NES Completions thread 2021 - 665/677

[Strikezone1 | 154]

I am curious about the 2 Olympic-style games left on the list - Gold Metal Challenge '92 and Track & Field II. 

I haven't played either game, but I have to assume that they are highly tedious and challenging since no one has taken them out yet this late in the year.

Looks like both take just under an hour for a complete playthrough, according to Youtube.

What specifically is the reason(s) no one has picked them off? Is it a lot of tedious button mashing required for some of the events? Are they unforgiving with few/limited continues?

Again I have never played either, just genuinely curious.

[Khromak | 768]

I tried playing one or both of these @Strikezone1 and for me it was the sheer amount of button mashing you have to do. Not just single button either, there's swapping back and forth between A and B, dpad stuff, it's actually pretty challenging, physically. I think I was playing T&F 2 and it requires you to win like...6 events or something. I was like "I might be able to beat 1 or 2 of these with practice, but trying to beat them all in one shot...someone else can do it"

[the_wizard_666 | 1,325]

4 hours ago, Khromak said:

It may distract a bit from the licensed list but it could be fun to branch out and try some games I wouldn't otherwise play, which has been the appeal of this thread from the beginning for me. I'm sure a lot of it is utter crap though, so...not necessarily the most appealing additions.

That right there sums up the entire reason I started the thread to begin with.  Sure there's a LOT of crap out there, but how many people have found games that they previously never would've considered playing that had become favourites.  The unstated goal was never to actually finish the list, rather it was to get people playing new shit.  The timeline was a way to get people to participate, but it was never the end goal when I started it off. 

[the_wizard_666 | 1,325]

4 hours ago, Strikezone1 said:

I am curious about the 2 Olympic-style games left on the list - Gold Metal Challenge '92 and Track & Field II. 

I haven't played either game, but I have to assume that they are highly tedious and challenging since no one has taken them out yet this late in the year.

Looks like both take just under an hour for a complete playthrough, according to Youtube.

What specifically is the reason(s) no one has picked them off? Is it a lot of tedious button mashing required for some of the events? Are they unforgiving with few/limited continues?

Again I have never played either, just genuinely curious.

Gold Medal Challenge is fairly long, but since you only need the overall gold and not every gold, it's entirely doable.  It's also one of the longest games of it's kind...but has a battery save feature to make it easier.  Honestly, I would've knocked it out myself by now just for fun if I weren't still spiteful.  Can't speak to T&F2 though, as I haven't played either of those games, but I'd assume it's something along the lines of "button mashing sports = nope" for most people. 

[bronzeshield | 293]

Since the discussion about unlicensed games is heating up, let me post this again as a reminder of how things went down the last time we did the whole licensed + unlicensed + PAL library (over at NA) :

On 4/26/2021 at 5:49 PM, bronzeshield said:

It might be informative to remind ourselves of how the unlicensed list went down in 2016, since the stats are still available at GoCollect aka NintendoAge. Here's a breakdown of who did what:

Bea Iank
2016 unlicensed points: 166
Single-game carts beaten: 28
Compilation cart games beaten: Action 52 (5 games), Quattro Adventure (1 game)

nerdynebraskan
2016 unlicensed points: 102.33
Single-game carts beaten: 21
Compilation cart games beaten: Caltron (2 games)

bronzeshield
2016 unlicensed points: 65.92
Single-game carts beaten: 8
Compilation cart games beaten: Action 52 (24 games), Caltron (1 game), Quattro Arcade (1 game), Quattro Sports (1 game)

MaarioS
2016 unlicensed points: 55
Single-game carts beaten: 5
Compilation cart games beaten: Quattro Adventure (2 games), Quattro Arcade (2 games)

scaryice
2016 unlicensed points: 31.75
Single-game carts beaten: 5
Compilation cart games beaten: Action 52 (8 games), Caltron (3 games), Quattro Sports (1 game)

catfriedrice
2016 unlicensed points: 10
Single-game carts beaten: 1

the wizard 666
2016 unlicensed points: 10
Single-game carts beaten: 2.5 (3 split with Dr. Morbis, 1 solo)
 
acromite53
2016 unlicensed points: 9.25
Compilation cart games beaten: Action 52 (14 games), Quattro Sports (1 game)

