Floating Platforms

Well, I did my three nights of Penguin Wars and I'm still no closer to really getting a solid strategy in place. Most of the time I still failed somewhere between game 17-21. My PB is now 26 of 40 games/matches. I'll revisit this from time to time, but I'm done for now. Tonight, I was free to get back to other things. With a working copy in my hands, Tom & Jerry: Frantic Antics is now done I do not understand the plot of this game. There is a lot that the game dialogue is clearly leaving out and the manual is not much help either. Tom & Jerry's house gets destroyed, then they have to help this random girl by going into another house and stealing stuff while sentient toys attack you and then you go to a cabin that's "on fire" but it's actually a vertically auto-scrolling level, so you're actually sinking and you escape by getting to the roof when you stop moving and do the final boss fight on top of what is supposed to be a burning building all so you can "rescue" this guy who we never actually hear about in the game as far as I remember. It's weird. The gameplay is super simplistic and the levels are constructed in a way that most of the time you'll be fine with health pick-ups and get through a good chunk of the game on your first try. There were 3 sort of tricky levels. The horizontal scrolling level with the dog, the vertical scrolling last level, and the one before that where you have spring shoes as it doesn't tell you how to use them and the manual is wrong. It took some experimenting, but once I got it down it was fine. The real struggles in the level are with the slippery movements. It's easy to overshoot jumps or fall of the edges or over-correct in the wrong direction. That caused most of my damage and deaths. If it weren't for that, this would be an extremely simple game. Instead it's just a simple game. After that was done, I also started Road Rash and I have 2 wins in the 2nd level so far. I might not finish it this week, but hopefully Monday.

Batman: Return of the Joker is done Trash. Batman is such a powerless weenie in this. He controls like a wet fish, but he himself cannot get wet even a teensy bit or else he'll take more damage than he would from enemies and get knocked off his ass. His punches do not consistently land and you need to be close enough to the enemy to hit them, which means you're usually trading hit points. Batman cannot jump to save his life. Two steps at a time...that's a huge struggle. He also can't fit into gaps that are his height, unless you are pixel perfect on your timing and placement. His grappling hook does not always work. You can be right at the top of the screen, obviously close enough for it to latch on, and instead you punch the air and fall down, likely to your doom. The batarangs are essentially useless. The manual says that they will not be used if you're close to an enemy. That's wrong. They always are thrown. It also says to save them for the bosses. Pointless, except for the third level (but even then, it's not really needed when you learn the pattern). The bosses will deflect them, they will not get hurt by them and it may change their pattern so much that you actually can't get good hits in. The hit boxes on the bosses is incredibly questionable. The Joker fight was a massive, massive pain for me. It took tons of tries to sort of figure out a good strategy for the first phase. The second phase was really just a crap shoot where I hoped to have enough health and stay away from his relentless attack options and the magnet to get more hits. The graphics were fine. The music was decent. The gameplay was horrendous and I spent most of my time fighting the unnecessary and unintentional wall jumping that happened far, far too frequently. Next up, I'll be trying Tom & Jerry: Frantic Antics, but that's waiting a bit because A) my cart was freezing, so I might have to buy another; and B) a community challenge was unlocked forcing me to play Penguin Wars for the next 3 streams to try to beat all 40 matches without stage select. This will be pain.

Maneater is done This finishes my PS5 goals for the year and is a perfect example of why I decided to build in options for each console. When I started the year, I thought for sure I would try to grind out Returnal, maybe choose AC: Valhalla as my super long game (even though I knew TOTK was coming), and assumed I would be playing Bugsnax. Maneater was low on the priority list, but we're nearing the end of the year and I knew it would be pretty short. I hit a wall on Returnal in January and didn't feel like banging my head against it more. Even though Maneater wasn't my first choice for PS5, it is still a fun game. Thankfully it's also short enough that the repetitiveness of its gameplay doesn't become a burden. There's a mini-collect-a-thon aspect that gets my brain firing and the 100% in each area is easy to accomplish once you're leveled-up enough. The combat took a little getting used to, and I probably wasn't handling some of the boss encounters right, but I had absolutely no problem taking down the final encounter. There are different evolution bodies you can equip, but I stuck with the bone for extra damage and shield. There weren't any specific circumstances that caused you to switch for progression either, which was odd. The levels are all pretty short and it's a game you could easily just throw on for a few minutes to knock out a couple objectives or play for a couple hours. Don't know if I would go for the DLC, but this was a good time.

