thegoldenband

My times for the week: TRS-80 MC-10: An Adventure in Williamsburg - 56 min. Famicom Disk System: Emi-chan no Moero Yakyuuken! - 15 min. Not much for me, but we did beat a text adventure on an emulated MC-10. It's a very basic BASIC game, but had one or two clever twists.

My (very minimal) time for the week: Famicom Disk System: Emi-chan no Moero Yakyuuken! - 44 min. Spent a modest amount of time trying to beat the predecessor to the FDS pirate game I beat last week. I normally wouldn't bother since this game is utter garbage, but it's the only FDS game left on my "played through it with savestates, now try to beat it legitimately" list, so it'll bug me as long as it goes unbested.

My times for the week: Arcade: 64th Street - 3 min. Gyruss - 3 min. Hot Shots Tennis - 9 min. Mad Planets - 8 min. Markham - 10 min. Ninja Baseball Bat Man - 5 min. NES: Jimmy Connors Tennis - 90 min. Marvel’s X-Men - 75 min. SkyKid - 146 min. Famicom Disk System: Yakyuuken II: Gal’s Dungeon - 107 min. Beat X-Men and a FDS hentai/dungeon crawler/rock-paper-scissors game (!), as well as Jimmy Connors on Intermediate. In between, I banged my head against the wall that is SkyKid. Also had a nice run on Mad Planets, one of my all-time favorite arcade games. Just found out there was a spiritual sequel to it on SNES that, sadly, went unreleased but is around as a prototype -- I'll have to play it!

28. Racket Attack (NES) 29. Marvel's X-Men (NES) Beaten these several times before, no need to comment. 30. Gal's Dungeon: Yakyuuken Part II (Famicom Disk System) I'm glad this pirate hentai game got fan-translated, because if you cut away the 8-bit cheesecake (of which there isn't much) and the rock-paper-scissors battles, there's enough of a dungeon crawler left over to offer a couple hours of amusement. (At least if you like note-taking and, toward the end, making maps.) It's no great achievement as a game, but the fact that it's entertaining at all is, under the circumstances, a real victory. C-.

My times for the week: NES: Dark Lord - 12 min. Jimmy Connors Tennis - 13 min. Marvel’s X-Men - 14 min. Tashiro Masashi no Princess ga Ippai - 16 min. Game Boy: After Burst - 23 min. Bases Loaded - 4 min. Neo Geo MVS: Art of Fighting - 53 min. Art of Fighting 2 - 3 min. NAM-1975 - 30 min.

If you feel that way about the SNES game, you're going to love the NES game! Actually, the NES game is super on-point in that it looks really nice (especially the versions released outside the US), but the gameplay is a memorization-dependent chore. The real kicker though is the last level, which goes way, way over the top with player-hostile mechanics. The Zaxxon ports for Atari 2600 and Intellivision are pretty odd. Understandable, since people wanted to play it at home, but the result is essentially a different game. The Tandy CoCo also got some strange ports, like Super Pitfall and Robocop. Why those particular games made it on, I have no idea, but I guess it's probably as simple as being available at a reasonable cost.

Super Cobra is one of several games where the score scrolls with the background, and the effect is a bit odd.

It's an appealing port! The only thing I wish for is a notification when you've run out of moves, rather than having to check the menu item. Otherwise it's very solid. I don't remember if it guarantees that every puzzle is solvable -- I'll have to check the manual on that -- it'd be nice if so.

My times for the week: SG-1000: Chack’n Pop - 60 min. Dragon Wang - 8 min. NES: Racket Attack - 244 min. Skykid - 14 min. Solomon’s Key - 2 min. Master System: Cyber Shinobi - 2 min. Shanghai - 385 min. Space Gun - 1 min. Submarine Attack - 1 min. Super Boy II - 11 min. Beat Shanghai for the first time, and Racket Attack for (I believe) the fourth.

