bronzeshield

Star Wars: Rebel Assault II.

Discworld.

Star Ocean (SNES).

Rad Racket: Deluxe Tennis II.

Just noticed I've gotten credit for Heavy Shreddin' on the leaderboard, but that's @NESfiend's clear, not mine. (I'd like to beat it someday, though last time I tried, the game seemed to require waaaaaay too much memorization...)

Hoops is done: Legs and Barbie were the only combination of players that seemed to work for me. Didn't realize until a game or two in that they were the only women players too! This game basically sucks, by the way. I guess it's playable, especially given that it has passwords (unlike its Game Boy sister, In Your Face), but there are so many issues: The constant ball stealing is ridiculous. Stealing a ball when standing well behind my player? Check. The constant fouling is beyond ridiculous. I've passed the ball, didn't hit a single button or D-pad direction while the ball was in transit, and immediately gotten a foul as soon as my player got the pass! The rubberbanding of the player speed -- when you have the ball, the opponent mysteriously becomes super-fast -- is beyond irritating. Double Dribble does it too, but it's more offensive here. You simply can't dribble or run with the ball, at all, if an opposing player is within 10 yards. The gameplay is cluttered and messy. It's often hard to tell who has possession, or who your characters even are, since too many players look very similar and your team doesn't get matching jerseys. No idea why your shots sometimes go in and sometimes don't. Timing is clearly a factor but, often, I think the game just wants you to pass the ball a whole bunch before it lets you take a successful shot. (This reminds me of the arcade, Game Boy, and Genesis versions of Double Dragon III, of all things -- a game that forces you to wait 5-10 seconds between attacks, as nothing you do will work unless you wait out its timer.) The "bring the ball back to the baseline" mechanic is tedious and poorly implemented (and prevents you from making jumping passes unless you can take a shot at that moment). The camera is often poorly placed, showing the background behind the court when it should be showing the bottom half of the court. This also conceals the possession arrow, leaving you unsure whether you can take a shot yet or not. The slam dunk mechanic is stupid. How many times have I seen the CPU block a shot when it's not even in the same time zone as my player? Or how many times has my player been right there, yet done nothing to block the shot? And why can't I just take a regular #$%#$ layup, or hit a button to switch the active player? The manual has several mistakes about what button does what. Not cool. Finally, the game caches your password after you win, but not when you first enter a password after a cold boot. In other words, you have to win a game during power-on in order to get your password cached -- which means that, for that first game in a session, you have to enter your password over and over again... Ugh. But, it's done. I think I'll do AD&D: Dragonstrike next, playing on Hard mode since that's the one difficulty I haven't beaten yet.

Still working on Hoops. 10 games done, 5 to go.

I always won the four tournaments and reached #1 in the world when I beat the game in previous years, but I didn't get anything from the game for doing so, sadly.

...it should be what? Oh no, did In Your Face get in your face?!

Fortunately Centre Court Tennis runs fine (as a ROM; the PAL cart itself won't work because of region lockout). No issues at all with that on an EverDrive 64 and a NTSC-U system, and the speed doesn't feel "off" either. I do own an original cart of Let's Smash, but it's a drag navigating all the menus in Japanese. If the Japanese carts of Rakuga Kids and Air Boarder have fewer menus (or are in English) then yeah, definitely, I'd go for those. It'd be nice if someone could confirm that there's no meaningful difference in gameplay or difficulty. By the way, someone really needs to inspect the Centre Court Tennis ROM and see if there's any way to trigger a proper ending, or if there are any graphics pointing to one. All I've been able to get is the trophy ceremony for each individual tournament. I hope you don't need to earn every unlockable item of clothing to get credits...

The ROM that works on NTSC is a finished but unreleased NTSC version, as I recall. If I'm not mistaken, the sound issue is that you have to turn the sound off, then on again in the menu to get it to work, or something like that. And to be clear, there are definitely working ROMs for all 7 PAL games that get them to run on NTSC. The EverDrive forums should have file names, or MD5s, or the equivalent. This problem has been solved for almost a decade -- the EverDrive users would never let themselves get locked out of the Liechtenstein-like PAL kingdom!

Centre Court Tennis, a PAL game, has always worked fine for me on the EverDrive 64. You sometimes have to find the right ROM to get them to work; Taz Express is especially finicky and has a weird curveball involving the sound. I'm definitely in favor of keeping them -- there are only seven, after all!

Is that the 486? I've been wondering how you type with boxing gloves on.

Quick note on Qbillion. Right now it says the win condition is "Complete all levels", but the game lets you select Levels 1-30 up front, and gives you a password for beating Level 30 even if you go straight to it and don't beat any others. From then on it gives you a password anytime you beat a level ending in zero; in effect, beating levels ending in 1-9 doesn't matter. So I think the win condition should be "Complete every tenth level starting from Level 30, i.e. 30, 40, 50, etc. up through 120". Not coincidentally, I just fired the game up for the first time in ages. In the past I'd beaten every level except 119 and 120, and tonight I was able to blast through Levels 30, 40, etc. up through 110 within about 75-90 minutes. So, if we follow the win condition above, everything required is done except Level 120. However, 119 and 120 are fiendishly difficult, so much so that I abandoned the game back in 2012. I tried coming back to it in 2013 and 2016, but otherwise I haven't touched Qbillion again until now. If I can just clear 120, I'll view the game as beaten even for my own list (which is usually pretty stringent), and regard 119 as an extra...

