Gaia Gensouki

@ninjistar

I tried Phalanx again and this time I actually beat it on normal. Sorry for the mistake last time. This was noticeably harder and had me cursing and swearing now and then. But eventually I almost beat it with a single continue, but failed at the final boss. On the second continue I beat him with zero lives left and only one or two hit points. This game is somehow really difficult despite offering hit points and the occasional health replenishment. But it was overall still fun and the ending theme was really great and relaxing.

Since I'm currently on vacation I have a bit more time to paly games and gave Extreme-G a few tries over the last few days and I finally unlocked the secret track. This was really tough and two tracks in particular took the longest to master. It's just so rough when you're in the first place in the last lap on the last track and can almost see the finish line when the second behind you gets five homing missiles and just blasts you into oblivion. Ugh! This made me wonder however. All these past years I've thought that the 8bit generation overall had the hardest games and that they got easier on average with every passing console generation. But going back to some of these N64 games made me realise that some of them are just as hard, if not even harder, than those old NES games, or at least if you want to complete these N64 100%. I also have Extreme-G 2 among my N64 cartridges and might give this a try, too, unless someone else wants to. But I have never played the second one during my childhood, so I have no idea how long it might take me to beat it.

Yeah, I eventually got through the difficulties and finished Final Fantasy. I'm sorry for the flip-flopping with the games. I still don't know what to make of the ending though...

And I'm continuing with Mega Man III. Whereas the first Mega Man on the Game Boy got me hooked, it was this one that was not only the first Mega Man game, that I owned, but also one of the first games that i ever got for myself. I even still have my copy from well over 20 years ago.

Too bad with Lagrange Point. I had hoped that it would be some kind of "hidden gem". Is there any chance that Famicom/Pal game will one day be included? Or maybe as a separate challenge? Anyway, good job on clearing it, @scaryice. I've been taking a short break from all this dragon questing and played some Final Fantasy. I have never played the NES version for more than maybe a few minutes, so it's a somewhat fresh experience for me. On the one hand it holds up very well and is mechanically a bit more engaging/complex than at least Dragon Warrior/Quest I and II, but on the other hand the difficulty is quite off or at least some of the enemies are woefully unbalanced, imho. For example enemies constantly deal status effects which is very annoying. I had it happen to me that I was fighting against 8 or so Ghasts/Wights, or whatever they're called, and they were keeping me stun locked. I just couldn't do anything except for sitting there for like 5 or 10 minutes or so and watch them slowly killing my party. Or a bit later many enemies have death spells against one or multiple targets. These enemies have wiped my party multiple times. This is really unfair, when there are no resurrection items or easily affordeable resurrection spells. Or sometimes enemies cast multiple spells against my group that deal anything between 40 and 200 damage on every character. Mute of course didn't work even a single time! I feel like DW/DQ balanced this better and due to that I actually had more fun with those game. However, the presentation and especially the music are still great. I guess it just took Squaresoft a little bit longer to put out really excellent and polished games? Or maybe this is just criticising on a high level.

Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge is done. I love this game, even if it's inferior to the NES original. It just holds such a sentimental value for me.

@nerdynebraskan It's too bad that the talent of the Follin brothers was usually wasted on mostly mediocre games. Had their music been featured in better games they could have elevated those even more. It's also really funny when you listen to top X0 NES songs list or something like that and you suddenly see a game like Pictionary and wonder why anyone would pick the music of such a game as a contender for the best music on the system. And then you listen and everything becomes clear. @scaryice That would explain why Isolated Warrior is so rarely talked about. Also, Lagrange Point is a game that I've been wanting to own/play for years now, because it always looked so cool. And a polished Konami take on the Phantasy Star series sounds not that bad. I have finally beaten Dragon Quest III aka Dragon Warrior III. What a fantastic game! It's too bad that the story was somewhat spoiled to me beforehand, but if I think about the kids in the late 80s playing this for the first time I imagine that their minds were probably blown away. It was just great and fun and I have a hard time imagining that an 8bit RPG could get any better than this. And this is really weird considering that my first proper DW/DQ game was the eigth installment on the PS2. I didn't know the series except for the Dragon Warrior Monsters game which I thought was just a cheap Pokemon ripoff (lol in hindsight). DQVIII didn't even feature the number in the title back in the day since it was the first mainline game of this series to come to Europe, so it wouldn't make any sense otherwise. And back then I just played all kinds of RPGs I could get my hands on. Unfortunately, it somehow bored me because I felt that it was too "basic" compared to stuff like Final Fantasy or the Xenosaga series with their epic and/or complex stories and complex character progression. So back then I didn't get into this series and always wondered why others thought that it was so great. But this somehow changed upon replaying the classics of all things! That's when I started to fall in love with this series and I would now consider myself a fan. Despite the grindy nature of these games they're still a lot of fun and filled with charm. During my playthrough I noticed that I got along very well with monks. They easily took most enemies apart and I only got some trouble later on as their armor class started to become lacking and enemy magic spells would hurt them quite a lot. Other character classes could at least obtain armor that would reduce spell or breath damage by 33% which makes a big difference later on. But thanks to the Sage's Stone I could still defeat the big baddy "relatively" easily. Well, at least it worked on my first try at level 40+. I thought about changing their classes, because I thought that it would be fun to have super fast and powerful warriors that I could equip with the Falcon Sword and then attack the enemies with two powerful strikes per turn. But unfortunately the level gains are extremely low after a class change. So you would probably want a character to change their class very early, i.e. at level 20, so that you can still profit from their stat gains. This also meant that I couldn't get an extremely fast and sturdy Sage either, because their stat increases were so low, that they were pretty much useless. This is why I reloaded my save file and just finished the game with the three Monks and my hero. Anyway, sorry for the long rant. But this was a big and impactful game. Also, with this completion I should now have over 200 points! It will however take a few days or so until I get to play the next game, which will probably be DQ/DW IV. I am now curious to see if they can somehow top this one.

