Gaia Gensouki

I did one loop of Popeye and played City Connection until I got to New York twice. I think that should count as one loop?

Donkey Kong 3 is done too. Strange choice to turn it into some kind of Galaga, Missile Command hybrid. The original is still my favorite. Sometimes less is more, imho.

Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. are done.

Secret of Evermore

I recently played Bio-Hazard Battle and during my first atempt I managed to kill the final boss, but was hit by a stray bullet, that I didn't see. So while he was already exploding and whatnot I lost my final life and my final continue. Game over. I had to try it from the beginning again. This was very frustrating.

I have actually looked at some of the games with a higher point value, to see if there's still something interesting left. But it was obvious pretty quickly why certain games have been left over for so long or why they have such a high point value: they're usually really difficult and/or straight up bad. Zanac and Silkworm fall into the former category as they're really good and fun games, but just too hard for me to complete. I've never managed to beat level 8 of Silkworm legitimately. There's just too much on screen and the indestructible rockets fly way too fast to react, so that you have to learn by heart when and where they appear. Zanac is really cool too and very generous with basically unlimited continues, but it has one fatal flaw: whenever you use a continue, certain power-ups no longer appear. So in later levels it just became impossible for me to get fully powered up and progress. I have tried a few other games as well, but with these games the balance between enjoyment and difficulty was way off. Anyway, the new ideas sound interesting and I'm definitely looking forward to the new year, whether they're being employed or not. This time I want to start this challenge from the very beginning.

I think Snow Bros. for the Mega Drive is indeed a JPN exclusive. Shove It looks exactly like Soukoban, i.e. judging from the screenshots the levels are exactly the same. Maybe I'll give it a try someday, unless someone else tries it first. But from my experience Soukoban gets pretty difficult pretty quickly.

I beat Phantasy Star IV. With this I have now played the whole series, even though I have never beaten the first one (I got stuck in the final dungeon). This game was imho by far the best in the series and had a worthy ending as well! I feel really satisfied now.

If possible I play on my Japanese Mega Drive Mini, which contains MUSHA, Slap Fight MD, GnG and Snow Bros, among others. So the screens from those games were from that system. Then I also have various MD collections for various consoles. If a game is on none of those collections I resort to an emulator. Honestly, I don't even own a Mega Drive and given the current prices I am not really tempted to buy one, especially since most of the good or interesting games tend to be really pricey nowadays.

Thanks. Yeah, I was struggling quite a bit in certain levels. 2A, 4B and 5B were especially challenging and required many tries. The boss in level 4 was probably the hardest too since he takes so many hits and constantly attacks you from all directions. The two worms that came from him also moved quite erratically. Overall it seemed to me that this game relied a bit more on randomness than, say, SGnG on the SNES. But it was still a fun. Btw. I also beat Snow. Bros MD. This is a fun Bubble Bobble clone featuring 70 levels and a boss battle every 10 levels. I left it on the default settings which were easy and 3 lives. The only other difficulty was hard, but judging from let's plays the ending seems to be the same in both modes.

The Japanese version is definitely easier. I think the enemies roughly give twice as much damage in the US version and the characters have been rebalanced. Also, the US version has some mild censorship, iirc. The female enemies no longer wear such revealing dresses and a certain enemy has been changed since that one was kinda offensive. Anyway, I just beat Ghouls 'n Ghosts for the first time. Since I didn't know which difficulty to pick I chose "professional". But somehow the second run through the game was much easier. I guess this was partially thanks to the Goddess' Bracelet? This weapon was really useful in this game and not once did I want to give it away.

Thanks. The light key is actually pretty early on in the game, so I would say that you still have around two thirds of the game ahead of you.

I just beat Breath of Fire for the first time in my life. I've started a playthrough several times and always stopped around the halfway point or maybe the last third of the game, even though I quite liked it. Playing it all the way to the end however I have to say that compared to, e.g. FF IV, the battle system misses nuance. Most enemies are practically the same and even the bosses are just big, fat enemies with a lot of HP that also hit a bit harder, i.e. there isn't much strategy involved. Especially later on in the game I would just use Ryu's final dragon transformation and beat the bosses quite easily. Even the final boss was more a test of endurance and patience than anything else.

I'm open to any of these threads as they're a lot of fun. But I'm not sure how many of these yearly completion threads can be sustained. The NES competition seems to be the most popular one with GB and SNES lagging quite a bit behind. So it could be that a "forever" thing may be a better choice for a system like the GBC or a system with a vast library, like the PS1.

That would be nice! My username there is exactly the same as here.

I tried registering there well over a week ago, but it seems like my account is still not activated. I will post though when I am able to.

