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Beat every Game Boy game - 2021 - 154/497


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I should have had this one done a couple nights ago, but I made a ton of stupid mistakes and tried to rush things.  Still, Bram Stoker's Dracula is done.

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The game is not good, but it's not absolutely terrible.  It suffers from a lot of the same pitfalls as other mediocre platformers: occasionally unresponsive controls, terrible and unfair enemy placement, unnecessary time mechanics. There are some good things, like the hidden areas that invite exploration (but the time limits and enemies and pits discourage), but most of what I enjoyed were the parts I could cheese or exploit (like the mid-level bosses where you can swing your sword non-stop and avoid damage). The boss patterns were super easy to deal with, including Dracula (although I think half of the bosses are him in some form)?  The backgrounds are okay looking. The music is annoying as all hell, and I wish there was a proper stage select. The manual says you can trigger it by pressing B while on the start option, but that doesn't work.  Mashing B after hitting start worked for me once to skip one level, and gamefaqs claims that it's a 1/60th of a second window to get that press in to move 1 level ahead.  Why even put it in the manual?  Anyway, it's a slog and Vampyre Vanquished.

I'm planning to try Quarth next, possibly as early as tomorrow.

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Welp...good news there on GBC thanks.  I'll do it, pretty sure at least as I've got a few dozen games to choose from.

I've not touched Switch for longer, but even Gameboy now for a few days just with too much going on.  My kid has some issues, so she's a handful and right now trying to make her learn(memorize) a small 3rd grade speech has been hell so I'm too tired to give a crap.

I will help you expand the Japanese import list on this site.  I broke into using yahoo japan auctions using a broker service, and given how their normal mail service is shut down due to the f'n virus, I had to go with a courier (DHL was cheapest) and my package is taking all of like 3 days to get here from I think Hokkaido.  I grabbed it for 2 specific games, but the more I've been plugging away at the small image they used I'm seeing some quality gems I'll want to take a stab at, and if i can finish them I'll submit.  My goodies should arrive on Friday according to the updates I'm being sent.

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Editorials Team · Posted

I beat Super Battletank. I beat the NES one last year, and I thought "wow, the NES one is way harder!" and I was right, this one feels ridiculous in comparison. It's basically the same game, except in this one, you rarely get fired at by an enemy, and thus very rarely take damage. Your tank has 6 hit points, and losing 2 before getting to a supply depot is a big deal! In the NES one, you have to ration those hit points verrrrry carefully.

Anyway, it took a little longer than I was expecting, so I countered it with the very-short Mr. Chin's Gourmet Paradise. It just loops, but here's me at level 1 with lots of points. Or, uh, KCAL.

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  • The title was changed to Beat every Game Boy game - 2021 - 54/497

Tried Quarth for a bit tonight and I am absolutely terrible at it so far.  I was trying to go in order to get acquainted and then decided to at least try 3-9.  Yikes!

Question for those that have gone through it before on GB, when I pass 3-9 and get to move on to level 4, do you get to restart on level 4 on a game over, or will I need to do all of 3-9 through 5-9 on one life?

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Editorials Team · Posted
40 minutes ago, Floating Platforms said:

Tried Quarth for a bit tonight and I am absolutely terrible at it so far.  I was trying to go in order to get acquainted and then decided to at least try 3-9.  Yikes!

Question for those that have gone through it before on GB, when I pass 3-9 and get to move on to level 4, do you get to restart on level 4 on a game over, or will I need to do all of 3-9 through 5-9 on one life?

As soon as you reach any new level past 3-9, you can die all you want and restart at those later levels. Just don't turn off the GB.

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Just finished up Final Fantasy Adventure. I've been wanting to play this game for 20+ years, but never ended up buying it for the Game Boy. I grabbed the Collection of Mana on sale for the Switch a couple of weeks ago, and was finally able to play it. It's a solid game. I think I enjoyed it more than I did its GBA remake.

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So what's all this about JP games? Is the list going to expand once more?

 

Oh, and I've been messing around with All-Star Baseball a bit more before bed lately, just trying to get a feel for it. It's definitely going to be a challenge. It and Roger Clemens are gonna give me a run for my money!

I will have more to say about Nobunaga's Ambition once the manual arrives. The blessed post is delivering in about 1-2 weeks presently. I know nothing about Koei games except that they are dense, so I am excited to get into it.

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18 hours ago, Tantalus said:

Just finished up Final Fantasy Adventure. I've been wanting to play this game for 20+ years, but never ended up buying it for the Game Boy. I grabbed the Collection of Mana on sale for the Switch a couple of weeks ago, and was finally able to play it. It's a solid game. I think I enjoyed it more than I did its GBA remake.

That's because it IS better than the GBA game. Sword of Mana has some serious flow and boredom problems they try and cover up with the classic angle of ear and eye candy to distract you.  FFA though, it's limited by the hardware so it has to really sell it on what matters, how it plays and plays well (audio visual) to the system limits and does it as nice if not in ways better than Zelda did back then.

