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


scaryice

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13 minutes ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

Great job @Gaia Gensouki! I've only played the PC version in the 1990s. Is the NES one any good?

Thanks! Unfortunately I haven't played the PC version so I can't compare them either. I can only say that the NES version seems to be competently made and that I never had the feeling of playing an inferior version. Maybe navigating some of the menus takes a little bit longer, since you have no mouse and instead use the digipad. But again, this is a minor inconvenience at the worst.

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8 minutes ago, Gaia Gensouki said:

Thanks! Unfortunately I haven't played the PC version so I can't compare them either. I can only say that the NES version seems to be competently made and that I never had the feeling of playing an inferior version. Maybe navigating some of the menus takes a little bit longer, since you have no mouse and instead use the digipad. But again, this is a minor inconvenience at the worst.

It's been close to 30 years since I've played the PC version. I didn't even know there was a NES port back then. I had Gettysburg and Railroad Tycoon too. I honestly liked the Sim series games better. I think I had all of them up to Sim City 2000. I even had Sim Health, which I think was mail order only and more realistic than the other games.

Edited by Bearcat-Doug
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Elkovsky here from the old NintendoAge Forums. I've been going back to the NES again recently and I decided that a playthrough of The Mutant Virus would be fitting given the current state of affairs. I made it to level 4 a little while ago but left my NES idling while I waited for my character to die after losing the super gun... but I didn't realize that waiting to long on the "Game Over" screen would boot you back the title. Welp, live and learn. 😕

So I was trying to find some decent information on this game, and there doesn't seem to be much. Vegita's guide on GameFAQs is mostly worthless, and the information about the game that used to be on the NintendoAge Forums is, I imagine, forever gone (although there's a blog by someone who goes by the handle of Hoz who saved some strategies from the forum, including a suggested path by GuitarZombie). It's obvious enough that the growth of the virus is based on the John Conway "Life" algorithm, as several sources have mentioned... so it's not totally random, but it's too chaotic for a human being to track in most cases (except for a couple of rooms that consistently spew stuff from a central point, in which case using an item is the best way to handily beat the room). There are several mechanics, though, that I haven't quite figured out; any information any of you have on any of the following would be appreciated.

*Is there a set of recommended places to use the different powerup things in stages 4? I've found a list for stage 5, but not 4.
*When entering and leaving a room, I'm not sure how the game is reckoning the state of unsecured rooms you've visited but haven't completed. I don't think it's updating them in real time, but I also don't know if the game is randomizing the state on subsequent visits, or altering the board state based on some internal timer, or what. Since Hoz posted some Game Genie codes from Arnpoly (
https://hoz14nes.wordpress.com/2018/12/28/the-mutant-virus-crisis-in-a-computer-world/), I figure it might not hurt to test some of this out (if someone hasn't already done this already).
*Related to this, does anyone know how the mechanics of outbreaks and core breaches work? Are the locations completely randomized, or is there some deeper logic to it? It seems like the intervals between warning messages aren't spaced at regular intervals, so I was wondering if an outbreak in one area has the potential to cause an outbreak in another (but I have my doubts about this). More importantly, though, how long does one have before an outbreak has to be addressed, and how does one "solve" the short-term breach problem? Is it just a matter of visiting the room? It looks like outbreaks convert to breaches if left unaddressed, which in turn convert to instant game overs.

Any thoughts from anyone who's done this before would be appreciated. Q*Bert was hard, but at least the enemy spawn pattern was fixed, not to mention comprehensible...

Glad I found you all again, by the way. 🙂

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7 hours ago, Gaia Gensouki said:

So happy to be done with this one. Also, by now I should have beaten exactly 80 NES games this year.

Pirates.jpg

Damn, I didnt remember that there were so many possible grades at the end. Thats a crazy feat. The way the difficulty was discussed, I thought it may be weeks rather than days. Nicely done!

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21 hours ago, scaryice said:

Nice to see you here! I found the old thread you're talking about here:

https://connect.gocollect.com/discussion/145999/the-mutant-virus-strategy-thread

Progress! First time clearing level 4 today. Thank you, scaryice, for the link; the strats for level 4 were quite helpful (although I had to improvise a bit because of the outbreaks, which is to be expected). Off to start my maiden voyage into the hellscape that is level 5; hopefully I'll have a report of completion later tonight. I just made some adjustments to my pin connector recently and haven't had as many random resets, and I'm planning on pressing on until I finish this thing, so... here's to hoping it doesn't take forever. (...although it probably will.)

