Floating Platforms

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.

Final Fantasy Legend II is done Overall this is a stark improvement over FF Legend 1. I mean, there's multiple save files! Plus, there's no potential for perma-death. It has a robot class now. There are a ton of different locations and characters to interact with. Fewer inventory slots taken up by garbage quest items you're not sure if you'll need again. Very little to no chances of soft locking. Better sprite work. More enemy types. It was mostly a great experience, even for someone who still gets irrationally annoyed by random encounters in RPGs like me. Then the last sections happened and the final boss wasn't the final boss. It was the beginning of a series of hard as nails fights that you can't run from and mini-bosses that can wipe your entire party before you get to attack if the RNG doesn't go your way (even characters with 999 HP). I ended up saving relatively frequently and tried the true final boss several times, making slight adjustments to my approach. When I found a system that might have worked, I still had to try that 3-4 times to be sure since the RNG of the damage output caused some issues. I'm sure if I had certain better items it would be different, but most of the stuff I really wanted to buy was unavailable by the time I had huge stacks of cash so there was nothing to spend it on. I had to play through FFL1 twice because I softlocked at the boss with an unwinnable build. This was more fun generally speaking, but there's still no way I would consider voluntarily playing this again. Next up I'll be playing Oddworld Adventures. If anyone's curious, here is my current soft dibs update for upcoming games 155 Oddworld Adventures 156 Ken Griffey Jr. presents MLB 157 Pyramids of Ra 158 George Foreman's KO Boxing 159 Wheel of Fortune 160 Simpsons: Bart vs. The Juggernauts, The 161 TBD on next poll after game 156. 162 Battletoads

Just finished the main story of Yakuza Kiwami but I still have a long way to go for the platinum trophy, which is my goal. I've done a ton of the side quests, boosted all my non-Dragon skills, have half the Dragon skill tree done, 50% of the completion log and very close to S rank on Majima. I still have a ton of the slot car racing and virtually all of the gambling to do and most coliseum stuff. I'm doing better than I thought I would so far in the year, but the more I look at the list, I think I'm going to fall short of my goals. There are several longer games I want to get through, but I set myself up for an average of 1 game completed each week. I think that simply reinforces that my backlog is just too big and I should avoid buying too many new games.

Jaws is done 3 days a week (most of the time), I'm streaming Game Boy stuff and I've decided to make more of a concerted effort to continue playing retro stuff on stream late night. Monday was LTTP, which I had been whittling down for several months. Tonight was time for a quick one. I've weirdly never beaten this one, but have gotten close many times. I remember getting to the final part where you have to make Jaws pop out of the water, but as kids we never figured out exactly how things needed to be done. I know it has the AVGN reputation, but I enjoy this one quite a bit. It's reminiscent of a solid 80s arcade game with a bit of progression mixed in on your way to an end goal. I could see the various single-screen shooter parts being one of my favorite Atari 2600 games if that were real. Leveling up and fighting the big bad shark (who can wander into your screen unannounced sometimes) is kind of a bonus.

Well, I can't read all of that since I haven't played it and I like to go in blind, but great that it's there! I was wrong about getting FFL2 done by the end of the month. I thought there was another week. Oops. After almost 7 hours, I have 35/77 magi things. Haven't had to grind yet, but it seems like that will hit any day now. So, maybe end of next week this will be done.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is done It's good to finally have this one done and behind me. One of those all-time classics that I didn't grow up with so rarely played. There were a couple instances where I had gotten through a couple early parts on emulator but then abandoned it because the game never fully pulled me in. Sadly, this was still true. I never really felt much desire to go back and keep playing and exploring. It's clearly well-made, but I did struggle with some of the controls and hit detection. I mentioned before that I was going to look up how to upgrade my sword as that was apparently required to beat the game along with getting an arrow upgrade. I wonder if the game's fortune teller would give you the proper hints. I just didn't feel like beating my head against the wall and there was no actual in-game guidance for most of the stuff you have to find. Just go out and explore everything and try everything, cut all grass, dig stuff, etc. As a kid, that would be alright. I don't have the desire to dedicate that time to search up and down 30 times. So yeah, not my favorite Zelda game of all time, but even the ones that aren't the best are still very, very good. I appreciated the challenge that certain parts gave me (but that also kept me away a bit longer than if I could cruise through some puzzle dungeons), and all of the boss fights were fun and unique. Personally I feel that later games done in this same style/perspective are a bit stronger because the developers were able to refine and fine tune things. Other things I'm playing: Picross S2 - roughly 40% done. The World Ends With You - I'm at day 6 of what they say is 7, but there's gotta be more to the story or it's one massive batch of postgame. Yakuza Kiwami - Episode 7 but I've been doing tons of side quest stuff. 20+ hours in and still so much more to do.

Congratulations! Did they ship it out yet by chance? I won a different auction from them (Wario Land 2), paid right away but have heard nothing. Had to open the case requesting payment/shipment today. I'm wondering if they're ignoring mine because it went too low in their eyes.

