bronzeshield

2 minutes ago, Floating Platforms said:

Very nice!  Sorry about that "discovery."  I have a feeling that there are going to be a few more revelations that pop up as we all sift through everything.

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.

13 hours ago, MagusSmurf said:

Wow, that ending screen is butchered! Is the whole fan translation that way, or just at the end? I assume you're using the Gideon Zhi translation from 2002, 1.01 version?

Played through the painfully slow Jeopardy! Sports Edition, and got this picture of the ending a fraction of a second before it faded:

Lots of guesswork, a bit of luck, and a full category of repeated questions helped. I guess there's no Daily Double in the first round? Final Jeopardy was Tennis, which was irritating since I wagered only $100, but I had a runaway by that point anyway.

33 minutes ago, Khromak said:

Found the answer myself, very interesting. And yeah, the answer is actually there, albeit very difficult to find. Basically, you would need to share notes with your friends on the bus to find this, most likely.

https://tcrf.net/X-Men_(NES)

I figured it out all by my lonesome! Honestly, all you really need is this:

Once you get that clue, which you'll eventually do if you play that level enough times and kill enough of the "special" enemies, you take a look at the label and see this:

The "plus" at the beginning gives it away: there's a missing button, and based on the ordering, chances are it's either Select + B + Up, or A + B + Up.

BTW it's interesting that breaking the fourth wall seems to be a "thing" with X-Men games. The Genesis game also requires you to press an unexpected button to reach the final part of the game!

BTW I'm working on Ultimate Stuntman, though very sporadically. It's on my list of "games I need to beat again", so I mean to see it through, and it has infinite continues so it should be doable with persistence. Unfortunately it doesn't play nicely with my EverDrive so I have to emulate.

22 hours ago, Khromak said:

X-Men is done, a first completion for me and I must say, I have got some opinions about this one...

The idea that this game is a compete dud or bomb is overblown in my opinion. It can be unfair, the AI is totally useless, and the hit detection has some wonkiness. The mazes aren't bad, there aren't many dead ends and you can quickly find the correct path. If you read the manual you'll be fine

That said, it's actually a decent little action game, or you could even consider it a shooter. And for what it's worth, I beat many levels with the melee characters, so they're not as bad as many people make them out to be. It's still not a good game, but not nearly as bad as most people say. I'd give it maybe a 6/10. With a friend, it's probably pretty easy to beat with a little practice. Losing a character each level to the NPC dying is brutal.

Totally agreed. There are some real mistakes in the level design -- there's one spot in Magneto's level where it's possible to fall victim to a near-instant kill -- and there are other obvious flaws like the forced AI companion (why?!), the wonky hit detection (though I'm used to it), the fact that you have to spend so much time farming for invincibility items, and the fact that you can just walk away from boss battles.

That said, there is an actual, playable game here -- one that I've beaten a bunch of times without too much difficulty, and almost beat BITD with no help. It's frustrating, I'd probably give it 4/10, but there are a ton of NES games I'd be much more hesitant to revisit than this one. If it didn't have the X-Men license attached it wouldn't get half the criticism it does.

And the complaints about the "label puzzle" are overblown -- it's very easy to solve if you pay attention to the red text (you don't even need all of it), and I figured it out for myself back in the 1990s. The problem is that the conditions for triggering the red text are pretty obscure, though if this had been a Japanese-exclusive game with anime characters (which it probably was going to be until it got repurposed into an X-Men game), those conditions would be part of the game's well-established lore. As it stands, we didn't know the trigger until a few years ago.

59 minutes ago, Floating Platforms said:

Congratulations! Is there any different end screen for beating it on Hi, or was this for a personal challenge?

Thanks! When you clear Level 20, you get a different cutscene on each difficulty level (I did Lo and Med earlier this week). Hi doesn't give you credits or anything, but the animated sequence is more elaborate.

Technically you get a cutscene after every 5 levels anyway, but the one at Level 20 definitely has an air of finality despite the fact that you can keep playing afterward. (I think the game crashes at Level 27.)

And yeah, it's for a personal challenge. I prefer to beat my games on Hard difficulty or the equivalent before I call them 100% done.