Dr. Morbis
2016 unlicensed points: 8
Single-game carts beaten: 1.5 (3 split with the wizard 666)

tablew/chairs
2016 unlicensed points: 7.25
Compilation cart games beaten: Quattro Adventure (1 game), Quattro Arcade (1 game), Quattro Sports (1 game)

Ozzy 98
2016 unlicensed points: 6
Single-game carts beaten: 2

guitarzombie
2016 unlicensed points: 3
Single-game carts beaten: 1

WashYourFace
2016 unlicensed points: 1.5
Single-game carts beaten: 1
Compilation cart games beaten: Action 52 (1 game)

bimmy lee
2016 unlicensed points: 1
Single-game carts beaten: 1

Note that we were also joined by TheMexicanRunner in 2016, who accounted for a bunch of pain-in-the-ass licensed games that would otherwise have siphoned off some attention -- or, more likely, simply resulted in a failed year. His participation rejuvenated us, I think.

(Post #1 in the linked thread is truncated at game #440, so you can't see his specific contributions, but there were 33.)

Edited December 17, 2021 by bronzeshield

[the_wizard_666 | 1,325]

@bronzeshield Isn't it harder because there are fewer regular competitors than in previous years?  Wouldn't it help immensely to have myself and @Dr. Morbis back contributing to the list?  Just throwing that out there.

[Dr. Morbis | 2,088]

9 hours ago, Khromak said:

I mean, we could always just have two goals: Complete the licensed library and also complete the whole library. It might be tricky to figure out the point values for the unlicensed stuff, since they haven't been in the list for a lot of previous years, but I'm open to the idea of adding them.

Why does it have to be so complicated?  Why do the unlicensed games have to be on a separate list with separate point values?  They are all NES games!!!  You don't need to do extra work: just throw them in the big long list of NES games where they were when this project started.

I can definitely see the distinction between licensed and unlicensed for collecting purposes, but for gaming... I mean WTF!?!? They are all NES games, some great, some terrible, just like the rest of the NES library...

...And the excuse that it's too hard already to complete the objective... I mean, holy shit, if you can't get a win then move the goal posts?  That's the solution?!?!  Wrong!  You set an objective and either you complete it or you don't - simple as that...

Oy vey..... 

[bronzeshield | 293]

46 minutes ago, the_wizard_666 said:

@bronzeshield Isn't it harder because there are fewer regular competitors than in previous years?  Wouldn't it help immensely to have myself and @Dr. Morbis back contributing to the list?  Just throwing that out there.

Well, you did contribute in 2016, and I do appreciate those contributions, as well as those you've made at Sega-16 and elsewhere!

Still, I think it's important to establish that, in that year, most of the heavy lifting on the unlicensed front was done by Bea_Iank, nerdynebraskan, me, MaarioS, and scaryice, with you and Dr. Morbis among those rounding up the Top 10.

It'd be great if you're offering to make the kind of contribution we saw from the folks at the top of the 2016 unlicensed list, who accounted for about 85-90% of the victories. Do you see that as being in the cards for you in 2022? That'd be fantastic if so!

******

As a side note: I run a similar effort at Sega-16, as you know, and we had several people who were super-vocal about what games we should include: "Why aren't we doing Japanese games?" "Why aren't we doing Sega Channel games?" "Why aren't we doing PAL/32X/Sega CD games?"

We added some of those things, and guess how many games most of those people ultimately contributed? Zero, sadly.

******

All this assumes the goal of the project is actually to try to beat the library, rather than to "play at" beating the library. I respect that you see it differently, and I agree that discovering new games is great -- but I don't see this project as an especially efficient way to do it, considering that so much of the Famicom's best stuff is in the Japanese-exclusive library.

Personally I haven't discovered many new favorites through this project at all; mainly it's given me an excuse to go back to games I played through with savestates in the early 2000s, and do it properly this time. I also knocked out some old enemies, like Ring King and Bases Loaded. Only a few games have been 100% new to me and at all memorable, and mostly because they were ball-bustingly tough, like Gumshoe and Star Voyager.

I busted my ass beating games in Action 52 in 2016, and a lot of my gaming energy that year went into that. I'm glad I did -- it was fun, and I like jank. But ultimately a lot of people are motivated by beating the library (me included), and it takes one hell of a lot of energy to make that happen if unlicensed games are in the mix. (I'm still not sure how the hell Bea_Iank beat Micro Mike from Action 52!)

