The 2022 Backlog Challenge

[Sumez | 2,961]

1 hour ago, Gloves said:

I bought a fight stick years ago to get a taste of arcade-like controls and found it took some getting used to.

I don't understand how people can put up with playing shooters on a D-pad. I mean, I can play them, but it feels to debilitating to play that way.  

Anyway speaking of arcade cabs and shmup PCBs, my next clear

Flying Shark - Cleared 2/2

My first of only two arcade clears I'd put on my list for this year.
I'm a little hesitant to dedicate myself to actually beating an arcade game for a challenge like this, because unlike most console games where getting through is mostly a question of dedicating the time, with many arcade games there's a real good chance you just won't be good enough to pull it off.

For Flying Shark, though, that really wasn't a threat. Of all the arcade shoot'em ups I've played this is honestly close to being one of the easiest ones.
Worth noting though, it's also one of the best! Flying Shark was Toaplan's third arcade shooter, and the game where I think they first really found their identity. Released as early as 1987, it's a seminal shoot'em up, eventually influencing other popular titles like the Raiden series, and a lot of ideas that would dominate the genre ever since. Hell, I could be wrong, but I think this might even be the earliest game with the ability to seal enemy bullets?

Although the game looks very pedestrian, and is all in all a very basic game, even for the genre, I think the minimalistic approach also really benefits the super tight design that carries it. You have one ship, one shot type, one movement speed, and most of your enemies are either ground tanks firing aimed sniper shots at regular intervals, or formations of enemy planes that will swoop down and potentially crash into you. There are a few others to mix things up, like turrets, larger planes or beefy mid-boss style tanks, but I think the former two are the primary ones that dictate the pace and feel of the entire game.

Get ready to spend most of your time sweeping left to right and back again in order to keep the ground and skies clean of anything that might snipe you, and if you change direction at the wrong moment and you'll immediately be toast. It's actually amazingly brilliant just how well balanced your plane's movement speed is compared to the action going on around it. There's a constant synergi to everything that happens like few other shooters have ever been able to demonstrate.
When I say the game is quite easy, the biggest reason for that is primarily how short it is, and the high amount of extra lives you can build up during that time, because the moment to moment gameplay still requires a decent amount of skill. Similar to one of the more notorious properties of the Gradius series, a death will mean reloading from a checkpoint and your ship reduced to base power. This means that unless you just choose to never die, a major part of the game is trying to recover from those deaths and get back to at least acceptable fighting power. Unlike Gradius however, these recoveries are all quite doable, especially with strategic usage of bombs, and in my opinion actually one of the most fun parts of the game.

Flying Shark is, simply put, one of the most exemplary demonstrations of basic vertical scrolling shooting gameplay when it is done as well as it can possibly be. Don't let the simple plain military theme fool you, once you play it you will quickly learn that this game has a lot of character, and learning how to deal with every stage is endlessly satisfying.
And for someone who may not be very good at shooters in general I think this game would also serve as a good introduction to the genre as well, considering a single-loop clear is definitely a very feasible achievement for anyone who sits down with the ambition to do it. Hell, if you have the drive to spend enough time with the game you could probably do it within a day, but I did fine spreading out my time across a few one-hour sessions.
 

 

Did my clear online on stream of course, so here's a link to the recording

The game gets a lot of fun on the second loop, so I'd love to sit down some time and do at least two loops of it, but as for now I have a lot of other stuff to play.

Edited April 25, 2022 by Sumez

[Gloves | 11,783]

2 minutes ago, Sumez said:

I don't understand how people can put up with playing shooters on a D-pad. I mean, I can play them, but it feels to debilitating to play that way.  

It's just what I grew up with. I didn't have the coins or access to arcades as a kid despite there still being some around, and I got really into shmups more around the PS2 era. I'd played and enjoyed games like Dino Riki and Zombie Nation but never really made the connection to the more traditional games in the shmup vein.

[MegaMan52 | 2,445]

Beat the Japanese version of Kirby 64: 

I got all of the Crystal Shards, defeated 0² (the true final boss), got the good ending, and beat the game 100%. I also unlocked the sound test and boss battle modes.

This took a little while, and I needed to look up walkthroughs for some of the Crystal Shards both because I couldn't find some of them and because sometimes I couldn't figure out exactly what abilities I needed to combine in order to reach some of the Shards.

By the way, file 1 and file 3 are from a Japanese player. I started file 2 from the beginning.

Edited April 26, 2022 by MegaMan52

[peg | 372]

4 hours ago, Sumez said:

I don't understand how people can put up with playing shooters on a D-pad. I mean, I can play them, but it feels to debilitating to play that way.

