Gaia Gensouki

Super Mario Bros. 2. This is from the final boss battle. The tubes gave it away.

Dragon Warrior IV is done. The game is obviously great, but maybe a little bit too long. I'm still not a fan of the companions being AI controlled though. You can't rely on them as healers during combat and they never ever use buffs or debuffs, which would have been nice during certain boss encounters. I got killed by the final boss and had to grind a few levels. When I reached levels 40-43 I attempted him again and barely made it. My group consisted of Alena, Mara and Nara. Alena is pretty much the GOAT later on in the game since she constantly deals critical hits and can even attack twice with the right weapon. So she was my most reliable damage dealer. Mara was a decent mage, but rather useless during the final phase of the boss as he reflected magic. Maybe Ragnar would have been better. Nara was my healer, but she turned out to be pretty awful. I should have chosen Cristo, but I used him the last time and wanted to try out something else this time.

My first gut reaction was Final Fantasy. Even just the mainline series is really massive with a nice variety in how the games play and feel. Theoretically you could even spend hundreds of hours into XI and XIV as well, if internet/servers were available for this. But just the single player games would already be pretty great in my book. If spin-offs were included as well, then you'd probably be looking at Final Fantasy Adventure/Legend 1-3 and all of the Tactics games! Alternatively strategy games might be a good choice as well, like the Heroes of Might and Magic series, although I would just need 2 and 3 and maybe 4 or 5 to have a change of pace. But just 2 and 3 would provide me with countless hours of entertainment. If spin-offs were included, then Might and Magic would be a good choice, because then I'd get the mainline RPGs and the strategy games. Now that I'm thinking about this, there are also many more spin-offs that are straight up action games as well, so I'd have a nice variety.

Holy shit. That's insane. You have my sympathy. That goal of 1 billion points sounds absolutely unreasonable. Is that really necessary? I can't even find anything even remotely close to that goal on Youtube.

Almost done with Dragon Warrior IV. Only the final dungeon is left. I bought 10 wizard's rings from the casino to restore my MP. So I'll probably have it beat tomorrow or so.

I hope that NES isn't fully broken and that you can still repair it or get it repaired. I've been trying the past few hours to beat Dragon Power. It didn't seem too bad at first. Maybe very janky and not all that great, but still doable thanks to unlimited continues. However, once you've reached the last four levels, you don't start over at the level where you've died, but you always have to repeat these four levels. This gets pretty difficult since you lose HP over time and the power ups, including the HP refills, are randomized. So you're always at the mercy of the RNG. I'm considering if I should maybe reset and try again from the start. After all, you can wish for something after level 6, which you can use to get a one-time upgrade of your max health. This could be just the boost that I need to finish the game. But always having to start from the very beginning with every try seems excessive. Does maybe anyone, who's beaten this game previously, have any advice?

Don't worry. There's still plenty of tough games left. Speaking of which, Last Starfighter might be just as difficult as Dirty Harry if not even more so.

Dirty Harry: The War Against Drugs is done. One of the worst and most despicable games I've ever played. From the infamous Hahaha room to the 30+ minute long first level to all the shit that they're throwing at you all the time or constantly having to retread certain passages just because you've missed a jump or someone shot you down from the telephone wires ... I absolutely despise this game. 1 out of 10. Never again.

Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight is done.

Days of Thunder is done. During my first attempt I kinda messed up down the line and was only missing 10 points for a win, which is such a small margin in this game. Next attempt went better.

Amazing Penguin is done. A cute and quite decent action puzzle game. The controls can be a finicky at times, when you're trying to go around corners to avoid enemies and such, but thanks to the infinite continues and passwords it's actually very player-friendly.

1943 is done. Man, what a brutally difficult game. The last level is just cruel.