Star Trek: The Next Generation is done The only hard part about this game was fighting the Romulans. Other enemies were push overs. The second hardest part was figuring out what to do until I was given the manual for the NES version. I got most of the mechanics and controls on my own, but I didn't guess the correct purpose of Geordi's little mini-game thingy. All of the missions are randomized from a very small pool of objectives and a large pool of planets you can go to. Most aren't too bad. I think the only one I never passed was saving people from an asteroid. I never had enough time. To rank up, you need to beat several missions in a row. I'm pretty sure that losing once resets progress. The graphics and presentation are absolutely fantastic. They have a nice version of the theme at the opening but grating sound effects for the phasers. I really enjoyed the experience overall, but later on it did start to get repetitive and a bit tedious waiting for the ship to repair in order to go back into battle. I liked the 25th Anniversary game more but this was solid. Next week I'll be starting Final Fantasy Legend II and hoping I can close that out by the end of the month.

Dragon's Lair: The Legend is done Honestly, it's not a terrible game. It requires learning and patience of course, but there's a solid collect-a-thon here for the most part. The music is well done. The graphics look great for such an early title as well with plenty of different locations and detailed animated backgrounds. What holds the game back isn't even the 9 lives with no ability to earn more. It's the terrible jumping mechanic and unforgiving fall damage deaths. Sometimes you can fall from a great distance, and sometimes you can't even go half a screen before it's death. I never learned the why, but I learned where was safe. The jumps occasionally do not work as expected. I would go straight up instead of over or I would jump twice on accident, or I would land on something unexpectedly and slip off (because it's really hard to know what is a surface to touch/use without trying/failing). So, yeah, learning it can be mean but treating each section like a puzzle to figure out made it better. Next week I'll start on ST:TNG and then dive into FF Legend II

Lego City Undercover is done I got to 99.9% last night and got the last objective during lunch today. I think I said last year after getting 100% on Lego Dimensions that I was done with those games for a while, but I wanted to make more progress on my Wii U backlog and this was an obvious place to start. I'll probably play the 3DS Lego City game next year. The game is good, the same type of stuff you would expect from Lego. Clever writing that is kid friendly but doesn't talk down and has some legitimate good jokes and moments. If you just want to beat the story, it's a fast experience. The meat of the game is going through the districts and searching for collectibles with all your unlocked abilities. After finishing the story, your percentage will likely be around 30-40%. The tasks can get repetitive and it wasn't great that you have several objectives on rooftops that take effort to climb, but each one takes you off the roof so you have to make the same trek 2, 3, 4 times. Some of the stuff is pretty deviously hidden but red bricks give you better scanning and there was only one thing that didn't pop up in my scan that I can remember. A good time waster, pretty good game to have on mute in the background while watching other stuff. In other news, I was stuck on the first major boss in Yakuza Kiwami (the Shimano fight at the funeral) and stopped playing for a few months, but finally got past it this weekend and I'm looking forward to sinking many hours into the sidequests now that the city has opened up to me.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin is done. I beat all three modes, but didn't do the Nest of Evil or whatever the boss rush area is called. Picture shows "Richiter" mode which unlocks after beating the main Jonathan mode. You also unlock Sisters mode, which is the third file (but also doesn't show "clear" for whatever reason). 3 Different ways to experience the same game with 2 of them not really adding much value. Honestly, it would have been best if the 2 unlockable duos were boss rush only since running through the castle and sub worlds was a total pushover from the start. The only part that gave me trouble in Richter mode was the final boss (since you can't heal like in Jonathan mode), so I grinded levels for a bit and then got it done. Sisters mode doesn't even have a final boss fight, you simply do all 8 sub world bosses and that's it. As for the game itself, it's a 2D Castlevania made after Symphony of the Night and those tend to be pretty dang good. I haven't played a ton of them, but this felt a bit more straightforward than others. Having two characters to choose from was interesting, but it was easy to find a way to cheese most encounters or areas so I rarely had to switch. You can have your partner out to fight alongside you as well, which helps but is rarely necessary (and their damage drains your MP). I think I liked Dawn of Sorrow more but still haven't played Order of Ecclesia (maybe next year). Pretty soon I'll have Lego City Undercover finished. I'm now at about 85% with just a handful of areas to clear out then I need to find a shorter game or two to knock out and stay on track.

Quick little update on my side. I was trying to do a re-visit of Chessmaster and beat it on the medium difficulty, but after a few days of trying, I decided I'm outmatched and need to learn some strategies first. Then I had a vacation and now I'm back to try Dragon's Lair. After a couple nights, I think I've seen all of the screens and made it to the end (just trying to learn the general path without collecting stuff). It will still probably take a few more days, but with practice and luck it seems manageable - which is surprising. I'm not sure if I've updated my soft dibs/upcoming games list in a while, but here's what's on tap afterwards: Star Trek: The Next Generation Final Fantasy Legend II Oddworld Adventures Ken Griffey Jr. presents MLB 3 games TBD Simpsons: Bart vs. The Juggernauts, The

Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose Maybe another day I'll do that hard mode run they're asking for. I had been working on a revisit of Chessmaster for my Game Boy challenge to beat that on the medium difficulty. After about a dozen hours, I realized I do not have the skills for that yet, so that's going back into the revisit pile and yesterday I decided to take a break with some SNES games. When I bought my SNES about 5 years ago, I waited until I found a lot on ebay that included this game. It's one I played a bunch at my friends' house, always had a good time with, but never beat it. It may not be a great game, but I still thoroughly enjoy it. The levels have a nice variety in settings and boss encounters. Some parts are pretty frustrating and trolling, but having some continues helped a ton. The mini games in between levels where you can earn extra lives were my favorite part. Back then I don't think we ever got past the football stage. Now with adult motor skills it was annoying (and basically entirely luck based) but doable. The biggest knock against the game is that the writing and story is really lacking and while some characters appear in the cutscenes, it doesn't feel like a great representation of the Tiny Toons show. After that I played more Link to the Past, got to the boss of the 7th dungeon and basically hit a wall. After trying several times, I was told that my L2 sword wasn't going to cut it unless I stock up on magic refills. Blah. I've played this so sporadically that I have no clue where anything is so I'll probably look up where to go to get a better sword. I'm also missing a possible 4th bottle. At least I have both rods needed for the boss as it sounds like that's a problem for some people.

The Unfinished Swan is... finished. I feel like I'm behind schedule and was on vacation for a week, so I wanted to knock out a quick one. I played it on PS4 but I know it was on PS3 era originally. It's a short experience and it goes a little bit beyond the initial concept of a totally white world that you fill with ink pellets in order to navigate through the areas. Sometimes you have water pellets which will force you to tediously grow vines for climbing and in one section, you create 3D boxes to climb. Honestly, I'd rather see the ink mechanic expanded upon or to use the water to clean the path instead of grow it. The visuals of the black objects against white is still quite striking and fascinating and that sense of wonder gets lost later on. None of the sections are hard by any stretch of the imagination, it feels like a fun proof of concept for gameplay that likely wasn't possible prior to PS3. The story didn't really grab me all that much, but it was far from terrible. It's told like a children's fable but has some deeper context. Nothing super, super deep, mind you. I'm ready to move on to the next game and making progress on a couple. Castlevania Portrait of Ruin has the Jonathan path done, the Sisters are almost done and the Richter path just needs some level grinding to take on the final boss. Lego City Undercover story is done, but I'm only about 50% done with all the stuff to collect/do.

The bonus world was a bit too hard for me, too. I never beat the Championship Road (or whatever it's called in this version) or the last toad house with the 15+ rooms you have to do in a row without failing. Sharp difficulty incline on that last world.

Ah, I see what you mean. It's not bad coding, but totally incomplete for some reason. Not a bad port, and maybe not even laziness, since the screens aren't even on the cart. I do wonder what possible reason there could be for that. Congratulations! If ever there was a good reason to not play games, that would be it. You certainly wouldn't want to deal with Flipull during any relaxation time you get anyway.

I remember this coming up in a previous year's thread as well. From the videos I've seen, the game does indeed basically glitch out and level 48 is essentially the end thanks to bad programming. So you can access and play level 49 but can never get past it. No matter how many levels, it's a game I'm scared to try as I can't wrap my head around what I'm seeing in gameplay, plus there's a timer and limited continues.... If you're going for it, more power to you!

No picture this time, but Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion is done. This third entry in the series is a noticeable improvement over Secrets Can Kill but it is still finding its bearings. The navigation is a bit clunky as everything is done with a magnifying glass icon, which is also used to zoom into key areas. So it's really hard to know if what you're clicking on will move you somewhere or lead to an item, or if you're missing something by clicking on the wrong spot. Later games changed movement to arrows. Weirdly there are several red herring screens where you can zoom in on things but they never get used throughout. The puzzles are still sparse. There's one at the start and the main objective you're working towards makes it seem like you'd have a lot of little puzzles to do throughout but it's all quickly thrown at you back to back to back at the very end. The rest of the time is mostly light, easy inventory puzzles or finding things to unlock dialog options to progress the story. I ended up looking up a couple things near the end because I missed an easily miss-able zoom area that was needed for the next step (because it was too close to navigation clicks, I think), and also for the safe I couldn't figure out how to rotate the dial. The cursor gives no indication when you're on the wheel, you have to be at 3 or 9 o clock and outside of the actual wheel to see the rotate icon, which is silly. Anyway, it was a fun enough story, even if the characters didn't want to talk about some of the key revelations I uncovered. It'll be interesting to see how adventure #4 compares.

My system has been plugged in all along, but didn't get much use between 2018-2021 or so when my wife and I played Fortune Street a bunch. So, while my system hasn't fully bricked, I did recently have a bad memory issue. I tried buying Metroid Prime Trilogy back in August and it wouldn't download. Smaller VC titles went through just fine. Fast forward to recently and I tried again. I kept getting the same error code to say the data was corrupted and to delete it. Unfortunately, trying to delete it gave me a different error code. I ended up calling customer service and they were able to give me a refund on a digital purchase since it was clear I never got to use the software and the only other option was to buy another Wii U and then try to transfer data between systems. After the refund, I still see it as a blinking error in my download area, so who knows how much space that corrupt data is taking up. At least I know there's nothing else that needs those GBs