I find that the D-pad (at least the good ones, which are surprisingly rare to find) allow me to hit smaller movements much easier than the stick.  Even with a lot of practice on the stick and clearing a bunch of stuff I'm still finding that I generally just play better and make less mistakes using the d-pad.  This is especially true with bullet hell games that require lots of tight dodges and micro-adjustments.

 

I really wish it was the other way around and that I played better on the stick because I much prefer the "true arcade experience" but at the same time I also have a lot of goals that I'd like to meet, and using the stick just wasn't working for certain games (I'm looking at you DoDonPachi) and started to become a massive handicap.

 

Also, cool to see another player clearing some shmups on real hardware, we definitely need more of these types of videos and less WORLD OF SHITPLAYS.  Even on the shmups forum it seems to be extremely rare that people who own these PCBs actually play them let alone clear anything, let alone record said clears.

[Gloves | 11,783]

16 minutes ago, peg said:

I find that the D-pad (at least the good ones, which are surprisingly rare to find) allow me to hit smaller movements much easier than the stick.  Even with a lot of practice on the stick and clearing a bunch of stuff I'm still finding that I generally just play better and make less mistakes using the d-pad.  This is especially true with bullet hell games that require lots of tight dodges and micro-adjustments.

 

I really wish it was the other way around and that I played better on the stick because I much prefer the "true arcade experience" but at the same time I also have a lot of goals that I'd like to meet, and using the stick just wasn't working for certain games (I'm looking at you DoDonPachi) and started to become a massive handicap.

 

Also, cool to see another player clearing some shmups on real hardware, we definitely need more of these types of videos and less WORLD OF SHITPLAYS.  Even on the shmups forum it seems to be extremely rare that people who own these PCBs actually play them let alone clear anything, let alone record said clears.

I'd happily record and share my 1CC/1LC clears but I'm very much playing on console, and generally speaking on a very small screen (10" JVC CRT). Still though, no emulation, just ports - again space is my primary issue, else I'd be buying these things up and making my dream basement. T_T

[monkeybut625 | 39]

Finally beat Gears of War Judgement. It only took 9 years! Overall fun game, probably would’ve been better as a coop game but all in all I enjoyed it.

[Sumez | 2,961]

12 hours ago, Gloves said:

It's just what I grew up with. I didn't have the coins or access to arcades as a kid despite there still being some around, and I got really into shmups more around the PS2 era.

Though I messed around a bit in arcades as a kid, of course I also grew up with D-pads on various consoles. It has nothing to do with what I'm used to though, but the fact that diagonals just are immediately much more intuitive with a physical stick that actually moves in said direction.

If you're more comfortable with D-pads I think that's really good, it definitely makes playing a lot of games a lot more convenient, it's just that for challenging and heavily skill based games it feels really bad to me to play with even a slight disadvantage.

[ScaryD | 237]

Neutopia beaten. Someday I would like to play the 2nd one but the price is a little crazy.

[Sumez | 2,961]

1 hour ago, ScaryD said:

Someday I would like to play the 2nd one but the price is a little crazy.

Try Bomberman Tournament on GBA if you haven't. I know it sounds crazy based on the title, but it's actually secretly Neutopia 3.

[Sumez | 2,961]

On 4/26/2022 at 2:18 AM, peg said:

Also, cool to see another player clearing some shmups on real hardware, we definitely need more of these types of videos

ok

Out Zone - Cleared 22/2

The next arcade clear was a bigger surprise. I expected this game to put up a bigger challenge, but it's actually also not too bad.
I actually played Tatsujin between this and Flying Shark, making for three back-to-back arcade clears of popular Toaplan titles. I just hooked up the Tatsujin PCB to test some technical stuff and ended up having so much fun with it that I couldn't unplug it until I'd cleared the game, glad to finally have that one down as well.

Anyway, Out Zone, what a game.

In many people's opinion Toaplan's finest game, and for very good reasons. Depending on your definitions, it's not strictly a shmup as in it's not an autoscrolling game, but rather of the top-down run-n-gun variety, and absolutely one of the best examples of that sort of game.
In this game you have two basic weapons, a multi-directional laser, and a forward spreadshot that only fires upwards. You have no way to strafe while aiming, so I think the directional gun can be very cumbersome to use well, and is mostly utilized strategically for specific stage sections that benefit from it. Fortunately a single pickup will toggle between the two weapons, and is typically available before each new segment. There are also two randomly appearing special weapons, one of which is incredibly powerful, both as an offensive and defensive tool, restricted only by it's slightly limited range.
In order to keep the pace up, the game has a constantly draining power meter (similar to the life bar in Wonderboy/Adventure Island) which you need to refill with pickups spaced throughout each stage. You're usually not too pressed for time, but it ensures the game maintains the arcade momentum, never allowing you to waste time anywhere, and since you get periodic refills, you're never unsure of how far behind you are, as you would with a stage-long timer. It's a simple system, but it works brilliantly.

