bronzeshield

One thing that hurts it is that the controls are actually given incorrectly in the manual. I don't remember the details, but there's a specific way to trigger the web-swinging reliably, and it doesn't at all match what the manual says. I agree that it's about average but could've been great. It's been trashed as "unplayable", "impossibly hard", etc. and that's obviously nonsense -- I beat the game within 3 hours of when I first picked it up.

Nice! I enjoyed Dragonstrike and it's on my "to beat on Hard" list. Right now I'm at 201 licensed completions, or 205 if you count a few games I haven't beaten on Hard yet, of which Dragonstrike is one (Burai Fighter, Castelian, and Shooting Range are the others). Throw in unlicensed and I reach 219. Meanwhile, Sky Kid crashed on me just as I finished Level 24, a bonus level at that, with a decent number of lives in reserve for 25+26. Sigh.

Honestly the biggest challenge with Overlord is remembering how the UI works. Every year I beat it, I have to refresh my memory on how to send the ship out to the enemy HQ. The actual battle is trivial, just drive in circles and shoot until the enemy is destroyed. Such a badly-designed game!

Still trying on Sky Kid. I've gotten to Level 26 once and Level 25 a few times, including today.

Beating Magical Doropie was the necessary precondition for me to beat Krion Conquest last year. There's a rumor that the localization was based on an earlier version of the ROM, as even if you set aside the issues with no continues and cut content, some stuff in Magical Doropie just works better. Hitboxes feel more natural, item drop rates are better-balanced and more like Mega Man, etc. Also the first endboss in Magical Doropie has a reasonable health bar, but becomes a ridiculous damage sponge in KC.

Dezaemon Plus, I think?

I love that game! Beating it was one of my most memorable gaming experiences as a kid, and I enjoyed replaying it for the annual effort a few years back. There's nothing else in the NES library quite like it, or quite like the feeling of desperately trying to find/reach your escape pod in time. This is also pretty awesome:

Oh, I know, but I loathe that game and have a longstanding grudge against it. So I don't just want to beat it on a lower level -- I want to rub its face in the dirt, take away its lunch money, etc. And speaking of which, Tennis is now done: Beat the first Level 5 opponent 7-5 6-1, and the second one 6-1 6-4. I'm still not 100% sure about the relationship between my controller inputs and the onscreen character's shot selection, but with enough passing shots, it doesn't matter. I hate the CPU in this game. Any tennis game where the CPU never hits anything out is fundamentally flawed in a deep way -- there has to be a relationship between shot selection, risk, and court placement that results in errors. At least it double faults or hits volleys into the net sometimes.

It is (PAL & Japan). I beat that one last year. The main game is only OK, but it has a great puzzle mode -- fiendishly difficult but very fair. And of course the name has "butt" in it, which is always a plus.

Awesome! And my bad on the long post, I should've put mine in a spoiler tag. Glad you were able to edit it to clean things up. BTW All-Star Tennis '99 is on the main list but should only be on the PAL list -- it was never released in North America. EDIT: Same for Anna Kournikova's Smash Court Tennis and Yeh Yeh Tennis. I think Virtual Open Tennis is unreleased?

Sure thing! There are two lists, actually, depending on whether a game was released in Japan or not: Didn't mean to edit, but stealing and removing so the post doesn't overpower mine My bad lol.

Awesome to see this! (Can we hit up the PAL exclusives too? I've got a list if you need one. Totally understood if you don't want to count them, or only want to do them as one-off bonuses. I've been wanting an excuse to replay Action Man: Destruction X, this time on Hard. It's a shockingly slick little GTA-for-kids game!)

Two near-misses tonight: I won the first match against the CPU on Level 5 of Tennis, 7-6(5) 7-6(3), but lost the rematch. Then I decided to play Sky Kid for the hell of it, and made it to Level 25 for the first time! I'll probably give them both another shot in the coming days, unless someone else gets to Tennis first. Sky Kid's on my to-beat list, though.

That matches what AdamL writes about it. As far as I can tell it looks like either reaching Level 5, or getting top score on the high score table (i.e. over 200k), would be the way to go. I can't remember how far I played into it as a kid, but I think I made the double-digits before it became clear this was one of "those" games, like Magmax, Seicross, etc. Annoying that they couldn't just give it an ending!

It looks like some work was done in MAME to support Miracle Piano MIDI for NES and SNES, but it's not clear whether anyone's actually gotten it to work. Will look into it!

If you play piano already, it doesn't look too bad. From memory (watching parts of TMR's playthrough) it has some weirdly finicky input handlers but that's really the main obstacle. Also if you got together two people who played piano and had one person handle each hand, it'd be fairly trivial. Not sure if the rules would allow that. The game lets you go right to the Habanera so only one piece is needed to beat the game (right?). I used to have an incomplete Miracle Piano set but got rid of it, as it didn't have the power cord or a couple other bits and bobs. Have any emulators supported MIDI input to make this doable without needing real hardware?