Bases Loaded is done This took some time and effort. There are a total of 5 games in the tournament and even the second (1A) is pretty hard to score runs on. I had to play them twice in my winning run because I tied them the first time and for some stupid reason, the game doesn't do extra innings on ties, it forces a full replay of 9 innings. There are two main things I learned to help me out. When batting, hit select and that will bring up a cursor that allows you to, in theory, aim your hits. It's not incredibly effective, but I think it did help some. I also had a really hard time with the very quick reactions you need to identify the pitch, so my strategy was to wear out the pitchers by taking everything until I either had 3 balls or 2 strikes. Then I would swing shortly after release and hope for the best. When pitching, it seems like everyone has 1 specific sweet spot that will allow you to get strikes looking. But it's extremely specific, so it took me 7 hours of playing before thinking I could strike anyone out. If you miss your spot one way (or pick the wrong direction to pitch), they will hit it. If you miss the other way, it will be a ball. The difference is pixels. It's a cruel and unforgiving baseball game, but still fun and better than a few others I've played so far. Extra Bases is still better but this might be better than the launch title Baseball. Next up is Batman: Return of the Joker.

Wilmot's Warehouse is done It's a cozy little timewaster with great ambient music. Basically you're this little square that needs to manage an ever growing warehouse and deliver stuff under a strict time limit. After every 3 deliveries, you can have unlimited time to reorganize the place as you see fit. You can also earn various upgrades, like a dash or a robot helper, or open more floor space. Ultimately, the goal is to unlock all 200 different items and it does take quite some doing to fit them all in a way that makes sense, but it's not overly difficult or stressful. I learned of this from some streamers/YouTubers years ago, bought it and made it to 140/200 items and stopped. Getting to the last 60 required another warehouse revamp but it was smooth sailing from there. A great title for those that have that compulsion to organize things

Beyond Good and Evil is done Since I recently finished my goals for the SNES and DS/3DS, I thought it might be time to go back to finish another console. I doubt I'll reach my overall goal of 50 games, but maybe I can at least hit some of my console specific goals. This was such a fun, shorter than expected experience. I loved the variety of gameplay styles and mechanics and how they naturally fit into the story. Light action, light stealth, light aerial combat, light racing, light Pokemon Snap, light puzzle solving all meld for a full, well-rounded adventure. Great music on top of that. I was enjoying the story, but did feel like it was a bit truncated at the end to possibly set up a sequel (and we all know how that's going, I think). Overall, it was a blast and I wish it was maybe one level longer. After I beat it, I went and looked at the sequel trailer announcement as the alpha gameplay footage that Ubisoft released in 2017 and boy does that sound like a totally different game. Honestly, it sounds more like Starfield than the genre-blending, character and environment focused game I played. It looked like a good game, but not one that fit the title. Space pirates is a much different story than planetary espionage. Dozens of dense planets in a game that takes 100+hrs seems antithetical to the core of this. Maybe someone realized that and rebuilt it to match the core and that's causing the radio silence (like Metroid Prime 4).

Bases Loaded is a lot tougher than expected. Reaction times are brutal. The fielding takes quite a bit of getting used to and doesn't work as expected (but still better than Ken Griffey Jr.). I'm not sure how many games are in the tournament, but I'm assuming 5 (rookie, 1A, AA, AAA, Pro - but maybe there's another level after that like All-Star, or maybe it doesn't follow the minor league levels?). Rookie I can beat. Next is 1A and the best I did was tie them. Tying the score after 9 innings doesn't take you to the 10th inning. Oh no. It ends the game and forces you to play the entire 9 innings again....how stupid. If I can figure out how to get pitching to work in my favor, I will be in good shape, but they never swing at anything even slightly outside of the zone and almost never take strikes looking, so I have to field everything which is a big issue currently.