The game is extremely creatively designed, constantly throwing new fun setpieces at you, which utilize both unique enemy behaviors and stage layout in ways that gel really well with the player controlled scrolling and run-n-gun style gameplay. And oh yeah, the soundtrack absolutely slaps!
I played this on my own PCB which uses the ROM set which mame apparently labels as the "harder" version. Enemies are a lot more aggressive earlier on especially, but overall this version isn't hard at all, and IMO another relatively easy arcade clear. Once the M2 port finally comes out next year, I'm really curious which ROM version it will go with as the default.
If it wasn't obvious, Out Zone comes absolutely recommended.

Here's my first clear, though I have done many since then:

 

Edited April 27, 2022 by Sumez

[T-Pac | 7,552]

Update: I beat Airlock [Atari 2600] on expert-difficulty for both single-player variations.

Airlock doesn't have a great reputation among Atari enthusiasts, but I really enjoy it. Then again, I'm always into simple, easy-to-master games.
It's like Donkey Kong, but the platforms flood sequentially every 10 seconds and there's no scoring.

-CasualCart

[Sumez | 2,961]

Elden Ring - Beaten 5/3 (100%/all trophies on 10/3)

Immediately after beating Elden Ring once, I went through the second and third NG+ loops to get every ending required for PS4 trophies. And after doing that I went through the game on level 1 without leveling up.
This is a really good game.

Edited April 28, 2022 by Sumez

[Webhead123 | 676]

23 hours ago, CasualCart said:

Update: I beat Airlock [Atari 2600] on expert-difficulty for both single-player variations.

Airlock doesn't have a great reputation among Atari enthusiasts, but I really enjoy it. Then again, I'm always into simple, easy-to-master games.
It's like Donkey Kong, but the platforms flood sequentially every 10 seconds and there's no scoring.

Interesting. I don't think I've even paid any attention to this one before. Then again, I haven't really been close to the Atari scene in a long time. These days, I usually just scroll through a great big list of roms on Stella and randomly pick a title with an interest-sounding name.

[Floating Platforms | 718]

Finished Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon yesterday.

I typically plan to 100% my games, but I'm not really interested in doing that here.  The Scarescraper is multiplayer and I rarely do that for any game (I'm a solo or couch co-op only kind of guy), so that means I can't catch all the ghost types. Plus, getting 3 star rankings on every level sounds like an unbelievably obnoxious time-sink of a chore as you could play nearly flawlessly and still get 2 stars if you missed a single treasure or took one hit or maybe spent a bit more time looking for said treasure. Since the game doesn't tell you what the requirements are, I'd be playing some 20 minute levels multiple times until the 3-star hit. No thanks. I did get all the boos and all the gems and did play all the story levels, at least.

Overall, I wasn't into this game for a long time. I started this file years ago and it didn't "suck me in." I would put it down for months and then come back to try another level and felt the same way so it sat for several more months while I played something else. I put it on my backlog list to force myself to finally get through the thing.  The levels are a bit too long for a portable experience in my opinion and the first couple locations aren't that interesting to look around.  The last levels were a lot better and had unique rooms and a better vibe.  I also don't like the slow reaction times while fighting multiple ghosts. While trying to pull one in, I can see the other ghost getting ready to attack, but there's not a ton of reaction time to actually avoid it due to Luigi's scooby-doo run in place momentum and the long animation times of stopping the vacuum.  It also didn't seem like my flashlight was connecting properly with ghosts all the time. My angle looked good but the light whiffed and I get hit.

So yeah, exploring was fun later on. I never played the GameCube one (don't own it), and haven't played 3 (do own that), so I can't compare this to either.  Based on what I know of 3's setting, I might like that better due to the different themes of the hotel. I might give it a shot next year.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,535]

I think 3 is the best game by a decent margin.

[Matchbook | 194]

Been working through FFVI on GBA.  It's been great and I can't wait to finish it once again.  First play through on GBA

[twiztor | 851]

4 hours ago, Floating Platforms said:

Finished Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon yesterday.