(That's one place where I'm at odds with a lot of people -- many folks use 1cc on defaults as the standard, but I don't aim for 1cc as a goal. That said I've done it plenty, e.g. Eliminate Down on Genesis last year, beaten 1cc on Hard mode with minimum starting lives, which I did partly because I don't like the game very much and wanted to obviate any "git gud" replies.  )

7 minutes ago, Splain said:

I've done that! It took a lot of deaths before I got a good starting layout. I got soft from playing a lot of multiplayer Dr. Mario 64, where the highest level still leaves room for 4 segments at the top. That's not the case on GB or NES. Congrats!

Thanks! And yes, that's the one big fault -- you're so dependent on good RNG to get anywhere, that many games are practically a reset from the start. At least it only takes a couple seconds to start a fresh game.

BTW I beat the NES version too, a couple years ago, but it was less harrowing somehow or maybe I've just forgotten. Still intense, but tonight was just exhausting even though I only played for about 40 minutes.

It's already been beaten, but checking in to note that I just beat Dr. Mario on Hi speed (with a starting virus level of 20). It's brutal! I don't think I blinked for 20 minutes, I was so terrified of choking away my winning run.

11 hours ago, Splain said:

The game defaults to Novice/Beginners difficulty, but I wouldn't say the season (short/intermediate/championship) defaults to anything, unless you count Practice.

Yeah, my mistake on that -- I don't remember how I got that wrong, but I did.

Thanks so much for checking on that! So it looks like any season is eligible, and the only question is whether Intermediate difficulty is required or the default Novice is OK. Like @Floating Platforms, for this challenge, I'd say 1st place on any season mode -- and, especially since Novice is the default and the ending doesn't change, any difficulty.

2 hours ago, Floating Platforms said:

I don't know why you would want to change perfection, but okay.

Interesting...  My thought is that if all the endings look the same, but just have the difficulty and season length listed, then we should count the medium settings for both. If its different screens, or if that only appears on the highest level, then maybe the highest is necessary.

Well, the difficulty offers NOVICE, INTERMEDIATE and PRO options (capitalization as in the manual), while the season types are SHORT, INTERMEDIATE, and CHAMPIONSHIP. Since the game defaults to NOVICE and SHORT, I tend to think that's enough as long as you get an ending?

(I usually aim for a minimum of Normal in my own playthroughs, and usually don't call a game done until I've beaten Hard. But that's my own quirk -- for efforts like VGS's, I think defaults are enough, barring a bad or non- ending.)

But yes, the key question is which modes do or don't give endings. My suspicion is that either all settings will give the same ending (with the text changed to reflect difficulty and season), or it'll gatekeep itself at INTERMEDIATE difficulty but allow for an ending on the SHORT season.

Thanks to Splain -- you're answering the unanswered questions! Maybe try NOVICE/SHORT next and see what you get? If you get essentially the same ending I think we have our answer and no others would need to be tried...

2 hours ago, Floating Platforms said:

I show 3 people as "beating this" on my tracker. checking the youtube vids for Moe and Atroz show they both got 2nd overall and said "good enough" and the third deleted their YT and Twitch accounts, so no way to check.  Maybe it would be worthwhile to try the shortest race season and see if it gives an ending for that before going farther?

Yeah, I watched Moelleuh's video and maybe Atroz's too, and saw that they got no ending to speak of. It'd be a downer to work to get 1st place only to get the same "nothing" finish!

I think this one is calling out for a savestate playthrough -- or a few of them -- to establish what's what. Not sure I'm the one to do it, as I've got an infant in the house, but I'll see what I can make happen.

Maybe there's a way to turn off collision detection with a cheat? That'd make it much easier to blast through to the finish line (literally) and see what happens.

7 minutes ago, Floating Platforms said:

I know you said you don't like it, but I enjoyed True Lies quite a bit.  It did require a lot of level learning. You can kill everyone if you want but it's about inching forward until they are partially off-screen and then shooting where you know they are. Most won't shoot back and you can kill them.  I think I did end up looking up how to do a couple of the bosses though. The GB screen is too small for them and they will shoot off-screen and you have no idea where to aim.

I liked True Lies GB too. It's very methodical and very fair. The one major annoyance is that they implemented passwords for every level, but chose only to give them to you on alternate levels. Kind of a dick move on a portable platform; it's not like there was a massive Game Boy rental market that had to be hedged against!

