Gaia Gensouki

Better late than never. Here is my submission. 1-1: 58 Coins, 246 time left. 1-2: 30 Coins, 250 time left. 1-3: 84 Coins, 165 time left. 1-4: 45 Coins, 221 time left. 217 Coins, 882 time left. So 1 coin missing in 1-1, 5 coins in 1-2 and 3 coins in 1-3.

If there's any time for a clean-up, then this is it. The remaining titles aren really unpopular and/or very difficult. So if you and @ZeldaFreak want to contribute, you're very welcome. There are still some major hurdles like Arkanoid, Bases Loaded I, III and IV, Championship Pool, Gauntlet, Hunt for Red October, Ikari Warriors (no ABBA code!), Kung Fu Heroes (I never made it past 7-4), Rally Bike, Silkworm (the last level is crazy hard!), Sky Kid, Top Gun: The Second Mission and Time Lord. Personally, I'm not even sure what I can contribute at this point in the challenge. Most of the games are way too difficult for me. I could maybe brute force my way through Back to the Future II & III, like a few years ago, but I really don't want to do this again. Athena has unlimited continues, iirc. But I still remember getting stuck in the water level.

Gold Medal Challenge '92 is done. This game allows you to save your progress after every challenge. This means that you can simply reset and reload if you're not satisfied with the results of any given challenge. Also, it seems like you don't have to win every single challenge to come out on top. I pretty much dominated with CIS anyway. I chose them, because upon research I found out that CIS was the actual winner of the 92 Summer Olympics and I was hoping of having an advantage. Not sure though if there's an actual difference between the teams. Anyway, this game way mostly fine, only the vaulting horse and marathon kinda sucked. Or at least I didn't understand them at all. That being said, still the only sports game of this kind that I actually like is Caveman Games.

Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll is done. The presentation is much more simplistic than in Flying Warriors, but the core elements of the gameplay, including the controls, are mostly the same. You just don't have the RPG elements, which means no grinding. So while this is on all accounts the inferior game, for the purpose of this challenge it's actually nicer since it's shorter and easier. And with this I should be at exactly 700 points.

Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge is done. Way easier than Formula One, but it misses the cool upgrading your car feature, is much shorter and graphically not as impressive. However, it's still a well-playing racing game and does its thing quite competently. And the lower difficulty definitely helped making this game more palatable. Small piece of advice: if anyone wants to give this game a try, then use manual transmission. It requires a bit more of you, but you get a small increase in speed that is incredibly helpful. It's only 10 km/h per hours, but over the course of a whole race this quickly adds up and can mke the difference between barely being able to catch up to the top three racers vs. driving past them and even creating a decent lead over them. So yeah, use manual transmission and it's not a bad experience at all.

I'm currently working on Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge. It's a bit easier than Formula 1 and also allows yoou to save your game after every race. Unfortunately, it's via a password system, so it takes quite a while to restart. But thanks to this I should be able to slowly grind through the game. Currently I have won 3 races in first place. 13 more to go.

I beat Little Nemo: The Dream Master the other day. It's a really fun and well-playing platformer where you don't just make it to the end of the level, but you have to search for keys to unlock the exit door. To find the keys you can take on different forms by feeding creatures candys. With this you can for example turn into some kind of frog guy and jump really high. Or the bee allows you to fly for a short while etc. This lets you overcome certain obstacles and reach certain keys. So it's a pretty fun mechanic that combined with the excellent controls make this game a very enjoyable experience. There's only a few minor nitpicks. Like how some levels are a bit long and have no checkpoint in the middle. So when you die you have to do everything all over again including getting the different transformations etc. Some of the later levels also get really difficult with some annoying enemies that respawn all the time (why does it always have to be bats?). Overall it's a delightful game with a decent challenge that I can wholeheartedly recommend to fans of the NES and platformers. I give it an 8/10, i.e. Great game. You like to recommend it. Little Nemo: The Dream Master (8/10) Destiny of an Emperor (6.5/10) Wurm - Journey to the Center of the Earth (5.5/10)

Formula 1: Built to Win is finally done! This game had all the makings of becoming a top-tier NES racing game: fast and smooth racing action like Rad Racer, excellent controls, many racing tracks and upgradeable cars. This should have been a homerun. But the experience is marred by a wonky difficulty curve where the game is either a bit too easy or way too difficult. Even with all the upgrades the enemy racers (the blue cars) are just as fast if not faster than you and the only way to have even a resemblance of a chance against them is using your turbo like a madman. But you only have limited turbo energy and the later race tracks are so long, that you will eventually run out of your turbo at around the halfway point. Then the enemy racers will eventually overtake you, no matter how flawlessly you drive. On top of that, if they drive into from behind your car will start spinning. If you don't react quickly you lose control and crash. This ruined so many of my runs at the end of the second lap. It's just so incredibly unfair! Because if you drive into the enemy cars, it's just a harmless bump. They don't get thrown off the track, you just lose some speed, so that others can overtake you. And oh boy, they will. Just make one major error, like a crash or driving on the green, and you can quickly go from first or second place to seventh or last. This is so frustrating and annoying. The game also likes to throw dozens upon dozens nameless racers (green cars) in your way to halt youor progress. At pretty much all times there are one or two of them in your way and sometimes completely blocking the road. You have to overtake them as soon as possible or they will slow you down so much, that the blue cars will overtake you. However, make just one mistake like crashing into a green car and you basically lost the race. What makes this even worse is that the blue cars aren't affected by the random green cars. The drive through them! So you have ALL of the odds stacked against you and it's so frustratingly difficult that it sucks any and all fun out of this game that I used to have. Did they not playtest this? The only way to actually beat this game is by saving up at least 1 million bucks (ideally 1,5 million), use this to upgrade your F-1 racer and then try to dominate the early races. Because after a certain point winning a race is borderline impossible.