I never played the GameCube one (don't own it), and haven't played 3 (do own that), so I can't compare this to either.  Based on what I know of 3's setting, I might like that better due to the different themes of the hotel. I might give it a shot next year.

 

2 hours ago, Reed Rothchild said:

I think 3 is the best game by a decent margin.

personally, i thought 2 was the best, but the themed floors of 3 do give you more variety. 

[Sumez | 2,961]

Yakuza: Like a Dragon - Beaten 27/3 (Final Millennium Tower beaten on 1/4)

When I played Yakuza 4 as my first game in the series last year, this game was already out. I knew the latest title was a turn based "RPG", and honestly I could tell that it would be a good fit for the series right away, especially given all the previous games already use dedicated encounter scenes for all combat.

Right off the bat I was a little let down. I'd expected more wackiness from this game, but the storytelling starting out is very standard Yakuza, just with a new (and generally less capable) protagonist. In fact, the game is a really really slow start, making you play through what essentially amounts to three separate "intro" sections across several hours, before it finally opens up and lets you roam the city. At this point the story also takes a massive twist, as the protagonist finds a "magical" baseball bat stuck in the ground. He lifts it and proclaims himself a legendary hero. And from that moment on, the enemies he fights all transform into wacky parodies of themselves in his mind, and of course that is what you see in the game, resulting in a much more colorful experience than what it initially starts out as. 
In a similar amusing twist, the game lampshades the combat with him being a nice enough guy to stand around and wait for enemies to take their turn to go up and hit him, because he's a big fan of the Dragon Quest games. Dragon Quest is referenced by name multiple times throughout the story, as well as with several in-game jokes and mechanics. Your character classes are "jobs" that you assign by going to the job center to pick a new job, and in an alleyway somewhere in the game you will find an unconscious body with the description: "No response, it's just a drunk." Dragon Quest fans will get it, and I'm glad the translation team did so too.

As Yakuza fans will know, or just anyone who read my writeup on Yakuza 6, the biggest strength in these games comes from the amount of ridiculous stuff you can run around to do just to pass the time, rather than advancing the story. And Like A Dragon is just shock full of that. From kart racing and golfing, to trying to stay awake watching boring movies, completing quests from a hero-for-hire agency, as well as helping random people around Yokohama or completing a "sujidex" for the "sujimon professor". You can spend HOURS on this game and not get anywhere, and although it's hard to argue any of it is good game design, it's impossible for me not to love it. Yakuza: Like a Dragon is the essence of the most enjoyable aspects of any Yakuza game, and the only thing it falls behind on compared to Yakuza 0 is the, once again, quite weak story.

[Sumez | 2,961]

Bug Fables - Beaten 9/4

Hey you. Yeah, you! Do you like the classic Paper Mario games? Then you absolutely need to play Bug Fables.
And you! The other person who thinks the classic Paper Mario games aren't great, but feel they could have changed some things to make for better games. Yeah, you need to play Bug Fables too, because it does exactly that.

The Paper Mario comparison is just unavoidable, Bug Fables wears it on its skin. Right down to the paper cutout style characters, and the minimalistic combat dealing with miniscule damage numbers, or the character customization based on equipping medals that switch around certain mechanics.
It basically elaborates on the elements that were ditched after the first two Paper Mario games, and a lot of fans lament missing ever since. On the other hand, what the game doesn't try to replicate is the wacky self-deprecating humor, an element that the later Paper Mario games only managed to scale up and massively excel at as time went on. In its place, however, Bug Fables still manages to craft an endearing cute world populated with likable bugs of all types. A sandbox becomes a massive desert, and a fridge becomes a gigantic frozen tower. It's great.

Right when the game starts, a character will give you a "Hard Mode" medal which costs nothing to equip. The incentive is that beating battles with it equipped will earn additional EXP, and beating major bosses will qualify you for additional medals to your collection. The EXP gain doesn't matter much though, as every level you gain will drastically reduce that amount anyway, so you really just get the same levels a bit earlier. And the boss rewards can always be achieved later on with the system to engage in refights. However, despite this I absolutely recommend equipping the Hard Mode medal right away, and then never looking back. The combat system in this game is just brilliant, and much better than Paper Marios 64 or TTYD, and when every fight is challenging, utilizing your options just becomes a lot more satisfying.