Edited December 18, 2021 by bronzeshield

[Dr. Morbis | 2,088]

6 hours ago, bronzeshield said:

But ultimately a lot of people are motivated by beating the library (me included)

...No, they're not and you're not, or both you and they would be a lot more vocal about the fact that 10% of the games are missing...

Oh, and on a related note, is it even possible to get a "licensed only" set of ROMS?  I don't emulate myself, but it appears that the large majority of NES gamers do nowadays, whether it be on their pc's or through power paks and/or flash carts, so I'm really curious if it's even possible to find a licensed only set of ROMS.  Are people like you and scaryice actually dividing up your ROMS into folders of licensed and unlicensed games?  Because this whole concept of "licensed only" gaming is really, really bizarre to me, I must say...

[PII | 1,886]

What if a bunch of us heavyweights pledged to knock out Action 52 ?  

Let's Do It!!!  ¡ Round up the HardCore Cowboys !  ¡ Ring in the Chicas Freakas !

Unlicensed Library Hasn't Got A Prayer!!!

¡¡REOOO-REOOOOO-REEOOOOOOOO!!!!

 

Edited October 9, 2022 by PII

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

5 hours ago, Dr. Morbis said:

...No, they're not and you're not, or both you and they would be a lot more vocal about the fact that 10% of the games are missing...

Oh, and on a related note, is it even possible to get a "licensed only" set of ROMS?  I don't emulate myself, but it appears that the large majority of NES gamers do nowadays, whether it be on their pc's or through power paks and/or flash carts, so I'm really curious if it's even possible to find a licensed only set of ROMS.  Are people like you and scaryice actually dividing up your ROMS into folders of licensed and unlicensed games?  Because this whole concept of "licensed only" gaming is really, really bizarre to me, I must say...

I don't remember where I got my rom set from, but I'm pretty sure it only had licensed games. I know I had to go back and add Micro Machines when we played it during the weekly contests.

[bronzeshield | 293]

7 hours ago, Dr. Morbis said:

Are people like you and scaryice actually dividing up your ROMS into folders of licensed and unlicensed games?  Because this whole concept of "licensed only" gaming is really, really bizarre to me, I must say...

I'm not sure what you mean by "people like you", but I don't divide up my ROMs on that basis. I don't split up my cart collection that way either.

7 hours ago, Dr. Morbis said:

Because this whole concept of "licensed only" gaming is really, really bizarre to me, I must say...

Well, sticking to the licensed library is really a pretty mainstream approach. Chrontendo only covers licensed games (from all regions), TheMexicanRunner only beat licensed NA & PAL games, and of course Nintendo themselves only acknowledge the licensed games, or at least that's how it was in the past.

I personally like playing unlicensed games -- and not just the good stuff like Skull & Crossbones, Captain Comic, Firehawk, etc. -- but I don't think it's hard to understand why people wouldn't bother with them. There's a lot of crap made with no love whatsoever, and while that's true of the licensed library too, the unlicensed is far worse.

I actually think Action 52 is one of the better efforts in that regard! Whatever their shortcomings, the designers somehow made it so almost every game on there can be looped in some sort of reasonable way (even if the gameplay itself is unreasonable). We proved in 2016 that Action 52 can be done, and it was fun finding out how to beat games like Haunted Hill, Billy Bob, Silver Sword, and the Ooze. Every time I thought the challenge and arbitrariness were so bonkers that it couldn't be done, there was always some way to make the win happen.

[Khromak | 768]

I downloaded a rom pack and it was explicitly sorted between licensed, unlicensed, prototypes, sorted by region, etc. It actually makes things a lot easier.

With a library like the NES you have to be specific or pedants will come out of the woodwork whenever you say "all." Beat ALL NES games? Well you'd better include every prototype with a different title screen. Make sure you include different revisions of the game. Are you including Homebrew which were released in 100s of copies and almost nobody has ever heard of? I mean, you said every NES game, right?! Or are you too afraid to beat them all?!

