Floating Platforms

Looks like a busy day for the thread! We should be hitting 150 pretty soon. I just finished High Stakes Gambling. So much better than Caesar's Palace! I really enjoyed the set-up of the game and its progression. You can buy "cheats" to help you on the various games (like switch hands in blackjack, or add a joker to your poker hand). The boss can too, so there's a bit of strategy needed to avoid them making counter moves. The games themselves play well and move quickly, and it's great that doing poorly in the 3 lead-in sections don't completely ruin your ability to beat the boss in the poker showdowns. The biggest downfall is that I didn't notice much difference in behavior between the five bosses and there are several moves they could have made against me with their cheats that were ignored. It made the game easier, but I was planning around strategies they didn't use sometimes. Next will be Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I would have started it tonight, but it seems there are no saves or passwords, so I'll wait until later in the week when I have more time to sit down with it.

Finished the second quest of Bubble Bobble today. None of the levels gave me an extraordinary amount of trouble this time, but the ones that force you to create bubbles underneath you while jumping in a narrow space feel like absolute pure luck. The final boss was the same pattern (although I think he threw bottles more often) and had more HP, but it wasn't too hard taking him down since I learned from my massive failures in the first quest. It took just under 6 hours to get both quests done in case anyone's thinking about trying it. I started High Stakes Gambling as well and I've defeated the first 2 mafia bosses (of 5). I might complete it tonight if the cards go my way.

Awesome. Thanks, @bronzeshield! So basically New Chessmaster is the same but with a couple patches applied. No new players rosters or anything.... In all seriousness, it would be interesting if they added a tournament mode or something. So, in terms of the challenge, I beat Bubble Bobble tonight. That last boss was a huge pain and probably took close to an hour on its own. Generally the game didn't give me much trouble except for lvl 75 (boss 3), lvl 99 and 100. I'm not posting a picture yet as I will do that after I finish the second quest. I'm through level 29 on that run so far. The first boss was noticeably different, so I'm worried what the real last fight will be like. I'll likely get that done on Monday. I have next week off from work, and I plan to get a decent amount of playtime logged.

That's fascinating. I've never really played much chess. I was more of a checkers guy, if we're talking the ancient classics. I read the manual before playing and it mentioned the difficulty settings, but I didn't see them in the menu. I played around a bit on emulator and found it by hitting select twice. If I need to do something different for this challenge, then I'll go back before the end of the year. Otherwise, I'll put it on my list to revisit at a higher level in the future! What are the differences between that and New Chessmaster, if you've played both? In other news, Toxic Crusaders is done already. Got it done in just under 3 hours. It wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting. I enjoyed the graphics and sprites. The cutscenes looked nice and I think they matched the humor and style of the cartoon series. The main enemy didn't change across all 6 stages, but there were a couple supporting enemies that were different. Overall the level design was quite repetitive and predictable. Take a step or two, stop and shoot and repeat. The bosses had some variety and posed a moderate challenge. It certainly wasn't the worst thing I've played, but it wasn't the greatest either. Solidly above average. Next up I'll be playing Bubble Bobble and going for the best ending, which I think requires playing through it twice. If my research is correct, you get a password or something after beating it the first time to get the "second quest" that leads to a different ending screen.

Finished two games tonight. Tamagotchi is done I beat all three tournaments and then retired the two that won it for me. On the screenshot above, the right side are the two that died early on. The left are the ones I rocketed back home to put them in the Hall of Fame. Fltpt2 won the race (shoe print icon), and Chiank (shortened version of the username for the person that voted for the game on my channel) won the Knowledge (circle) and Beauty (star). I tried winning Beauty with a third character but they lost all 3 tries. Here's what I learned for anyone wanting to try this. Never give your creatures the cake or ice cream. To fill up the fun meter, only do the smile game over and over. You can mash A to make it go faster. Every once in a while, when they pass the sports or math game, give them praise (especially if they get perfect in math). In the math game, you can press the direction of the answer but they won't always listen. The sports game is total BS and full of garbage hit detection. Stay in the center the best you can. To get the balls on the edges, you need to be already facing in that direction when in the center, otherwise you won't have time to catch it. You can't catch things that are 2 steps away otherwise either. The manual says very little about tournaments - just that they exist. You can only try one tournament per day per Tamagotchi and in-game days are 45 min-1 hour. I have no idea how the beauty one works at all still. I guess just keep trying? Keep your deed and fun meter full - it probably helps. Knowledge looks at the IQ meter so keep that full and make sure they get perfect in the math game a couple times before sending them in. It still took me 3 tries. The race will look at body, so try to max that out. On the sports/ball game, when trying the highest difficulty and back out using B if you know you'll lose. The race has two parts and took me 2 tries. If maxed out on body, I held left for the first race and then mashed A on the second and I think that helped? The game is interesting, but needed more depth. It was simply a chore most of the time. Glad I don't have to touch it again. I also beat Chessmaster I looked to see if there were different difficulty settings, but I didn't notice any, so this was won on default settings. I am not good at chess at all, but at least know what the pieces do. Despite my making several moves that allowed pawns to capture my higher value pieces, I was still able to manage the win using my remaining knight and queen. The presentation is very bare bones and there's no music. The sparse voice samples are cool to hear on Game Boy, but it needed more to keep me awake. Maybe New Chessmaster will be better? Tomorrow I'll be starting Toxic Crusaders on my cartridge that is appropriately slightly warped/melted (but still playable).

