bronzeshield

I have both (just got a nice flat-screen Sanyo with component inputs for free), but I beat it last year on a curved-screen Toshiba. I thought light guns acted weird on flat-style CRTs? Maybe it's only some light guns that do so?

No, I think it's an interesting game too, but 1CC'ing it is quite an achievement -- and that's coming from someone who's beaten the game too! I can imagine that it's possible, but man, getting the kind of consistent response from the Zapper necessary, and with the brutal event timers/RNG element...I'm impressed. Maybe it'd be easier if I played on a smaller TV? I played on a 21" CRT from about 6-7 feet away, and the main problem I had was getting consistent hit detection with anything right at the edge of the screen.

You 1CC'ed Gumshoe?! Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaàaaáâäãåāaaamn.

Right, I've consulted that before, but the language they use -- "Fire the Zapper while the Game Over screen is displayed to restart the game on the last phase attempted" -- doesn't really do a good job of spelling out exactly what you need to do (which contributed to the collective misunderstanding about needing to shoot rapidly, etc.). As I recall, if it doesn't register your shot in the right place within a certain amount of time, you're back to square one.

The manual does mention how to continue (as WashYourFace notes), and I'd read the "spam the trigger" thing elsewhere and it seems to be widely believed. But neither of those really gets it quite right: you have to shoot the words GAME OVER (as i recall) to continue, so some aim is required (and spamming the fire button is of no help). Even if it weren't in the manual, I'd still question whether it constitutes a code, since shooting the only significant onscreen object in a game with one-button input is a pretty obvious course of action.

Gumshoe is tough, but since you have infinite continues it's manageable. I don't know how many hours I put into it last year, but probably only about 10-12, I'm guessing -- yeah, I just looked at my notes and it was just over 10 hours over the course of 3-4 weeks. The main factor for me was physical fatigue in my hands and trigger finger -- the game just wore me out after a while -- plus my ability to gradually get a better sense of the right strategy for the last level. The last boss is pretty unforgiving, though, and I still don't have a 100% handle on what triggers the bonus areas (which frankly are sometimes better avoided).

Interesting discussion. I'd say one thing that annoys me is when reviewers focus on quantitative aspects of the game -- things that can be measured -- and assume there's a relationship between those things and how enjoyable the game is, which is really all that matters to me. (That's using a definition of "enjoyment" that includes "the rewards of mastering a tough challenge": a game doesn't have to be fun at every moment to be rewarding.) Sure, things like a steady framerate usually correlate with more enjoyment. But there are lots of other things that can be measured, like the amount of content in a game, or the resolution and color count of its graphics, that don't necessarily have any bearing on enjoyment. That line of thought can get absurd: do we fault an Italian mosaic for being "low-resolution", or a painting for not being photorealistic? The idea that more realism automatically = good is totally unproven for every parameter (graphics, sound, physics, etc.). Sure, I respond in a positive way to stunningly beautiful nature scenes in a downhill skiing game, but it (realism) still has to be handled on a case-by-case basis, rather than treated as an absolute metric. What's good is whatever makes the game more enjoyable and serves its goals well -- and better tech specs only constitute progress to the extent that they enable new experiences. I think reviewers -- in every field, not just games -- like to talk about quantitative stuff because it lets them pretend to be "objective", and gets them out of the much harder task of describing the subjective experience of playing a game and what makes it enjoyable or not. Someone else noted that one of the key questions when you review anything is: did this media item do what it set out to do? The best place to attempt objectivity lies in answering that question -- and that's a totally distinct question from "Do I like it?" If you're not a person who enjoys the kind of thing a game is trying to do, maybe you're not the right person to review it: someone who hates sports and sports games probably has little ability to appraise a sports game in a fair and reasonable way. At the same time, it's absolutely true that everything has a context. First of all, the relationship between spending money and the value represented by a game was a big deal to us as kids, but it goes out the window once you've left the game's retail era. On top of that, the experience of playing a game at the same time as other people is non-trivial: some of these games were meant to be played by bored kids with tons of time on their hands who would share tips at school, and slowly find things out. If a middle-aged, solitary, impatient gamer doesn't have that social context, and is instead trying to play the game during a window of 45 minutes while the kids are asleep or whatever, it won't be the same experience. Everything in life -- certainly any media item -- is enriched by knowing other people who are experiencing the same thing you are. We're social beings, wired to seek shared experiences and common ground. I think every reviewer has to ask themselves hard questions about whether they've "aged out" of certain forms of entertainment -- not through any fault of their own, or by doing something wrong along the way, but simply because it feels different to spend 20+ hours grinding in an RPG when you're 10, or 20, or 40, or 50. Something that was special when you were a teenager can start to feel like a Skinner box, or even remind you of mortality, when you're much older. I find longer games usually wear out their welcome, so I tend to prefer my games to be short and difficult. When people complain a lot about games being too short, I wonder whether they're looking for games to be more of an escape, whereas I'm looking more for the rewarding feeling of mastering an interesting challenge. But then again, the depressed kid sitting in the middle of nowhere deserves to have something to distract him while his parents fight for the umpteenth time, you know? So I think every game has a kind of potential purpose embedded in it -- or ideally, more than one -- something it can enable people to do, or something it can mean to them. It takes a really open-minded reviewer, someone who can step outside themselves and their tastes and biases, to try to see what a game could mean to someone totally unlike themselves. That's one thing that's great about Super Mario Bros.: it can be a walk in the park, a demanding speedrun, an old friend, a mysterious world full of surprises and secrets for a newcomer, a 5-minute game or a 60-minute game. It's not just well-remembered because it was popular or because it was "first" in some way, but also because it struck a brilliant balance between accessibility and depth.

