Floating Platforms

Demon's Crest has been great so far. I'm probably about 75% done based on the inventory screen. I'm really happy that they got rid of the pretense of the overworld and made it the fly & swoop map. I do miss having any real character interactions since the one town I've been to is just shops and a single guy who always says he's never seen me before. The rest of the game is making up for it. Right now, my only major wish is a better way to switch forms. L & R would have been great instead of having to pause and select all the time.

At first I thought you meant Super Star Wars and I was going to say no because I've already finished the first one at some point and I'm not looking back! But now that I've re-read and seen the screenshot, I can say no because I'm avoiding non-US games to give myself a fighting chance at finishing my challenge.

Gargoyle's Quest 2 is done via the Wii U Virtual Console It's been a couple of decades since I beat Gargoyle's Quest for Game Boy, which is one that I absolutely loved back as a kid. I won't get to play that for my Game Boy challenge until I beat another 200 or so games, though. What I'm saying is that I don't recall the story at all from that, but the sequel seems very separate. The story was really nothing to write home about and, like many NES games, was really more of an outline rather than something with a fleshed out arc. "Firebrand, you need to go here to get this thing." "Thank you for getting that thing, here is your upgrade." Everything was a bit more linear than I expected, since there is an overworld you can explore. Exploring doesn't typically get you anything since it's just a hub for the locations with the exception one enemy square you can farm for vials that get exchanged for lives. I remember a greater sense of exploration and even backtracking with new abilities when I played on GB, but maybe I'm imagining things (or I got lost back then). The progression of the level design works well and the stages and bosses got tougher. I beat most of them by the skin of my teeth. The second to last was a joke and the final boss took a few tries (after going through a long, dangerous gauntlet that used multiple abilities) before I found the sweet spot. Overall, not bad because the level traversal and boss fights were still fun, but not great because of the lackluster story and fake openness. It didn't give me the same sense of magic and wonder that I remembered feeling. I could be jaded by now, though. I may jump right into Demon's Crest through the SNES NSO to see how that compares.

Last night I actually got around to beating the main story for Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom It took me 145 hours according to the switch clock but a lot of that time was spent exploring and doing other side stuff before deciding to head for the endgame and avoid more detours. I don't want to say too much in this mini review, but BOTW became one of my favorite games and this is somehow another level to me. I was worried that there wouldn't be any sense of wonder with a "re-used" map, but I can't tell you how many times my eyes got wide from a discovery or I gasped to myself asking "what is that?" or ran away from a new danger I never would have expected. It's been a while, so I may be wrong, but I feel like there is more actual main story this time around and it went places I wasn't expecting (a rarity for Nintendo). With BOTW I completed all the quests and shrines, but did not 100% the map or find even half of the koroks. I think this game will be back on my backlog list for next year with the intention of doing the same thing - 100%ing everything except the Koroks. That may take another 100 hours since there are so many places I still haven't even touched. Since I haven't hit the halfway mark of my 2023 backlog goals, and the year is half done, I'm probably going to beat one or two quicker games before jumping back into my Yakuza Kiwami platinum quest. I've also recently started my first ever playthrough of Super Mario RPG on my SNES Mini and I'm 3 stars in already.

The Simpsons: Bart vs the Juggernauts is done I was expecting this to be much worse, but honestly this was a mostly enjoyable game. It had the potential to be my new favorite Simpsons game on Game Boy, but there was one event that ruined it all. The Moe's Tavern shoving thing is a broken mess where my button presses would not recognize, my attacks would push me back farther than my opponent, they constantly recovered from the brink of falling and all kinds of other terrible things happened. After a lot of error and some trial I finally found a strategy that worked well enough. The rest of the events had ways to learn what to do with consistency so you could easily improve and it ended up being a fun collection of mini games that are a little rough around the edges. Moe's event felt like a hurried afterthought and struggling with that added literal hours. That's especially true as it turns out you basically need to win every single event in order to reach the money goal at the end. Good writing, decent enough graphics, terrible music, mediocre game. Next up for me is one that won't count for this thread but I need to do - Joshua: The Battle of Jericho. I think this will be better than Exodus simply because it looks like there may be passwords?!??! So I won't have to tediously re-do the last 20 hardest levels just to make a little more progress? We'll see. After that I have Battletoads....

I just tried to search the address to see who might have the PO box and I don't think it exists anymore. I think they switched to a different system. With my luck they would have just sent me a live scarab to deal with.

Awww man, I could of had a certificate of completion at least.