24. The Karate Kid (NES) I first beat Karate Kid back around 1989 or 1990, hadn't really played it since, but was prompted to fire it up again when a recent NES Works video claimed that it was punishingly hard or unfair or otherwise unpleasant in the final section. And that's a pretty silly take, because this is a very easy game that took me less than half an hour to beat again. It's no great shakes, but the visuals and presentation are at least competent. C. 25. Sega Chess (Master System) A surprising amount of effort was put into this European-exclusive chess game, including nice opening title screens and a victory tune that's Follin-esque in its lavish length. Only sour note: when you promote a piece, the game appears to hang, though I guess it's actually considering its next move. Otherwise it plays well for the period, and to beat Grand Chess Master difficulty took a few hours of real focus. (There's also an Infinite Think difficulty but it allegedly takes days to make a move, which suggests that it's not meant for actual gameplay.) A-. 26. Karate Champ (NES) Thing is, if you're going to have a game with incredibly arcane controls, and the appearance of a punishingly steep difficulty curve that can only be surmounted by mastering those controls... ...you probably want to make sure that the whole thing can't be trivially looped by just ducking, punching, and running out the clock by leaping all over the place. Pointless, and that's no bull. D. 27. Shanghai (Master System) Nice-looking, addictive as hell, and whenever I found something to fault, I soon discovered the game had already addressed it (e.g. tile identification). After many attempts, finally getting the win -- with the aid of multiple and entirely legal takebacks, naturally -- was quite gratifying. Only major complaint: why not just tell me when I can't make any more moves, instead of making me manually select a menu option? A-.

My times for the week: NES: The Chessmaster - 15 min. Jaws - 48 min. Jimmy Connors Tennis - 2 min. Karate Champ - 43 min. The Karate Kid - 24 min. Sky Kid - 10 min. Solomon’s Key - 233 min. Sega Master System: Sega Chess - 332 min. Game Gear: The Chessmaster - 5 min. Beat The Karate Kid for the first time in about 30 years, after watching a YouTube review that claimed it was punishingly hard or unfair or something. It's...a very, very easy game. I also beat Karate Champ (by looping all 10 stages), which mostly turns out to be an exercise in ducking and punching. Weirdest controls ever. I'm still trying to decide whether to say I beat Sega Chess. Certainly I beat the game on several difficulty levels, including the highest nominal difficulty, Grand Chess Master, with the Black pieces. However there's also an Infinite Think mode that allegedly takes up to a full day to come up with its moves...ugh. Sounds like a recipe for turbo boost mode in an emulator, but I'll have to set that up. Finally, I made a few unsuccessful attempts at Jaws -- a rather tedious game I've never beaten -- and made it to the late game in Solomon's Key, which offers infinite continues (via a legitimate code) but expects you to beat the last eight levels in one fell swoop: continuing puts you back at Room #41, the last Room is #48. I've got #41 and #42 completely down and #43 figured out, but I haven't gotten past #44 yet.

My times for the week: Atari 2600: Assault - 2 min. NES: The Adventures of Captain Comic - 42 min. Castelian - 138 min. Escape from Atlantis - 68 min. Fist of the North Star - 117 min. Kyoro Chan Land - 13 min. Takeshi no Chousenjou - 226 min. Beat Fist of the North Star, Takeshi no Chousenjou, and Escape from Atlantis -- all from the category of "games I beat with savestates in the 2000s, and now want to clear legitimately". Nice to reduce that list by three more entries, and relatively easily at that. I was worried about Escape from Atlantis, since it's an unlicensed prototype (two strikes!), but it turns out to be very playable thanks to a remarkably forward-thinking character death mechanic. Thoughts on those here. I also beat Castelian on Novice difficulty -- and, ironically enough, did a savestate-assisted playthrough of Captain Comic (for research purposes), though I've beaten it legitimately twice before.