The line has to be drawn somewhere. Sure, we can all agree whether or not it includes PAL, Homebrew, unlicensed, or whatever, but acting like the line between licensed and unlicensed is arbitrary is totally unreasonable. I think if you told almost anybody in the entire world who isn't a hardcore NES collector that you beat every NES game, not a single one of them would ask if you also beat Bubble Bath Babes, because if not then it didn't count.

All this to say that while I'm sure unlicensed games are part of AN NES library, they aren't necessarily part of THE NES library, that's a totally subjective thing that's up to each person to decide. If you couldn't find a game at any Toys R Us in the world, it's pretty easy to see how it should be excluded from the "library" of the system.

In spite of the above, my vote remains the same, I still think we should add them in 2022 and just see what happens. At the very least, we'll have a more active community even if we don't complete the list. Regardless of how this conversation plays out though, I'll be playin' some nintenda tapes.

[scaryice | 587]

Here's the summary of what the competitions have looked like in previous years:

2012 - licensed (SUCCESS)
2013 - licensed + unlicensed (FAIL)
2014 - licensed + unlicensed (FAIL)
2015 - licensed + pal exclusives (SUCCESS)
2016 - licensed + unlicensed + pal exclusives (SUCCESS)
2017 - licensed + Famicom selection (FAIL)
2018 - licensed + Famicom selection (FAIL)
2019 - licensed (FAIL)
2020 - licensed (SUCCESS)
2021 - licensed (???)

For 2018-19, we had bonus points for the top NES publishers. For 2020-21, we've instead had bonus points for previously unbeaten games.

I've always seen beating the licensed games as the main goal, and anything else to be extra. I guess that's because they're a well-defined set of "official" games, whereas unlicensed is messy and could technically be anything. Not to mention the low quality of many of those carts. Once we beat everything in 2016, I wanted to try moving on to some other extra goal since we had already taken care of those (also, I thought it was a decent way to possibly help the SNES thread). And then in 2019, since we had a few years without success, it was just about going back to basics to try to do it again. That year was probably doomed because of the NA/VGS switch, but we finally managed it last year.

I suppose one way to compromise on this would be to just count some or all unlicensed/pal games as bonus points. So they could still count, but not be part our success or failure for the "main" competition (i.e. licensed games). I know most of you probably don't care about distinctions like that, but I do. That would mean getting rid of the current bonus points, since there would be too many otherwise.

Although, I have to be honest, I'm kind of getting tired of doing these threads after 10 years. I've still been playing a lot, but I've definitely noticed that I've been participating less in the thread itself this year. Part of that is probably due to VGS's like system, which I feel like ends up leading to less posts and conversation, but that's another topic.

 

Number of people to beat a game

2012    88
2013    85
2014    64
2015    43
2016    58
2017    58
2018    40
2019    45
2020    35
2021    41

I don't think the numbers here have anything to do with whether or not pal/unlicensed/famicom are included. It's true that there are fewer competitors now, but we probably have around the same number of hardcore people. There were many, many people who only beat a single game in the first few years.

I've thought about having some kind of rule to prevent people from beating the same games in consecutive years, which could possibly encourage more participation. But, that would certainly hurt our chances of finishing it.

 

Edited December 18, 2021 by scaryice

[scaryice | 587]

In other news, I got to stage 21 in Sky Kid yesterday (of 26). That's a new PB. It does feel like you're better off being more aggressive, as Arnpoly suggested in his write up. Definitely one of the hardest games I've tried to beat on the system...

 

[bronzeshield | 293]

29 minutes ago, Khromak said:

With a library like the NES you have to be specific or pedants will come out of the woodwork whenever you say "all." Beat ALL NES games? Well you'd better include every prototype with a different title screen. Make sure you include different revisions of the game. Are you including Homebrew which were released in 100s of copies and almost nobody has ever heard of? I mean, you said every NES game, right?! Or are you too afraid to beat them all?!

The line has to be drawn somewhere. Sure, we can all agree whether or not it includes PAL, Homebrew, unlicensed, or whatever, but acting like the line between licensed and unlicensed is arbitrary is totally unreasonable. I think if you told almost anybody in the entire world who isn't a hardcore NES collector that you beat every NES game, not a single one of them would ask if you also beat Bubble Bath Babes, because if not then it didn't count.