Which reminds me... I probably need to start a thread elsewhere on this board about N64 troubleshooting, since mine has been randomly resetting as of late...

IMG_20200617_182442.jpg

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Finished! Boy, that was a doozy. Sorry the image is a little washed out.

NES-177_mutant-virus_ending-final.jpg

I had a single unit of health left on my last life, but fortunately, I managed to pull level 5 off on either my second or third "full" attempt (I'm not counting the first trip to the level, where I was low on lives and just kind of futzed around a bit). Like everyone else who's beaten this game, I still don't entirely understand the mechanics, but for anyone who decides to take this game on in future years, here are a few thoughts from my time with it:

*At the risk of being Captain Obvious: as mentioned before, the virus movement rules are based on John Conway's Game of Life, although there are a few additional mechanics at play. First, there has to be some additional rule about how walls are handled, as "cells" (virus/vaccine spots —apologies to any biologists reading this) would appear in squares near walls even if there weren't the requisite three neighboring cells to that spot. Second, color changes to virus or vaccine seem to happen during the same frame as an update to the cell layout. I'm assuming that the number and quality of cells (virus vs. vaccine) around a new cell determines whether or not a new cell is virus or vaccine... although I couldn't figure out the logic behind this right away. Even watching a simple spinner in a frame-by-frame of some random gameplay footage I made in emulation (separate from my main run on original hardware) wasn't making sense, but I didn't spend a lot of time trying to figure it out.
*The suggestion in the old Mutant Virus thread to shoot at diagonals is a really good idea, especially in narrow corridors where you can basically saturate most of the squares the virus could possibly tread on. I ended up using a mix of automatic and short-range shot for everything else (the short-range is especially good at dealing with predictable, regular patterns like the "gliders" in a few of the rooms). I didn't find much use for the long-range shot myself, although maybe others have.
*The rooms numbers that guitarzombie has listed on his maps are different from the sector numbers the game gives you; probably not a big deal, but something to keep in mind for anyone who uses the level 4 route Svankmajer came up with.
*For some rooms, it can be beneficial to enter, shoot a few viruses to make the room "neutral," and immediately leave and re-enter. It seems like the game randomly rearranges the vaccinated squares upon leaving and re-entering—and in fact, "rearrange" might not even be the right word; the game might just be randomly assigning a certain number of viruses to be vaccine squares. There was at least one time when I converted, like two or three virus squares to vaccine and left, and when I came back, there was a healthy chunk of vaccine towards the center of the room that quickly spread out and secured a decently-sized area, saving me a bit of time ("time" in this case reckoned relative to the internal timer that determines virus outbreaks and core breaches).
*To add a bit to the previous statements from guitarzombie about the nature of the virus outbreaks in stages 4 and 5: it seems like the game recognizes five conditions for a room: unmarked (i.e., not visited), cleared, virus-owned (marked with the color of the virus for that level), "neutral" (mix of virus and vaccine), and "core breach imminent." As guitarzombie said, there's a good chunk of time at the beginning of the level where the game doesn't harass you; he said about eight minutes, which is probably about right, but I'm wondering if that number is a little different between stages 4 and 5. (I say this because outbreaks can happen in stage 3, and I've had one towards the end of my runs there, and I think it took longer than 8 minutes for it to trigger.) Anyway, once outbreaks start becoming possible, unmarked rooms are chosen at random and converted to virus-owned rooms; I'm pretty sure that other "transformations" of rooms will not occur until all of the unmarked rooms are converted to virus-owned. Once that's happened, a room that is not clear is chosen at random, and its status is "degraded" to the next level on a three-tier scale: neutral, virus-owned, and core breach imminent. If a core-breached room is chosen, it's game over (although I somehow managed to never have that happen to me). Some of this has been explicitly brought up before (and again, my sincerest thanks to guitarzombie and company for laying the foundation, without which I wouldn't have been able to beat the game nearly this quickly), but I decided break this down more specifically here so I could note that converting rooms to neutral status is a good way of buying time; the game won't alert you when a room goes from neutral to virus-owned, but this seems to count as a room change the same way as outbreaks and breaches.
*One other thing related to the timer: there were times where the interval between room changes seemed to be a little faster or slower than the minute or so that guitarzombie mentioned. Towards the end of my run of stage 5—I think it was on my next-to-last room—the other room I hadn't cleared had been converted from neutral to virus-owned, but it took longer than I was expecting for the breaching warning to show up. I'm not sure how much of this was related to my subjective perception of time during a stressful final stage and how much was the game actually slowing down to be fair. As for faster room changes, I think a couple of the conversions to neutral status might have been a little faster, but I'm not 100% sure. In any case, this might be something to look into, and I imagine this could be figured out from analyzing gameplay footage of TMR or Dugongue (the only two complete playthroughs I saw on YouTube).