I'm thinking more of an RTS like Command & Conquer: Red Alert or some other 90s PC game or so.

With a bit of luck I've made it to the F1 races. They're already quite difficult, but thanks to that 1 million dollar trick I have an advantage right now. I'll use that and the save function to make sure that I win the first few races and rack up some points. I'm expecting these races to get ridiculously difficult, so it doesn't hurt to earn a bunch of points at the beginning. I'm hoping to be done with this game in the next few days.

I'm currently working on Formula 1: Built to Win. It actually seemed really fun and I even got to the last race in Hawaii. But I looked it up online and apparently the couses that I'm playing right now are only the first half or so of the game. So there's still a LOT more coming up. On top of that, I'm struggling with most of the races right now as they're quite challenging. I hope the second half of the game won't be such a struggle throughout.

Legend of Kage is done. I remember having trouble with this game previously, but this time around I managed to beat it in roughly 30 minutes or so. I feel like levels the best strategy is to just run and constantly use the sword attack, because it can block most projectiles.

Parodius is done.

We could always use some help in the completion challenge threads. There's always a decent number of people on the NES threads, but Game Boy and SNES could really use some more help. And on a site note: If you really want to clear the entire libraries, then don't play all of the fun and great games at the beginning, because then you will be left with dozens, if not hundreds, of games that are mediocre or plain terrible. So if you don't have anything fun to look forward to anymore at this point, the challenge will most likely fail. The start of each of these challenges seems to be fun and progress really smoothly, but then you eventually hit a brick wall and you have situations where noone wants to play the remaining games anymore, because they're all duds. We were once stuck at 665 out of 677 NES games for months. So maybe consider going at this a bit strategically, i.e. change it up between long and short, difficult and easy games, different genres, trash games and great games etc. Some streamers even use randomness to figure out what to play next, either by a random number generator or marble races. Personally, I've given up on the idea of ever finishing an entire console's library even though I have already something like almost 200 NES games beaten. The reason is that some games are incredibly difficult to the point that I've given up on the idea of ever beating them. Plus, there are many games and certain genres that I just don't like at all, like sports games. So instead I just play the games or genres that I'm interested in. Sorry for the long rant. I hope you have fun with the challenge and good luck!

Just beat Little Nemo: The Dream Master for the first time. What a surprise that such a good game was still on the list this late in the challenge. It poses a decent challenge, but isn't one of the harder NES games. Anyway, really good game that felt like a reward after the long and difficult Flying Warriors.

I'm going to say something outrageous: Mega Man and Castlevania games were better on the Game Boy than on the NES. I also prefer GB Kid Icarus over the NES version. Maybe you could also count Donkey Kong since it expands the arcade game to a completely new and original game. And while not a straight up port, but if I wanted to play a Zelda game, then I would rather play Link's Awakening than the original The Legend of Zelda. The same with the Zelda-inspired Final Fantasy Adventure.

Flying Warriors is finally done! What a beast of a game. It took so many hours with lots and lots of grinding and trying he levels over and over again. What started as rather decent turned sour about halfway through and the final level with the boss rush was soul-crushing. There were few games where I was so anxious during the final boss fight, because even with max level, helath and healing potions it ultimately came down to luck. And I wouldn't have wanted to redo the boss rush before the final boss. This is the kind of game that I'm fine with playing only once in my life. PS: I just noticed that I now have over 100 pain points.

