NES Completions thread 2020 - 677/677 (All Clear!)

[Gaia Gensouki | 1,075]

Okay, thanks for the advice. At least I was on the right track. So with my second Wizard on level 34 I have finally managed to beat this unforgiving game, i.e. Bard's Tale is done. This has to be one of my most frustrating playthrough so far. This game really felt like it was trying to steal my time. I don't mind dungeon crawlers or mapping out dungeons, but here you didn't get anything for mapping out the levels. There are no treasures or shortcuts to find. There is maybe one or two items per dungeon that is/are required for progression, but aside from those nothing really matters. It really just is stealing your time. Or like in the battles: later on the battles frequently contain 10 or more enemies divided among three groups. And some enemies take several turns of constant attacks from my three physical attackers in order to beat them. And now imagine this like 10 times or so for every fight every few steps or so! This was really grueling. And what was the reward for this? I saved the town. Wow... Also, I got these really lame credits that are just plain text on a black background with no music whatsoever. How lazy! It's not bad, but just so tedious and frustrating later in the second half of the game.

Edited April 12, 2020 by Gaia Gensouki

[NESfiend | 1,515]

@Gaia Gensouki

You have been through some brutal RPGS lately. I've been laughing to myself at the prospect of having to beat a boss with full heal capability and the only hope is he doesn't use it - for 7 minutes. More will than I have that's for sure. Nicely done. 

[Gaia Gensouki | 1,075]

Thanks, @NESfiend. I didn't expect Bard's Tale to be that tough though. And usually RPGs are my comfort food. In most action games you'll have to do the whole game over again once you've seen the game over screen. So not only do you have to do everything over again, but you also only make progress if you "git gud", as the young people like to call it nowadays. However, some of these old games can be downright brutal, so it' actually nice for a change to have a game like an RPG where you can make some progress during every play session, even if you only gain a few levels or some money. Ghost Lion and Bard's Tale were a bit unfortunate choices for me since your experience level is locked at certain points in the game. It does have the advantage though that these games never become pushovers eithers.

I have also beaten Addam's Family: Pugley's Scavenger Hunt. It's not half bad for a beta version, if you can get accustomed to the somewhat slippery controls and the hit detection. But between the missing music for most of the game, the lackluster sound effects and the awfully drab monochrome backgrounds this game doesn't feel like a finished product, or at least like a very rushed one.You can even see this on this plain ending screen. Maybe they didn't get more development time.

Anyway, I don't know what will be next for me. Most of the games left don't seem that thrilling or are extremely tough.

[nerdynebraskan | 356]

If my math is correct, I have now clinched the title for most completions for the seventh straight year. I plan to play some more Conflict today; I got the first three battles won yesterday (13 to go!).

@Gaia Gensouki

If Bard's Tale hasn't burned you out too much on RPGs, the Ultima games are still on the board. Quest of the Avatar, as scary noted, is said to be one of the best RPGs on the NES. Exodus came first, and seems to have a solid reputation among RPG folks too.

[Strikezone1 | 154]

On 4/12/2020 at 12:53 AM, nerdynebraskan said:

I finally knocked out The Lone Ranger.

I guess it took me 10-12 hours across two days to finish it. It's a fun concept, with cool level design and it's maybe the best example of a multi-genre game actually getting some polish on the NES. But man, did they have to crank up the difficulty this hard? It reminds me of Snake's Revenge on that level: tons of enemies and traps, you get one life, and the checkpoints are few and far between. It got pretty tedious having to replay chapters over and over and over again. I wish the game had an "easy" mode of some kind, because this could be a legit Top 100 contender with all it has going for it but the sheer brutality of it was something of a turnoff.

Love me some Lone Ranger on the NES. A truly well made game that nailed the multi-genre factor IMO. I agree that the difficulty ramps up quite a bit. I didn't consider it overly brutal, but it's tough for sure. I don't think this game's difficulty hinders it's ranking at all, as it easily cracks the top-100 (maybe top-50?) in the library IMO... "Easy" modes are for sissies. 