The only thing I liked about Rad Racket was "YUK A RAT", which granted is pretty awesome. Otherwise it's a lot like black-box Tennis, just not as awful. It's been almost 7 years since I played it, though. I managed to figure out a winning pattern for the tennis game in Quattro Sports -- the details might still be on NintendoAge somewhere, from when I beat it in 2014 (and again in 2016). I think the biggest "aha" moment was getting the hang of serving aces? I seem to remember something about the game being really counterintuitive. Ah, I found it: "When serving, the key is to always serve wide (hold left or right), and to wait for the ball to drop quite low -- near eye level when you're serving from the far court, and slightly above headband level if you're serving from the near court. If the ball goes long or hits the net, you're hitting too soon or too late (respectively), but if you get a let (the ball dribbles over the net), you're close. Get the timing right, and you can serve strings of aces, which makes life much easier. When receiving, I found it best to stay behind the baseline, and hit the opponent's serve hard and deep crosscourt. That will often elicit a "floating" ball in response, which you can rush forward and smash crosscourt for a quick win of the point. BTW the opponents in this game are basically in groups of three, and the main difference is that the game speeds up after every 3rd opponent -- it starts out quite slow, and gets rather quick by the end. It takes a few moments to adjust your timing, but it's doable. Andre is noticeably more powerful and consistent than the others, but can still be overcome with good serving and aggressive returning. I don't think the tennis part of Quattro Sports is as bad as some sources say. The difficult serving is a drag, but once you get used to it, the rest of the game is pretty decent."

There's one, and only one: Family Tennis by Namco, on the Famicom. It uses the engine that became World Court Tennis on the Turbografx-16, which (ridiculous localization aside) is very very solid. Plus the characters are (thinly disguised) real-life players from the 1980s, and play a lot like the actual players. Navratilova's volleys are sick. There's a fan translation that came out pretty well (full disclosure, I was one of several who worked on it). All the other NES tennis games suck to varying degrees. The Japanese version of Racket Attack is slightly better since it has upgraded sound, but it's still floaty and slippery. Still, at least it tries. Evert/Lendl is trash, Connors is trash, black-box Tennis is an abomination, the unlicensed games are trash. Outside of North America, Rackets & Rivals is the only one I haven't beaten yet but it seems trashy. There's a Famicom Disk System game that might be OK but I can't really tell until I give it a proper playthrough. A lot of the best tennis games are Namco releases. They seemed to understand how to make one that was both accessible and played like the real sport.

Hey, thanks for this. I think I'd read much the same before, but something about the way your advice was phrased made it "click this time and I ended up beating Sword Master today. It comes close to being a sleeper classic, but that platforming is so janky -- on my winning playthrough, both of my continues came after I basically plunged through a platform. The hitboxes in this game are very odd indeed.

Nice! I was working on that but got stuck on Level 4. The double-jump seems to require frame-perfect timing and release, but I was kind of getting the hang of it until that gauntlet of three floating eyeball things. Did you use the trick where you change to the mage and deliberately get knocked back in order to remove one of the eyeballs, as seen in some YouTube playthroughs? Or something else?

In the interest of transparency, my house has windows.

4/10. Terrible controllers, inexcusable sound, stupid power cord. And those double-wide pixels really make the system's graphics look trashy, low-class, and outdated -- that hurts its plausibility far more than is usually acknowledged, I think. But it can do a few things the NES can't, and wise developers took (and are continuing to take) advantage of those things, so it deserves to exist. Midnight Mutants is a fun time. Plus the backwards compatibility is a huge plus.

Gain Ground on the Genesis. Bought it kind of randomly, didn't really know anything about it, graphics and sound aren't especially impressive -- but it turned out to be my favorite game on the console. Great in co-op, great solo, and with three difficulty levels that offer genuinely distinct challenges.