I had something almost exactly like this in my post but deleted it because it was getting too long. The part about ROM variants isn't just a hypothetical issue, either; I don't know offhand of examples on the NES, but several games on the Master System and Intellivision were reissued with a ROM update that totally changed the difficulty level.

The NES is in a unique position. The Genesis had only a handful of unlicensed games that made it to shelves in the US (one of which, Whac-A-Critter, is borderline impossible for a human to beat). Some publishers did a reverse Tengen, going from unlicensed to licensed, like Accolade.

Meanwhile the Atari 2600 had a ton of sketchy jank but defining licensed vs. unlicensed on that platform is an exercise in futility. Most of the weirdest ones only came out in PAL regions anyway, sometimes as pirated prototypes lifted from established developers. There were a few teeny-tiny small-print releases like Red Sea Crossing.

But the NES has this huge glut of unlicensed games, and behind that is a mind-bendingly massive glut of bootleg, pirate, and otherwise sketchy Famicom games. Check out the difference in system totals at TCRF:

https://tcrf.net/Category:Unlicensed_games

I don't claim those numbers are scientific -- there are tons of bootleg/pirate/unlicensed GB, GBC, and GBA games -- but it gives some idea of the difference in scale between the NES/Famicom and other systems. Not even the Atari archivists are 100% sure what came out for the 2600 back in the day, but for the Famicom, even if you restrict it to the original retail era (and don't factor in any NES-on-a-chip stuff), it's just impossible. There's too much!

Edited December 18, 2021 by bronzeshield

[Dr. Morbis | 2,088]

I guess this all stems from me being around before most of these other people here started collecing and before retro gaming was "cool."  I started in '99, and I don't think I heard a single person refer to a "licensed set" of NES games until maybe 2009 or so?  I mean, it just wasn't a thing.  There was a master list, and yes, it had errors, but the US set was pretty much set at 776 or whatever it is, ending with Sunday Funday in 1995, with the only argument being whether or not to include Cheetahmen II, which seemed to have been Grandfathered in.

I guess when the new blood came along they saw things differently and wanted an easier way to claim a complete set or something.  The whole "licensed minus SE" is beyond ridiculous to me: either you're going for every US game or you're not.

Whatever people want to collect is cool, you gotta do you, but at the end of the day, the reason I stopped participating in this project is because it got away from it's fundamental and original defining purpose: can we beat every US NES game in a year?  I just can't get motivated to get behind a project with a goal of hitting a 90% bar when I know those other games are out there.  And yeah, the Color Dreams and AVE stuff sucks, but almost every Tengen and Camerica game is at least average, if not a lot better, so the whole "unlicensed games suck" schtick just doesn't work with me.  In fact, pound for pound, unlicensed probably has a better good to bad ratio than the licensed set; think about it: the two best publishers made over half the games!  You can't say that about the licensed stuff.

Anyway, I'll take a peek at the new thread on December 31 and see what the parameters are, but at this point, I sure ain't holding my breath...

[the_wizard_666 | 1,325]

4 hours ago, scaryice said:

I've thought about having some kind of rule to prevent people from beating the same games in consecutive years, which could possibly encourage more participation. But, that would certainly hurt our chances of finishing it.

I tried that once, and my advice is not to do it.  It's a pain in the ass to keep track, and it discourages people from participating.  Maybe giving half-points for consecutive years by the same person, but even that gets to be a pain in the ass to deal with.

Anyway, I like how you did it in 2016.  You had the lists separated out, and had overall standings for each section.  I personally would prefer it all being the way I initially had it (one full list), but I'd rather they be there in some fashion than not at all. 

4 hours ago, bronzeshield said:

I had something almost exactly like this in my post but deleted it because it was getting too long. The part about ROM variants isn't just a hypothetical issue, either; I don't know offhand of examples on the NES, but several games on the Master System and Intellivision were reissued with a ROM update that totally changed the difficulty level.

The NES is in a unique position. The Genesis had only a handful of unlicensed games that made it to shelves in the US (one of which, Whac-A-Critter, is borderline impossible for a human to beat). Some publishers did a reverse Tengen, going from unlicensed to licensed, like Accolade.

Meanwhile the Atari 2600 had a ton of sketchy jank but defining licensed vs. unlicensed on that platform is an exercise in futility. Most of the weirdest ones only came out in PAL regions anyway, sometimes as pirated prototypes lifted from established developers. There were a few teeny-tiny small-print releases like Red Sea Crossing.