In my case the fire buttons on my 5200 were basically non-functional from day one (Christmas 1983, Pac-Man as the pack-in game). They required so much pressure, anything that needed them was essentially unplayable. (Oddly the Start button was OK, or at least I don't remember a problem.) Within a couple weeks, my parents wisely picked up the Wico adapter to use a 2600 controller; without that, the whole console might well have gone in the garbage -- which would have been a shame, since I loved Zaxxon and Mr. Do's Castle and played the heck out of them once I had the Wico. As a kid, the 5200's DOA fire buttons and Sssnake were the two things that made me realize that "conning the consumer" was a thing in video games. There's no excuse for a console that doesn't work perfectly out of the box. And yeah, we had a controller port go bad on our 2600 too! My dad soldered up some jury-rigged solution with lots of loose wires, which worked for a while until we were able to get a replacement console.

I'd replace that "But" with an "And", myself! No "ifs", though, we're sold out of those.

20. 4-in-1 Funpak: Volume II (Game Boy) It offers solitare, cribbage, dominoes, and "Yacht" (i.e. Yahtzee), and I suppose it does so competently. But if I was able to beat all 4 games in just over 30 minutes, despite not really remembering the rules to cribbage or dominoes, how good can it actually be? C-. 21. Fist of the North Star (NES) Pretty much the epitome of early NES/Famicom jank. At least it's sort of playable, and has an iota of goofy charm, but when a game's brokenness is its strongest asset, you're in trouble. D. 22. Takeshi no Chousenjou (NES) In this case, it's intentional jank -- a kind of anti-game from a comedian who hated video games, and wanted to parody many of the same Famicom tropes that Fist of the North Star epitomizes. (In fact the game itself is almost like a cross between Fist of the North Star and two Master System games that came later, ALF and Alex Kidd in High-Tech World. The resemblance to ALF in particular is sometimes acute.) But the gameplay itself is little more than an obstacle, and -- if the fan translation patch is reasonably accurate -- the game's humor is more conceptual than actually-funny. The game's hangglider shmup stage is its sole attempt to be an actual game, but when your bullets repeatedly (and maddeningly) go right through your enemies, no meta-joke can save proceedings. At least it's got a password system. Oh, and the trick to the karaoke scene: pick the children's song, and hold A (on Controller II) for 1.5 measures. Works every time, which is good since nothing else did. D-. 23. Escape from Atlantis (NES) The trifecta of jank is complete, since this game is a prototype from Color Dreams, of all places. And yes, its controls are questionable, its hit detection erratic, and its stage goals obscure. But many of its faults are really an issue of being on the wrong system -- that is, they would be forgiven on a heartbeat on an 8-bit computer platform like the C64 or ZX Spectrum. Escape from Atlantis also has one of the best ways of handling character death I've ever seen. Rather than a fixed number of lives, you get just one...but you can "renew" it an unlimited number of times, as long as you're able to escape the underworld without getting tagged by the Reaper. OK, there's no challenge to the Reaper sequence once you figure it out, but it's still clever -- and reduces the game's frustration factor by an order of magnitude. It reminds me of Conan -- but if I gave Conan a D- (which I did), Escape from Atlantis should at least get a D, since it doesn't have that game's unforgivable, pure trial-and-error urn sequence. But actually, I'll go all the way up to a D+ -- because, gosh darn it, I actually had some bona fide fun with this game. BTW I also beat AD&D: Dragonstrike and Castelian recently (as well as the Japanese version of Castelian, Kyoro Chan Land), but I'm not counting those since I didn't complete them on the highest difficulty setting yet.

I still get dreams and/or nightmares about Dungeons of Daggorath, every once in a while, all these decades later. One of the most stressful, atmospheric, high-tension games ever made! I think it had at least as much of a lasting effect on me as, say, The Twilight Zone did. And the fact that they used your heartbeat as your health meter...

Learned today that Assault, by Bomb, has a kill screen at the 13th wave of enemies: The enemies become invincible and invisible beyond that point, sort of like Chuck Norris Superkicks except that they keep shooting (and there's no timer). So reaching Wave 13 would seem to be the win condition for this one -- making it another Atari game that has a clear end point. BTW there are a bunch of "games with endings/games that can be beaten" threads on the site: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/60371-games-with-endings/ https://atariage.com/forums/topic/174889-atari-2600-games-with-an-ending/ https://atariage.com/forums/topic/30977-winnable-games/ https://atariage.com/forums/topic/39262-list-of-games-with-musicending/ If only one could wave a magic wand and consolidate them!

