NES completions thread 2019 - (587/677)

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

1 hour ago, bronzeshield said:

We've used clearing Level 4 as the standard, I think? The enemy aggression rollover trick was the only way I was able to pull that one off back in 2016.

I went ahead and put four loops in to be safe. I can't handle much more. It's like someone took the stairway section of Ghostbusters and made an entire game out of it.  The sad thing is I actually liked Elevator Action when I was a kid and my neighbor had it.

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

I will see if I can knock off anymore games later this week. Out of the ones left, Gumshoe, Battletoads & Double Dragon and Thunder & Lightning are the only games I've beaten before. 

Edited December 11, 2019 by Bearcat-Doug

[Strikezone1 | 154]

I have been working on Laser Invasion. At this point I am able to get about halfway through mission 4. I should be able to beat it by the end of the year. Hopefully within the next week.

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

Battletoads and Double Dragon is done. Hope I don't have to play that one again for a while.

 

[scaryice | 587]

On 12/10/2019 at 7:17 PM, Bearcat-Doug said:

I went ahead and put four loops in to be safe. I can't handle much more. It's like someone took the stairway section of Ghostbusters and made an entire game out of it.  The sad thing is I actually liked Elevator Action when I was a kid and my neighbor had it.

 

Level 4 is what bronze was talking about, not loop 4. So just the one loop is fine...

BTW, you're on quite a roll! We have exactly 100 games left now, so we're not gonna clear it this year. But at least we'll finish strong.

Edited December 12, 2019 by scaryice

[scaryice | 587]

Cool to see Battletoads & Double Dragon has a timer displayed at the end. I can't think of too many NES games that did that (King Kong 2 is one, and maybe the earliest).

[Strikezone1 | 154]

Yeah the timer displayed upon beating BT&DD is a neat lil feature the game had. It's the only NES game I've seen do this.

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

1 hour ago, scaryice said:

 

Level 4 is what bronze was talking about, not loop 4. So just the one loop is fine...

BTW, you're on quite a roll! We have exactly 100 games left now, so we're not gonna clear it this year. But at least we'll finish strong.

Normally, I start a little earlier when the more common games have been knocked out and try for some of the more obscure ones that I've either beaten for the weekly contests or games that are just personal favorites that might not be as popular. I think I beat Gumshoe for this once before so if I can drag the CRT out sometime in the next two weeks, I might give it a try. It's actually not a bad game. I honestly thought the idea of a Zapper platformer was interesting even if it didn't turn out to be one of the best games.

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

11 minutes ago, Strikezone1 said:

Yeah the timer displayed upon beating BT&DD is a neat lil feature the game had. It's the only NES game I've seen do this.

I think there are some others, but I'm drawing a blank. It doesn't give you the time of your entire run, but if you beat Mike Tyson's Punch Out using the Another World Circuit password, you get a slightly different ending screen that shows what round and time you beat Tyson in at the bottom.

[Strikezone1 | 154]

Laser invasion is beaten. 

Christ is this game a brutal challenge!  A lot of frustration in trying to beat this one, and pretty much all of it comes from the helijet flight sim parts. The last sequence of the final stage was hell, it took a ton of practice.

The flight sim parts are basically the exact same as both Top Gun games (especially the 2nd one) and I recall TG2 being incredibly hard and frustrating as well.. The 3-D maze and first person shooter parts of this game I think are actually fun and really well made.
 

Overall I think this game is okay. I give Konami credit for their ambition in adding multi sub-genres into the same game... but the insane difficulty in the flight sim sections really hinders the experience in this game. 

[nerdynebraskan | 356]

Nice to see you back in action, Strikezone1. That puts you over 100 points for the year. I don't know if you even care about such things, but I'm a sucker for it.

[8bitdontquit | 226]

Hunt for Red October done! 

[Tablew/chairs | 242]

Alpha Mission beaten, there's no shortage of shitty shooters on nes

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

I made it through Thunder & Lightning. Probably the last one I've got left this year unless I can get around to beating Gumshoe again. 