One of the defining factors of the combat is how your base damage output or defense never changes outside of a very tiny couple of items you can get very late in the game, and you never get to equip your characters with progressively better gear either. As such, the numbers will always stay low enough that any modifier you can apply to allow you to either block or deal just ONE additional HP of damage can have very massive consequences. You are stuck with the same three characters throughout the entire game, and every round of combat allows you to change their order without using up any actions. You can also choose to delegate each character's action to a different character with a one HP performance penalty. Choosing who gets to take which action from which position in every round is just as integral, especially when different attacks have different properties, such as piercing defense, or hitting enemies in the air.
In general, I have rarely seen a turn based RPG with as well balanced an economy as this game. Everything from the cost of items, your inventory limit, the available "magic points", damage count, and abilities from medals just sync up perfectly to the point where you can never afford to ignore any single factor in the game. Every decision you make in combat is as important as how well prepared you are for dealing with the next boss encounter.

On top of that, the world exploration is consistently satisfying, with a nice platforming metagame full of progression puzzles and hidden items that require properly utilizing each character's overworld skills. Honestly, I can't really think of any single good reason why every turn based RPG shouldn't have a similar platformer style overworld, it just makes every town and every dungeon feel so much more engaging.
Bug Fables is one of the best games I've played of its style, and I'm very thankful to whoever recommended me this game some years back. It definitely transcends being just a Paper Mario tribute, and becomes completely its own thing. I'm looking forward to whatever the developers are planning on doing next.

Edited April 30, 2022 by Sumez

[Sumez | 2,961]

We are almost caught up now!

Uncharted 3 - Beaten 19/4

I fully knew what to expect going into Uncharted 3, but even then it's kinda hard for me to fully accept. As expected, coming from the previous two Uncharted games, the third game is basically the exact same formula. Go on an Indiana Jones'y adventure across a continuously switching setting between climbing clearly marked ledges and murdering hundreds of dudes from behind cover.
To switch things up a little more, this game adds an incredibly poorly implemented fist fighting component. This comes across either as an annoying alternative approach for individual enemies during a gunfight, which is very likely to get you killed, or via a small number of dedicated sequences where you have to punch dudes until you get to continue. These sequences are always the same, and the incredibly simplistic and hard-to-mess-up implementation means all of these feel like nothing more than a boring waste of time.

As with the previous games, the climbing setpieces are the most entertaining parts of the game, but since it essentially just involves following a dotted line, it pretty much requires the shooting sequences spaced out between them to avoid going stale.
But this is also the biggest issue of the game - I can't believe it's been over 12 years since I played Uncharted 2, so forgive me if I don't remember it well, and maybe am cutting it more slack than it deserves, but I seem to recall that game being a fantastic demonstration of well paced game design. There's a constant switch-up of different kinds of action, interspersed with calm moments where you just walk around and chill, resulting in the player never really getting fed up with one element before they move on to the next - something that was a pretty massive improvement over the extremely repetitive first game, and made me seriously appreciate the sequel despite not feeling that any individual gameplay aspect was particularly exciting.

Uncharted 3 does not fare as well, not by a long shot. The shooting segments are frustrating, and all drag on for much longer than they need to. Enemies take way - WAY - too many hits to kill, and once you kill them, new ones keep showing up with no indication of how close you are to eradicating them all. And more often than not, one elongated shooting segment just leads right into another one in the very next area, which really wore me out in certain places.
The game does try to mix up things a little by having more places where enemies show up to try and shoot you while you are doing the climbing stuff, and I do think that works quite well - in fact it probably should have been the more common usage of the shooting gameplay, but it doesn't change the fact that the dedicated shooting portions take up way too much space.
Outside of the pacing, of course the larger issue here is that the shooting segments just aren't very good. Some of the basic mechanics are fine, but effectively the game is either tedious (waiting for AI to pop out behind cover) or challenging in non-satisfying ways. Usually to make things harder, enemies will move around the area and try to shoot  at you from all directions to avoid being able to just camp out in a single safe space. But this means that in order to successfully cover all directions you kinda need to know ahead of time where the problematic enemies are going to show up, to avoid entirely unwinnable scenarios, or getting shot without knowing what hit you.

This is an approach that governs the majority of the game's design. As a primarily cinematic and narrative driven game, almost everything you do as a player is a matter of guessing what the game is implying that it wants you to do, and then doing it. It doesn't matter if it looks like you can make the jump, if the game wants you to do it, you'll make it. While doing other things that do appear feasible will just result in instant failure. I think this abstraction from the perceived game world makes the game in general feel incredibly brittle. If you at any time try to approach it as a video game, it falls apart immediately, and that even translates into many of the shooting segments, which feel super frustrating as a result.

