bronzeshield

Star Voyager is done:

Irritating that the damage RNG can so easily make or break an otherwise good run ("Close to victory? Whoops, there goes your laser cannon!"), and that the game apparently regenerates the motherships you kill if you leave the sector without clearing out all of the cannon fodder ships. I like the Starmaster/WarpSpeed approach better, where the game's more transparent about the number of ships in an area. Oh, well.

All-Star Tennis '99 is awful, but fairly easy to beat if you know the trick: just slice everything (I think it's C-Down as I recall) and wait for the CPU to make mistakes.

It's possible to go for a winner now and then, but it's easier to just junkball the CPU to death, since the game loves to send your hard shots long.

On 2/26/2020 at 1:37 PM, NESfiend said:

I started on heavy shreddin' last night and made some decent progress. Got about half way thru after way too many tries. Have a feeling the second half is going to get crazy difficult. I'll post again if I give up so others know to give it a shot. 

Like lots of NES games, pretty good game if you can overlook some randomly placed very difficult jumps, sequences, etc. Best part is the scary, but kind of hot, very dark image of an 80s chick with a serious face and even more serious perm. At the end of each level, she appears with a caption that says, "Good" or "smooth". I think more work went into drawing that womans face than all of animation during gameplay. 

Edit: Here she is. The rest of this game is essentially stick figures and trees. So odd. 

Getting a kinda Grace Slick ca. Starship vibe from that one:

Centre Court Tennis is a funny one since AFAIK it doesn't have an ending, just a victory sequence when you win each of the game's 4 tournaments.

I beat the game twice for NA (and myself), and set an arbitrary victory standard of winning all four tournaments and thereby becoming world #1. It's possible there's a way to get something more definitive (maybe by winning all the available items of clothing and accessories, but that'd be insanely time-consuming).

Ring King is done:

The problem with this game isn't how it plays, or even how long it drags on. It's that, at a basic level, it's dishonest about how it works.

For instance, if my Punch and Speed stats are higher than those of my opponent, I should do more damage and move faster -- but instead, the game totals up your overall skill points (including Stamina, an otherwise nearly-meaningless stat) and uses that as the basis for assessing who moves faster and hits harder.

Or, if my overall points are higher, then I should outclass my opponent, right? Well, sometimes the game "anoints" one of its boxers, and no matter how much better your stats are, he'll comprehensively whoop you. Or sometimes it does the reverse, and a superior opponent (in training, at least) will succumb quickly -- including the very same boxer that just beat you badly. It makes no sense.

Fortunately I discovered very late in the game that if you camp out in the lower-left corner facing upward, the CPU gets confused and defends poorly. I used that to take out the World #2 and #1 despite having underqualified stats.

BTW I'm amused to see that a few sites have passwords (which I obviously didn't use) with "SLAYER 1" as your boxer's name: the same name I always used when I played this game as a kid! I suppose it's a pretty obvious choice, since the game forces you to re-enter your name every time you input a password, so the lowest-effort solution is best.

I took a break from Ring King for a while, but I'm back to working on it. Got the U.S. title, and the World title awaits -- after some grinding, grinding, grinding...

1 hour ago, BriGuy82 said:

There's only 5 levels in the GB version of Marble Madness apparently. I looped it a few times to see if level 6 would show up, but it didn't. Very cheesey compared to the NES version which is one of my favorites.

As far as I can tell there are only two good console ports of Marble Madness: the NES one, and the Japanese-exclusive version published by Tengen (not Electronic Arts) for Mega Drive.

Everything else is trash: Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Master System, Game Gear, etc. The Electronic Arts port for Genesis is maybe barely passable, but it really has no excuse for not being as good as the Tengen version.

(Too bad the PC Engine port didn't come out -- that one looked likely to be good.)

Long post incoming! I'm mostly going to stick to games that I've beaten, which are in bold:

On 2/4/2020 at 11:22 PM, Wandering Tellurian said:

A couple of others you might want to look at are Dune and Iron Helix.   Their reception was mixed with people either really  liking them or finding them mediocre at best.   Both suffer from not offering much replay value - something that doesn't bother me if the first go around is fun.  

Iron Helix! There's a game that almost nobody talks about. It's quite playable, though, and even fun -- if you're willing to commit to the mapmaking and note-taking required for a game of this kind. My wife and I completed all three difficulty levels and enjoyed it.

Seconded on Wirehead and Night Trap, which were mentioned in earlier posts and which we also enjoyed. Dracula Unleashed is another one we completed, though it took us ages as we got stuck in a couple of places (typical for a point-and-click adventure). Panic was a trip, not for all tastes but definitely amusing. Fahrenheit was more playable than we expected, and even fun at times; note that you have to beat the game on Hard to get an ending.