The World Ends With You is done, sort of. I beat the story and new game plus says you can collect extra stuff and there's a new side story available and if you collect all the new notes things then a special secret is available. So, I'm going to keep playing (since this is the last handheld game I had planned this year anyway), but I would be totally satisfied to leave it where it stands if need be. The dual screen combat is such an interesting concept that doesn't fully need to be there and really gets lost in the hectic nature of the encounters. The battles are sometimes frantic and they demand your attention on a single screen. There is no way to actually manage both. So, most of the time, I was mashing left or right and hoping that the bonuses that come from letting your partner build their meter in a certain way would happen eventually. I certainly had no ability to guide the cursor to a specific icon the way it's expecting you to. Also, it's not needed. The combat from the pins and their various abilities is enough to carry the combat on its own. Mix and match your preferred style, because there are so many choices. However, I ended up sticking to basic actions like "touch empty space" or "slash across Neku" because the more complex things like "draw a circle" didn't register very often. There are so many items in the game, so many pins but resources are still limited which made the progression interesting for someone that didn't want to stop and grind for the best gear. I did enough extra battles to get that last little bit to get by and that worked. The game also won't penalize you for switching difficulty. In fact, the "noise report" encourages you to beat each enemy at all 4 levels - I stuck to normal most of the time. Story wise, I found the premise very interesting and it kept me engaged most of the time. The actual ending felt like it was missing a chunk and rushed through without explaining enough (so maybe that's where NG+ comes in, but I hope not). It was solid enough that I'm now interested in Neo World Ends With You and might pick it up if it's not too expensive already.

Shanghai is done So... @Splain, I have some possibly new info. I try to beat every game as comprehensively as possible, so for this one I saw that the manual mentioned 6 different screens. I wanted to see them all. I figured, it would be RNG to find them, but after a couple play sessions, it seemed like that was not the case. The screens were coming in the same order, but I wasn't getting the 6th after winning 7 or 8 boards a day. I figured I either needed to win x in a row, or x total and I believe the answer is 10 games total in a single play session, because after I beat game 10 I got that 6th image above for the first time (which the game says means Gratitude) followed by.... Credits! The manual doesn't tell you but they are there. So, we probably need to adjust the win condition for this to say win 10 games in a single playthrough to see credits or something like that. The game itself is fun, but far too limited. I was obsessed with Shanghai/Mahjong Solitaire back on Yahoo Games, but that offered multiple different board layouts and limited shuffles. This has one single layout type and zero shuffle ability. You can choose any three letter combo for a unique board, which is nice and I chanced into a random easter egg one (REV turned all the tiles upside down). It would have been great if certain letter combos gave a different layout. I honestly don't know if all the boards are beatable, but if I was younger with fewer games I probably would have tried to keep track and beat everything. It's a shame that original GB didn't get a better Shanghai game in the US, because this feels very low effort and isn't a great introduction to the game. Next I'm starting Bases Loaded. Depending on how many games are in the "tournament," I might get that done tonight

Ah, ok. I've never touched the game. I know the NES "Golf" has a reputation and it's tough to get under par there. If the ending is the same for both courses, then it does make more sense to only get one by topping the leaderboard. I'm certainly open to other people's thoughts too if they have experience.

Yesterday, Golf was picked for me as a future game. I see the win conditions say to get par or under on both courses, rather than just one. Are there different endings for each? Since we don't typically require 100%, I'm interested to know why both courses are required in this case.

