Floating Platforms

Untitled Goose Game is done

Well, in the genre of 'Games starting with the letter "U" that also feature a bird' this is my second favorite behind Unfinished Swan. I had heard good things about this but it ended up not being my thing. There was a bit too much emphasis on stealth and waiting unless you're doing the super optimized speed-run strats (but at that point, you either looked up a guide or have been through the levels.  The human RNG was also a bit obnoxious.  The game was also extremely short. The level sizes were fine, but maybe random objectives or more objectives would be better. Even with the optional to-do's there were so many items within the levels that are totally useless (just like the flap wings button). The game was fine, but way overhyped. I'm really glad I didn't pay full price for it.

Joshua: The Battle of Jericho is done

I know this doesn't count for this thread, but it's been keeping me from doing more since it is part of my challenge.

This is the same style of game as Exodus, but more forgiving.  You have boulderdash style levels but this time there are a couple of new mechanics like the goat enemies and potential secret exists that lead to bonus points.  It also has passwords! That literally saved me 20+ hours over Exodus when I had to do levels 81-100 all in one run.
Like Exodus, the game itself is actually pretty good but while it's improved in some ways, it's worse in others. There's no background song and the storybook part only shows up once every 5 levels, instead of after every level with Moses' story. I don't understand many of the sprite choices here, either. Overall, I'd say the difficulty of the puzzles are harder, but Exodus had the hardest levels between them. Exodus also had more devious exists. Both have a good variety in puzzle type (sequence of events, speed, enemy, explosion, etc). I still think that 100 levels is too much, and that the difficulty is antithetical to the point of having a kid progress through the game to see and answer more Bible questions. But it has passwords, so I'm not complaining nearly as much this time around.

Now that this is finished, I am starting Battetoads. Then I have several quicker games lined up like Little Mermaid, so I'm hoping to add a few clears by the end of the month

Well, getting closer to the platinum on Yakuza Kiwami. Finally finished the completion list so all that's left are the climax battles and to beat the game on the hardest difficulty on NG+. Before I do that, I'm going to try to get another quick one out of the way.

I'm also trying to find more stream time to get through Super Mario RPG. I've just acquired star 4 of 7, but don't know how much longer the levels/areas leading to the next 3 might be in comparison.

9 hours ago, Sumez said:

I wish I could keep my write-ups as short as you guys, maybe people would actually read them then

I read your reviews (unless I know for sure I'm planning to play that game for myself some day) and thoroughly enjoy them. I wish I had more time and ability to make mine longer.

Man...I'm finally ready to pick up Kiwami again to continue that platinum trophy quest. I finished up darts and spent a long time playing mahjong incorrectly last night. I now know that you either need 4 sets of 3 + 1 pair, or 7 pairs. There is no mixing/matching multiple pairs with sets. Should go better next time.

23 hours ago, Sumez said:

The True Last Boss in demons crest means business for sure! 

yeah, I do not feel bad about looking up strategies and creating a save state right before the battle began at all.

21 hours ago, Webhead123 said:

The extent of the branching paths in Demon's Crest really took me by surprise. All these years I had assumed it was a pretty straightforward platformer only to discover that there was so much more to it than first appears. Great game.

For sure, the first time I found a secret exit that led to a boss, I was surprised that the levels were so deep and long. It also clued me into the idea that other things might be interactive in other levels. Each section was short enough that it never felt like a chore searching for secrets, either.  Maybe Capcom will bring back the series in some form someday.

Demon's Crest is done through the SNES app on the Switch NSO

I went for the best ending and 100% completion. I found most of the items and things on my own, but did use a guide for two parts - the last health upgrade that's tied to a minigame I didn't find or assume would have one, and for one of the talismans.  I also used a suspend point at the start of the final, true boss so that I didn't have to constantly farm money to buy more potions for another try, and I looked up hints on strategy - something I would never do for my Game Boy challenge, but I have less of a problem for a personal backlog game when I feel like I'm beating my head against the wall.  Learning you could charge your shot was a difference maker. NSO needs to attach manuals to these games (text based ones at the very least).  Those last bosses were tough and very annoying with constant projectiles and homing attacks that made it very hard to get in good position for even a single shot back at them. It took me 3 nights to beat the last 2.

Again, I don't really remember specifics about the original Gargoyle's Quest, but this game is certainly a lot better than 2. I miss the idea of going from town to town and having the residents tell me the story and send me on the adventure. Here you have a single town with a single person that says one thing regardless of how much progress you make. Instead you get improved navigation through the mode 7 map and some roman numerals to tell you generally where to head first. Each area has branching paths and multiple bosses and potential secrets. Now you can always hover forever, so it felt like the level design wasn't as strong as it was mostly linear or clearly intended for one of the special abilities you get later like water or flying upwards. Some of the abilities are completely useless - I never had to use the tornado platforms or the wall goop thing. But the music is fun, the characters look awesome. The bosses are really cool with variations in technique and, again, ramping difficulty. It was a lot of fun to explore everything and felt satisfying to make progress and finally take down that last guy.

On 7/17/2023 at 3:19 AM, Sumez said:

Demon's Crest ditches the presumption of an overworld entirely, it's just a map where you go directly to each individual platformer location. You do have to fly around on it, and it's possible to miss the existence of some hot spots (especially since some only get unlocked later, and they won't look different), but it's an even smaller part of the game than it was in GQ1 and 2.

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.

13 hours ago, MagusSmurf said:

Was anyone else planning to play the original Super Wars Wars this year?

...Probably not. But if so, I WILL DENY YOU POINTS.

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....

4 hours ago, Splain said:

It says "All correct entries." Send in the card!

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.

1 hour ago, bronzeshield said:

Fortunately, Bart vs. the Juggernauts isn't that bad. Once you figure out how the game works, it's not difficult to beat --I think both times I cleared it, it took one day of practice and then I beat it the next time I picked it up.

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.

5 hours ago, Splain said:

At one point I considered Wheel of Fortune to be The Worst Game on GB.

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

25 minutes ago, Splain said:

I have 400+ manuals, but not Pyramids of Ra yet, so I just bought one on ebay. I'll report back when it arrives.

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.

12 hours ago, Sumez said:

Tears of the Kingdom is aggressively grinding my backlog progress to a halt.

The past weeks I've had very little time to sit down with a game at all, and when I have, it's been TOTK every time. There's just too much to see nad explore in this game, and I'm not really seeing any end to it yet, I'm expecting it'll go very close to 100 hours before I can let it go. A playtime which could have been used to play through tons of smaller games in my backlog.

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