Also, this was my strategy for my final run—the first part was based on Dugongue's successful run, using guitarzombie's numbering system from the map preserved at the following link: https://hoz14nes.wordpress.com/2018/12/28/the-mutant-virus-crisis-in-a-computer-world/

*Start in room 1, go immediately to room 8
*Get the super gun in room 8 and go immediately to room 1
*clear room 1 (the redistribution trick can be helpful here)
*put blue 0 in the middle of room 3 and then go room 4
*clear room 4 (using the SF gun is the way to go, in my opinion—I just left the SG in room 1), get green 1 and go to room 1, then room 8
*put green 1 in room 8 and go to room 6
*make a beeline for the "permanent" super gun (doesn't disappear when you die) and go to room 5
*clear room 5

...and after this I was improvising a bit more (and it's possible that one might have to improvise before this). I did room 6 next (which doesn't require a CM item despite having a spot that spews viruses consistently); then I took out room 2, but left the green 0 item there temporarily so I could keep the super gun. It's probably best to end a run with two rooms next to each other—one easy-ish and one hard—but the last two rooms I did were 3 and 8, both of which are pretty tough and fairly far apart. I ended up with blue 0 and green 0 in room 3, and blue 1 and green 1 in room 8; I had to do some weird juggling to get this all to work. After converting rooms 3 and 8 to neutral, I waited in the hall just outside of room 3, hoping that it would get chosen for a downgrade, as that would allow me maximum time to finish; I don't remember whether or not that played out, but I ended up going back and forth between 3 and 8 to keep them both neutral as long as possible before finishing 3. Then I got the breach warning and went to 8, taking the fast route and approaching from the right; however, I was so low on health that I figured it would be safer to beat the level approaching from the left, and thankfully, that paid off. If you've got blue 1 as one of your two items in room 8, it makes it a *lot* easier to secure the room from the left, and it's actually possible to clear the right side of the screen without triggering the proxy SSVs by carefully positioning yourself at different angles and getting super gun shots ricochet off of walls; my final few shots of the level were taken like so:

NES-177_mutant-virus_level5strat.jpg

Anyway, sorry about the gigantic word vomit, but I wanted to record some of this for posterity in case I don't end up doing a complete FAQ on this. Do guitarzombie and Svankmajer still frequent these forums? I wanted to get their consent before using any of their strategies in a walkthrough (for which they would of course be credited).

@Daniel_Doyce Good luck with F-15 Strike Eagle! I played through F-117A Stealth Fighter years ago, and it was kind of a slog. I've seen gameplay footage of Microprose's PC stuff (like F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0), and I'm inclined to believe that those games were fine on PC and simply ill-suited for NES.

By the way, what else hasn't been "claimed" for upcoming NES completion?

Edited by Elkovsky
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@Elkovsky

That's a monster clear! @guitarzombie is here, and I'm sure he'll be excited to see your post.

As far as games I don't believe anyone has yet mentioned starting or planning to start, I believe those would be:

Airwolf, Back to the Future 2 & 3, Bill & Ted, California Games, Last Starfighter, Metal Mech, Michael Andretti racing, Rock N Ball, Stealth ATF, Thrilla's Surfari, and World Games.

As far as games that have been mentioned but are to the best of my knowledge in a gray area whether anyone is actually currently working on or seriously considering starting soon:

Athena, Athletic World, Battle Tank, F-117A, Jungle Book, Kid Kool, Kung Fu Heroes, Q*Bert, Sky Kid, Street Cop, Super Glove Ball, Super Team Games, and To the Earth.