Kirby's Pinball Land is done. I did some gaming on the go and beat one loop of this cute little pinball game. But despite the cutesy graphics is actually a bit challenging. After a few unsuccessful runs I suddenly had a really good run, where I even got a bonus life. Thank God I had this, because during the fight against King Dedede I was burning through all of my lifes. I don't know what happened, but Kirby constantly landed between the flippers. You can

Airwolf is done. Finally! I've been playing this game on and off for well over a week putting in a few attempts here and there. Even though I've beaten this game before, I was somehow having a really hard time this year and constantly choked in the last quarter of the game. But now I had a really good run and finally beat it. I think by now I've played enough Airwolf for the rest of my life. I'm so done with this game. On a side note, if I'm not mistaken, we should now have beaten 577 games, i.e. only 100 left! Let's go! We can do this!

Jimmy Connors Pro Tennis Tour is done. I played on medium difficulty with only 1 set. I used the passwords that were provided by the game and thus managed to cheat my way to victory win every match. I felt like playing something different and came across @bronzeshield's post in the requirement discussion thread which made this game sound rather easy. Personally, I never figured out the patterns well enough to trivialize the matches, but I got good enough to win most of the times. I only really had problems early on while trying to figure out the game and during some of the later matches, specifically in Spain and Russia. My attempt at a strategy was to make a powerful stroke (b button) towards the right side of the enemy field, followed by a normal stroke (a button) to the left side and then a powerful stroke to the right side again. When done correctly this often made the enemy player run around quite a bit and move really far back in his field to the point where he was almost hugging the wall with his back. This was the right time to run to the net and land a normal stroke to the right which usually landed on the right outermost line of the field which the CPU usually couldn't catch in time, because he was standing so far back. But this didn't work all the time and there were many heated back and forths between me and the CPU player. And to be honest, I mostly enjoyed it. It was fast and intense, while also controlling fairly well. I tried Racket Attack shortly before this and while RA seems like a technically more impressive game and a more faithful simulation of the sport, it was difficult to control and I couldn't get the hang of it. So for a beginner or for some quick arcadey action, Jimmy Connors Pro Tennis Tour is actually fine.

Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road is done.

I'm currently in the fifth chapter of Dragon Warrior IV and have almost my full party assembled. Shouldn't take too long to get the rest of the game done. I also came across this legendary line in chapter 4: This line re-appeared in later Dragon Quest titles and even an anime made a joke about that, where a character dies and gets reborn in another world as a slime. Later he comes across another person whom he suspects of also being from our world so he says this to get a reaction out of her:

Thanks for the invitation, but I will have to think about it. I participated in one of the previous years and went pretty hard on it, so that it took a lot of time and I'm not sure if I would want to do that again. Or maybe I have to be a bit more casual about it? I'll decide when the weekly contests start. I hope that we can knock out some more of these NES games here until then.

Day Dreamin' Davey is done. I followed a speedrun to get the directions down, because the last time I played this, it took me quite some time going back and forth trying to figure out how to progress. So just knowing where to go and what to do was a big help. However, I couldn't do the stuff that lets you skip certain parts, e.g. a speedrunner can do the first part of ancient greece without finding the shield by skillfully evading enemy attacks. But I couldn't pull that off and therefore needed to find the shield. I also found out that you can beat most bosses by jumping around like a madman while constantly attacking. This way I managed to beat the dragon and some other bosses on my first try, whereas I previously needed several attempts. So this saved me a lot of time, too.

You can add Chase H.Q. and Burai Fighter Deluxe to the list. I beat the latter on albatross, i.e. medium difficulty.

Is there maybe some kind of trick on how to win the matches easily? I'm not good at sports games, but if it's not too difficult and just a long grind, I could give it a try.

I've just finished chapter 2 of Dragon Warrior IV. I spent roughly two hours in the casino to get one metal babble shield and three meteorite bracelets, which are awesome, because they double a character's agility. I'll probably continue with Taloon's chapter tomorrow.

Adventures of Tom Sawyer is done.

Centipede is done. Nemesis is done. Imho not as good as Gradius - The Interstellar Assault, but still decent. Super Breakout is done. I did all three modes.

@the_wizard_666 I played through it again, but this time against a COM4 who ended up running out of time. There was no different message and also no higher difficulty to unlock.