I agree with some of the picks here like Cliffhanger and Ikari Warriors -- but has anyone ever played Loadstar on the Sega CD? I spent a couple hours trying to beat the first level of that one and had no luck. Massive amounts of memorization required, on top of dealing with all the "pleasures" of FMV-based games.

Very glad to have played some part in your journey towards a 32X set! Not sure how many people have had two CIB copies of WSB 32X, but it was my good luck to be one of them thanks to a combination of searching and total accident. One of my copies -- I think it was the one I kept, but I've lost track of which is which! -- came from a yard sale where game collectors were circling like sharks (and frankly behaving rather badly!), seemingly unaware that the highest-value game of all was right under their noses, one of those scorned and overlooked sports titles. I like some games on the 32X, especially Metal Head and Space Harrier. I actually had fun with Motocross too, though it's not to most tastes. I'd like to spend some quality time with DarXide too. Among the FMV CD games, Fahrenheit and Night Trap are both playable. Sadly Blackthorne and Kolibri are wildly overrated! Kolibri has this weird flaw in its controls where if you stop, then move in a new direction, you'll often continue in the old direction. Between that and the respawning enemies and obscure stage goals, it's not nearly the game it could've been. Still, it's clearly the best hummingbird shooter on the 32X, don't let anyone tell you different... I remain super-appreciative of your kind gesture in letting me have that B.C. Racers box from Supergun. All I need now is a Kolibri manual (which I hope to trade for someday) and Spider-Man CIB, and the latter I may never get, which is fine -- I'll just hope for another magical yard sale.

I think with both of these, one solution is to not limit it to a year, at least at first. Start out by nailing down what exactly counts as a win, and then move into trying to do it in a year. Not such a big deal with the smaller libraries of the Virtual Boy and the North American SMS library -- as opposed to something like the PlayStation, say -- but still worthwhile, especially since some of those early SMS games are ambiguous about whether they have an ending. Anyway, I've beaten a smattering of SMS games over the last few years -- I beat six or seven last year, actually, including a couple trickier ones like Altered Beast. I'd have contributed!

One place where I can imagine some confusion about the rules -- and which could lead a person to clear a bunch of games "ahead of schedule" -- is if someone didn't realize that emulator speedup is forbidden. Not sure if every user will understand that "frame skip" refers to that, and since it confers no gameplay advantage (except stamina) it might not occur to everyone that it's disallowed. You could probably do Bases Loaded in a single, exhausting day if you just fast forwarded your way through it whenever possible, since the at-bats after you score are meaningless. And lots of RPGs and strategy games would go from 10+ hours to a fraction of that.

It's OK, this year you can play Glovet instead! ...wait, there isn't a game named Glovet? Oh, jeez, now you're in for it.

Minimum completion time for Bases Loaded should be about 33-34 hours. That's at 25 minutes per game (optimistic but doable if you're both lucky and efficient), times 80 games. For my 2020 playthrough, my total playtime was exactly 38 hours, as it happens.

Horrible news. The word is that he just collapsed out of nowhere, and people are speculating that it might have been an aneurysm. I guess he and Heather had just moved to Hawaii only a couple days beforehand. I watched part of Joseph Saelee's video from yesterday but couldn't take more than a few minutes, as the poor guy was totally distraught. I didn't know that they were close friends (in a little brother - big brother kind of way).

...

Yeah, I didn't mind Jordan vs. Bird too much at all (I beat it for the completion effort 2 years ago, I think it was?). (EDIT: Ha, it was 2016 -- yikes!) The slam dunk contest was irritating, but the main game seemed heavily loaded in favor of Bird to me -- you can just nail 3-pointers all day, and attrition will gradually give you the game even if Jordan scores more often.

Are you talking about the 3-minute tool-assisted speedrun on YouTube? I'd never use a TAS as a benchmark for how long a game takes to beat, since the gameplay tends to be totally unlike normal play -- it usually involves exploiting obscure bugs and requires frame-perfect inputs that humans can't replicate. Also that specific speedrun doesn't have a link to TASVideos and a playback file, so we don't even know if it's legit. (The next-shortest TAS of Family Feud NES is almost 15 minutes long, so I'm suspicious.)

I practiced in an emulator too, and the thought of pausing again to practice did cross my mind! It's such a bizarre game -- you can tell they wanted to do something good, but they didn't put in any of the infrastructure to support it. Maybe they realized at the last minute that they didn't really have enough of a game, so they decided to make the last boss fight such a hassle to stretch things out -- or to discourage renting the game, who knows. Did you use a pattern where you hit him 10-11 times, then go to the bottom right corner until he backs off? I came up with that one on my own., but I'm sure others have found the same thing.