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22 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

That's because it IS better than the GBA game. Sword of Mana has some serious flow and boredom problems they try and cover up with the classic angle of ear and eye candy to distract you.  FFA though, it's limited by the hardware so it has to really sell it on what matters, how it plays and plays well (audio visual) to the system limits and does it as nice if not in ways better than Zelda did back then.

I haven't played through Sword of Mana since it first came out, so I didn't want to say anything too definitively about it. I appreciate FFA's brevity as I remember Sword of Mana being too long and stretched out without being interesting enough to compensate. Good to know that my memory serves correct here.

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17 hours ago, koifish said:

I will have more to say about Nobunaga's Ambition once the manual arrives. The blessed post is delivering in about 1-2 weeks presently. I know nothing about Koei games except that they are dense, so I am excited to get into it.

I beat this one in 2016 (it's actually the only Game Boy game I own CIB). It's a decent way to get your introduction to Koei. It's a pretty stripped-down version -- kind of a mashup of the first two Nobunaga games, as I understand it -- but it's quite playable.

It's kind of a bastard on Hard but still beatable, especially if you're willing to save-scum and exploit the AI's shortcomings. I found it helpful to keep extensive handwritten notes on who everyone was and their stats, since otherwise it gets confusing!

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  • The title was changed to Beat every Game Boy game - 2021 - 55/497

Nobunaga's Ambition is completed. I took over Japan on the easiest difficulty. Once I got my head around the game, I think it got reasonable. I had to understand manipulating the markets on rice and men, as well as how to get money to build the Empire up. In the end there was just me and Honganji, but the latter seems to hav willfully self-sabotaged in the name of making me win; they went from a massive force defending them to having almost no troops or rice. At that point I just took them to war and waited for them to starve to death. Sounds gruesome but that's war, baby!
Speaking of war, I'm making gains on big hurt baseball. The manual taught me how to hit and now I'm poppin off my way through the playoffs. Hopefully I will be spinning a win there in the next few weeks.

 

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I'm bummed by Frank Thomas. I thought the password you got when you quit a game mid-way was to continue at that point in the game; Instead, it's a password to return to the same place in a season/playoff/etc, but it seems that you lose the game you were in automatically! I guess the password was made to save progress pre-season, but when you do it in the playoffs it means you just lose whatever game you're in and start over. Kind of annoying to have to do games all at one time, but so it goes. The fielding makes the game end quickly; It does not feel much like an offensively oriented baseball game (as opposed to Extra Bases and Bases Loaded).

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Level 4-9 of Quarth is kicking my butt.  I've taken time to map out the level and look for opportunities for power-ups and I found a couple good opportunities early on to get a stop-time and a clear the board (lightning) right away.  I've been two or three lines away a couple times but keep making really dumb mistakes.  I'm going to give it another try tomorrow to see if I can break through, but if 5-8 and 5-9 are even harder than this, then it might be a while.

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Editorials Team · Posted
3 hours ago, Floating Platforms said:

Level 4-9 of Quarth is kicking my butt.  I've taken time to map out the level and look for opportunities for power-ups and I found a couple good opportunities early on to get a stop-time and a clear the board (lightning) right away.  I've been two or three lines away a couple times but keep making really dumb mistakes.  I'm going to give it another try tomorrow to see if I can break through, but if 5-8 and 5-9 are even harder than this, then it might be a while.

Quarth, man. You can tell the difference between people who have played a couple of levels and those who have tried to get to 5-9 because of how they talk about the game. It's either "that's a surprisingly fun game! A hidden gem!" or it's "That game is a beast." I'm rooting for you.

Well, I've fallen way behind this week, I didn't have time for any games at all until tonight. I have 7 days to finish 15 games. I'm going to realllly start pulling out the cheesy wins, lol.

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Something else I wanted to comment on, regarding big hurt, is that I think the manual might be off on some things. The booklet says, for example, that you press start button plus a direction to steal bases. When I do that, however, it just opens the pause menu. I may be mis-remembering, and need to recheck it, but it doesn't seem to work.

I've started to suspect that game boy was not a very important platform for this game, in the eyes of Acclaim anyway. It makes me wonder; Did certain games care more about the game gear when designing ports than they did our favorite grey brick? I am wondering that more as I see games, especially US games it seems, design themselves around a 3-button layout a la game gear's A/B/Start config, such as Jam, Mortal Kombat, and now (I suspect) Big Hurt and All-Star Baseball. The way the manual talks, it has me wondering if they copied in GameGear text by mistake. I've already seen one error in that it shows the wrong button for hunting in an image (even if it is the correct button in the text) and with how some of these games play, and with some idea in mind of how Sega's reputation was in the US (for sports especially), it has me wondering if there wasn't some general disinterest in better support for the GB versions of these games.