But the NES has this huge glut of unlicensed games, and behind that is a mind-bendingly massive glut of bootleg, pirate, and otherwise sketchy Famicom games. Check out the difference in system totals at TCRF:

https://tcrf.net/Category:Unlicensed_games

I don't claim those numbers are scientific -- there are tons of bootleg/pirate/unlicensed GB, GBC, and GBA games -- but it gives some idea of the difference in scale between the NES/Famicom and other systems. Not even the Atari archivists are 100% sure what came out for the 2600 back in the day, but for the Famicom, even if you restrict it to the original retail era (and don't factor in any NES-on-a-chip stuff), it's just impossible. There's too much!

Unlicensed didn't exist before the NES because nobody had to get a license to make a game until Nintendo came along.  With Atari, every game not published by Atari is technically unlicensed.  Also, looking through that list, it lists homebrews and bootlegs, which are not "unlicensed" games by definition.  An unlicensed game is a contemporary release for a system that was made without authorization from the console's producer but is otherwise a legitimate release (no IP theft or anything like that).  The designation removes homebrews due to not being contemporary releases, and also removes bootlegs and pirates, because in those cases the program itself is illegally obtained.  The distinction is actually very easily made if you don't want to intentionally muddy the waters.

[the_wizard_666 | 1,325]

7 minutes ago, Dr. Morbis said:

I guess this all stems from me being around before most of these other people here started collecing and before retro gaming was "cool."  I started in '99, and I don't think I heard a single person refer to a "licensed set" of NES games until maybe 2009 or so?  I mean, it just wasn't a thing.  There was a master list, and yes, it had errors, but the US set was pretty much set at 776 or whatever it is, ending with Sunday Funday in 1995, with the only argument being whether or not to include Cheetahmen II, which seemed to have been Grandfathered in.

I guess when the new blood came along they saw things differently and wanted an easier way to claim a complete set or something.  The whole "licensed minus SE" is beyond ridiculous to me: either you're going for every US game or you're not.

Whatever people want to collect is cool, you gotta do you, but at the end of the day, the reason I stopped participating in this project is because it got away from it's fundamental and original defining purpose: can we beat every US NES game in a year?  I just can't get motivated to get behind a project with a goal of hitting a 90% bar when I know those other games are out there.  And yeah, the Color Dreams and AVE stuff sucks, but almost every Tengen and Camerica game is at least average, if not a lot better, so the whole "unlicensed games suck" schtick just doesn't work with me.  In fact, pound for pound, unlicensed probably has a better good to bad ratio than the licensed set; think about it: the two best publishers made over half the games!  You can't say that about the licensed stuff.

Anyway, I'll take a peek at the new thread on December 31 and see what the parameters are, but at this point, I sure ain't holding my breath...

I feel ya man...I just don't understand collectors these days...

[bronzeshield | 293]

42 minutes ago, the_wizard_666 said:

Unlicensed didn't exist before the NES because nobody had to get a license to make a game until Nintendo came along.  With Atari, every game not published by Atari is technically unlicensed. 

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that, beginning with the Atari vs. Activision lawsuit that was ultimately settled. Different companies had different relationships to Atari and not all were adversarial, and trying to compare it to the NES era is a bit apples vs. oranges, which was my point.

Meanwhile, both Atari and Mattel took countermeasures against third-party developers that predated the NES -- Atari, by including a checksum system in their 7800 console; Mattel, by modifying their EXEC in a way designed to screw over Coleco.

42 minutes ago, the_wizard_666 said:

Also, looking through that list, it lists homebrews and bootlegs, which are not "unlicensed" games by definition.  An unlicensed game is a contemporary release for a system that was made without authorization from the console's producer but is otherwise a legitimate release (no IP theft or anything like that).  The designation removes homebrews due to not being contemporary releases, and also removes bootlegs and pirates, because in those cases the program itself is illegally obtained.  The distinction is actually very easily made if you don't want to intentionally muddy the waters.

Yes, I'm well aware of the shortcomings of the TCRF list! It wasn't posted as a definitive tally of the number of unlicensed releases (that's not what TCRF is trying to do anyway), but as evidence of the vast difference in scale between Famicom/NES unlicensed releases and other consoles.