It's good to have you back!

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Oh wow thats pretty cool!  Especially someone archived my old NA post trying to autopsy that game with Bea!

I didn't even remember having a strategy for level 5 so thats cool!  Hahaha.  I don't even have the maps or the text I came up with on NA so I assumed it was lost.  So if there was a more 'consistent' way of beating level 4 and 5, it surely should be knocked down.  I always wanted to email the people that made the game and ask them because I felt there was a 'proper' way of dealing with those last 2 levels.  

Cool to see!  @scaryice I ate my own words!  Even if it was my own guide that did it haha

BTW to address some things, IIRC I used an emulator and counted those times.  I don't remember how many tries I had (probably like 3-5) to get those numbers but its possible it fluctuates.  Also the numbers I chose for the maps were just my own as I think the last 2 level number systems seemed kinda random.  The numbers were just for my maps and strategy.

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6 hours ago, nerdynebraskan said:

@Elkovsky

That's a monster clear! @guitarzombie is here, and I'm sure he'll be excited to see your post.

As far as games I don't believe anyone has yet mentioned starting or planning to start, I believe those would be:

Airwolf, Back to the Future 2 & 3, Bill & Ted, California Games, Last Starfighter, Metal Mech, Michael Andretti racing, Rock N Ball, Stealth ATF, Thrilla's Surfari, and World Games.

I am going to play around with world games tonight. Neved played it and it looks bizarre. I had been meaning to try that one out at some point. Im sure if it's still available now, its going to be crazy hard. 

Edited by NESfiend
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Good luck with that. You might as well try California Games if you prove to be good at World Games. I'm not sure exactly how objectively hard either game is. I just don't think the mash-buttons-to-run-fast olympic minigames compilations have aged particularly well. Some of them are 1- and 2- pointers because they literally have no high scores built into them, so any idiot (i.e.: me) can just participate for 5 minutes and do as much as can be done. The others of the genre require more patience because they have built-in high scores so you actually have to practice long enough to play them well.

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On 6/11/2020 at 8:56 PM, NESfiend said:

I was winning the first two and losing the third. I thought it had a lot to do with my having completely lost interest by that point, but im sure it does get tougher as you go

I'm not sure after finishing the game. I won the regular title with 4 seconds left, but I beat the Blue King "boss" without much trouble. Pro Wrestling is fairly easy until about the last three fights and pinning Great Puma is tough within the time limit.

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13 minutes ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

I'm not sure after finishing the game. I won the regular title with 4 seconds left, but I beat the Blue King "boss" without much trouble. Pro Wrestling is fairly easy until about the last three fights and pinning Great Puma is tough within the time limit.

I havent played a lot of wrestling games on the NES. Those two (tecmo  and pro wrestling) are both fair and enjoyable when you pick them up. But after about 10 minutes I've had enough. They both get boring fast. 

My brother and I used to play the crap out of wcw/nwo revenge on n64. Really well done wrestling game. I wouldnt ask for more or less as far as the options and variety. Even that doesn't hold my attention very well anymore. Wrestling games are just slow and repetitive. 

Edited by NESfiend
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5 minutes ago, NESfiend said:

I havent played a lot of wrestling games on the NES. Those two are both fair and enjoyable when you pick them up. But after about 10 minutes I've had enough. They both get boring fast. 

My brother and I used to play the crap out of wcw/nwo revenge on n64. Really well done wrestling game. I wouldnt ask for more or less as far as the options and variety. Even that doesn't hold my attention very well anymore. Wrestling games are just slow and repetitive. 

The NES wrestling games were generally not very good when black box Pro Wrestling may have been better than anything that came after. I can't name a decent 16 bit wrestling game. I don't think they started getting good until the THQ games in the 32/64 bit era unless you want to count WWF WrestleFest in the arcades, which I still have no idea how that didn't get a SNES/Genesis port.

Edited by Bearcat-Doug
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7 hours ago, guitarzombie said:

BTW to address some things, IIRC I used an emulator and counted those times.  I don't remember how many tries I had (probably like 3-5) to get those numbers but its possible it fluctuates.  Also the numbers I chose for the maps were just my own as I think the last 2 level number systems seemed kinda random.  The numbers were just for my maps and strategy.