[Strikezone1 | 154]

On 12/14/2019 at 4:19 PM, nerdynebraskan said:

Nice to see you back in action, Strikezone1. That puts you over 100 points for the year. I don't know if you even care about such things, but I'm a sucker for it.

Appreciate that nerdynebraskan! You’re right, I don’t much care about the points, but thanks nevertheless! It’s always nice to contribute where I can. 

Since Laser Invasion isn’t all that popular of a game and it is fresh in my memory, I will take it out for the 2020 thread in a few weeks.

[scaryice | 587]

Well, it looks like we're going to pass last year at least (582 games beat). Maybe 2017 as well. It would be easy to blame our failure on the switch from NA to VGS, but we were already way behind at that point:

 

 

There's still 22 games left which have been beaten in all 7 previous years since I've been running these threads. Overall, we had 463 such games coming into 2019. Will they drop off that list, and decrease that number?

 

I've also been thinking about possible gimmicks and bonus points for next year's thread, since it doesn't seem like too many people care about the publisher titles. One idea is just to simply give 1 bonus point to anyone who beats a game that they haven't beaten in a previous year. I remember years ago when The Wizard 666 was doing these threads before me, he had a rule to not allow people to beat the same games they'd beaten previously, to encourage people to play new stuff. The downside of that was some people had a tradition of playing certain games every year, or they had a smaller collection. But by giving bonus points, you wouldn't stop anyone from playing something.

Or, there's the idea of giving extra points to the hardest games. How about 1 point for each year that a game wasn't beaten? So something like Flight of the Intruder or Flying Warriors would be worth 15 points, despite a base value of 10. I'm not sure how much point values matter when people decide what to play, but anything that gets people to try some of those more obscure titles is probably a good thing.

Let me know what you guys think.

 

 

Edited December 16, 2019 by scaryice

[scaryice | 587]

Looking at my spreadsheets, most of the point values for 2020 are already set. Here's a look at which games will be changing by 2 points next year. As always, it's based on the previous 5 years (2015-19). There's more which should be added to this list later when everything's finalized.

 

 

[bronzeshield | 293]

For next year, if there were some way to reward playing on higher difficulty settings or getting the best ending, that'd be a fun twist.

Maybe there could be an extra bounty on certain games in addition to their point value, and it could be available even if the game's already been beaten: that way people can still beat the likes of Chessmaster, Metroid and Castlevania II right away, but someone else could come along and do it on max difficulty or get the game's best ending.

Anyway, just a thought.

[Strikezone1 | 154]

First and foremost I want to say you do a fine job managing this thread year in and year out, so thanks for your efforts @scaryice.

I don’t really mind the publisher gimmick, but at the same time I wouldn’t mind switching it up to something else either.

Part of me is against the idea of disallowing people from beating the same games they’ve beaten in previous years because there’s only a handful of members who contribute to this semi-regularly, and it might cause the action to slow down quite a bit...  but another part of me says try it because maybe it could entice more people to join in, especially if some of the shorter/easier games stay on the list awhile longer than usual... I could go either way on that.

i like @bronzeshield‘s idea of adding/including hard modes for additional points. There’s a fair amount of NES games that have a difficult setting or 2nd loop that in many cases shows the final ending of the game.

I definitely vote for more points for the more difficult titles. Battletoads is a perfect example. I know the reasoning behind it being only a 2 is that in the past a few members had the game mastered and would knock it out very early on,  but despite that I think we can all agree it is a very challenging game.

[arnpoly | 198]

I just noticed the Conditions for Victory section has not been carried over from NA.

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

Just now, arnpoly said:

I just noticed the Conditions for Victory section has not been carried over from NA.

I had to try and find it over there too. With the games that loop, I didn't know if it was the rules required looping the game, beating the high score or what. I still don't know what counted for Excitebike, but I finished 1st on all 5 tracks in one run so I'm sure that would count.

[scaryice | 587]

I still have it, just forgot to post it. Here's the link, although it's not formatted properly:

https://pastebin.com/i4RUdFu9

[scaryice | 587]

On 12/17/2019 at 8:29 PM, Strikezone1 said:

First and foremost I want to say you do a fine job managing this thread year in and year out, so thanks for your efforts @scaryice.