Balloon Kid is now done! The game was actually quite a bit harder than I was expecting and the later levels took some practice and a tiny bit of trial and error in certain spots. The last level is kind of brutal and long. The game does offer a lot of extra lives, and continues at every 50,000 pts, but it still wasn't enough for me. Part of it is that I'm terrible at momentum based gameplay like this. The other part was that there were several parts where it was better to abandon your balloons and jump (which was not expected). Blowing up new balloons was not very consistent and I really didn't like the pinball effect of some of the enemies. Still, it was a pretty fun time once I got past some of those frustrations. The best part was seeing the mini Game Boys that are tucked away where you can try to pop balloons for a chance at an extra life. Seeing the GB model in-game was so cool when I was a kid and still gives that nostalgia trip today. Next up for me is Tamagotchi. I've played a little tonight and I'm happy that it does not require a real time clock monitoring system. You can pick up and play. On the surface it seems super simple, but I've already accidentally killed 2 of them and I really don't fully know how. I know the goal is to beat one tournament, but I'll try to get all 3 done just to see all the game has to offer. No idea how long it will take though since I don't have an adult yet after 2 hours.

Mulan is done! I went ahead and beat it on hard mode since the only options were that or the default easy. This reminded me a lot of Hercules in that you get one life, but have passwords after each level. The controls are also that same type of stiffness that comes from prioritizing character sprites over fluid movement. The levels had some variation, which was good and I got temporarily stuck on a few, and really stuck on the last level as I tried all kinds of things to beat the final/only boss. The music was good and the SGB color choices worked well, too. I wasn't a fan of using the same button for run and attack and found myself hitting the wrong button way too often. Still the game was decent enough, especially for a movie tie-in. My next game is going to be Balloon Kid which I plan to play and beat tomorrow.

Hey Hey! Krusty's Fun House is done! Took close to 20 hours total, but I got through all 5 worlds. The first two weren't a problem. The 3rd level gave me troubles as there were a lot of enemies, especially in the very last level and the ammo boxes don't come back when you die (and your default ammo isn't refilled). The 4th level had a lot of hidden platforms to deal with. The 5th level had the hardest puzzles, but I was finally able to persevere. It felt good to reach this end screen with Krusty driving what should have been a Canyonero (I know the game came first). As a kid, I never would have thought I'd get through the whole thing. Overall it was quite a lot of fun, but artificially difficult due to the enemies and fall damage and the ammo/health not re-populating after losing. The puzzles were more than interesting enough to make the game worthwhile without having to deal with obstacles and chores like that. Anyway, next up for me will be Mulan, but I might not start until next week at the earliest.

World 4 of Krusty is done. I've only explored a few levels in world 5 and it's significantly more difficult so far. I have a general idea on how to beat most of the ones I've looked at, but there's one that has me totally stumped. It seems this last world relies a lot on invisible platforms and fake walls that are found only through trial and error. I'm still hopeful that I'll be able to beat it next week sometime.

Alright, I'm about 10 hours into Krusty's Fun House so far. I've completed 3 of 5 worlds and have explored more than half of world 4. So far, it doesn't seem too incredibly bad, but I've already learned that this game can through some serious B.S. at you, so the stages I haven't seen yet could cause a ton of trouble. I'm enjoying the puzzle solving aspect of the levels. I don't enjoy the controls or the fact that enemies and fall damage can really halt progress. Fingers crossed I'll be able to get done with this in a couple weeks or so.

Was able to beat Star Wars earlier than I thought. Several of the levels are somewhat maze like and require some exploring and trial and error to get through them, especially Tatooine. After spending a couple hours looking through most of the caves, I learned what to avoid on the next run. I think the only reason I didn't get 100% is that I didn't max out the ship shields. Overall, I liked what the game was trying to do, but the execution was bad. There are too many blind jumps, too many jumps that lead to enemies you can't avoid. Enemies will push you or if you land on top of them, kill you instantly (why?). The Lightsaber is garbage. It has a wind-up and I swear the Tusken Raiders are pure chance as to whether you'll hit them, as are the rest. The whole game was cheap and too long and I somehow barely beat it on my last continue and second to last life. Next up, I'll be trying to tackle Krusty's Fun House by viewer request. Already scared of that one.