Wheel of Fortune is done Since you can pick your prize before the bonus round, I decided to beat it "100%" and win all 5 prizes. That took quite some time because the game has the old school rules where you don't get any freebie letters at the end. If you pick the wrong stuff, there likely aren't enough clues to guess. The bonus puzzles aren't separate from the normal puzzles either (I got 3 repeats I saw in normal rounds over 5 hours but only recognized 2). The time limit on the bonus round is the only thing that makes this game hard in my opinion as it is extremely short and if you don't know the answer immediately, you will probably run out of time as you try to input something. Oh, and a lot of the puzzle solutions are based on things from the 1920s-1960s. For a kids game released in the 90s. I always played against the computer and half the time they were picking X, Z, and other nonsense. They only solved one actual puzzle in the entire time I played. There was one other problem I encountered twice. When solving, I would select a letter, but the board displayed something else. For instance, I picked "E" while trying to solve and the game filled in "F" even though that was off the board already. Both times this was on a normal round and the CPU is dumb so it only wasted time, but strange that it happened twice. Anyway, I'm rich now, so I'm going to hitch my sailboat up to the cruise ship on my way to Hawaii and spend $25,000 on who knows what and then come back and show off my Porsche. Later, suckers Next week, I will be the sucker playing Bart Vs. the Juggernauts and openly wondering why they didn't also port American Gladiators to the Game Boy.

It's one of those games that's built a bit of a reputation. I think the longest time I have recorded from other challengers is 11 hours, which means it will likely be 3 sessions for me. I know it's one of those games where you have to start from scratch each time you lose and replaying those earlier games over and over just for the opportunity to learn or re-try later levels is going to be the truly annoying part. I also know you can get through all of the games/events and still not win. It'll be interesting to see how it compares to the other Simpson's games in my mind.

well that bodes well for me. I'm still hoping for a relatively stress free playthrough of it. I'm going for all 5 prizes because here's what I have waiting for me right now: 159 Wheel of Fortune 160 Simpsons: Bart vs. The Juggernauts, The 161 Joshua: The Battle of Jericho (Doesn't count for this thread and will likely take me 50+ hours) 162 Battletoads 163 Little Mermaid, The - finally starting to break away from troll picks 164 Primal Rage 165 Home Alone I do own Pit-Fighter now but Primal Rage won the vote, so I don't have to worry about it for a bit longer. I ended up giving George Foreman a 2/10. Out of 158 games, 8 of them have that ranking now. My worst of the worst are the 3 that have earned a 1 for being completely broken messes: NBA Live 96, WWF War Zone, FIFA International Soccer.

George Foreman's KO Boxing is done Garbage. Imagine Mike Tyson's Punch-Out but with none of the elements that make that game good. No fun character design. Patterns that have no visual queues, thus requiring you to take a lot of damage and lose in order to start to figure them out. Also patterns that might change if you try to take advantage of openings you thought you saw but were wrong. Split second reactions with controls that are slow and clunky. Super punches that rarely do anything more than normal damage unless you find the magical sweet spot and sometimes you still need multiple in a row to make a difference. Opponents that will always get up on the same count every time you knock them down, no matter how they are hit. This is forcing you to basically TKO (4 knock downs across all rounds) or last until a judges decision. Punches that will hit you if you are actively dodging because the game wants you to get hit sometimes. Blocking that does nothing to reduce or prevent damage. Passwords that don't work (as I found out yesterday since the pw they gave for my 2nd title win was evidently just wrong and I had to do it again). The positives: I miraculously won several judges decisions even though I was clearly losing overall (conversely, I lost a few decisions when I definitely did better, so who knows how that actually works). Only 9 fighters and none of them repeat? It's not the worst sports game I've had to play? Honestly there's not much good about this one. Next up is what I hope is a good game, or at least a low-stress one - Wheel of Fortune

Finished Rise of the Dragon last night I got an ending, but not the best ending. Honestly I assumed I was going to have to go back to an earlier save and re-do things because there were several elements of the game I never saw. I never meet the mayor, didn't do anything in the police room/armory and didn't do anything in the reservoir even. And in the last area I made a pretty major mistake that caused me to not get a better ending, but I kept playing just to see what awaited me when I came back. Well, lo and behold I was still able to get a legitimate story resolution anyway. Maybe I'll go back and try for a better ending someday? I enjoy my point and click adventures and this one is quite fun. There's trial and error and places where you can get stuck, but that's alright since the overall experience is kind of short once you start to figure out the steps and what not to do. The interface on Sega CD is a bit clunky and sometimes it's not overtly obvious as to what you can interact with. Sometimes you have to click on things a few too many times in the guise of realism. Sometimes the part you need to click on is extremely picky, like in the phone tapping part. Later in the game, there are side scrolling action segments but while they are a change of pace, they aren't very exciting or difficult. I loved the voice acting and loved some of the various dialogue options and characters. It's great that there were different ways to approach scenarios and while the visuals are a bit muddy and green tinted on SCD, the comic book cutscenes were still cool. I wish there was a bit more descriptive text/dialogue for some of the areas, especially for those screens that really meant nothing to the gameplay. I also wish that a couple of the locations were used more than once. Those are minor gripes in a solid but short adventure.