I beat Tom & Jerry. I hate this game. It may not be one of the worst NES games, but levels 4-2 and 5-2 were some of the worst and most frustrating levels of recent memory. This game really suffers from blind jumps, enemies coming out of nowhere and a weird maze-like structure of the levels that makes you constantly wonder where to go next. Some of the jumps in the later levels are really tricky, too, even if it wasn't for the barrage of enemies that come at you. At least there is the possibility to grind a bunch of lives in certain spots by amassing a lot of points. While this may offset some of the ridiculous difficulty and cheap design of the game, it causes the pacing of this game to become painfully slow. The only interesting part of the game was the music since it reminded me of the Follin brothers and some of the tunes they did for Silver Surfer etc. And guess what, Geoff Follin actually made the music for this game.

I played Isolated Warrior and was wondering why this game still wasn't beaten. Yeah, the perspective may be unusual and definitely requires some time to get used to, but other than that it's a fine game. And thanks to the unlimited continues it's not too difficult to beat. That was until I noticed that the final level was locked and that it could only be unlocked by beating the 6 stages without using a continue. Now this explained a lot. It took a bit of practice, but in the end I did it without too much stress. I think it was still easier than beating any of the Contra games on hard. However, I died on the final boss and had to use a continue. Does this still count as completed? I at least got this ending screen:

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is done. What a lackluster and awfully short game.

In Dragon Quest III I have so far acquired 5 out of 6 orbs and opened up the Necrogond Cave. I'm expecting a lot of grinding about now, but even with that it probably shouldn't take too long to finish this game now. And until now I got through the game pretty easily with my 3 monks. They're really strong, but now there are more and more enemies that can take a lot of dmage and that cast spells all the time. So now I am starting to have trouble with healing. Maybe I will change classes with one or two of them after all. So far they have great stats with attack and speed somewhere around 140 or 150 each and over 200 hit points despite not even having level 30. Currently they're mostly held back by not being able to equip stronger weapons and armor.

Hurray! I finally beat the first round of Raid on Bungeling Bay on Mode B. This may sound easy, but the game got incredibly difficult later on. Instead of making several levels they made only one, but with the destruction of each of the six factories the game got incrementally more difficult. So this one map felt like a whole game with 6 "stages". For anyone who's interested, Will Wright, the creator of this game, gave a talk at GDC about his game, which you can find below. It's a highly recommended watch as he talks more about the underlying mechanics of the game and the creation process.

I completed 10 rounds of the Wood & Water Rage in Town & Country Surf Designs. The surfing is pretty horrible, but the skating was pretty decent, but very repetitive.

I thought it was about time to complete a NES game or two for a change since Dragon Quest III will take quite some time. So I have played and hopefully completed Caveman Games. I played the competition over and over again until I finally got highscores in every competition and finished with 240 points. And I actually found myself quite enjoying the various mini games and the challenge. The games may be quite primitive, but they still have at least some depth to them so that you have to do more than simply pressing A as fast as possible.

@Reed Rothchild Okay, I will try that game again. But it's really noticeably harder on normal, so I might take a while. Only got to level 7 so far. In the meantime I have beaten Aero Fighters. I really like this one, but it's very difficult as well. This game might also be a good contender when people complain about shmups on the SNES not being fast enough etc.