Two more down. Jurassic Park Part 2: The Chaos Continues The gameplay in this pseudo-sequel is much different from Jurassic Park 1. That was a top down adventure-like game. This is a horizontal platformer with some maze-y stages and a couple auto-scrollers. Here you only have three weapons. The gun or grenade on land and the spear in water. I only used the grenade on two boss encounters to cheese the hell out of them. The levels are fun and pretty quick. Health replenishments are frequent enough to never truly feel like you're in danger, but I did game over once as I learned the T-Rex chases and some of the unique patterns of the different boss dinos. The music is quite fun and the graphics look impressive. I wish there was a tad more depth to the gameplay with different weapons or power ups but that would also require more grunt enemies that posed a challenge. It's really easy to run and gun and kill them all on your way to the next collectible needed to pass the level, so the base gun doesn't "need" improving other than to stave off boredom. I think I like the original game slightly better but this was still a good time. After that, I had a little bit of time so I started and ended up finishing Revenge of the Gator in 30 minutes. Some of the other GB challengers have taken multiple hours to beat this, but that might have been them trying to see all the bonus stages or imposing some other goal. It took a couple games to get a hang of the absolutely terrible pinball physics in this game, but after 10 minutes, I got a handle on how to manage the delayed inputs and work with the awkward scene transitions in order to keep the ball in play. I could never really aim for anything sucessfully, or hold the ball with the flipper even, but keeping it bouncing eventually was enough to reach the high score of 500,000 points. I don't think I beat a bonus stage and I didn't even clear out all the stuff on the top-most board of the three screen high layout. So, there's more that can be seen content wise, but no real extra goal to go after. It's cute in its presentation but lacking in depth and in fun. I'll be starting up Shanghai next and going for all 6 of the end screens that the manual mentions. I think that will happen in one night, so I might start Bases Loaded very shortly too. The next 3 after that (for soft dibs) are: Batman: Return of the Joker, Tom and Jerry: Frantic Antics & Road Rash. Then it's my milestone game Donkey Kong Land which has been covered here already.

Joe & Mac 2 is done I realized that the screenshot probably doesn't actually prove much more than I upgraded my house all the way (which I don't think has any bearing on anything. I did use the NSO save states at times because the whole concept of continues in this game is pointless. You get 3 lives and 3 continues as well as passwords in the main town (which track your lives and continues). Using a continue will not let you continue from where you were killed, nor will it send you back to the most recent checkpoint, nor to the start of the level. It will put you back into the hub town, so you really have 3 lives to get through any particular area and if you fail, its better to reload the password than use a continue. Same holds true for the final level which is basically just a long boss gauntlet with no health pickups and a new form of the final boss. If I were doing an actual challenge, I would do it legit, but this is backlog fun so I save stated through the boss rush as I've beaten those before in the main game. I never beat Joe & Mac, but did rent it with friends back in the day and enjoyed it a lot. This was not too fun. The first level is alright, but there aren't really sub-weapons exactly but you can get one or two temporary upgrades to your club that last until you die. Some health pickups will let you spit seeds or bones, which can be a mandatory downgrade if your club is at level 2. The enemies are pretty annoying and can move a bit too fast to react to thanks to some of the level design quirks. I also felt that they could hit me easier than I could hit them here and there. Each level has multiple parts with checkpoints, but still getting through it all, and the boss with 3 lives did require some learning. Most of the bosses were pushovers except for the triceratops and the main boss. There are interesting concepts in this game, like the hub world and the town that has items to buy (that are basically all pointless), but nothing was fleshed out. It's like Gargoyles Quest 2 in that you have these areas to go to (or area in this one) and you can talk to people, but it might as well be linear. Sure you can do any of the 4 main levels in any order but there's no benefit to choosing one first. It's not like you get an item from lava world to use on ice world. Overall the game was fine. Frustrating at times and lacked better items, structure and proper continues.

Yeah, I need to make some adjustments to my approach next year as well. I went too aggressive. I probably would meet the goal if I wasn't also doing Game Boy three nights most weeks. My guess is I'll get to 40 of 50 done, which is huge but also meant sometimes ignoring real life stuff so I could stay on track for a goal that doesn't actually matter. Anyway, I finished Maquette late last night As a puzzle game, it's not too bad. I still haven't played Superliminal or Viewfinder but this comes off as similar in that several of the puzzles involve playing with perspective. Here you're taking an object and placing it somewhere to make it bigger or smaller elsewhere. For many levels, there is a central hub that acts as both the interior and exterior. There are dioramas and if you manipulate something in the small world and exit the hub, the big version is also impacted. For instance, you take a small bridge and place it in a path on the small wooded area, when you leave the hub to go to the normal wooded area, a normal bridge will also now be there. Tough to describe through words. All the levels involve growing or shrinking things and/or yourself in various ways to navigate the space in different ways but it never felt incredibly repetitive - partly because it's somewhat short. Story wise, I'm mixed. It is all about the blossoming and ending of a relationship (that's not a spoiler as the first part talks about the ending but spoiler tag for me talking about the "how" it ended). The acting is fantastic and the dialogue is mostly realistic and feels very natural - overall a huge step above most games in that regard. However.... the way the relationship ended did not make sense to me. There was a big effort to set up their dynamic and show how well they melded, and then there was a text box to say that cracks were starting to form. Overall, the game looks great. The puzzles are intriguing while not being overly complex. Each level plays a song which comes out of nowhere and the tracks are all good, even if they don't always fit the vibe. I'd recommend it as a short playthrough but maybe try not to get too invested in the story part.