Mansion of Hidden Souls was atmospheric, but short and easy. I can't remember if I enjoyed Masked Rider: Kamen Rider ZO or just found it unremarkable. Tomcat Alley was decent and vaguely fun. (Midnight Raiders seemed similar but I had more trouble with that one and didn't get too far; I keep meaning to play Surgical Strike, which was also on the 32X but only in an insanely-rare Brazilian release.)

BTW one of the big mistakes a lot of FMV games made was to have a poorly-implemented difficulty system, especially if the game expects you to beat Hard to get a good ending. Star Wars: Rebel Assault and Crime Patrol are fun on lower difficulties, but become just about unplayable on Hard, as the pixellated graphics are too poor to respond with enough speed or accuracy: you literally can't see your enemies until it's too late.

Fortunately, they don't require Hard to get the ending, but some other titles do -- and when a game has wildly unrealistic expectations, being lectured about what a failure you are by some no-name, horse-faced '90s actor loses its amusement value pretty quickly.

Non-FMV games:  Sol-Feace is brutally difficult -- much more so than the Genesis version since it throws you back to Level 5 when you continue in Levels 5-7 -- but beating that one on Mania difficulty was very satisfying. Wonder Dog is mediocre, sadly, and Heart of the Alien was very disappointing for anyone who loved the first game (which is included).

The Sega CD also has a fairly large Japanese library with a bunch of interesting-looking games. Too bad none of them have been translated into English. The only two I've beaten are Earnest Evans, which is basically the cartridge version with cutscenes and Redbook audio, and the beat-'em-up Anet Futatabi, which is utter trash but has nice cutscenes.

I'd really like to spend some more time with the scaling games like AH-3 Thunderstrike, RDF Global Conflict, and Soul Star; I also know a few people who think highly of B.C. Racers (but only in its Sega CD version). And someday I'll dig into Third World War...

3 hours ago, Splain said:

Nice job on those hard titles. Alien storm has only those 2 difficulties, lol. Supereasy and superhard. If @bronzeshield has an opinion from his experience then I'm all ears, but I lean toward requiring superhard because it looks like there's no credit roll after supereasy.

Back in 2014, the guy who beat it for Sega-16 (Zebbe) said the following:

"I have beaten this game on super hard before. Super easy is much easier. More power-ups and bosses go down easier. Also, there are passwords and unlimited continues on super easy. Super hard has three lives only. The ending is the same on both."

Then there was the following reply from user sjorspion:

"There are differences ingame although, mostly extra/extended cutscene's. For example the transformation from the boss on the train...
Just checked it, when fighting Xi-Tiger on Super Easy the screen will just flash white to transform to Xi-Tiger. On superhard there a little cutscene.
As far as I remember, there a more of these little extra's in the Superhard mode. Can't remember though if it had any effect (/extra's) on the ending..."

And then Zebbe again:

"That's strange, I never noticed any differences like that. I played the PAL version on super easy, it had that transformation cutscene. I also have the Japanese version but have never played super easy on that one."

And then another user, superandroidtron, helped make some sense of it all:

"That cutscene appears on both difficulty levels, but sometimes does not appear due to a bug. If you die between the start of the level and the boss fight, the cutscene will not play."

So...I don't know?  But we accepted the victory at the time, I can say that.

6 hours ago, Gaia Gensouki said:

Gain Ground is actually one of my favorites on the Sega Genesis and it's imho too bad that so few people actually talk about it or seem to like it. It's like Ikari Warriors, but in good and with a lot of different and unique characters that change up the formula quite a bit. This allows you to approach every level in several ways in order to beat it as quick as possible.

I love Gain Ground -- one of the few games that's just as good co-op as single player. Even each difficulty level offers a slightly different experience. I think it's just starting to get the reputation it deserves, little by little. It's one of my top 5 games on the Genesis!

The US did see a SG-1000 compatible console in the form of the Dina 2-in-1, which could also play ColecoVision games. But that was after its primary market window had already closed.

Wow, beating Air Fortress took me twice as long -- just over 13 hours, by my notes. Then again I was drawing my own maps, so that certainly added a lot of time.

^Brilliant.

10 hours ago, acromite53 said:

Kolibri: You may or may not like the gameplay, but it is worth it for style and concept. It is a beautiful game in graphics and music. 

Oh, it's a great-looking and -sounding game for sure. The problem is, the controls are screwed-up, the stage design is either by-the-numbers or unpleasantly cryptic (like a second-rate Ecco), and enemies respawn as soon as their spawn point leaves the screen, which does not work in a game with the kind of whippy camera/scrolling that Kolibri has (i.e. the typical 16-bit thing of making the screen whip around every time you turn).

My problem with the controls, BTW, is simple: when you stop and try to change direction, the game sometimes forces you to keep going in the direction you were traveling before you stopped. In other words, if I press Right, then release it and my hummingbird stops moving, when I go to press Up I shouldn't move a bunch of pixels to the right before I'm allowed to go upward. The same thing got messed up in Sega's home conversion of Air Rescue for the Master System: in a helicopter game, there shouldn't be pre-existing momentum from a standstill.