Is it the one depicted here at letter D? https://www.nesmaps.com/maps/Commando/CommandoMap4-1.html If so, looks like the exit is hidden and has to be revealed with a grenade.

All right, Panel Action Bingo is done: @Floating Platforms I did indeed play using numbers! And @Splain, the method you describe is exactly what I had to do for Levels 26-30 and 56-60: sit on the panel with the lowest (or highest) number, plan out my strategy for the next few moves, carry it out, and then repeat. The rounds with hazards are actually easier since the CPU actually has obstacles in its way, but then again, it will happily refuse to claim the next available panel if it can see that you'll get 2-3 panels in return! No idea why the game doesn't autoload the next password after you lose. Speaking of passwords, my normal password for Level 60 was RPCBKSPH, but on one occasion I gave up and tanked the last life, and then I got the password QPBBJSNH, which also worked. I wonder what triggers that? Too long for what it is, I guess, but I gained grudging respect for the game when it got so hard in the last part of each loop and forced me to come up with better strategies.

I'm halfway through Panel Action Bingo (i.e. Level 31 of 60) and hope to get it done over the weekend.

I'm working on Hoops. Four games down, 11 to go.

Nice! That gets us to 160 for the year, which is a nice total considering 150 wasn't a sure thing. I'm also pleased that (once my points for Popeye are added) I just barely made the Top 10, which feels like an achievement considering how little bandwidth I've had for gaming this year.

10-Yard Fight is done:

Overlord done, because this damned game should always be a Day One special:

Just on a lark -- and because I've been focusing intermittently on early Game Boy games -- I beat the Japanese exclusive Popeye (DMG-PYA): This has to be one of the worst-designed Pac-Man descendants I've ever seen. Success in the last few levels (of Course C) is entirely RNG-dependent. At least they provided unlimited continues; the game would be a crime without them. Well, it already is a crime, but it'd be more of one. Apropos early Game Boy games, I've been tinkering with Blodia and the fan translation of Ayakashi no Shiro -- both Japanese exclusives -- but they're clearly going to span multiple years at this point. Not sure if I have it in me to deal with the later levels of Blodia; the first 25 are taxing enough, and not entirely in a good way.

Oh, to be very clear, I'm extremely glad (and grateful) that you found that out! If I haven't actually beaten a game, I definitely want to know -- and a game with a definitive ending is so much more satisfying than one without one. I hope my strategy guide is of use, if you allow yourself to check such things. I honestly didn't find the game too difficult once I tuned into the key tactics, but I think the last match will likely be nasty no matter what.

It annoyed me sufficiently to have "beaten" this game a few six (!) years ago, only to discover that it had a definitive ending, that I decided to get it done, end of year or no: In Your Face is beaten. The exact win condition is (1) to play 2-on-2 matches to 25 points, which is the only way to trigger tournament mode, and (2) to win 5 of those matches in a row. (Draws are possible in timed games but not in this mode, which is probably why they forced you into it.) So, the win condition is "Win five consecutive 2-on-2 matches with "Time or Score" set to 25 points", something like that. I don't think losers out vs. winners out matters. And it has a multi-screen ending, not just a single congratulations screen, though I don't remember any credits. Honestly, once you get into the groove of the game's weird logic, it's fairly playable and not as random as johncarls says in his video description. The shots appear to be timing-based, and I got the timing down -- tap B twice, not too quick, not too slow -- and generally took them at an angle just outside the paint, eventually getting a pretty high percentage. The main thing is that the game is all about stealing and passing. The CPU is an absolute beast so you have to take every advantage you can get. It's crucial to keep the ball out of the CPU's possession as much as possible, because it's not subject to realism in terms of percentages, and can drain shots from anywhere on court. Maybe you can too, but the timing is too finicky to risk it. Dunking didn't work well for me. Instead, my approach: when the CPU has possession at the start of the point, it will consistently try to pass after about a second, and you can steal the ball time and again as long as you track where the other CPU player was at the start of the point. Meanwhile, when you start with possession, pass immediately to your teammate and the CPU generally won't intercept. Otherwise the CPU player will be all over you and you often won't make it two steps past the center line before you've lost the ball. Then fire off a shot just outside the front corner of the paint (SSE or SSW) and it'll usually go in if your timing is "on". I was able to thrash the next-to-last opponent using this strategy, 25-13, but the last opponent was discernibly tougher. I barely won, and had to vary up the "immediate pass" strategy when I had possession. Passing at the slightest sign of trouble was the key, but my players screwed up a lot of passes in that last match and threw the ball out of bounds. The CPU just absolutely saturates you -- it's faster than you and will steal instantly, including when you're mid-layup -- but stealing that first pass gives you a good chance to creep ahead, as I did. Anyway, In Your Face stinks in a few different ways, but it's more playable than it seems at first, and the fact that it has an ending makes its existence marginally more justified. I only had to sink about 100 minutes into it this time around to beat it.

OK, this has gotten ridiculous, and a fella has his limits after all, so: Overlord is done.