Congrats on beating it.

[Gaia Gensouki | 1,075]

4 hours ago, nerdynebraskan said:

If Bard's Tale hasn't burned you out too much on RPGs, the Ultima games are still on the board. Quest of the Avatar, as scary noted, is said to be one of the best RPGs on the NES. Exodus came first, and seems to have a solid reputation among RPG folks too.

I'll think about it. I even have both games as physical editions here and never played them so far, but I think it might be too much to jump straight into another big RPG (series) right now. Currently I'm trying my hands at Dragon's Lair. I've already made it until the third level, but it's really, really tough. This game requires a lot of memorization and even then some challenges are still insanely hard. And I'm afraid of the final boss battle. I've seen videos of it and am not sure if that's possible for me, but I'll at least try it.

I think there was no doubt that you would be the winner of this competition, nerdynebraskan. But still, congratulations on the amazing achievement! You've beaten so many NES games, what would you say are your favorites? And how many left until you have cleared the whole library?

[arnpoly | 198]

On 4/11/2020 at 4:00 PM, Crabmaster2000 said:

@Tablew/chairs @NESfiend I really like that sports analogy, that is a good way to look at a lot of these games. It's not great in this case though I don't think because once you beat a team you don't replay them again (except in a finals kind of situation). Repeating the 4 lakes 3 times each when nothing about them changes makes this feel different to me. 

Is it possible to just C and B rank your way through and just finish the last lake in 1st? So for example I could just select end day 9 times in a row and then just win the last three lakes to go from 200th to 1st all of the sudden? That seems like the quickest/easiest method to get a first on the final day if that does in fact work.

Thanks for throwing ideas around with me btw. Very much appreciated

 

I get email alerts for this thread, so I was reading and following along (even before I was tagged) but I'm just now getting a chance to reply. 

I did do a write-up on this one with some tips and my path to winning:  http://takeontheneslibrary.com/finished/83-the-black-bass/

I believe you can do the strategy you outlined: Skip the first 9 days and win the final three.  You don't even need to win Class C or B, just get 5th or better in that tournament to advance.  (That would be 101st-105th in Class C and 51st-55th in Class B, if I am remembering the placings right.)  The only bad thing about that is that the later days in the season have shorter tournament hours and then it more challenging to get the amount of good size bass you need to win.  Also there are two Class A lakes, so it's up to you if you care about playing both of them in the game.

This game really has two "endings."  The 1st place tournament win, and the end message at the end of the season.  I just made a video of the final lake, so for the sake of optics only I wanted to do both at the same time.  If it were up to me, I would say it's fine to get 1st place and finish the season separately to say it's beaten.

 

[Gaia Gensouki | 1,075]

Dragon's Lair is done. This was another nerve-wracking game. It's one of those "cinematic" platformers, where the movements are fluid and the graphics highly detailed, but the controls are incredibly slow and delayed. This is one of those cases where more realistic does not equal more fun. Actually it's quite the opposite. Apart from that it's a game that you have to memorize from start to finish in order to have any chance of beating this one. It took me many tries and the third stage was definitely the hardest part of the game. Then of course the fourth stage and the especially the final boss were just insane and maddening. Those dragons hatching from eggs that fly slightly below your throwing curve or that useless dagger power-up directly before the final boss. Once you collect this one you can basically restart the whole game. Imagine you're playing Ghosts 'n Goblins and right before fighting against Satan there drops a torch power-up in a very difficult to avoid situation. If a game is even more ruthless and unfair as GnG, then you know that you're in for a ride.

Anyway, what helped me beat the boss was the realization that I could throw my axes quicker if I just hold the A button down. This was crucial to quickly defeat the constantly spawning mini dragons during the final encounter. Before that I just couldn't keep up with damage. Mashing the button was always slower and got me killed several times. Another trick was that I found out you could pause whenever you wanted during the final fight. This helped me to correctly react to the flames shot by the dragon. After all, you have to either duck or jump with the right timing or you'll die instantly. I was so nervous that I made many mistakes this way. So thanks to the pause function I could react to the attacks correctly and in time. This should be legal (I hope) since it's a normal function fo the game. Maybe this can help someone in the future to beat this game. Although somehow a game this difficult does not have a single pain point. Maybe others don't have problems beating this game? Or is this the kind of game that you can beat once and then easily beat again each year?