That said, one aspect where Uncharted 3 does follow up from its predecessor nicely is in the massive impressive action setpieces with incredible locations like a burning castle, a crashing plane, or a high seas pirate chase followed by a sinking ocean liner. All of this is amazingly well done, and what essentially makes the game possibly worth experiencing. In terms of the "gameplay" though, I'm glad it didn't last more than a couple of days to play through. I am never going to return to this, and I am glad I didn't put Uncharted 4 on my list as well. 

[Matchbook | 194]

Final Fantasy VI Advance - Complete 5/1/22

I finally finished this game after starting it a couple of years ago.  I had played through most of the game as a kid during the SNES era but never quite beat it on my own.  I did with my dad's saved data.  After multiple play through attempts spanning decades, I eventually gave the GBA version a shot.  I went through half the game ( to the World of Ruin) on a GBA and then came the Retron 5.  I finished it up on the Retron 5 on the big screen and loved it.  Also after all these years of talking about it being one of my favorite games ever, my wife could finally hang out and watch me play and enjoy it with me. 

I made a couple errors along the way, leaving the floating island without waiting for Shadow, which I had to finish the 2nd half of the game without him.  I also didn't have Mog in my party when I went on to get Midgarsormr Esper, which would of allowed me to play with Umaro the rest of the game.  I did however make a save point before beating the floating island so when I come around to do another play through, I can pick up with that save point and do a run through with Shadow and Umaro, the latter I have never played with.

It took me about 60 hours to complete.  I probably could of done it in about 45 hours but, once I got ready to go to Kefka's tower, I decided to level grind in the desert getting every character from the low 40's to  around 64-70.  This allowed everyone in my party to learn Ultima which was the nuke that ended Kefka's pathetic life.  A good strategy to mop up all the bosses in the tower is to get all your characters to learn Ultima and Quick.  Using Quick will allow the user to have two turns, combining that with Soul of Thamasa relic (allows user to cast two magic spells back to back) and you can really do some damage.  Cast Quick and Ultima, then because you get another turn you can cast two more Ultima spells.  This kinda locks the enemy down since they have to wait for your turn to end.  So you can just repeat this on most characters. I will come back to the game and defeat the Dragons Den which is unlocked after beating the game.  Also there are a couple Espers that I still havent seen.

Final Fantasy VI Advance didn't let me down, adding some new Espers and extra areas to the original SNES version. I will continue to call it my favorite Final Fantasy game in the series.  Now, on to Breath of Fire, a new experience for me.

Edited May 2, 2022 by Matchbook
add info and pics

[Reed Rothchild | 9,535]

It's that time:

@Reed Rothchild 6/15
Xenoblade 2 and Breath of the Wild are already done.  Because I cheated and did most of it in previous years.  But Metal Warriors has destroyed me.  Konami is gonna humble me 2 straight years.

@Gloves 2/18
Doug beat 2 games in the first 4 days.  He has beat zero since.  I'm not sure he's even played one.  Boo Doug.

@Renmauzo 10/16
Probably the candidate most likely to finish his list the quickest (edit: that aged well).  He's already knocked out all of the big bad JRPGs.  Except for maybe Nexzr.  I don't know what that is.

@peg 4/19
Pretty far off pace, but every one of his clears is harder than everyone else's.  He's a machine.

@0xDEAFC0DE 1/41
Beat a game on 1/5, and has been MIA since.  Which is too bad considering how much he killed it last year.  Someone ban him from Survivor and Werewolf.

@Californication 2/22
...and he didn't do himself any favors with such a brutal list.

@ifightdragons 17/37
Is this the highest count so far?  Because it's pretty impressive.  He's almost beat as many GBA games in 4 months as I've beat in my entire life.

@Jeevan 3/10
...and he beat all 3 of those on 1/1.  And he doesn't like Ogre Battle.  We're no longer friends.

@Sumez 10/47
Can he do it?  I think he can.  Most of it seems manageable.  Plus he writes novels about them.  Double win.

@fox 7/26
Though it could be fewer titles, depending on shifting release dates.  And he's retired more than a few.  Though I did the same thing, so who am I to judge?  I'm guessing he gets through the entire list, one way or another.

@Brickman 3/12
Seems super do-able.  Not too many timesinks left.  But will he ever finish that Persona Strikers game... probably not.  Every Persona game is FUCKING ENDLESS.

@ThePhleo ??/??
Joseph chose to go avant-garde with his list.  So who even knows what's happening!  But last year he swooped in with like 50 clears at some point, so I trust his process.

@DoctorEncore 6/24
Doc initially had a goal of beating 5 games in a year.  He's done that both times now.  I'd call that a success.

@spacepup 0/11
Maybe he slabbed all of these $$$ games and said to hell with a backlog.  Or his stable of dogs cut off access to his game room.