Mario's Early Years: Preschool Fun and Mario's Early Years: Fun with Numbers are both done. I would say that these games are at least a bit more interesting than Thomas the Tank Engine and the presentation is relatively nice thanks to Mario and friends. They also do have a fair bit of clear sound samples and upbeat (Mario) music. However, the content is overall still very meagre and I can hardly imagine children learning much from these games. Maybe very young preschoolers up to the first year of elementary school? But then again I'm no expert in pedagogy. Anyway, I did every mini game in these games and only took one exemplary photo each. I couldn't stomach the final and third game in this series, which I will do later or leave to some other brave soul. Space Invaders was just to quickly wash away the bitter taste of these edutainment games.

If it's sufficient to beat Phalanx on easy, i.e. the default difficulty, then consider it done.

I'll be that guy and say that I actually and unironically like King's Knight. Sure, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but somehow it's still fun to shoot everyone and everything and to level up your characters. It's sort of my guilty pleasure. But Athena is a really good choice, especially the NES version. It's just an absolutely dreadful game. Even with a few tweaks it could have at lest been playable, like giving Athena a short invincibility time after getting hit and maybe bumping her back a little bit so that you can shake off the enemies and kill them instead of dying in a split second. Also, it sucked that enemies would constantly drop weapons on you thereby erasing the good weapon that you're currently carrying. I also somewhat dislike Borderlands. It can be fun, but only in multiplayer and in short intervals. Also, whenever I play it I kinda wish I could just play a good shooter or Diablo like game.

Today I finally beat a big one: Shining in the Darkness. And as a cherry on top I did ESWAT as well. The first one is a really good and enjoyable dungeon crawler that only dragged on a bit in the labyrinth proper once I reached floor 2 and 3 since they were very difficult and required quite a bit of grinding. But I still got through and thoroughly beat Dark Sol. My whole group was level 50+ by the time I reached him so that he stood little chance. ESWAT is a pretty fun and challenging game as well that had me on the edge of my seat during the later levels.

Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends and Timon & Pumbaa's Jungle Games are done. In the former game I did every mini game on every "difficulty" mode. It's a shame that this is yet another awful education game money grab. It could have been at least somewhat decent if they just hadn't thrown a ton of stupid ideas at the wall, figuratively speaking, but if they instead had focused on just a few ideas and developed them further with a bunch of content. Instead it feels pointless and soulless. The latter game is just another collection of mini games, but this time without any pretense of being educational. On the other hand this is just good enough that I've been wondering why they had to focus on several ideas without making sure that any of them was really solid and great. The games are rather the poor man's version of other, better games. Anyway, I played any of those games and at least achieved some kind of score. I don't know if any of these games can be beaten though. I got to level 15 and 18 in two games, but they still just kept going until they were too difficult for me to continue.

And I beat the highscore in every game of Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits.

I achieved highscores in all six games of the Arcade's Greatest Hits: The Atari Collection 1. Although to be honest, some games didn't even have a highscore so I just got any score, while others required a little bit of effort, e.g. Centipede and Missile Command. I put all of these fotos into one collage hoping that this would be okay. I did not want to spam this therad with too many pictures. Also, I've beaten Barbie Super Model. I am almost afraid to admit it, but I overlooked that you had to get the highscore and actually achieving it was somewhat difficult. I can't really tell all the different colors in the mini games apart and whenever I had a decent score I would mess up in level 3 or 4. This is an awful game and I feel sorry for every girl that got this back in the day. I'm also baffled why the developers bothered to put their names in the credits and how many people were actually responsible for this mess. What's even worse is that this got the Nintendo seal of approval.

I've started my playthrough of Dragon Quest III yesterday and continued today. In the third game you can have a party of up to 4 heroes and basically recruit characters of a certain class and mix them up to your liking. Usually the game has a balanced preset party consisting of your hero, a warrior, priest and magician. But what I did was to recruit 3 martial artists, which means that I will have hardly any magic at all or rather only the few spells that the main characters has. This is probably going to be really tough, but on the flipside I have a really fast and offensive party. What's even better is that their extremely high speed stat adds additional points to defense. This combined with their high hit points makes them aktually pretty decent tanks who hardly require any armor or weapon upgrades at all. And so far the challenge has been very manageable. Certain dungeons have actually been really easy since all the enemies were dead before they could damage me. I'm not sure if I will keep this combo, but later on I can still do a class change and maybe get a priest and/or sage that inherit part of the martial artists' strength. Anyway, it's been a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to how the journey of Cecil (the hero), Rinoa, Rikku and Kimahri will go on (btw. Rinoa is the undisputed MVP right now).

Then that's a testament to your skill. It took me many tries to even get to level 8 and I couldn't do that consistently. But beating that level is a whole different level. I guess you just have to learn that one by heart. And after that there's still the final boss battle, which is absolutely ridiculous as well.