On a different note: Now that I'm actually playing a bunch of NES games for the first time myself I got interested into rewatching old AVGN episodes and stuff. The Dragon's Lair episode is a really curious one though. For roughly two thirds of the episode he was stuck on the very first screen and only made it a little bit into the actual first level. This was a bit short, no? Doesn't seem like he put that much time into playing the game. If he had made it farther there would have been so much more aggravating things that he could have raged about. It also made me wonder how many reviewers gave certain games an overly/undeservedly bad or good reputation just because of lack of time invested or personal grudges or tastes. Dragon's Lair definitely deserves the criticism though and is one of my lesser liked games so far, but if you spend some time with it, it can grow at least a bit on you. Or maybe my bar has been raised too low these past few weeks.

[Gaia Gensouki | 1,075]

If it's allowed to continue Total Recall from the movie theatre after finishing the hobo town level, then consider this game done.

[bronzeshield | 293]

17 hours ago, Gaia Gensouki said:

Another trick was that I found out you could pause whenever you wanted during the final fight. This helped me to correctly react to the flames shot by the dragon. After all, you have to either duck or jump with the right timing or you'll die instantly. I was so nervous that I made many mistakes this way. So thanks to the pause function I could react to the attacks correctly and in time. This should be legal (I hope) since it's a normal function fo the game. Maybe this can help someone in the future to beat this game. Although somehow a game this difficult does not have a single pain point. Maybe others don't have problems beating this game? Or is this the kind of game that you can beat once and then easily beat again each year?

While I didn't use it myself when I beat Dragon's Lair last year, I think the pause strat is legit, as are all pause strats. If the game lets you do it with a regular NES pad, it's fair game.

I can't speak to others' skills with Dragon's Lair, but I found it very demanding and wouldn't be able to beat it easily year after year. Then again, I was getting to Level 5 pretty much every time and the final boss was the real bottleneck, so I don't know -- maybe it could become almost routine. A scary thought.

And hey, just saw your Total Recall screenshot. Yes, as a game-provided resource, that's gotta be legit to continue from the theatre and go straight to Mars (or however it works) -- certainly, it's what I did when I beat the game. Nice job!

Edited April 15, 2020 by bronzeshield

[nerdynebraskan | 356]

We're under 100 games now! And of the final 99, it seems only 17 have been beaten every year. I'm up to 9 of 16 battles won in Conflict, so that should be done in the next couple of days.

While the games remaining have whittled down to the hard, long, and unpopular, there's still a pretty good diversity by genre. By my count:

Misc Action Games - 19

Sports - 19 (mostly baseball and track & field)

Platformers - 15

Shooters - 11

RPGs - 6

Strategy Games and Zapper Games - 5 each

Power Pad Games, Puzzles, and Racing - 4 each

Other - 7

[nerdynebraskan | 356]

21 hours ago, Gaia Gensouki said:

I think there was no doubt that you would be the winner of this competition, nerdynebraskan. But still, congratulations on the amazing achievement! You've beaten so many NES games, what would you say are your favorites? And how many left until you have cleared the whole library?

I haven't won yet. The primary yardstick of individual competition is the points system here. I did win the completions count in each of the last six years, but I'm still only recognized as a three-time champion because I was outscored by folks playing more valuable games than I was playing.

As for my favorites, I suppose I grew up mostly playing pretty obvious stuff like Mega Man, Mario, etc. The Mega Man series are probably still my all-time favorite NES games. But I definitely played and enjoyed more obscure titles like GI Joe, Desert Commander, Dr. Chaos, Cobra Command, and Home Alone. I may be the only one on this forum who unironically loves the first Home Alone game on the NES. The programming is a bit clunky and the graphics suck, but it's an intense (but not brutal) experience that totally fits with the tone of its source material. Some of the appeal of this annual thread to me has been in finishing some of the games I dabbled with as a kid (like Bart vs. the Space Mutants, to cite a recent example).