Boggle Plus is done 50 point regular Boggle tournament against the 3 hard CPUs. This took over 10 hours because Charles is a cheating dictionary that steals every word possible and uses words no one has heard of. Rejecting unrecognized words was painful sometimes. I had to toss out "nope" "denting" (but dentin is allowed...) "nanny" "soiree" "quad" and a few others that were definitely words. All while the computer got to play stuff like "Ait" and "ret" and "xray". On my first night of trying I noticed some repeating boards. To win, I had to take notes and list what Charles scored on and also list the words that I scored on so that if/when that board came up again, I could prevent him from gaining points while still getting my points. I also learned that when the boards repeat, they do so in the same sequence. Still, there were so many configurations that it took 20 pages of notes that had 3-4 boards on each before I finally got a set of repeats early enough in the game to finally win. This game felt like a homework assignment that never ended. The solo modes were fun, though. Next up I'm playing Jurassic Park 2: The Chaos Continues.

I finished two games today Super Mario RPG is done I never played it growing up, but in college I tried to play through emulator. I couldn't get past the second main area, though because the water textures wouldn't display properly, so most everything here was brand new to me. I'm really not an RPG type of guy, but this alleviates almost all of my problems with the genre. Random encounters are the bane of my gaming existence, but here you can choose almost all of your fights (and most of the time, there is no quick respawn preventing your escape). Everything was nice and linear with decent, constant progression. The presentation was absolutely outstanding with a wide array of enemies, locations, characters, encounter types and a few optional objectives. It's amazing how much character there are in the sprites and how many different animations were created for 1 or 2 seconds of a cutscene. This game oozes with personality and drowns in incredible music. If I were to complain about anything, it's that there's too many coins for not enough purpose. I was almost always maxed out on money and items because I rarely needed to use the stuff I had. That's pretty minor, though. I can easily see why this is so beloved. Then, I went ahead and closed out the last couple chapters of Yakuza Kiwami to lock down the platinum trophy. I'm already pretty well hooked into this series. Again, not a typical "RPG" guy, but action RPGs with open world elements are a whole different ballgame. I absolutely loved this world and the characters and the dichotomy between the incredibly serious main story line and the off-the-wall bonkers sidequests. Going for the platinum is definitely a choice and a commitment. The completion list does require grinding for money in one way or another, gambling takes too long to accomplish as well. There are a couple of really challenging points in that list but most is manageable if you want to take the time. The climax battles were fascinating but quite difficult. I do feel like I'm better at the combat of the game, generally speaking because of them. Beating the game on Legend was a breeze after doing the climax battles and getting the items from those. I didn't need a healing item once. The only tricky part was the on-rails shooter car chase part which took a dozen tries (and makes you do the whole chapter again to retry). My understanding is that Yakuza 0 is maybe an easier platinum but a longer one. I'm planning on tackling that next year so I can try to maybe catch up on all of these titles.

Yeah, I think it was 4 levels, but most had multiple missions within it. I remember the revelation of being able to destroy some buildings for health, ammo, & armor. Figuring out the right route ended up being a lot of fun. You're making me look forward to Jungle Strike even more. Hopefully next year (unless it wins the pending raffle)!

Interesting. The old trial and error method. I've been wanting to play this for a while too since Desert Strike seems so long ago and it was a blast. It's been picked a few times in my viewer polls, but never won the raffle. Are you moving right into Urban Strike next?

Well, I was making great progress on Yakuza Kiwami's climax battles and only had 8 left to do. I decided to unwind with a different game and when coming back today, all my progress was gone. I've been putting the PS5 in rest mode for weeks but apparently the game doesn't save progress unless you go back to the main menu, so I have to do all but 3 all over again. Whoops. It wouldn't be so bad, except that the enemy AI has RNG elements baked in so you can start a fight the same way but get wildly different results, possibly minutes into a run making you do it all again. There's still a chance I'll be done with this in a week or so since I took time off from work. It will all depend on how hard the NG+ is and how quick that story-only run is. But, hey, I got a couple levels of Maquette done.

