Floating Platforms

38 minutes ago, Splain said:

Ahahaha @Floating Platforms already did Teen Tournament! Of all the Jeopardy games I could have grabbed, that's the one that's been done already lol. Ok, I'll probably grab 2 other Jeopardy games to finish out the month.

Well, if it's any consolation, your score crushed mine. I may have been the faster teen, but you had the higher GPA

It's strange that any NFL Quarterback Club game doesn't have the mini games. That was the whole appeal, I thought: A Quarterback skills challenge tournament.  To me, it's like making an Olympics game that only has one playable event.

Congrats on all the clears so far. Sounds like you'll make it and then you can a head start on the 31 games of March!

Pipe Dream is done!

This was a lot easier than Quarth.  I'm not sure if I ever got all that good at the game, but I sure did try until I got the next password.  The last 8 stages that you have to do in a row finally helped me get a better feel for everything, but I was still terrible at strategizing. My moves were purely reactionary with little advanced planning. When I did try to plan a bit, I never lucked into the pieces I needed fast enough to make the plan work.  Anyway, it was a good time and thankfully pretty short and forgiving.

Next up I'm going for the best ending in Yogi Bear's Gold Rush. Looks like average time is about an hour for any %, so even if I have to hunt for all the collectables needed, it should be done pretty quick.

4 hours ago, Bucket said:

That face is the stuff of nightmares!

Oh yeah! The Teletubbies sun did not age well

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's a relief! Also a relief to realize I read it wrong initially since I thought I needed to get to 9-5 instead of 5-9.

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?

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.

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.

Small Soldiers was one of the last, but depending on the resource, there may have been a couple others released later, such as Beavis & Butt-head and Rugrats Movie (which had both black and gray cart versions). The packaging certainly matches, and the Japanese release was around the same time as the US releases of Blue & Red.  I think those pre-date Game Boy Color's launch, but I honestly don't pay attention to GBC that closely.   I remember reading something about why Yellow is technically GBC (That thread could have been on the NA forums), but I can understand counting it as regular GB.

Yeah, sorry to take that one away from you. It took a good 2 weeks or so to finish all the characters. I think Courier Man may have been my favorite. The Ref/Judge was the funniest due to what seemed like a bad translation. There aren't many fighting games on original GB, but I gave this a 10/10 because of its depth and style and fun, etc, so I'd be surprised if any US releases are better.

I own Battle Arena Toshinden, but haven't gotten around to it yet. I'm probably only tackling one more fighter this year and if you're focusing on Takara, then it's probably impossible we'll have to worry about playing the same thing.

2 hours ago, Splain said:

I'm impressed with the depth of Samurai Showdown, I didn't know any of that. Do you think the requirement for that one should change?

I'm always going to try to beat fighting games with each character if the ending for each is different (like I did with Killer Instinct last year), but I'm not sure it makes much sense to make everyone do that. Even requiring best ending on something wouldn't change things for this game since it seems Normal endings are the same as Hard.  I would recommend playing through it a couple times because it's fun to see the stories, but doubt it should be required.

Alright, Samurai Shodown is completely done. All 15 characters. Here's a couple of screenshots from the different endings

Here's part of Amakusa's ending

Here's part of the Judge's ending - both of these are "secret" characters - the game tells you how to unlock them if you beat anyone's story.

This was an incredibly impressive fighting game with a ton of characters to choose from (12 main, 3 hidden) that all look and feel unique. Each character gets their own background stage, music, dialogue, storyline with cutscenes, move set, and a fantastic sprite.  During my first few runs, I had a lot of trouble with certain character matchups, but after I learned (on my 4th character) that you can press A&B together for a power slash, it opened the game up considerably. Still, expect about an hour for each run on normal difficulty (it took me 18 hours total).  It was amazing to see so much variety in this cartridge and I liked exploring all of the different story lines. The translation had some comedic spots (possibly inadvertent like "join the dark guy") and there were far too many instances where they use "Not!" in the same context as Wayne's World. But the cutscenes were well done, just like pretty much the rest of the game.  If they can fit all of this into a Game Boy cartridge, it really raises the bar for other fighting games that probably can't come close to this.

Now that I've fully finished that, I'll move on to Bram Stoker's Dracula later this week sometime.

Nothing wrong with cheapo clears!  If I didn't set my system up to rely so much on randomization and viewer votes, I would probably try to get a bunch of those done too.  I'm surprised I was able to get 3 games done in a day earlier this month. Doubt that string of short titles will come along again.

11 hours ago, Splain said:

I'm planning to switch to Game Boy in February-- 28 GAMES.

Hold on a minute...is this you calling your shot? 28 Games in 28 days?