I just found the game to be a chore. A nice-looking chore, sure.

On 1/15/2020 at 8:11 PM, NESfiend said:

Its been a while, but if I remember correctly, you can go back. I play/beat world champ more often, but its the same format and you can train anytime in that. I remember grinding all the way the first time for world champ and realizing later I didnt need to do that. 

Thanks a ton for this! I'm still working on Ring King, and you're absolutely right -- I was able to train for a while, then take the Rookie title, then go back to training.

My experience with the 32X has been the opposite of most people, in that I hated the games that get a lot of praise (Blackthorne, Kolibri), and enjoyed the games that usually get trashed (Metal Head, Motocross Championship).

I think Metal Head is a genuinely worthwhile game, though you have to hold down the run button to bring the experience up to a reasonable speed. For an early texture-mapped 3D title, it's pretty slick.

The two 32X CD games I've played much are Night Trap and Fahrenheit. Night Trap definitely benefited from the video upgrade, but Fahrenheit's audio got kind of trashed in the 32X version.

I don't like the Mortal Kombat II port very much -- my favorite combo with Jax, which worked in the arcade and SNES versions, doesn't work on the 32X. (I think the 32X version may be based on a later revision of the game.)

The Space Harrier port, though, is pretty nice. That's the first time the feel of those Sega Super Scaler games was really brought to a home console.

Has anyone played T-Mek much? I keep meaning to get into it.

Ah, RoboWarrior. I was pretty psyched when, as a kid, I borrowed a game I'd never heard of (i.e. RoboWarrior) from a friend and was greeted by something with such good production values. Even though the gameplay was kind of a grind, I still found the game intriguingly weird, but only made it through the first couple levels before I had to give it back.

Later on, maybe around 1993, I randomly ran across a Jaleco brochure which listed the boss's health -- is there a scan of this brochure anywhere on the web, BTW? -- and made beating the game sound totally impossible.

Then, back in 2012 (and again in 2016), I ended up playing through the game with the help of a walkthrough. The truth is it's not a hard game, just one that expect a lot of meticulous combing of the environment (and noticing one or two minor tricks). So I don't feel too bad about using a walkthrough since the game itself doesn't really require much skill, but it would have been nice to beat it back in the day.

Gaia Gensouki, I'm not sure why, but those pictures look to me like huge, holographic, textured art pieces hanging on a white wall. Like, I know you just took a picture of your monitor, but it looks like you went to an art gallery with giant reproductions of Game Boy art mounted on their white walls.  I don't know whether it's a trick of the light or the way the shot is framed, but it had me confused for a solid few seconds.

Battle Chess is done:

Beaten on Level 1 with the black, or blue, pieces.

2 hours ago, mbd39 said:

Even better, bypass the entire game.

Actually, I dunno, I've never played. But it looks horrible.

It's not quite as bad as people say -- and certainly isn't the worst licensed game on the NES (as one site claims) -- but it's still pretty bad. Buggy as hell, and very frustrating.

I actually have zero problem with the whole secret code thing, and don't understand why people complain about it so much: I figured it out as a kid, with no outside hints.

But the forced AI companion thing is just stupid, and on my playthrough last year I encountered a horrible bottleneck late in Magneto's stage -- one I don't remember from previous playthroughs -- that's almost impossible for your character to survive.

That said the stage design is almost clever at points, the music is slightly above average, and it's possible to run through the game very quickly if you know what you're doing.

If you like bypassing bosses, you'll love Marvel's X-Men on the NES!

2 hours ago, OptOut said:

Honestly, my biggest problem with Honey Hunt is simply I wish they had voiced cut-scenes rather than just text. Would have been great to hear the original voice actors reprise their roles for the game. But then again, that's more like wishful thinking than an actual criticism of the game.

Have you played the PlayStation version? I haven't, but based on what I've seen in YouTube videos, it has exactly that -- voiced cut-scenes with either the original actors, or excellent impersonators.

3 hours ago, Red said:

What should the win condition for Championship Pro-Am be?  It loops after 24 tracks, but if you do 2 loops, your trophy room is filled and you get extra bonus points.  In the NES thread, one loop of RC Pr-Am is considered beating it (Championship Pro-Am is a port of it).

I had planned to use one loop of 24 tracks as the standard for Sega-16. Whether you do one loop or two, we'd be pleased as punch if you'd cross-post the win over there, since that's one of the 31 games left we haven't cleared!

Super Jeopardy! is done:

First two games came down to Final Jeopardy, which I never like since it's a big risk, so I was glad to get a runaway in my last game (the finals). I also saw a lot of category and clue repetition in my last game, including the exact same Final Jeopardy question I got in the quarterfinals!

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Tigger's Honey Hunt. It's just a remarkably pleasant game to play -- very aesthetically pleasing and sweet-natured. (The minigames are terrible, though.)