Thanks! Once I got in the game, that's what I saw and went with. The manual indicates that one of the guys in the top 4 is not so great and that one of the people in the "bottom 4" is pretty good, so that's what threw me off. Charles is the one to watch out for and I honestly don't know a legit strategy to win with my vocabulary and my inability to play the game well. I noticed that boards do repeat on subsequent tries of the tournament, so my tactic may be to map out what words Charles gets points on and what ones I get points on and basically squeak out a win that way. The dictionary is so strange. So many actual words I put in that aren't in there. The one that bugged me the most was one where I put soiree and soirees, but yeah...not in their dictionary. But Hereof and hereto and xray as one word count? Dumb.

Cliffhanger is done I haven't seen the movie, but there's quite a bit of story and apparently it's relatively faithful, even if written like a children's book. This is not a very good game. It took me about 30 minutes to get through all parts of the first level as I learned the jumping mechanics and quirks. Jumping while not running, you can control your guy mid-air. With the run jump, you cannot. Hit boxes are pretty wonky which occasionally caused problems with minor enemies who somehow got hit priority over me. Weapons don't stack, so if you have a gun with 5 bullets left and grab a single-use knife, that gun is gone forever. Thankfully a lot of the enemies can be straight-up skipped. The health bar is generous and resets with each new section of the level and most of the bosses pose no problem. I couldn't figure out the strategy for the level 4 boss, though and got lucky trading hits. The music is better than what we got in Home Alone and the cut scene graphics are good enough, while in game sprites are average with decent backgrounds. I had trouble with just a few key frustrating areas, but having 3 continues and short levels kept the true rage at bay. I did not start Boggle Plus like I hoped, so I'll work on that tonight. The win condition says to beat the 4 top CPU players. Does the game tell you which are the hardest? The manual gives descriptions of their playstyle, but doesn't specifically say if they are easy, medium or hard. @Splain, you've beaten this one before, right?

Home Alone is done This was a little better than expected, but overall a tedious adventure. The levels are split between two parts. First is collection, where you go through one of the 4 wings of Kevin's house and grabbing expensive stuff before the bad guys do. Once you have enough, you get a key to one of the 4 basements and need to navigate creatures to get to the bosses. Each level has more rooms, more bad guys and more things to collect, but ammo carries over. The last level sees you collect 70 items (you can hold 9 at a time before depositing) which doubles the length of the rest of the game. I found level 3 to be the toughest and it took a few tries to understand the basement part. Really none of the collection areas are all that hard as extra lives are pretty easy to get. The final boss area was incredibly easy. The music loops are a bit grating and too repetitive and I do wish there was an option to actively place my own traps instead of leading people to spots or shooting them with weapons. Still, it was pretty fun overall. I also found a glitch that ended up softlocking me. In the attic in level 3, you can jump over the stairs and leads you right into the level 4 where you can collect animals. Depositing those gives you credit on level 3, but if you pass the boss and then go to level 4, those items are still gone. Maybe there's a possibility you can skip a boss, but I always died before reaching the basement door to test that. Dying puts you back into the level 3 floorplan. I'll be working on Cliffhanger tonight and if it's as short & easy as it sounds from looking up times, then I'll be working on Boggle Plus as well.

Toem is done As I work through Super Mario RPG (5 of 7 stars) and Yakuza Kiwami (most Climax battles and NG+ to go) and Picross S2 (~100 puzzles left), and picking The World Ends With You back up, I wanted another quicker clear. Now, only 8 months into the year, I'm halfway to my goal of 50 games done.... I was about halfway through this when I put it down so it only took a few more hours to get through the rest of the main story and the DLC. This was much more my speed compared to Untitled Goose Game. I loved the art style and the light puzzle solving involved throughout a meatier set of levels. Almost all of your picture subjects are visible normally, you just need to figure out the way to get the right shot. Only a couple are hidden from your typical view, asking you to go into camera mode and swivel. I did look up a couple of the objectives/trophies as I was cleaning up since I forgot that the filters were a thing. The worlds have plenty of character and each offered a nice, different environment even in a completely grayscale presentation. It was also nice that there wasn't a lot of backtracking from one locale to the next. Almost everything was self-contained to its own area and that helped to reduce some of the confusion. It's a very charming game and I hope their next effort has a similar feel.