I periodically try to find things on the internet that might have watermarks, but here is the project that I was talking about that's looking for clean first-hand sourced scans - https://www.sprintinglegs.com/gbdb/manuals/ Sadly there's no sorting of the columns, but there is a checkbox at the top to see all the ones that do have manuals. Otherwise, it's unfortunately a matter of searching each individually. Not sure if this link will work, but here's a view-only look at my drive folder with all the manuals I've been able to find - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HMCJOrdL0-RmAbCLMaDpVFp3_eQkOGl2?usp=sharing

very nice. I forget if we're allowed to share links here, but I have a google drive with almost 350 scanned manuals found through scouring the internet. If you have anything I don't and vice versa, it would be great to fill in the gaps. I know there's a community that's also looking to build a database of clean scans across all regions for GB.

Same here...I will be making a strong effort to keep TOTK as a weekend only game from here on out and do retro consoles on weekdays. Because of that, I'm almost done with Rise of the Dragon. I think. Making good progress either way and enjoying it a lot. Even though I'm loving my time in Zelda, beating it is a long way off (only done 1 of the 4 main quest areas after 60 hrs). I might take a couple days off from it to go back to Yakuza again. I've been feeling the itch to do some more gambling and climb back in the coliseum.

George Foreman's KO Boxing is terrible. Expect a rant when I'm done with it. Currently 6 of 9 (if the manual lists them all) boxers are done.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses has tea parties you can use to build relationships with everyone. That was weirdly one of the main selling points that got my wife interested in the game.

Pyramids of Ra is finally done after 28 hours or so Even with the trick I mentioned earlier to gain more energy without resetting and re-entering passwords, this was simply far too long with far too many puzzles. Even with perfect play and jumping 100 rooms at a time it would be too many. Eventually the rooms got to be derivative, which was good for recognition but bad for engagement. I don't feel like the difficulty really increased much, if at all, past tomb #3 either so it really became a slog. I absolutely hate the super precise timing for the scarab jumping and those moving tiles that will stutter step sometimes instead of going along their normal path are the devil's work. I've heard that there are potentially unbeatable floors. I didn't run into any of those, but I did get a password that refused to load a level. It only played music on a loop so I had to backtrack to an older password once. Of the two jumping related puzzle games I've played, I think I prefer Lazlo's Leap, even though the presentation in this one is better. I can't find a copy of the manual anywhere. Does anyone know anything about the prize that it mentions? Next up for me is George Foreman's KO Boxing

I'm making progress in Pyramids of Ra, but it's slow. I don't know what floors have the exits (and I'm purposefully not looking it up), but I'm on tomb #4 and got to room 5800+. Scarabs and those moving tiles that stutter step can go to hell. Anyway, I discovered a trick that is helping me move up a bit more without essentially "save scumming" passwords. I have yet to go back to previous passwords and retry for a better energy score. I'm just taking what the game hands me with the energy I end up with but keeping some older passwords in reserve in case I run into any unwinnable rooms, which I guess can potentially happen? I don't know how this game has so many potential puzzles. It's fun most of the time, but I haven't had the mental energy this week to make as much progress as I hoped.

Mansion of Hidden Souls is done I'm back on the board! With all my complaining about the long games I'm juggling, I kinda forgot that I've been promising to stream more non-Game Boy games. I'll do my normal GB streams and then break and come back with other retro systems for the general backlog. I started this a couple weeks back and finished it up last night. It's a fun little experience, but if I owned a Sega CD and this growing up it would be disappointing. It's weird that it was included in the Genesis Mini 2. We're looking at a very short adventure that's light on exploration, light on puzzles, light on story and light on just about everything. It has its charms but I wish there was more to interact with or more point & click elements/inventory puzzles. Mostly, it's walking around and talking to the butterflies and grabbing an item here and there to open the next door. The ending sequence was odd with a timed escape and what seemed like pure guess work to get out (unless I missed some key piece of information, but it's really hard to miss the little lore there is). I guessed wrong so often that I barely got out before the timer was up, but I can say goodbye to that mansion now. I think I'll start up Rise of the Dragon next to keep the Sega CD fun going.

50-60 sounds about right for Ghosts of Tsushima. I did all the non-multiplayer stuff including the DLC island. Xenoblade scares me with how long that could be for someone like me with a completionist mindset. Shenmue shouldn't be too terribly long compared to these others. I'm one of those types that absolutely loves the game for its campy-ness so I was wasting tons of times talking to all the NPCs after everything to see what they would say.. All of the talk around Baba is You on this thread is making me not want to pick it up, just because I don't want to get sucked into that time commitment. Juggling these long games (and knowing more are waiting in the wings) is making me think about how to readjust my 2024 backlog goals even further.