@FireHazard51 0/22
This was a bold goal considering last year's meager results.

@RH 0/7
RH by his own admission has never beat a game, so I'm pretty sure he's just trolling us.

@Mr. CIB 0/0
Some say he's still out there, honing that list.

@darkchylde28 4/14
May have set some sort of record for number of games being played simultaneously.

@Webhead123 2/14
The only thing that matters is beating Final Fantasy III.

@ScaryD 0/16
Killed it last year.  Maybe he just hasn't updated it?  Maybe it's not about the games beaten, but the game friends we make along the way.  I'm paraphrasing like 10,000 redditors there.

@Murray 0/10
Has been playing Persona 3 since roughly 1/1.  To be fair, I played Persona 3 for like 80 hours and I still haven't beat it either.

@MagusSmurf 3/25
The only list where I don't know a bunch of the the titles.  I assume this is a tall task.

@Jicsan 1/12
Only 4 months behind!

@monkeybut625 2/12
I feel like it's still do-able.  3 long ones left, but the rest aren't too bad.  Or maybe Halo Wars 2 is a 50 hour game.  Fuck if I know.

@SailorScoutMandy 0/6
...and they're all like a million hours each.  Good luck with that!

@drxandy 0/2 I think?
90 hours into Bravely Default II and it's not cleared?  You're telling me that's a 100+ hour game?  How the hell am I ever gonna find the time to beat Bravely Default, Bravely Second, and Bravely Default II, so that I can then try to get to Octopath and Triangle Strategy and Live a Live and...

@Floating Platforms 6/30
Well, most of the games in this list are awesome, so you've got that going for you.

@Kguillemette 0/17
At some point you have to reset your expectations.  Lower the bar.  Like my boss and my wife/boss do with me on a daily basis.

@Splain 0/6
I'm not gonna say anything, because this poor guy has proofread like 700 of my SNES thingies.  I'm surprised he has time to do anything else.

@CasualCart 10/6
This year's Doc Encore.  Set the expectations in the basement.  And then shatter them in a matter of weeks.

@MegaMan52 6/64
Go big or go home.

@twiztor 5/8
I beat Mega Man & Bass on an emulator in high school.  I'm now convinced that I'm only lying to myself and that I must have cheated my way through it with save states and somehow tricked myself into remembering otherwise.  I mean, I was using a damn keyboard for Christ's sake!

@G-type 0/3
Sometimes I watch my 5 year olds play a game and I get frustrated that they have the gaming ability of 5 year olds.  And then I feel bad.  I imagine this is similar to what @North feels when he watches his old man struggle to play Super Mario Bros. 2.

@Philosoraptor 94/20
I don't even know what is happening here.  Games are being eviscerated left and right.  No quarter.  Is it possible to beat a game a day for an entire year?

@Foochie776 1/10
Barbie?  I mean, I guess I beat Barbie for SNES, so, I get it.  I do.

@cj_robot 1/12
It's now 11:25PM, and I'm already regretting committing to this post.  Only 10 more pages to scroll through, looking for stragglers.00000

@FenrirZero 1/(the number of games Fenrir beats + 1)
Another rules troublemaker.

@Jaden 0/20
We hardly knew ye.

@killerkobra 0/13
Kobra likes to pop in, and then recede back into the night for a year or three.

@OptOut 0/0
Doesn't partake because his wife doesn't allow him to.

@Matchbook 1/17
He beat Final Fantasy III, and that's all that matters.

[Brickman | 3,987]

1 minute ago, Reed Rothchild said:

@Brickman 3/12
Seems super do-able.  Not too many timesinks left.  But will he ever finish that Persona Strikers game...

haha so true. I've really slacked with my backlog challenge (and gaming in general). About four games on the list I'm at various stages so I need to get back to it! 

[Sumez | 2,961]

Resident Evil 1 Remake Remaster (PS4) - Beaten 23/4

I haven't done the research, and have no idea if dedicated Resident Evil fans typically consider REmake a crime against the subtle finesse of the original game, or an exemplary demonstration of what a video game remake should be, but if I had to put my money on one it would definitely be the latter!
Playing this on PS4 I'm kinda amazed by how good it looks, and the crazy thing is that it doesn't really look much visibly improved from the original GameCube version, using the same prerendered backgrounds. At the same time, the gameplay itself feels incredibly oldschool. There are a tiny few "quality of life" aspects that I speculate possibly weren't in the original PS1 game, but to be honest it's hard to tell. It seems like the things that relied on the game feeling somewhat archaic are left mostly intact, and in my book that's a very good thing, but we will get to that...