I don't think I'm an expert and there are surely better players here. The only things I can say are that you really need to learn the races by heart and how to take the individual turns. Also take the accelerating arrows whenever possible and as long as they're not detrimental. In some courses these accelerated me so much that I would just crash against everything and everyone, so they're not always ideal. And since the enemies are basically rubberbanding behind you, you have to make sure to drive pretty much perfectly without any major error. Any big mistake in the last two laps is almost a lost cause, whereas a mistake in the earliest laps can be undone. I also found that the fastest car is not always the best. It takes an awfully long time to get to full speed, so some of the other cars may be a good choice too. As for the turns it seemed to me that I could sometimes take them better by releasing the gas pedal instead of braking, which takes away too much of your speed and should only be used for very tight corners. I think there were quite a few nuances regarding turns, but I would have to get into the game again to say anything more. Maybe try some more experimentation with releasing gas, using the L and R buttons and breaking? And don't forget to press forward when you're jumping as this accelerates you as well and helps with getting over bigger chasms.

I had some spare time with my 3DS and beat Gargoyle's Quest and Donkey Kong Land on the Virtual Console. I can't believe that GQ hasn't been done yet. This was my first time playing it and I really enjoyed it. It may have had some down time like when grinding for vials so that I could purchase extra lives. But the main levels were excellent and really fun. Surprisingly the regular levels were more difficult than most bosses. Also, the second to last level was really challenging and required quite some grinding. DKL is overall pretty decent, but you can tell that this is a stripped-down conversion of a console game. It may look stunning for a Game Boy game, but unfortunately it didn't feel optimized for the small screen. Also, some of the controls were a bit janky and took quite some time getting used to. I can only assume that the later games in this series are maybe a bit more suited for a handheld?

I thought about contributing something too. So here's Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters. I played it via the Virtual Console on the 3DS.

I beat Super Valis IV and have thereby finished the whole Valis series. The fourth game looked mostly pretty decent, even if most levels were a bit dull and repetitive, and it sounded quite good. The controls feel more responsive and there are more subweapons which come in handy during certain encounters. So it might seem like this game is a major step forward, but unfortunately there were a few design choices that dragged the game down a little. I have already mentioned, that the levels were repetitive. In some levels I didn't mind it as much since they were nice to look at and decent to begin with, but the seemingly never-ending, always the same looking castle interior of level 2 or the overly long psychedelic hallways of level 6 weren't particularly great. The levels are also rather long consisting of three areas before you encounter the boss. And if you die at the boss you have to repeat the whole level over again, which is a huge pain. In the earlier Valis games you had several lives and were set back to the beginning of the current area or maybe directly in front of a boss with a few power-ups at your disposal. You only had to redo the full level if you lost all of your lives and something like this should have been implemented here. But they didn't. I guess it was because they introduced some strange kind of timer. At the bottom of the screen is an HP bar of the boss and it gradually fills. So ideally you'd want to rush to the end as fast as possible, so that the boss doesn't turn into a horrible hit sponge. But if you rush you will constantly run into enemies or miss critical jumps, which obviously sucks. But even if I learned the level and made my way through it relatively quickly, the bosses were still quite the hit sponges (the later ones easily take 50+ hits). This didn't matter so much with some of the earlier bosses since you could use your powerful items or spam long-range shots at them. But the later bosses had to be hit from close-up with your sword and some of the patterns were too random for me to really master the boss encounters. And then there's the final level. This one was awful and frustrating. It was basically a short buss rush with three out of six bosses and of course they chose the most difficult ones. In-between were short areas where you could refill your (now useless) subweapons or gather health refills. After that it was time for the final boss. This one may not have been all that difficult at first glance, but he takes an awful amount of hits and after he has lost about half of his health, he will use his special attack. He is literally throwing blue balls at you. And when they hit they draw some hit points off you and restore the boss by a large amount! And his blue balls have different patterns, which makes it difficult to evade them since you never know quick enough which trajectory they take. Due to that the defining factor regarding whether or not I won or lost was whether I was able to avoid getting hit by his energy draining balls. I once had him almost dead, but then messed up, got hit a few times and he almost had half of his max HP back. This was so frustrating and that boss encounter alone almost ruined the whole game for me. Did I already mention that after dying you always start at the beginning of the level? Well, that means that you have to beat all previous three bosses as well! It's like in Joe & Mac 2, but with power-ups and much, much harder bosses. Also, one life only. And what was the reward for this? Our heroine saved the day and returned to Yuuko during a short credit scene and that's it. The Valis games were never rich in story, but they still at least tried and always had one or two good moments in every game that had an impact on me. Here it's really just go and defeat bad guy, then the final boss is like "I will kill you" and Lena says "No, I will not die. Not before I restore love and peace to the world". No joke. Anyway, despite some gripes and room for improvement this was still a decently fun game and I'm happy to finally have experienced the whole Valis series. This game may have felt a bit unnecessary and tacked on since the original story was finished after the first three games, but at least it's not the awful monstrosity that is the hentai reboot of this series.