I've been off dealing with conventions and conferences and whatnot for the past 2 months, but I'm finally back to playing again. Hopefully, I'll get Star Wars done at some point over the next 7 days. I do have some days off around the Labor Day weekend that will go towards playing. We may be lower than usual, but it's great to see people are still keeping it alive. Overall, I'm hoping to be good for another 10-15 more games this year still. It will be tough, but fingers crossed.

Finished Tetris Plus last night I beat it on normal and I'm assuming that there aren't different endings. Finishing the last level unlocked the ability to play any level, but it doesn't tell you how to select them. Found a reference to a code on gamefaqs afterwards. Puzzle mode was fun, but the explorer guy's stupidity in blindly climbing into spikes got annoying on occasion. I got the hang of most of his quirks, but there were still a lot of times where I thought the piece dropped early enough that he wouldn't latch on and climb, but he still did. Some of the puzzles looked like they relied on getting good luck on random pieces early on, and there were too many times where I needed a specific piece but had to cycle through 20-30 pieces to find it. If some of those odd quirks weren't there, it would have been great. Instead it was just pretty good. Next week, or the week after I'll be trying Star Wars. I hear it's tough, but the manual mentions continues. If it's unlimited continues, then I can hopefully force my way through

No, I'm not trying to blame or say you're in the wrong. Of course this is a challenge (a community one), and no one has dibs. I was only trying to say that I'm happy to avoid playing games if I know that others are actively playing them. I wasn't sure if you had mentioned it and I missed it, so I was apologizing if I had. Not trying to insinuate that you had to announce it.

I might do it sometime later. My other thought is that I'm so inconsistent with streaming that I'd go inactive often. I think I have 1 or 2 weeks left before a bunch of life stuff is going to intervene again making playing time minimal until mid-September. Ah, I think I misinterpreted the requirement then. I though Par or better on the full course meant to end that way rather than get par or better on each hole. I think I also might have missed it if you mentioned that you were working on it, as I would have picked a different golf game instead to avoid overlap. Well, since you are actively trying for the true goal, I will wait to revisit this for my personal challenge until at least next year and keep plugging away at my queue.

That sounds interesting. Rewarding you for exploring the level with a password in an in-game collectable. I'm honestly a little surprised that's not more common. Oh yeah, I don't track the mulit-system GB guys like BPN or RetroBladen yet. When they eventually handle more than a handful, I'll add them to my time tracking list. I keep going back and forth about whether I should submit my name, but I keep thinking that I don't want to ask to be part of that streaming community when I know I can't devote hardly any time to watching theirs or interacting back.

Two games are off the board. Sports Illustrated Golf Classic is done, I think! Okay, so you'll have to tell me if this counts. I do want to revisit this at some point. The game has three modes, 1P Practice, 2P Match and 2P Stroke. The 2P modes are not human vs. CPU, but human vs. human. I want to see if there is a possible ending in those later. The 1P practice kicks you back to the title screen after finishing the last hole, but here's the weird part and why I'm not sure if it counts: I did a full 18 hole round and got 7 over par. After each hole, it showed the overall score card. After that experience (and partly because there's no way to quit mid-round without resetting the console), I went back to a password when I was still under par (the game gives you passwords after each hole) and worked to finish the round, resetting as needed and progressing with new passwords. That method does not show the full score card anymore. It just moves to the next hole, so after I beat this hole 18 with par, giving me -2 as the final score, it went back to the title screen without showing my full round stats. If we collectively think that we need par or better from the full 18 and score card showing, then I'll revisit it sooner than later. One game I know is done is Tom & Jerry. This took about an hour and half. I'm glad I had a copy of the manual to reference, because it tells you about the long jump from hitting A&B together. Without that, I would have been really annoyed. Instead it was just mildly obnoxious, but quick enough. It wasn't too hard to get through any particular level, but you do have to navigate through a bunch of BS and guaranteed hits if you don't know the level. The sprites are really good. The music is solid and you get the T&J theme, so it was a decent time. You get passwords after levels 3, 6, 9, and there are only 10 levels, so it took 90 minutes to knock this out. Next for me will be Tetris Plus. Doubt I'll get that done in a single day.