I'm going to be falling way behind. I took a break from long game Yakuza Kiwami to start massive game Tears of the Kingdom. If I don't want to do either of those, I have long game Picross S2 and my handheld time is long game The World Ends With You. I might get a couple Sega CD games done by the end of the month if I'm lucky.

Ken Griffey Jr. Presents MLB is done First I tried the All-Star game to get a feel and see if it would have its own end screen. I lost 22-1. Then I moved on to the Home Run Derby and after watching the CPU Griffey's turn with no way to skip or fast forward, my choice of Frank Thomas won first try. I switched to Griffey's Mariners for the World Series mode. There are no other rounds of the playoffs, just a best of 7 and you can pick any teams. I chose the Phillies who had one of the worst records in '97 and won in game 7. This game is awful and made me mad, mostly because of the terrible programming of the defensive side. Batting is okay in that you can hit virtually any pitch but I didn't have much control over fly balls vs grounders (despite what the manual says). Pitching is blah. I was able to get some strikeouts, but there are very few speed and location options and the CPU will hit most things. There's no such thing as multi-base hits. It's either singles or homers. I managed 2 doubles with Griffey but in 7 games that's it. All players have rocket arms. Thankfully the CPU also rarely tries to advance more than 1 base at a time, which is weird because there were a lot of opportunities for them when I lost track of my outfielders. Defense is broken in a logical sense. There were a lot of hits that, based on their field position, should be handled by certain players but the game forces you to use someone else (so you're moving the wrong way instantly). Other times, there are line drives past the shortstop but you aren't allowed to control him, so you watch the ball go past your statue player while you scramble to re-orient yourself to the outfielder that needs to get it. There's a mini-map that shows you where you are and where the ball is and where it should land. Many problems with this. 1) It's wrong. Actual fly balls that give you time to position yourself are very, very rare. Almost every hit is a screaming rocket. When you do get time to react properly, you can put your dot inside the target on the mini map, but the ball drops far away from your guy. There were a couple times where the mini map showed the ball would land foul and it didn't. My best bet was to get close and then hit B to dive/jump and hope it worked. 2) the runners are also the same dots. So is the ball on the ground. It's very easy on infield hits to not know what you're controlling and what you're chasing. It's all a huge confusing mess which caused me to lose multiple games and stress out while I finally managed to squeak through game 7 after being up 3-1 in the series. I don't know if it's the worst baseball game I've played. Probably yes. I think Sports Illustrated's baseball side was tougher to get a handle on, but in a different way. This game I never got fully used to the defense because so much of it makes little practical sense from a baseball strategy perspective and from a UI/gameplay perspective. Next week I'll be starting Pyramids of Ra. I have no experience with this one and don't have the manual so I have no clue what to expect. My target is to get it done by the end of the month

Oddworld Adventures is done I don't have any experience with the Oddworld series, so it's tough for me to know how this actually compares to something on a more powerful console. I was expecting a puzzle platformer and that's what I got, but I wasn't rescuing my fellow odd people. I was navigating ledges and enemies to light torches and go through doors. I didn't have the manual, so I probably did some levels the hard way, but it seemed like a couple of the mechanics were only utilized once. For a bit it was interesting to learn how to get through levels, but the more times I failed on a particular stage, the more the game wore out its welcome. Going with those cinematic platformer controls never feels good. Far too many inputs get eaten and too many jumps fail because a button was held a frame or two too long, causing you to do the stage over. Thankfully there are unlimited continues. Tomorrow I'll be starting Ken Griffey Jr, trying to not only win the world series, but also take on the home run derby.

The Amazing Spider-Man Vs the Kingpin is done Played on normal mode. The only parts that really gave me any trouble was the first boss (for me) Electro, and then at the end with multiple enemies. I did get some chat assistance for the latter. It's a pretty simple game, but quite fun. I'm a sucker for cheap animation in video games (and FMV). I love the campier side of art and this hit that spot. The era-appropriate opening rock anthem was the perfect mood setter for the cutscenes that offered really cheesy writing, decent performances, and odd character animation choices. I will never understand why the eye holes go down way past Peter's cheekbones, but whatever. It's cool that the game offers different difficulties and optional comic cover collectibles for those that feel like mastering the game or going for the nightmare contest upon its release. A wide variety of villains, all with their own cutscenes, was great to see. I wish there was a bit more variety in how you fought each one. I also wish there were more web abilities. The swinging and movement of Spidey wasn't all that fluid and honestly the web swinging was on par with the Atari 2600 game. I'm glad I was finally able to enjoy the full story of this one after originally playing it with a friend nearly a decade ago and stopping half-way through. I think I'll stay on the Sega CD next week and either tackle my other holdover game Rise of the Dragon, or maybe Mansion of Hidden Souls.