As a group, that would be great to see. I will probably only get 4 done if my current planned games stay available. After that is my milestone game #75 - Final Fantasy Legend and I don't think I'll finish that until March. (Not calling dibs on it by any means, though.  I will be playing through it whether someone beats it first or not)

I was addicted to the yahoo java games version of mahjong solitaire. It's a shame that "completing" Shanghai is so short.

Quick update on Samurai Shodown - 6 characters done, 9 left. Had a hell of a time with the first three, then I read the instructions better and learned about using A&B at the same time for a power strike and that changed everything. Now, I can finish a character in about an hour. That should mean that I'm about half done time-wise and I'll move on to something else by early February

In terms of this challenge, Samurai Shodown is done. I beat the game with two characters last night on normal to see their endings (Gan-En and Galford). Only 13 more to go for my personal goal to see all endings.  If anyone knows if the endings are different when playing on hard, let me know.  I'll post pictures later when I'm all finished, but that might take a while.  First character took 1.5 hours, second took me 3. I'm not good at fighting games - glad there aren't too many on Game Boy but sadly my next fighting game after this is only 8 away.

I've only played Tesserae for about 1 minute. I got my copy late last year in one of those retro game loot box subscriptions and can't even remember what the gameplay is like anymore.

What did you end up using for your completion criteria for Super Breakout?

I haven't started my latest game yet, but possibly tomorrow?

Can't say I think of a reason to apologize for beating more Game Boy games.  Congrats on all the clears!

2 hours ago, Splain said:

Don't get me started on how garbage the Jeopardy games are.

I only ran into one issue with stupid matching. something like What Life Function describes the process of getting larger.  I answered "Growing" which was incorrect because they wanted "Growth."  It will probably be a while before I get to any of the other Jeopardy's so I'll live in blissful ignorance a bit longer.

Well, I didn't play last night, but did play tonight and knocked out three quick games!

TaleSpin

Only 5 levels in this one, and even though I beat it in less than an hour, it still gave me more trouble than I would have liked.  I found myself dying far too often by getting stuck on obstacles that I thought I was clear of. I also took way too long to figure out the right pattern for the 4th boss. The game was fun, with decent music and graphics. I liked the idea of using the cash in the level to buy upgrades, and the upgrades were useful in those later levels, but the game is far too short to recommend.

Tiny Toon Adventures: Babs' Big Break

Here's another one where the graphics are good, the music was fine, but it was a bit too short. The saving grace was getting to see so many of the Tiny Toons involved in the story and that it was story heavy. I wish the three playable Toons were different (other than weapon) and I wish you could play as the helper you find in each level.  I again had a lot more trouble with this kids game than I ever should have.  A lot of dumb deaths and poor choices on my part. I don't know if the game has continues and I was afraid to find out, so I used the racing mini game to farm lives. Still I almost used them all up on the final boss because I couldn't time my jumps properly to save my bunny life. It made for an exciting playthrough at least.

Jeopardy! Teen Tournament

I'm twice the age but twice as dumb. There were times where the questions felt too vague and other times where the answer seemed so obvious that I couldn't believe the simple answer would be right. The game made me overthink like crazy. I haven't played other versions yet, but I noticed this one had a lot of paired questions where one answer would lead into the next in the same category. It made for some very simple moments but there were a lot of ridiculously hard ones as well.  I managed to barely squeak by with more than double the CPU's score when Final Jeopardy hit, so I bet $1. The question was an exact repeat of something from the first round, but I had already forgotten it. See? Twice as dumb.

I won't be beating my next game in one sitting.  Next is Samurai Shodown and I'm going for all endings.

11 hours ago, MagusSmurf said:

I think Tale Spin is just a port of the NES game, Can confirm that one’s short.

Glad to hear. And since it's a port, there's a good chance there will be fewer levels, making it even shorter.  Maybe I'll try to get that finished tonight after the wife goes to sleep

Panel Action Bingo is done but with a correction needed to the description. The game is 60 levels (30 counting up if doing numbers or A-Z if letters; 30 going down/Z-A).  I went through the numbers all the way and went through 10 levels of the letters, which was enough to see that the picture you slowly uncover is the same so I think both produce the same ending.

The only similarity to bingo in this game is that you need to match 5 in a row, but otherwise it plays like a flash game you might find on AOL. I lost my first life because I was expecting bingo and waiting for numbers to be called. No, you need to select the numbers in order before the CPU to match 5 in a row.  I found the whole thing to be very monotonous and would be better served with either more variety built-in or half as many levels. It was either far too easy or far too difficult and there were only a couple levels with each grouping of 30 where you needed to employ much strategy. Otherwise it was a cake-walk or heavily luck based.  On the last levels, I devised a strategy to try to park on a specific row or column and only focus on those numbers while hoping the CPU cat didn't get a bingo first or ruin my line. Took a few tries, but it wound up being effective.

I'm moving on to what should be a shorter game in "Tale Spin."  If it's as short as people say, I might be able to get another game done besides that too!