The Real Ghostbusters is done! This was pretty fun. It has absolutely nothing to do with Ghostbusters, but what do you expect from a game that was reskinned from a Mickey Mouse game that was converted to Garfield for Europe and then Ghostbusters for her? The Game boy screen did affect things a bit as there were a lot of times where you needed to guess the path because you can't see up or down enough. Learning the path is key in later levels because the time limit is a problem and if you go the wrong way, you'll run out. I typically lost a life at least once in each level during the second half of the game because I had to figure out where to go, etc. I also did not like the auto-death from running into a reappearing tiles. There were several times when I thought it had reformed, but I died because I was a frame or two early. Passwords after every level was great, but it got slightly obnoxious to replay some of those longer levels. The end boss gave me a little hassle and the chat ended up helping on that, but this was a good time. Next up for me is Sports Illustrated Golf Classic. Not sure what to expect, but hopefully it won't be too difficult.

This was Manicket, a Spanish language streamer. Don't remember how I learned about him, possibly from StingX2s spreadsheet of challengers. I think that's my biggest problem is that I didn't take time to look at different top spin and draw type shots. Just hitting it dead center is a bit of a random adventure since that cursor shows several different outcomes and even when all of the ghost previews go in the hole, you can still miss on occasion. When I was doing the emulation, it did seem like the balls always wound up in the same position after the CPU misses, though.

Good luck! Is this for the first tournament or did you do speed pool to get to the final one? I did some emulation practice and it is quite tough, even with save states. There are 2 tournaments if you start off straight & the second one adds another opponent. But if you lose on the 2nd tourney, you go back to the first (I think....not 100% sure on that). Anyway, if you get a certain score on Speed Pool, you jump to the 2nd tournament and stay there as long as the system is on. There's one guy I follow that did this for his GB challenge and he spent about 71 hours on it....

Mortal Kombat II is done! I'm really bad at fighting games and didn't get a ton of time to play these past couple weeks, but finally managed to get through it. I found that the key was to adjust my timing on upper cuts and let loose earlier than seems natural. Then for the final boss, I played around a bit and found that spamming my projectile non-stop kept him from charging and gave me the win. I'm very grateful there were no double battles. Not thrilled about revisiting both of these games when I do the combo cart as part of my challenge sometime down the line. Next up for me is "The Real Ghostbusters." I've already gone through 15 levels and might get through the rest on Wednesday if the difficulty doesn't ramp up too much.

The Simpsons: Bart & the Beanstalk is done! Well, this took a little bit longer than it probably should have. It took me several attempts to grasp the patterns of the bosses in the first two levels (the only bosses in the game), and then there are multiple BS spots where you will definitely die because the game expects you to do things you couldn't possibly know. Level 5 & 6 were the worst for this. I lost a few lives at the very start of 5 because if you wait for the next platform to appear on the scrolling level, then you get crushed by the giant homer. If you jump too early, you fall to your death, so you have to learn the timing from experience. Level 6 scrolls as well and if you get caught on a ledge, you're dead instantly as well. Kind of annoying. However, I have a feeling that this could be the easiest Simpsons game overall and maybe the one with the best graphics. It would be great if there were chances for extra lives or continues, or passwords. It would be great if there were more than 2 songs. It was annoying, but could have been worse. Next up for me is Mortal Kombat II. Started playing for a little bit tonight and, yeah, I still suck at fighting games. Couldn't get through the first 8 guys, so I haven't seen what hides behind the question mark in the tournament yet. I'll power my way through likely next week.

I had the pleasure of beating this one a couple years ago. I honestly didn't mind learning the levels to get through it. What made it rougher for me is that there was a glitch that caused you to re-start the moon level if you die near the boss sometimes (not always). The good thing about that game is that you can earn extra lives at least. I almost got through another no save/no continue game tonight, but Bart & The Beanstalk is still pending. This one gives you 4 chances to get through 6 levels, and there is no opportunity for extra lives. Thankfully the levels are pretty short when you learn them, but it's still a bit of a slog. I think I got really close to beating it tonight, but it throws some cheap BS at you in levels 5-6 that you have to memorize.

For sure. Probably the worst part of that game is the slow betting system. It couldn't have been too hard to have one button place one chip and the other do a max bet, right? Or at least speed up the animation and cursor movement. On my end, I made some progress on Bart & the Beanstalk on Wednesday. It took me a while to learn the first couple levels and I still get mixed up on the second boss' pattern, but I think I know how to get through levels 1-4 of 6 without issue. There are no continues or extra lives, so you get 4 lives to do it all. I'll probably get this done next week.

Good luck! I looked back at my time and it took me 40 minutes to do my winning run, so to get ~40x that in one sitting...yikes... I tried to look up "banner ending" on youtube and didn't see anything, but I did see speedruns of the GB version and one mentioned that the result of the Wheel of fortune spin is based on the frame number. If that's true for roulette as well to some degree, then I guess that makes sense as to why the NES sequencing doesn't work. Plus it seems to indicate that there might not be a way to form a reliable system. There still may be a good wheel betting strategy that would keep the total rising steadily.