Alright, Primal Rage is done I don't have much experience with this game on any system. Maybe played it in the arcade once or twice, so I really have no clue how this port compares to others, but I did not enjoy this game. I didn't have the manual, but did find an ebay listing that had pages scanned so I could learn the one listed special move that way. (I don't allow myself to use information that isn't in the manual, so I didn't want to risk checking gamefaqs for a moves list and have it tell me things that the manual doesn't include). That ended up helping because the CPU can spam the crap out of their projectile special moves. I had to cheese things and do my best to stay alive. Then the mega punch for blizzard (the manual evidently doesn't show you how to do his freezing move?) was a good spam option for me sometimes. It's a short adventure and the sprites are not great. The environments are fine but there are only 6 stages. I mean, thankfully that's all there is. The stupid gauntlet at the end was a terrible surprise, but at least the ending was lackluster. I also got a little bit of learning done on Home Alone and I think I'll get that done next week. I played up to the boss on level 3 but didn't get a hit on it. With that knowledge and 3 continues given, I might beat it when I play next.

Two games finished yesterday. First was Battletoads This is the first Battletoads game I've ever actually tried to beat and it was probably the best place to start. While it shares a name with the NES cartridge, this is its own thing and seemingly a lot easier overall. The stages are all incredibly short and many of the bosses are incredibly easy. I had some trouble with the first level's boss because the dash function never worked as consistently as I wanted. The rest of the mechanics were smooth. You definitely still need to learn levels through some failure but pretty quickly you'll get to the point where 75% of the mistakes, death and damage are your fault and the other 25% are from strange hit boxes and backwards attack priorities (where you'll throw a punch first but the enemy gets a cheap shot on you anyway). The vertical levels were the worst. Going down, they stop the scrolling in places that keeps enemies too high on the screen to hit and the tunnel doesn't fit on the horizontal, so the insta-death slimes can be very tricky. Also the rat at the end has one of the more confusing hit box set-ups I've seen. I have no clue what actually causes me to get squashed sometimes. The going up level turned out to be the last and is a tightly timed gauntlet where you dodge a bunch of stuff and stop to do mini space invaders stuff and then keep going before you die. 3 hits and you're screwed. Go to slow, you're screwed. So that's all learning the path and executing it well. I also hated the spinning blades level as there are circular platforms and holding right at a certain spot moves you left. Of course if you're off-center, your jump will send you to death. So yeah, it's not easy and not always fair, but it's manageable and I felt like nearly every try was new progress made. The music and graphics are outstanding as well with plenty of character and it still has the variety of attack animations and new enemies each level. If I had more tolerance for harder games, this would get a higher rating, but if you're a fan of Battletoads in general, it's worth trying. After that, I had just enough time in the night to start and finish The Little Mermaid, which took about 45 minutes Here's a nice, simple, semi-relaxing game to cleanse the palate. Unlike many other Disney games, this one really emphasizes the story through several cutscenes and good still images between levels. The actual levels are maybe a little short, but dying will usually send you to the start. The only part of the adventure that gave me any trouble at all was the slow reaction time of Ariel compared to the faster fish enemies. There isn't enough time to turn around and shoot if they are close enough. A couple of tight spaces (and my aggressive play) made me game over a couple times. There are unlimited continues and as long as you make it to the boss, all should go well. The boss fights are the same concept of take bubbled fish and toss it into boss and presents them in different ways. The last phase of Ursula looked great, but did not present any more of a challenge. I do wish there was a bit more depth to the game, but the presentation was nice and it was fun for what it was. Here's the list of what's coming up next for me. I expect to get through Primal Rage before the week is out at least Game #164 Primal Rage 165 Home Alone 166 Cliffhanger 167 Boggle Plus 168 Jurassic Park Part 2: The Chaos Continues 169 Revenge of the 'Gator 170 Shanghai