I'm currently at the endgame of Flying Warriors and have real trouble with the bossfights. There's basically a boss rush similar to one of the Wily stages in Mega Man, but imagine the bosses having twice as much HP and dealing at least twice as much damage. And whenever you die against just a single one of these bosses, then you have to redo ALL of them. This has me really scratching my head. Also, if I want to have even a remote chance of beating these bosses, I have to grind for money to buy healing potions, but this takes quite a bit of time. So every new attempt at these takes me easily an hour or so only to get buttstomped by the final boss. The gameplay during the bossfights is something like Simon says, i.e. the game shows indicators if you can attack, where to attack or when to defend. Generally not a bad idea, but for some reason my commands aren't executed most of the times. At the beginning I didn't have this problem and got through these fights fairly well, but now I hardly have a chance and I don't know what's the reason for this. Maybe the time for inputting a command is increasingly shorter? Or maybe you have to input a very specific attack? There's plenty of options, like kicks, punches, several special attacks and later on even spells. But the spells haven't worked for me a single time since the enemies are always defending. I've looked at longplays of this game and there it worked without problems. Maybe I'm still doing something wrong? Or do I need ALL of the mirrors and Dragma? I've missed one mirror and potentially one Dragma, because they were hidden and I can't get back anymore to get them unless I restart the whole game. Either way, the last third of this game has gotten extremely grindy and unfairly difficult. I've been gnashing my teeth both today and yesterday for roughly 5 hours each, but it didn't work out yet. I'm considering using my password to continue playing on real hardware with my Everdrive in the slight hopes that maybe the delay from the emulator messes things up.

At first I thought that this could be Frogger, but that would be too easy.

I've started Flying Warriors on hard mode. This seems to be a rather long game and will probably take me some time. Grinding out a few levels at the beginning definitely helped with surviving enemy encounters, but it still doesn't trivialize them since some of them can hit really hard.

Peter Pan & the Pirates is done. A suprisingly short and easy game for a 9-pointer this late in the challenge. The biggest difficulty comes from learning the awkward jumping and flying controls and then the later pirate ships levels, where you can pretty much hardlock yourself, if you're not careful. For jumping you have to keep pressing the A button to get this really slow and floaty jump, but it's sufficient for most of the game. If you keep pressing the A button and up on the d-pad, then you can fly, but you will slowly drain your energy. This becomes relevant later on, because on the pirate ships you have to fly at certain points to get from ship to ship. Unfortunately, once your flying energy is depleted and you can't find any refill, it's pretty game over. Your flying energy refills after dying, but the refills scattered throughout the level don't. So that's the biggest hurdle later on. The flying is also rather awkward and hard to describe. You have to play it for yourself, to understand how weird it is. My recommendation would be to just rely on your jumping as much as possible and if you want to fly, then try to jump up straight and fly up. I feel like this gives you more control over where you want to fly to and you can even go through obstacles that are above you, like a plank or something to reach a power-up or a pirate or something. The objective during the levels is to kill all pirates within every level. The exact number is diplayed in the upper right corner. You can only advance once they're all dead. Wow. What a violent children's game. Mass murderer Peter Pan even says, that it's fun being himself with a big grin on his face. What a psychopath. Anyway, the treasures that are scattered throughout the levels basically give you health. The upper left number on the screen is your health and you can stock up on it to some ridiculous degree. At some point I had over 200 health and enemies usually take 1 or 2 health points from you. So the actual enemies are laughable. The real challenge is not dying in any of the pits which is why you have to get used to the jumping and flying controls. Once you do, the game is actually somewhat decent. Or maybe my standards are so low at this point, that even a generic platformer feels good right now.

I've beaten Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but it seems I didn't get the good ending. I assume you have to catch the guy climbing the ladder in the second part of level 12, because in the playthroughs I've seen on YouTube they got the message "YOU WIN BIG MAN", but I only got "YOU WIN". I hope it still counts. Either way, this game is awful.

This seems to be the way to go. There is always just one route that will lead you to the goal, but it's not always so easy to see which will lead you to the other side and which one will end in a deadend. I've also been playing this game for 5 or 6 hours straight and I just can't beat it. Even if I get through level 9 with some luck I'm usually stuck in level 10, where there are six huge and very difficult interconnected areas where you have to find a secret entrance. Thanks to the maps on gamefaqs it's not so tough to find the right map that you have to go to, but finding the right exit without dying is crazy hard. Because once you die you have to go to three skulls and retrieve the crystal balls or whatever without which you can't open the secret exit. This is top-tier BS, because there might just be a random bat flying at you with mach speed and when it hits you, you fall down into the lava. Then of course you have to collect these things all over again and hope that you don't die again. But some of these creens are so tough to get through, that I'd rather just get a game over and hope for better luck next time. It sucks so much. I even made it to level 11 two or three times, but couldn't beat them, because I didn't know how to retrieve the three items from the skulls. Turns out, you have to jump up when standing in fron of them. However, getting through level 11 without dying is just insane. This game is so incredibly frustrating. I might give it another go tomorrow or so, but I'm so close to giving up. This is such a terrible game.

I suggested Snow Bros., because it's actually one of my favorites on the Mega Drive. I have it on the Mega Drive Mini and it's one of my most played games on that device alongside MUSHA and Slapfight MD. The Mega Drive version is actually the best home port of the game. The graphics are nice and it plays buttery smooth. Plus, you have an extra 30 levels on top of the regular 50. So it's a bit longer than the NES version. I highly recommend giving it a go.

Toejam and Earl has to be the single most boring roguelike I've ever played in my life. It's super slow and almost every enemy only exists to further slow you down and to annoy you. I'd rather replay Fatal Labyrinth to completion again than spend even 15 minutes on Toejam and Earl.