 

One other thing about Big Hurt, the dev company for this was RealTime Associates Seattle Division, which was founded by Steve Ettinger, whom if you are an intellivision fan, may stick out to you as the developer of Hover Tank, as well as lead programming on several of the later Intellivision sports games. It also appears that he programmed and/or led development on some other GB games of note to us, such as the fiendish Q-Bert release and the GBC version of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Things like these don't seem to come out much; Even for lauded individuals of the pre-NES days, it feels like the fans only really care about their work up until they finished developing for the treasured classic machines. I think there may be more interesting stories to be found if one were to look into it more.

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2 hours ago, koifish said:

Something else I wanted to comment on, regarding big hurt, is that I think the manual might be off on some things. The booklet says, for example, that you press start button plus a direction to steal bases. When I do that, however, it just opens the pause menu. I may be mis-remembering, and need to recheck it, but it doesn't seem to work.

I don't know why sports games always try to reinvent the wheel on the same hardware.... Why not keep it as holding the direction of the base you want to steal and hit the non-hitting button?

You were saying that Frank Thomas may be the same game, or backbone, as All-Star Baseball. I have the manual for both and they both say stealing is "hold Start and control pad," so if it's wrong, they didn't fix it however many years later for the "update".  The bunting diagram is fixed on All-Star. It shows and says A for bunting. B would check your swing.

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47 minutes ago, Floating Platforms said:

I don't know why sports games always try to reinvent the wheel on the same hardware.... Why not keep it as holding the direction of the base you want to steal and hit the non-hitting button?

You were saying that Frank Thomas may be the same game, or backbone, as All-Star Baseball. I have the manual for both and they both say stealing is "hold Start and control pad," so if it's wrong, they didn't fix it however many years later for the "update".  The bunting diagram is fixed on All-Star. It shows and says A for bunting. B would check your swing.

On one hand, I do like how the pitching is done off of a menu; It makes it less intensive than other games, plus you have way more pitch variety than in other GB baseball games I have played so far. That said, the batting is a bit strange to me.

Moreover, this game is weird in that B button, not A button, is the batting button. I have never seen this on any other GB Baseball game. This is part of why I wonder about the "intended platform", because if you look at a gamegear, the buttons are numbered 1 and 2 (I forgot this) and the left button is button 1. It would make sense if your button was button 1 that it would be the main button, and thus the batting button. Hence why I suspect that Acclaim cared more about a GG version than a GB version.

I tried to confirm that stealing base was with Start; I'm just having a damn hard time getting it to register. I think it's a specific setup you have to do in order to really make it work. Otherwise it just brings up the menu.

An issue like this when the system has four usable buttons really lends more credence to the idea that this was a GameGear title first, and a Game Boy title second. With that said, I actually decided to order a Game Gear to repair (for fun) so that I can check out the competition.

@Splain With how quiet our contest thread is, it would be funny to see how quiet a gamegear completion thread would be 😄

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Editorials Team · Posted

Hey, I've got a working Game Gear and a decent box of games! I'd love to explore those some more. But I agree, it would be a struggle to get any decent activity in that thread. Maybe someday though. Lots of overlap between the GB library and GG library.

Meanwhile I knocked out some EZPZ's: Casper, Mickey's Ultimate Challenge, and Wordtris (no ending screen) Gotta catch up!

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  • The title was changed to Beat every Game Boy game - 2021 - 60/497

Quarth is done!!!

Here is the sun celebrating the victory and giving a formal name to the ship I used in 5-9 that I lovingly called "Chubby Boy." Honestly, debatable as to which name is better.

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I may edit this with some notes and review comments later, but for now I need to calm down. My heart was racing and I'll probably have an adrenaline crash shortly.

My next game is currently planned to be Pipe Dream, unless @Splain happens to get his yearly playthrough done first. I'll likely start that Wed or Thursday night. I'll be doing movie stuff with the wife tomorrow.

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The only reason I have a Game Gear at all is because I bought this huge lot of Sega stuff off of Craigslist about 15 years ago (Genesis, CD, 32x, Saturn and nearly 200 games, I think) and that was part of the bundle. The only game the guy had was Columns and I've never bought a second cart for it.  So...I could maybe contribute Columns?

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4 hours ago, Floating Platforms said:

Quarth is done!!!

Here is the sun celebrating the victory and giving a formal name to the ship I used in 5-9 that I lovingly called "Chubby Boy." Honestly, debatable as to which name is better.

y4E85qG.png

I may edit this with some notes and review comments later, but for now I need to calm down. My heart was racing and I'll probably have an adrenaline crash shortly.

My next game is currently planned to be Pipe Dream, unless @Splain happens to get his yearly playthrough done first. I'll likely start that Wed or Thursday night. I'll be doing movie stuff with the wife tomorrow.

That face is the stuff of nightmares!

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