strats to clear the last level. This also could have been a decent game, maybe even an excellent precursor to Lethal Enforcers, but again it's too RNG-dependent, and likes to troll the player too much: why on earth does the Health powerup only appear onscreen for half a second? It's just stupid design, as is the grenade launcher that kills hostages and enemies alike. D+.

My times for the week: NES: Barker Bill’s Trick Shooting - 144 min. Duck Hunt - 2 min. Freedom Force - 118 min. Shooting Range - 108 min. A week of light gun games, though I should note that all of Duck Hunt and 34 minutes of Barker Bill date from April 20: somehow I neglected to transfer those from my handwritten notes to my text file, until now. Anyway, I made it to Round 11 in Barker Bill, beat the first loop in Freedom Force (albeit with pause strats in the last level), and cleared difficulty level 1 in Shooting Range with a gold medal.