But it's also been about going deeper with some of the games that I got a kick out of when I discovered them as I renewed my NES collecting about a decade ago. Magician has music that is moody as hell and I love it. Lone Ranger is probably the best example of a multi-genre title, even if the difficulty was a bit of a turnoff for me. Star Trek: 25th Anniversary is really a joy to play for a Trekkie like me. Pipe Dream is a puzzle game that I look forward to playing every January; the NES port is relatively new to me, but I've played clones since I was in middle school and really love the concept. I really cracked out on Wario's Woods the first time I beat if for this thread, to the point where I would daydream of those dancing creatures when I daydreamed. Even a game like Conflict, which I initially thought I would beat once just to say I had and be done with, I grew attached to like I had some kind of 8-bit Stockholm Syndrome. Over time I went from "this is so slow!" to "Yeah, I'm going to blow up that MiG! Boom!!!".

[Kid Dracula | 126]

Nice work guys! Great to see the thread still super active. Hopefully I can finish a few more to add to the list but my gaming time has slowed down significantly since the birth of our son last week. I am happy I was able to contribute 75 completions. A lot of them were first time beats and a few of them were actually very challenging. Congrats to Gaia for taking second place! If you keep up this pace you might have a chance at the title. I always considered it more of a community effort than an individual competition but hopefully you guys duke it out for the win. Keep it up gang! 

[Tablew/chairs | 250]

Tecmo Cup is done, one of the few sports games i had left to beat, not sure why i avoided it for so long it's a unique concept and a well done game

[NESfiend | 1,515]

I got to the 7th level of 9 on empire strikes back today. I have wanted to play through this game one day because I am such a big fan of NES star wars, but the difficulty and slow pace has always kept me from really getting into it. For good reason. Its fun, but I find new ways to die every day. I will be tied up a while. Crazy there are less than a 100 games left this early in the year.  

@nerdynebraskan 

Celebrate that cart victory even if it isn't the main competition. What an impressive run 2020 has been. With no sports, the points race between you and @Gaia Gensouki is the new fed ex cup. Hope you both grind it out to the end and wish you both the best of luck. Not a lot of scoreboards to check right now. Enjoying this one. 

@arnpoly 

I checked out your website with the completions and write ups. Really cool. The write ups on each game are very well done and will be a fun introductory point next time I try something new. Following the completion videos on youtube too. 

@Tablew/chairs

Hell of a contribution knocking off tecmo cup soccer. I didn't own it growing up, but it was one of my most frequently rented games. I know I have a lot of nostalgia for it, but I don't understand why a sports rpg isn't at least discussed more. I think it was very well executed and soccer and the 90s went hand in hand. It takes forever though. Forever. It needed to be about half that long, if that. 

Keep the pain points run going! Another good race to keep an eye on.

@Kid Dracula

Congrats on the birth of your child. Hang on for six months. That's when sleep becomes regular and you can get your wits back day to day. The beginning is a hard road, but it gets easier and more and more fun. My son is 19 months and is starting to like gaming controllers and watching the screen. Prospect of playing mario bros together becomes more real by the day. 

Edited April 15, 2020 by NESfiend

[Crabmaster2000 | 501]

@arnpoly - Thank you so much for the feedback. I took a break from Black Bass to work on a couple other games to hear what you had to say before I kept going. I think I'm going to go that route and and phone it in during the first 9 days and then try and end on a high note and get that 1st on the final level. 