Gotcha—yeah, I'm not entirely sure if my in-the-moment judgment was accurate, but I can't help but wonder if there's something influencing the timing behind the scenes. By the way, those maps were immensely helpful—mainly for knowing where the proxy SSVs work, and knowing how they worked in the first place, so thank you for all of that. I'll consider putting together a guide sometime this summer, then, with credit given where credit is due.

I think I'll give Rock N Ball a shot. It'll be a new completion for my master list, and after doing Gauntlet and Mutant Virus recently I could go for something a little less daunting (although much of the difficulty in Gauntlet is "knowledge-based" rather than "reflex-based" and it's a pretty well-documented game).

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11 hours ago, nerdynebraskan said:

As far as games I don't believe anyone has yet mentioned starting or planning to start, I believe those would be:

Airwolf, Back to the Future 2 & 3, Bill & Ted, California Games, Last Starfighter, Metal Mech, Michael Andretti racing, Rock N Ball, Stealth ATF, Thrilla's Surfari, and World Games.

As far as games that have been mentioned but are to the best of my knowledge in a gray area whether anyone is actually currently working on or seriously considering starting soon:

Athena, Athletic World, Battle Tank, F-117A, Jungle Book, Kid Kool, Kung Fu Heroes, Q*Bert, Sky Kid, Street Cop, Super Glove Ball, Super Team Games, and To the Earth.

I've been on a break from NES -- got a bit burned out by it, especially with the tendency to crash that my current setup has. For a few days I played some Jaguar instead, of all things (and enjoyed it!).

Of the games I had on my "to play" list, I've actually been playing Sky Kid the most, though (a) not very much and (b) I'm not really getting anywhere with it: Level 13 is still my highwater mark, and that's only halfway through the game.

I'm still committed to tackling Bases Loaded -- easy enough to switch between emulation and real hardware for that one -- and I'll probably crack Solomon's Key again in the next couple weeks. I'd really like to do Destination Earthstar and hope to do Sky Kid eventually, and might try To the Earth (though its reputation is intimidating and Gumshoe already cramped my hands enough).

Anyone is more than welcome to "steal" any of these, as I'm not in high gear right now, and need to beat them for my own list anyway so I don't mind if I don't end up getting the credit.

Edited by bronzeshield
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6 hours ago, NESfiend said:

I am going to play around with world games tonight. Neved played it and it looks bizarre. I had been meaning to try that one out at some point. Im sure if it's still available now, its going to be crazy hard. 

It's not that hard and it's very short.  It takes about 10 minutes to beat all the records if you know what you're doing.  I'd recommend reading the manual before you start though.  I think it would be pretty tough to figure out exactly how to play some of the games on your own.  

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4 hours ago, Elkovsky said:

Gotcha—yeah, I'm not entirely sure if my in-the-moment judgment was accurate, but I can't help but wonder if there's something influencing the timing behind the scenes. By the way, those maps were immensely helpful—mainly for knowing where the proxy SSVs work, and knowing how they worked in the first place, so thank you for all of that. I'll consider putting together a guide sometime this summer, then, with credit given where credit is due.

Thanks!  I did them cuz I wanted some help from the community to figure it out.  There was NO info on it, and TBH I dont even know why I started.  I wanted to like the game but it did everything it could for me to not enjoy it haha.  I started to think it was more of a puzzle game, so some of those elements would make more sense for certain rooms.  You should totally find some of the developers and email them!  Those are the developers in the credits so luckily you took a picture to save em.  So yeah do what you want, go crazy, IDGAF.  I wont be much help anymore because I haven't touched it since I beat it a few years ago.  How long did it take you?  It took me 4 hours, and that AFAIK is a record among people who've beaten it.  But from what you were typing I would guess it was shorter than that!

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5 hours ago, Elkovsky said:

I think I'll give Rock N Ball a shot. It'll be a new completion for my master list, and after doing Gauntlet and Mutant Virus recently I could go for something a little less daunting (although much of the difficulty in Gauntlet is "knowledge-based" rather than "reflex-based" and it's a pretty well-documented game).

 

This video from WashYourFace should make it a lot easier:

 

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