I don’t really mind the publisher gimmick, but at the same time I wouldn’t mind switching it up to something else either.

Part of me is against the idea of disallowing people from beating the same games they’ve beaten in previous years because there’s only a handful of members who contribute to this semi-regularly, and it might cause the action to slow down quite a bit...  but another part of me says try it because maybe it could entice more people to join in, especially if some of the shorter/easier games stay on the list awhile longer than usual... I could go either way on that.

i like @bronzeshield‘s idea of adding/including hard modes for additional points. There’s a fair amount of NES games that have a difficult setting or 2nd loop that in many cases shows the final ending of the game.

I definitely vote for more points for the more difficult titles. Battletoads is a perfect example. I know the reasoning behind it being only a 2 is that in the past a few members had the game mastered and would knock it out very early on,  but despite that I think we can all agree it is a very challenging game.

 

I didn't mean it to sound like I was in favor of stopping people from playing certain games. I wasn't saying that I supported that myself, just trying to point out that it was done in the past and probably not the best idea.

Difficulty is such a... difficult question. It's hard to judge games based on that because there's so many different ways of determining what makes a game hard. I mean, that's why I came up with the whole points system, so I wouldn't have to objectively rank every game. It would be a lot easier just to give bonus points to the games which haven't been beaten in previous years, so that's likely what I'll do for 2020. One extra point for each year a game wasn't beaten. Six games would end up being worth 15 points (Battle Tank, Days of Thunder, Dungeon Magic, Flight of the Intruder, Flying Warriors, Infiltrator), and many more would be worth 13-14. I think we can have a separate ranking of who has the most bonus points (of course, they'll still count for the overall title as well), so that could be fun.

I disagree with you on Battletoads. It doesn't need to be worth more points because people love it and will play it regardless. There's dozens of people here who could beat it without too much trouble in a night. Whereas games like Infiltrator need a boost because nobody wants to play it.

 

Edited December 20, 2019 by scaryice

[Gaia Gensouki | 1,073]

On 12/16/2019 at 12:56 PM, scaryice said:

I'm not sure how much point values matter when people decide what to play, but anything that gets people to try some of those more obscure titles is probably a good thing.

I have actually looked at some of the games with a higher point value, to see if there's still something interesting left. But it was obvious pretty quickly why certain games have been left over for so long or why they have such a high point value: they're usually really difficult and/or straight up bad.

Zanac and Silkworm fall into the former category as they're really good and fun games, but just too hard for me to complete. I've never managed to beat level 8 of Silkworm legitimately. There's just too much on screen and the indestructible rockets fly way too fast to react, so that you have to learn by heart when and where they appear. Zanac is really cool too and very generous with basically unlimited continues, but it has one fatal flaw: whenever you use a continue, certain power-ups no longer appear. So in later levels it just became impossible for me to get fully powered up and progress. I have tried a few other games as well, but with these games the balance between enjoyment and difficulty was way off.

Anyway, the new ideas sound interesting and I'm definitely looking forward to the new year, whether they're being employed or not. This time I want to start this challenge from the very beginning.

[Strikezone1 | 154]

8 hours ago, Gaia Gensouki said:

Zanac and Silkworm fall into the former category as they're really good and fun games, but just too hard for me to complete. I've never managed to beat level 8 of Silkworm legitimately. There's just too much on screen and the indestructible rockets fly way too fast to react, so that you have to learn by heart when and where they appear.

Totally agree with ya on Silkworm. I had a very similar experience. It is one of 2 NES games where I put in legitimate effort into beating it, but came up short and threw in the towel. You’re absolutely right about level 8. It’s flat out ridiculous the amount of enemies & bullet that come at you at once. I think I barely got through it once or twice, then proceeded to get my butt kicked by the final boss on level 9.

I was playing with the helicopter (I assumed you were too?). I have heard the game is actually a bit easier to beat with the jeep. It’s just an awkward control scheme to get used to with the jeep. Maybe someday I’ll give the game another shot with the jeep.