As for homebrew vs. unlicensed vs. bootleg vs. pirate, I agree with you in principle, but in practice the distinction isn't always clear-cut. Some unlicensed Taiwanese releases for Mega Drive use stolen sound engines or other assets, for example, and yet the rest of the game is wholly original.

Meanwhile plenty of references count homebrews as unlicensed games. On the other hand, some deem any contemporary release that wasn't sold at retail as a "homebrew", even if a few copies were sold door-to-door. We see several cases of that with the Atari 2600 library, and other consoles like the Bally Astrocade and ColecoVision are affected too.

In any event, no one is trying to "intentionally muddy the waters", so let's not take that tack. But I'm honestly curious: are you and @Dr. Morbis willing to commit to beating a large number of unlicensed games if we were to resume doing them in 2022?

[bronzeshield | 293]

1 hour ago, Dr. Morbis said:

I guess this all stems from me being around before most of these other people here started collecing and before retro gaming was "cool."  I started in '99, and I don't think I heard a single person refer to a "licensed set" of NES games until maybe 2009 or so?  I mean, it just wasn't a thing.  There was a master list, and yes, it had errors, but the US set was pretty much set at 776 or whatever it is, ending with Sunday Funday in 1995, with the only argument being whether or not to include Cheetahmen II, which seemed to have been Grandfathered in.

I started in 1999 too -- or arguably in the late 1980s, since I still have my collection from that period and never got rid of it (I still play on my childhood NES, though now with a Blinking Light Win).

1999 was my first self-consciously "retro" purchase, a copy of Captain Comic I bought on Ebay. At that point I wasn't thinking about "complete sets", just buying games I wanted -- and especially games that hadn't been dumped properly (there wasn't a good dump of Captain Comic at the time) or didn't work on emulators.

But I was definitely aware of the difference between licensed and unlicensed games. It was pretty obvious in a variety of ways, starting with the carts themselves. The cart list printout that Nintendo put out didn't have Tengen, Camerica, or Color Dreams games on it, and I think some of the magazines I read talked about the issue (not Nintendo Power obviously). The brief appearance of Tengen Tetris on the marketplace caught my attention -- did I actually play that version first, on a rental? Can't remember.

Getting Color Dreams carts to work on my system was frustrating as hell, and ultimately led me to do the 10NES mod in 1999 (if you can call it a mod, since I just cut a leg on the chip). So again, it never seemed like a subtle distinction -- it was pretty obvious that there were two categories of NES games, and one of them made you run into a lot more jank, as was obvious when I rented games like Silent Assault, Master Chu and Drunkard Hu, etc. (Actually I kinda liked Chu/Hu.)

[Dr. Morbis | 2,088]

16 minutes ago, bronzeshield said:

As for homebrew vs. unlicensed vs. bootleg vs. pirate, I agree with you in principle, but in practice the distinction isn't always clear-cut. Some unlicensed Taiwanese releases for Mega Drive use stolen sound engines or other assets, for example, and yet the rest of the game is wholly original.

You are honestly creating a ridiculous strawman and then knocking him down.  The list of US unlicensed games is pretty definitive (Cheetahmen II being the outlier).  Unless you get a time machine, you're not going to be able to make any new NES unlicensed games within the contemporary 1985-1995 time period.  So please stop lumping them in with pirate/homebrew/taiwanese/whatever garbage and using that as an excuse as to why unlicensed games can't be included.  Your argument is laughable!

Do you really need me to list the US unlicensed games for you?  There are less than a hundred, so it doesn't really add all that much to the total library.  Better yet, check out the first couple years of this project when the complete US library was properly listed and you'll find them all in there - no need for separate lists and separate points and all that garbage - just put the games back in the full list where they belong and change the thread title back to its original iteration and we'll see if VGS can beat every NES game in a year.  Easy, peasy, Japanesy!!!

And yes, I would pound out a bunch of unlicensed titles in the first three months, but once the weekly NES Contest started in March, that will probably become my focus for most of the rest of the year...

[the_wizard_666 | 1,325]

I can't commit to beating the games, but I can definitely commit to the attempt.  I'm always looking to play new games, but revisiting some old favourites would be welcome as well. 

