LHCGreg

1 hour ago, cj_robot said:

Whoa, wait, what? I always found Hyperstone Heist WAY easier than Turtles in Time, mainly because the bosses are all super easy, even on the hardest difficulty. Just attack four times, jump out of the way, repeat. The bosses in Turtles in Time usually takes a little bit more strategy than that.

That describes bosses in Turtles in Time as well. The only bosses in Turtles in Time that put up a fight are Rat King and Slash.

My thoughts on the two games that I wrote elsewhere in 2022:

Hyperstone Heist 1cc hard with all turtles done. I also played through Turtles in Time again while my Hyperstone Heist memory is fresh to decide which one I like better.

I might have to give the edge to Hyperstone Heist. HH is faster and there's a dash button. The minute to minute gameplay does "hitbox jousting" better, with enemies often hovering outside your reach unless you make an effort to engage them. It has dash mapped to a button despite having fewer controller buttons than the SNES, encouraging you to make extensive use of the dash as part of your core moveset.

That said, they're both good games. TiT feels more cohesive as a game rather than patched together from scraps of other games like HH.

On 3/25/2024 at 4:32 PM, cj_robot said:

I agree with this, considering how badly they dumbed down the difficulty. Still, it's the perfect game for those times when I want to just turn my brain off and mash the A button for 45 minutes.

But Hyperstone Heist is harder than Turtles in Time. That's what makes it worth playing over Turtles in Time.

10 hours ago, Kguillemette said:

Is Snatcher so good it beats Castle of Illusion? It seems so niche. I suppose some say it's among the goats of visual novels anyway. Just curious what some of the snatcher voters have to say.

I haven't played Snatcher but I've played Castle of Illusion and I found it thoroughly average. Sega fans talk it up like it's Mario 3 or something.

I'm getting into PS1/PS2! Added a big list of games for those systems that I'm interested in.

The Pirates of Dark Water is done. It's a long slog of a beat em up, with one playthrough taking in the neighborhood of 2 hours. Tula (fast but weak) is by far the worst character. Her extra speed doesn't really make a difference but her lack of power sure does. I think she takes more damage too? This game gets beat em up fundamentals mostly right. The main problems are enemies have wayyyy too much health, there are too many enemies on each "stop" of the belt scroll so you fight 3 enemies at a time for minutes on end and repeat, enemies like to hang out off screen, and Tula needs a buff. I'd put it above Rival Turf and Jim Lee's WildC.A.T.S because those games are kind of broken in various ways but it can't touch any of the actually good beat em ups on the system. I beat with all 3 characters on both Normal and Hard difficulties.

Final Fight CD

On 2/27/2024 at 9:27 PM, a3quit4s said:

Grind Stormer - if it makes the top 8 I’m buying it

Be warned that there's a common problem with Grind Stormer PCBs that renders the cartridge unplayable. It can be fixed by transplanting the ROM chip to another compatible game's board or with another method described on the consolemods wiki page.

Anyway, I nominate TMNT Hyperstone Heist.

Wow! How does Alien Crush compare to Devil's Crush? Is it easier to get extra balls? I recently beat Dragon's Fury on Genesis which is a port of Devil's Crush. I used the password feature to save scum my way to the max score and beat the boss. There's no way I could have done that without save scumming. My best score without scumming was only 91.9 mil, a long way from a billion.

2 hours ago, Sumez said:

Didn't Majyuou already have another cart re-release a few years as go? I think they marketed that as King of Demon's too. 

There was one in 2018 in Japan. I got it through play-asia.

9 hours ago, the_wizard_666 said:

Is maxing the score required for the ending or did you just do massive overkill for its own sake?  I'm curious what the requirement is so I know whether to go for it or not lol

When you max out the score, you get immediately transported to the final boss.

There might be an alternate way of getting to the final boss: clearing all 6 bonus stages in a single game. I think I read that in a FAQ. But in all my play time I NEVER cleared bonus stage 5 (the green field where you have to hit an enemy over all the circles to light them up). I only cleared the blue bonus stage a handful of times.

I would count on maxing the score being the only practical way to reach the ending.

Dragon's Fury is done. I used the password feature to save scum to a billion points and beat the final boss. You can get a password any time by pausing and pressing A. It saves number of balls and score, but nothing else (not ball position or the state of the table). I used the options menu to set the ball speed from the default of fast (which is very fast!) to slow (which is more like "normal"). I took a victory lap after beating the boss and played normally without save scumming and got my best normal score ever, 91.9 mil.