 

@Gaia Gensouki - While pause buffering makes it "feel" cheap I think it's totally legal since it's in the tool set the games gives you even if it wasn't intended to be used. I had to pause buffer like crazy when I beat Arkanoid last year. One thing that I think gets lost a lot when talking about Dragon's Lair (NES) is that I don't think it's intended to be a platformer. I think it's intended to be as similar to the arcade game as they could muster on the NES. It's mainly about memorizing what's going to happen and then react in the one way that will avoid or defeat that obstacle. It's not about mastering controls or having quick reaction time, it's solely about knowing what's coming and how to manage that. It feels frustrating to play as a platformer because it sucks as a platformer. If you come at it like you'd come at the original Dragon's Lair it's still terrible, but makes a lot more sense I think. 

[scaryice | 587]

Pause buffering is highly encouraged for all those difficult games (especially schmups), so no problems there.

[nerdynebraskan | 356]

Conflict is done. I screwed up pretty bad on "The Final Conflict", but somehow managed to finish off the enemy's Flag Tank with my Flag Tank as basically my last surviving unit.

[Crabmaster2000 | 501]

9 hours ago, Crabmaster2000 said:

@arnpoly

Still plugging away at Black Bass. Took out two more tournaments today. 

 

Anyone have any tips for Top Gun Second Mission? I played the first one and beat it yesterday, tried the second one today and it seems a bit tougher.

[bronzeshield | 293]

M-O-O-N, that spells "bronzeshield beating a game he didn't really feel like playing again but he took one for the team and after all it didn't take that long":

Jimmy Connors Pro Tennis Tour (aka Jimmy Connors Tennis) is done, beaten on Intermediate, 1-set matches.

Don't try to outslug the CPU in this game, it'll never work. The trick is: serve out wide (B + angle); hit a soft second shot (B), so that the CPU goes behind the baseline, and rush the net; then, put the ball away with a volley, Up+A. If you're receiving serve, go straight to step 2; if the volley doesn't work, go back to step 2.

Do that every time, and you'll win all your sets 6-0, like I did (except the first, since I was remembering how to play), and it took only about 90 minutes since the pace is so comically fast. You can skip blurbs with the Select button to make it go even faster.

Edited April 15, 2020 by bronzeshield

[Daniel_Doyce | 475]

Side Pocket.

Going to do Othello in a bit here, it doesn't take long

[Daniel_Doyce | 475]

Othello

Surprised this is always a late finish since there's a deterministic way to beat it every time

Ok back to L'Empereur

 

[bronzeshield | 293]

In the continuing spirit of takin' one for the team, I was "abel" [sic] to make it to the final mission, and beyond:

Marvel's X-Men (aka Uncanny X-Men) is done.

[PII | 1,886]

Gettin' to the table a little late, but here's my recent wins that I photographed:

Cool World - Did this one tonight -managed to take out Holly as quickly as possible w/3 balloons at a time between jumps.

Dino Riki - Beat this one legit for the first time a few weeks ago w/o the super secret 'push up and start' at the game over screen for continues.  Actually did 3 play throughs in a row.  The later two involved continues, but before it came to that, I managed to top a Million points for the first time as well.  Started the 4th play through and noticed that the enemies seemed to still be getting a bit faster...

Simpsons Bartman Meets Radioactive Man - Nothin' special to say here.

And somehow, I found the time to get a game of Jaws in ;9

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 25, 2022 by PII

[Gaia Gensouki | 1,075]

Some nice clears. We're getting closer to the finish line!

I did my part too by beating Mad Max. I had this weird interest curve in this game where it seemed awful at first, then grew on me a bit when I started to figure things out and get better at it and then my opinion of this game fell down a bottomless pit when I encountered the final boss of this game. This has got to be one of the worst final bosses I have had the misfortune of encountering so far. It's right up there with Bard's Tale and Dragon's Lair. What's up with my recent games and awful, game crippling boss fights?