[bronzeshield | 293]

19 minutes ago, Dr. Morbis said:

You are honestly creating a ridiculous strawman and then knocking him down.

My point was simply that the NES has a unusual situation, both in terms of the huge proportion of unlicensed releases that made it to North American retail and, more generally, the uncountable amount of unauthorized software that's been put out for the Famicom.

No other console comes close, except maybe the Game Boy family -- but most of those GB/GBC/GBA games didn't make it to US retail. (The Atari 2600 is sort of a different situation; I'm not sure if anyone has spelled out, publisher by publisher, exactly what agreements Atari had with each of them if any.)

By the way, there are some pretty sweet Taiwanese games for the Mega Drive -- I wouldn't dismiss them all as "garbage". Beggar Prince, Water Margin, Brave Battle Saga, Super Bubble Bobble MD, all offer a good time in varying degrees.

Anyway, great that you and @the_wizard_666 are willing to step up to the plate if and when unlicensed games come back!

Edited December 18, 2021 by bronzeshield

[the_wizard_666 | 1,325]

My thinking is this - looking at my first-time completions list, I had the following in 2017:

US 202. Caesar's Palace (January 5, 2017)
US 203. Capcom's Gold Medal Challenge (March 5, 2017)
US 204. Genghis Khan (March 17, 2017)
US 205. Nobunaga's Ambition (March 22, 2017)
US 206. Gemfire (June 28, 2017)
US 207. Incredible Crash Dummies, The (September 16, 2017)

Based on having three Koeis on there, I can safely assume that this was the year @Dr. Morbis was focusing on Koei as well...unless I'm mistaken, he knocked off all 9 that year.  Can't tell me that wouldn't have been a huge boon to the effort, possibly changing the landscape in December and possibly even preventing failure.  Also, I had huge gaps - usually what I would do when I wanted to play a game was to look at the list of remaining games and pick something from that.  Without the list, my gaming output dropped significantly - in fact, US 208 wasn't added until January 3, 2021, when I knocked off Overlord; and there wasn't even an entry on my list (I track PAL, Famicom and Homebrew as separate entries chronologically) until December 2020.  So basically, without this thread, my interest in actually completing games seriously declined.  I was definitely still playing them, but I didn't care enough to actually beat them.  So even if nothing else was a factor, I want unlicensed back so that I have another resource to pick a game to play

EDIT: For comparison, my first time completions from 2016:

US 170. Silent Service (January 1, 2016)
US 171. Soccer (January 1, 2016)
US 172. Krazy Kreatures (January 1, 2016)
US 173. Wall Street Kid (January 7, 2016)
US 174. NES Play Action Football (January 9, 2016)
US 175. Defender of the Crown (January 10, 2016)
US 176. Bandit Kings of Ancient China (January 10, 2016)
US 177. Casino Kid (January 13, 2016)
US 178. Romance of the Three Kingdoms (January 19, 2016)
US 179. Rad Racket: Deluxe Tennis (January 23, 2016)
US 180. Where's Waldo (January 30, 2016)
US 181. S.C.A.T. (January 31, 2016)
US 182. Classic Concentration (February 1, 2016)
US 183. Wild Gunman (September 18, 2016)
US 184. Faria (September 21, 2016)
US 185. Ice Hockey (September 26, 2016)
US 186. Anticipation (September 26, 2016)
US 187. Double Dare (September 27, 2016)
US 188. Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (September 27, 2016)
US 189. Darkman (October 2, 2016)
US 190. Pictionary (October 2, 2016)
US 191. Rollerblade Racer (October 2, 2016)
US 192. Shooting Range (October 8, 2016)
US 193. Swords & Serpents (No Death Run, October 15, 2016)
US 194. Friday the 13th (November 17, 2016)
US 195. Hatris (November 18, 2016)
US 196. Cyberball (November 19, 2016)
US 197. Pinball Quest (November 19, 2016)
US 198. Dragon Warrior (November 23, 2016)
US 199. Win, Lose or Draw (November 25, 2016)
US 200. Castlequest (November 28, 2016)
US 201. Xenophobe (December 31, 2016)

This is in addition to old favourites that got played through as well.  This is just my first-time completions.

Edited December 18, 2021 by the_wizard_666