I beat Syd of Valis and Arrow Flash. Arrow Flash was, as I've described in another thread, the first shoot 'em up that I've ever beaten in my life, thanks to it being very forgiving and offering unlimited continues. It's also a decently fine Gradius clone with some trippy backgrounds. The fifth and six level were quite tough and took me a few continues. Compared to that the final boss was laughable. I only had the standard shot and took him down without even using a single arrow flash. His pattern was just that simple. Syd of Valis is the black sheep of the Valis franchise, imho. It was originally known as Valis SD with SD meaning "super deformed". It's a term used for a certain visual style in Anime and Manga, where the bodies of the characters are very small and the heads huge. But they mistranslated it somehow and renamed Yuuko to Syd?! They didn't even bother to translate the credits. The game itself could have been good, but somehow Yuuko is way too fast and very difficult to control. She constantly controls as if you were playing an ice level and has an extremely floaty jump. To top it off, the screen scrolls only when you're at the edge of the screen. Combined with her insane speed this means that you're constantly running into enemies. Instead I had to carefully advance while fireing off my weapon all the time. Also, the later bosses are crazy hard and I could only beat them by finding some exploits, i.e. finding a certain spot where I could just crouch and shoot while they were unable to even hit me. Or another boss fired rockets on you from the top of the screen and there's so little room to evade, that I could never reliably evade them. Of course, they gave massive damage. So what I did was waiting until the first rocket came down, changed my outfit to the guardian outfit and run into the boss, because he gave only a fourth of the damage, that the rockets did. Too bad that I had to rely on cheap strategies like this, but I don't know how else to beat these bosses later in the game. If only this game had gotten a bit more polish, since it had some really good ideas. I liked the different costumes and weapons that you could unlock as they offered quite a bit of variety and allowed for different strategies. Your life bar increases as well as the game progresses giving this game almost a small RPG vibe. Unfortunately the mechanics are a bit too rough to fully enjoy these good ideas.

I beat Bio Hazard Battle. This was honestly a very tough one. During my first try on the Switch I had quite the problems and only managed to reach the last level on my final continue. I even got to the final boss, put up a valiant fight and killed him with only one life left. As I marveled at the glorious explosion a shot hit me that I hadn't see at all. So I already had the final boss killed, but still saw the game over screen. Needless to say I was furious! Anyway, today I tried it again on my PS4 and did much better. The Joycons are just absolutely atrocious for playing these old games, especially something like this that requires precision controls. Unless I carry a Pro Controller or something like that around, playing action-heavy games like this on the go is an awful experience.

Just beat Secret of Mana. What a wonderful game. If only there weren't this many bugs. It happened several times during this playthrough alone that I got stuck and had to reset the game after beating a boss. But I still love the game. And somehow the endings of games in the Mana are usually very sad and melancholic. I think most Final Fantasy endings are a bit more upbeat and positive.

Is backwards compatibility allowed? Because that would make a huge case for certain consoles. If, however, backwards compatibility is not allowed, i.e. only games specific for that console, then my list would look like this: Atari: 2600 NEC: Turbo Duo Nintendo: SNES Sega: Saturn Sony: PS2 Microsoft: XBox 360 This would give me roughly one console per generation and would allow me to play all kinds of games, although there's quite a lack of portables. But home consoles usually had the more interesting titles anyway.

I did it! I beat Powerball! One game off the unbeaten list! If anybody is curious, here are some more fotos in the spoiler: At first I played this game on my Japanese Mega Drive Mini, which I had set to English. I played with the USA Boxers and eventually got pretty far. The later matches were very difficult and I had to try them over and over again, since they would often steamroll me. Luckily you get a password after every match and can try it again. After beating all other 7 teams there were bonus matches, which were even more difficult. On the second or third one I was on the edge of despair as the game got extremely difficult. Eventually I looked up online for help and noticed that I was actually playing the Japanese version and that this one was very different from the US version. So I gave up realizing that I had wasted my time grinding away at those matches for nothing. But today I loaded the US rom and gave it another try, this time as the UK. And lo and behold, the US version played much better and was much fairer! Or maybe the UK in the US version was a better team than the USA in the Japanese version? But at least I can say that from the very first game I was able to score so much more points. It's even hard to explain how exactly it played differently, but I managed to score frequently something like 12-0, 10-0, 8-1 and so on. The only match I lost during this run was against the Canadian Mounties due to them being the strongest and toughest team in the whole game. With this version I finally really had fun with the game. But I would still say that it's quite a flawed game and you kinda have to earn the fun a bit.