My times for the week: Atari 2600: Assault - 6 min. NES Earthbound Zero - 20 min. Kyoro Chan Land - 150 min. Game Boy: 4-in-1 Funpak: Volume II - 33 min. Fire Fighter - 62 min. Beat Kyoro Chan Land on Novice difficulty, and also "beat" 4-in-1 Funpak by winning and/or defeating the CPU in all four games. Apparently I know how to play cribbage and dominoes...

Looks like it (Capitalism Plus) is a DOS program? ...ah, I see Agamon's edited to that effect. Pretty interesting-looking little game, actually.

My times for the week: NES: Kyoro Chan Land - 74 min. Super Pitfall - 126 min. Beat Super Pitfall (the first quest, at least, which is good enough for me). Kyoro Chan Land is the Japanese (Famicom) version of Castelian, aka Tower Toppler, aka Nebulus, aka whatever other monikers that game has had. It's got a different sprite for the protagonist, and unlike the NES version, has passwords.

17. Ring King (NES) The problem with Ring King isn't how it plays (decently), how long it drags on (way too long), or even its total lack of an ending (bummer). It's that, at a basic level, it's dishonest about how it works. For instance, if my Punch and Speed stats are higher than those of my opponent, I should do more damage and move faster -- but instead, the game seems to total up your overall skill points (including Stamina, an otherwise nearly-meaningless stat) and uses that as the basis for assessing who moves faster and hits harder. Put all your points into Speed, and you'll still be slower than the guy whose total points are higher. So, if my total points are higher, I should always outclass my opponent, right? Well, sometimes the game "anoints" one of its boxers, and no matter how much better your stats are, he'll comprehensively whoop you. Or sometimes it does the reverse, and a superior opponent (in training, at least) will succumb quickly -- including the very same boxer that just beat you badly. It makes no sense. Worst of all, Ring King doesn't use the three-knockdown rule. Not only is knocking your opponent down meaningless, since you can't get a TKO that way, but it actually helps your foe to get knocked down, since he recovers a little bit of energy that way (and you don't). So all those flashy super punches mean nothing, and are just a waste of time that runs down the clock -- and, since Ring King lets boxers be "saved by the bell", makes matches drag on even longer. Ugh. D-. 18. Star Voyager (NES) This is my fifth time beating Star Voyager (once per year since 2016), and it seemed to get on my nerves more this time around. I think it's because the game isn't transparent about the number of motherships in a sector, so it's never clear how much more you need to do -- and since failing to clear out every enemy drone makes the whole group regenerate from scratch, that's kind of a big deal. D+. 19. Super Pitfall (NES) I only beat the First Quest and didn't get a "PERFECT", but I'm calling it done. Too bad Super Pitfall isn't better, because it means well and I like what it's trying to do. But you just can't hide this many things -- especially mission-critical, must-have things -- and expect to get away with it. D.

Thanks for that! I got much better at Blockade Runner within a year or two of writing the post you quoted. I was able to complete one mission, but I still want to roll the score, which apparently isn't too tough to do.

My time for the week: GameCube: Army Men: Air Combat: The Elite Missions - 50 min.

My times for the week: NES: AD&D: Dragonstrike - 517 min. Star Voyager - 242 min. Super Pitfall - 34 min. Beat Star Voyager for the fifth time, and also beat Dragonstrike on Medium difficulty using the gold dragon (who's a lot nicer to use than the bronze dragon).

My times for the week: GameCube: Army Men: Air Combat: The Elite Missions - 69 min. Army Men: Sarge’s War - 20 min. Frogger’s Adventures: The Rescue - 2 min. I think Sarge's War was starting to make me feel slightly ill (simulation sickness) when I stopped, but Air Combat: Elite Missions turned out to be just the kind of mindless, mission-oriented entertainment a fella needs sometimes.