The RE franchise has been one of the biggest gaps in my video game experience ever since they first came out. Every time I've tried a game in the series I always fell off, not having the patience to finish them. Even though I did like RE7 a bit and played it almost to the end, I generally have a hard time seeing what makes them so "great" in general. I love the first two Silent hill games, they are genuinely scary - but it's hard to find the same appeal in Resident Evil because, well, zombies just aren't scary.

Anyway playing this version of RE1 I think the game finally clicked for me. There are plenty of mechanics in the game that, looking at them separately, don't really play well.
Trying to shoot a zombie, it basically takes a random amount of bullets to put them down, and way too many either way. You clearly aren't meant to try and fight most of the enemies, but the game doesn't really make that clear, because you are constantly stocked with ammo - it just gets consumed very fast, and there's just no real way to conserve it if you're actually ever using it.
And even running past enemies, the mechanics are so wonky that doing so is often a gamble even in situations where it otherwise works consistently most of the time.
And the all-encompassing restriction that pretty much defines the game, is the way every single resource is absolutely finite. The ammo already goes without saying, but there are also no places you can always get healed, only a limited number of healing items scattered across the game, and unique to the first few games in the Resident Evil series is the Ink Ribbon. Even without having played any of the games I knew about this - An item, limited in quantity like everything else, needed any time you wish to save your game. This means that across a full playthrough there will always be a limited amount of times you can save your game - and a very real threat that you might use up all your saves at any given moment, at least until you find the next pack of ink ribbons.

Having limited resources in this manner in almost any other game would be borderline bad design. How will you know whether you can afford to use your items when you have no idea when you will next find more? Should you use your grenades to kill the lizards roaming the halls outside your safehouse when you don't know if a big boss fight is gonna show up just 14 minutes later which needs them? Basically at any given moment in this game you will be making barely informed guesses, and try to plan your way ahead based on which resources you feel would be the safest to spend.

But Resident Evil is a great example of a game that is absolutely more than the sum of its parts! Because this uncertainty and constant pressure is what makes the game a horror game. You probably won't find yourself afraid of getting scared by whatever visuals turning the next corner will present - but by the gameplay itself. By the risk of running out of resources and being stuck with no way to recover from a mistake or save your game going forward.
In reality you actually get more than enough ink ribbons to save your game with decent frequency and never run too long stretches without that safety. But at the same time, the limitation means you do think twice about everything. You can't just peek out the door of the save room, perform a task, and then go back and save because it went well - you are gonna have to eat up some mistakes, and deal with the consequences.

Actually, my best memory from the game was a bit over halfway through when I was down to only two ink ribbons and thought I probably had to start really conserving my saves. I had a few potential places I could go from my last safehouse, and ended up taking multiple "suicide runs" down different paths as I started piecing together the most effective route for making the largest amount of progress with as few risks as possible before I would finally save my game again.
This small "meta puzzle" based on roughly every mechanic in place was incredibly satisfying, and a great representation of what the game does best. It wasn't a situation specifically orchestrated by the game, but an organic result of the gameplay itself - something that I think is massively commendable, far beyond trying to nitpick about why combat or movement doesn't feel good looking at it individually.
The overall experience of playing Resident Evil 1 was something completely unique for me, that no other game has ever given me, and no matter what "review score" I feel the game is genuinely worth, I think that aspect of it ultimately weighs more.

I'm very glad I played this, and it really makes me want to play more games in the same style (not just horror games, but games that specifically touch that same resource based metagame). To my knowledge, the only other RE game that approaches RE1 in this manner, is RE2. But my 2022 backlog has RE4 listed instead, due to the pedigree of that title, and I find myself in a pickle - Do I follow my backlog and play Resident Evil 4 next, or do I follow my heart and play the original version of Resident Evil 2?

Edited May 6, 2022 by Sumez

[Sumez | 2,961]

2 hours ago, Reed Rothchild said:

@CasualCart 10/6
This year's Doc Encore.  Set the expectations in the basement.  And then shatter them in a matter of weeks.

How do people go over their goal?
Should I add in all the games I've beaten that weren't on my list as well?

I feel like if I put 40 games on my list and beat 40 games not on my list, 40/40 would be misleading, since I didn't beat any games on my backlog. But at the same time at least getting through 40 games should count for something still.
Maybe something like "27/40 + 13" could be a useful metric dunno. Just speaking for myself anyway, if this were a competition I wouldn't have put 47 games on my list 

Edited May 6, 2022 by Sumez