Meanwhile I tried Jeep Jamboree, but man, that game is a painful slideshow. I was able to do OK in earlier races but as soon as the track gets cluttered it's an exercise in misery. The win condition is "Win the Championship race season on at least intermediate difficulty" -- is that because there's a known ending on that mode? The manual (which is garbage) doesn't mention anything about it and the available playthroughs on YouTube don't reach 1st place at the end. The Short or Intermediate seasons might be more achievable.

OK, Jack Nicklaus' Greatest 18 Holes of Major Championship Golf is done --

-- if you want to call a score like that "done". I didn't read the manual so I had no idea how to keep every shot from hooking severely, but I just played around that and had 3-4 passable holes and a whole bunch of absurdity.

Dull, slow game, but I played during a long phone call so it all worked out.

Beat Hook:

It's not as bad as I initially thought it was, but it's still a pretty dumpy game.

Thought I'd take care of Skull & Crossbones, since it's always fun:

For Greg Norman's Golf Power, we just have to play 18 holes of golf, regardless of the outcome, difficulty, or presence/absence of a CPU opponent -- correct?

If so, that one's done, as I played a solo round on the US course on Amateur difficulty, and scored an impressively bad +24. I did get a few birdies along the way and almost got an eagle on my first hole, but there were a bunch of "disasters" along the way too (to use the game's term).

It's a painfully slow and ridiculously "British programming of the 8-bit era" game, but at least it's playable. Hard to get much satisfaction from a playthrough without facing a CPU opponent, though I think they're apt to be tough.

1 hour ago, Daniel_Doyce said:

Pro Quarterback

Regardless, this was a pretty easy completion

Heh, even I've beaten Pro Quarterback (on Genesis), and I know about as much about football games as I do about...um...football. Not much, that is.

1 hour ago, Jeevan said:

that is a fun one, but better with 4 people lol

My wife and I beat it five times (N64 x 2 on Normal/Expert, PlayStation, Dreamcast x 2 on Medium/Very Hard) and had a blast! Four players might be even better. Gauntlet: Dark Legacy was also fun; we beat that one twice, on Easy and Hard.

With the power of coagulated dairy, Dragon Warrior III is done:

Disappointing that they didn't have a screen with a full rollout of all four character names: AssCheez, Chedarse, ButtBrie, and Camembut.

(Spent the whole game regretting that I didn't name him Camembum. Or, wait, no, I should have named my female priestess BumBrie. Either way.)

It's a trip to realize I last played through this game almost 20 years ago, in October 2002. I don't remember much about it for some reason, probably because I savestated the hell out of it back then. It's a pretty well-designed game, with not too much excess grinding required after the start, though occasionally the "Where the hell am I and what do I do next?" syndrome crops up.

12 hours ago, Splain said:

All-Star Tennis 99

I've got some complaints about this game, but I should probably read the manual before I say them out loud.

Don't worry, I can verify that it's crap.

On 2/22/2022 at 8:12 AM, Crabmaster2000 said:

After finishing the NES library

Hey, I didn't see that you finished your project. Congrats! Since the TurboGrafx-16 is really like a "Super NES" (but not SNES) in a lot of ways, moving on to that makes a ton of sense to me.

Just for the record, I think all completions of Ghostbusters are legit, whether or not they trigger the 255 health glitch.  A glitch that can be triggered through 100% routine gameplay never delegitimizes any attempt (not that I'm saying @nerdynebraskan is making any such claim).

The case of Ghostbusters is especially extreme as you'd need to avoid using a needed gameplay resource in order to be sure of avoiding the glitch -- in other words, you'd have to avoid playing the game as intended. You don't even get an onscreen health bar display to tell you when you're on the edge of it! Not the player's fault the designers screwed up (in about five different ways -- for the most part, the SMS port wipes the floor with the NES version).

Meanwhile, progress continues in Dragon Warrior III. I'm at the Cave of Necrogond and have been grinding there, finding my way around while trying not to use a map. Up to Level 32 or so, but those Marauders and Hologhosts are still a nightmare to deal with!

2 hours ago, Khromak said:

Don't worry about it, you're way past where I am. I beat it every year regardless

Oh, nice, I figured you'd be near the endgame by now! I've only beaten it once before, and that was with savestates in the early 2000s, so this is my first legit playthrough. I just got the Book of Satori, have 2 of 6 orbs, probably need to go to that tower near Soo next. Very standard party, no urge to turn anyone into a Sage. I'd forgotten how much the manual gives away -- I'm trying to look at it only when strictly necessary.