Anywaye, in this game you roam about an apocalyptic wasteland in your car, throwing dynamite at other cars, avoid enemy enemy projectiles, that somehow have homing capabilities, and discover hideouts, caves or whatever. Whenever you enter one of these you are in an overhead "dungeon" where you're blasting enemies with a shotgun reducing them to a steaming pile of flesh and blood. Meanwhile you scavenge these areas for food and water, which serve as currency, as well as ammo, gasoline and keys. Yes, there are keys and seemingly more doors to open than keys available. And you want to gather as much food and water as possible, because in order to progress to the next level you need to buy an expensive arena pass and make it to the exit of the stage. So you can get screwed easily if you open the wrong doors and miss out on precious items. At first this whole concept of the game might seem great. Aren't there modern indie games that are basically like this, i.e. survival adventures/roguelikes etc. like Death Road to Canada or so? The enemies here don't even use firearms, so tehy even resemble zombies slowly coming at you. But where this game goes wrong though is that you run out of ressources faster than you can explore the levels, i.e. if you're running out of gas during exploration you die. Or your car might get damaged to much or you no longer have dynamite and can't make it past a barrier. And everything requires currency to refill of which there is only a very limited supply in each level. So basically you're going around like a headless chicken in hopes of finding one or several of these hideouts. You will probably die a few tiems just searching the area and trying to find your way in this ever repeating wasteland where everything looks the same! When you have found or two hideouts you will want to give it a new try and basically make a beeline between them and the exit to the arena. This game requires exploration, but at the same time actively discourages it. I guess they were trying to achieve more than is reasonably possible on this limited hardware and the experience fell flat as a result. That being said, once I understood what I had to do it got a bit enjoyable for a while despite the repetitiveness.

In the arena you're in maze where you have to find the exit and kill a number of enemy cars by bumping them off the track or into one of those pits that constantly open and close. This was somewhat entertaining as I was enjoying the hilarity of my enemies being sucked up pits as if they were black holes. Unfortunately this game mode lacks depth and get repetitive as well. And this is where the final boss battle comes into place.

You see, whenever you die you can just input the password or continue right from the starting screen in the level where you just were. But there is a unique "feature" of the final boss that has you repeating not just the last arena match, but also the previous scavening level. This is because you have limited ammunition in a boss battle! Whoever thought that this would be a good idea? You can not possibly defeat the final boss with the ammo you have available. So you need to start over from level 3, which is the longest and hardest btw., and search for up to 4 crossbows hidden across several hideouts. Every crossbow gives you additional ammo during the final fight, with at least one additional crossbow being absolutely necessary to win, but this requires you to hit with almost every single shot. And nothign is more frustrating than whittling the final boss down to one or two health bars and to have your ammo run out! WTF?! So I had to go back, do this level and the correspoonding arena level over and again just to get another try. And by this time the arena level, where you have to destroy 50 cars(!), will start to turn sour as well. And even if you have full ammo the boss is still incredibly hard to beat! He easily takes 80 hits or more and you can only shoot while standing still. But of course he always moves around, fires almost non-stop and inflicts much, much more damage than you do! This might also be a good time to mention that the final battle happens to take place in a sideways view, where both of you stand on the opposite end of a bridge. You can move to the left and right and up and down, but beware, because you can fall off the bridge, which, of course, happened to me a few times as well. You can also duck or jump, but these function in a different way than what you would expect. The best way to describe this is that this battle screen has no z-axis, only x and y. So what ducking and jumping does is to move you up or down the y-axis. You can still get hurt pretty easily this way. And of course the boss has rapid fire enabled all the time while moving around and he kills you with a few shots. So much fun!

This completely killed the game, which I would otherwise have regarded as a mediocre game with some flaws. But having to repeat those levels over and over again just because of an extremely hard boss fight with new mechanics added on top is just too much for me. Whereas a game like Dragon's Lair (NES) may be awful as well, it still grew a bit on me over time as I learned more and got better at the game. It was nice to see my efforts pay off. But in this game it was the reverse. It got more and more frustrating and despicable the more I played it. I'm happy to be done with this one and to hopefully never play it again. I would rather replay Dragon's Lair or Total Recall, which is saying a lot.

I also have to say that I'm starting to get burned out by these subpar and oftentimes frustrating games. If it wasn't for the community effort and mutual help and encouragement here I would probably have thrown the towel on some of these games. Thanks everyone! Despite that I might take a short break from NES games. We'll see.