Could be. I'm trying to find what the final bid was on each -- no luck so far, though the main auction looks to have reached $30K. He did describe the licensed set as "every game ever made" for the NES, apparently. Meanwhile this was (according to the comments) a "licensed-only" auction in 2008: https://blog.pricecharting.com/2008/04/every-nes-game-ever-made-costs-11388.html

I found an example of a collector who sold off his licensed collection in 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20070203051048/https://digg.com/hardware/Guy_selling_every_NES_game_ever_made_on_eBay_With_pics EDIT: Never mind, he sold off his unlicensed games separately. Still interesting that he divided them up, though. I wonder if this auction played a part in defining "all the NES games" as licensed-only in some people's minds?

Naah, I wouldn't think so. I think it's more a perception that unlicensed games aren't as good (which certainly isn't correct, though there are plenty of bad unlicensed games), combined with a feeling that it opens up an endless rabbit hole. On the Famicom side, collecting or even specifying a full set of unlicensed games would be pretty much impossible; maybe people don't realize that it's much more achievable on the NES. Also, they tend to be expensive with crappy packaging, which doesn't help. Maybe there's also a Nintendo loyalist angle of "the big N doesn't approve"? I certainly can't relate to that. Like I said, Captain Comic was the first NES game I ever bought in the post-NES era.

Fair enough! It'd be interesting to look back at the newsgroups from the 1990s and see if anyone floated an idea like that. I've never gone after a full set on any Nintendo platform, so the issue's never been on my personal radar...

Hey, if that's true then we're on the same page to a degree. I can't dig up much NA stuff before then, though I found a post from you on Digital Press from 2005: https://forum.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?59806-Tengen-Pac-Man-Licensed-vs-Unlicensed-(NES) Beyond that, I can only say that I was well aware of the difference as a kid, though it was more "Huh, most Color Dreams games are crap, guess I shouldn't rent them" than anything else. (A dash of "Huh, Tengen Tetris is really expensive in the BRE Software catalog" too.) But the weird stuff Camerica and Color Dreams games expected you to do to make them work definitely screamed "not 100% legit".

Don't get me wrong: I think including protos, homebrews, etc. as a bonus for fun is a fine idea, and I totally understand limiting the effort to released games. All I'm saying is that deciding to define "every NES game" as "every NES game released during the console's original lifespan" is a choice, not something handed down by Moses on stone tablets. Re: the community making no distinction between licensed and unlicensed in 2010, I joined NA in 2009 but didn't start posting for a while, so I don't remember firsthand. But doesn't this thread suggest otherwise? List of members with complete licensed NTSC NES sets The first post is from January 2010, though for some reason the replies only begin in May 2011 -- it looks like the thread was restarted somehow. Also there was a thread by Topload_Dogbone titled "How many licensed US NTSC NES games are there?" that dates from April 2009, but I can only find it in the Google Cache of GoCollect. I don't know, man...if you're claiming that everyone in the community thought of licensed and unlicensed games as "the same", then if I'm being totally honest, this "no distinction" thing seems like revisionist history to me. I was making that distinction as a kid! But maybe I'm misunderstanding you.

Respectfully, why a "duh"? I know a streamer on Twitch who's trying to beat the whole Mega Drive/Genesis library, and he plays protos as long as they're complete (or at least beatable). That makes perfect sense to me. I think a better argument is that you literally can't beat all the protos, because some don't circulate and others we don't even know exist. So it's a set that can't be completed or even defined. Also, flash carts were still pretty niche back then. Re: homebrews, wasn't Sack of Flour, Heart of Gold around? I guess that never got finished, though I used to mess around with it in the 2000s. Homebrew NES games date way back, to the late 1990s at least, but people actually finishing them and putting them on a cart didn't happen much (if at all) until later.

I agree with your post otherwise, but has anyone actually said the licensed list is the "correct" list? (For this project, I mean, not in terms of collecting etc.) I certainly wouldn't say that, as I think there are perfectly good reasons to include unlicensed and PAL games, and perfectly good reasons to exclude them. Both options yield an interesting project, so I'm honestly fine with either one.

Sure, those data sets -- "all NES games released in the US" vs. "all licensed NES games released in the US" -- aren't arbitrary, but no one's saying they are. It's deciding which of those categories to use that's essentially an arbitrary decision, or a matter of judgment. If you're hung up on the "ALL" , I'd say this: the title of the original thread was "Can NA Beat Every NES game in a Year", right? But that doesn't say anything about when the game was released, or whether the game was released at all. If you're going to criticize someone as "speaking from the perspective of a collector", then isn't it just as "arbitrary" to use a collector's full set, rather than including prototypes (which the original thread didn't do) and homebrews (which it did, but only "for fun")? Those are NES games, aren't they? That's Khromak's point, I think. With any "completist" project, you're always drawing a line in the sand somewhere, it's just a question of where. You may have preferences, even strong beliefs about where that line should be drawn, but those are your own. TheMexicanRunner did NTSC and PAL licensed games, but not unlicensed; Chrontendo is reviewing games from all regions, but no unlicensed; I'm sure there's someone on Twitch doing every NES game with the unlicensed games included. No one is "wrong", because it's always an arbitrary cutoff.