There's not a lot to do in this one. You'll spend most of your time in the middle screen trying to shoot into the holes to change the face in the middle for bonus stage 6 or destroy the wall on the left for a random bonus stage. You can't worry about scoring if you fall to the bottom screen, you just need to focus on trapping the ball with a flipper and then going for a shot back up to the middle screen. I couldn't intentionally go up to the top screen, it was just something that happened sometimes. The default ball speed is way too fast, I recommend changing the speed in the options menu.

It probably took around 20 hours total to grind out the billion points. I learned partway through that if you reset the console, it remembers the last password you got and will autofill it for you. It's still a good idea to record the password every 10 mil or so in case of a crash, which happened to me once when resetting.

I map my S to F tiers onto the scale using the descriptions as a guide but not always literally. Like I don't think there's a meaningful difference between me describing a game as "very good" and describing a game as "great".

S->10
A->8-9
B->6-7
C->4-5
D->2-3
F->0-1

9 hours ago, Splain said:

Good question, I'd love to make a list of which games are playable for non-speakers, which are playable with a patch, and which ones need the janky Google Lens trick. If anything is truly unplayable, we might as well mark it as such and not "require" it. Which ones do you know of?

@LHCGreg how playable was Wonder Project J2?

I played Wonder Project J2 with a translation patch, so no issues.

Thabeast721 on Youtube is beating every N64 game including Japanese exclusives. He doesn't know any Japanese and is using a translation app to get through text-heavy games that don't have a patch. You can get an idea of how accessible a game is to people who don't know Japanese if he's done a video on it.

Sorry I didn't help out at all last year. I got tied up for half the year getting every pokemon in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team. But you guys pulled it off, congrats!

Here's Wonder Project J2 done. Looks like it's the first Japanese game of this thread.

51 minutes ago, avatar! said:

Internet disagrees --

Internet is wrong. Hades is not turn-based and metaprogression means it doesn't have real permadeath. It bears little resemblance to Rogue.

4 hours ago, avatar! said:

Tetris is not a roguelike.

Neither are Hades and Slay the Spire for that matter.

Added Master System games.

9/10, great game. The strawberries, B sides, C sides, Farewell, and golden strawberries let you take the difficulty as far as you want.

I guess I'm the unofficial yearly tier list thread creator now. 2023 thread here

Another year, another tier list. Post the games you played in 2023 and how you rank them. I made mine with the offline tierlist maker from https://github.com/silverweed/tiers. Feel free to be lazy and just post text though.

Fewer games for me than 2022 since I've been stuck trying to get every pokemon in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team for the last several months.

S: Fight'n Rage
A: Tetris Attack, Touhou 10: Mountain of Faith, Resident Evil 4 (Gamecube), Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course
B: Battle of Olympus, Super Mario Sunshine, Madden 06, Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, Final Vendetta, NFL Blitz 2003, Fire Shark, Kirby's Pinball Land, Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara (via Chronicles of Mystara collection on Steam), Burnout 2, Gokujo Parodius (SFC), What the Golf, Sim City (SNES)
C; Chuck Rock 2: Son of Chuck, Super Bonk, Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom (via Chronicles of Mystara collection on Steam), Phantasy Star IV, Gekitotsu Yonku Battle (famicom), Soldiers of Fortune (SNES), Whip Rush
D; The Three Stooges (NES), Boomer's Adventure in Asmik World
Children's Edutainment: Sesame Street 1 2 3

Past years:

2022

I voted SNES since that's the system I have the most games for, but it's really a mix with NES a close second. Current counts (including imports):

SNES: 361
NES: 341
Genesis: 142
N64: 119
Gamecube: 102
GBA: 68
GB: 57
DS: 40
GBC: 24
3DS: 19
Sega CD: 15

bump

Modern consoles are just locked-down computers. My newest home console is a Gamecube. I play any new games on PC.

7 hours ago, Gloves said:

Can you be my dad?

I, too, would like the opportunity to claim @Reed Rothchild's Aero Fighters.

I voted for games that are new to me, but I just realized that I've tested every game in my collection to make sure it works and I've got ~1000 games that I've technically "played" but are basically new to me. If the wizard's ok with me changing my answer I'd switch to games I've played. Otherwise I guess I'm selling my collection and taking up PS1/PS2 collecting.