Dr. Morbis

4 hours ago, the_wizard_666 said:

That could be the best bet.  I'd still like a trusted person to be the guide for this, maybe @Dr. Morbis if he'd be willing/able...

Like I said, I would be willing to help out as much as possible if I'm still in the area when the time comes, but I honestly don't know how much longer I'll be here in the city...

I know a lot of you guys are Dolphins fans, but man, they are going to get their clocks cleaned in the playoffs.  Just please tell them to take out the Chiefs before they leave...

If you're willing to take some constructive criticism, I feel like you started this contest way too early, as many people are/were still in the midst of their holiday shenanigans in the first week of January; it would have been better if you had started in maybe the third week of January when everyone's day to day lives have gotten back to normal.

Anyway, I said I would participate if you did TG games, so here I am .  You didn't specify in the rules if this was a one life contest or if we were supposed to burn our lives to maximize our score, so I erred on the side of caution and this is what I ended up with after killing every enemy on 1-1 on a single life (including a trip back to the start to see if any of them respawn; answer: they don't)...

1,300

9 hours ago, RegularGuyGamer said:

Do you have any friends? My best friend is more than willing to help liquidate my collection of my wife wasn't able to or didn't want to.

The problem is more that he collects full sets for everything, and I mean everything from Atari to the present, so his entire basement is full of thousands of games.  As someone who's not living in his house, it would be like a full time job for many weeks to try and get everything sorted out, which is a huge ask for someone outside the family who's only motivation is "it's the right thing to do."

In the final analysis, his two options are to either tell his family to sell *everything* to Jeff (a local store owner who buys out collections) or to deal with it himself right now and pare it down to something more managable.  I decided years ago to get out of full set collecing for all consoles outside of NES/Famicom and TG/PCE due to how cumbersome and demanding it was both physically and mentally, and my collection still takes up two full rooms of my house, so the thought of having to deal with the sheer volume of stuff he has is absolutely daunting, even for an avid and experienced video game collector...

5 hours ago, GamerSmith548 said:

I know I might be kind of answering my own question here, but I decided to try and do more reserach, and it looks that the round seal version probably doesn’t exist at all, as many of you were saying. After doing some digging, it seems that the Power Pad originally included SMB / DH / WCTM. The pack in with just a WCTM cartridge might have come later when the Oval Seal transition was already made, as the only pack ins I can find with a WCTM cartridge all have an Oval Seal.

No, the Power SET included the combo cart; the stand alone WCTM only ever came in the Stand alone retail Power PAD box, making it significantly less common than the combo cart...

2 hours ago, Code Monkey said:

It was released in August 1988, how could it?

The switch to the Oval Seal didn't happen for most titles until Feb 89, and furthermore, certain games by certain companies (I'm looking at you, Konami) kept circular seals on their games and boxes for later print-runs of pre-89 titles for the entire length of their run.

In a perfect world, WCTM should exist predominantly as a round seal (because Nintendo almost always over-produced the initial print runs of their first-party games), but the real world doesn't always work that way.  Look at Stadium Events release date and then tell me why almost every one ever found is a 3 screw version; it looks like the SE re-release is following in its footsteps by breaking the rules as well...

I just saw this and I remember when level 29 (I think) was considered "impossible" just a few years ago; now these kids are getting to level 150+.

Moving forward, I think the trick will be avoiding the kill screen for as long as possible to get the highest scores/lines possible...

Probably doesn't exist; it will be on the level of 5 screw Mega Man rarity if it does...

1 minute ago, Daniel_Doyce said:

The winning conditions guide says to start at the highest level, but I think that's not going to go well.

You're really lucky then, because that will save you hours and you've only got to do 25% of the game.  But yeah, without ramping up your experience and skills mentally, starting on Mayhem might be a bit of a slap in the face...

9 minutes ago, Daniel_Doyce said:

I've never played Lemmings on the NES, so I'm going to give it a spin. Giving a heads up since it's going to be a slog based on the pain points

It's kind of like Battleship in the sense that it's not really difficult so much as it is a chore and a time sink to have to play through so many individual levels...

6 minutes ago, fcgamer said:

Or he could do a Famicom run of a star keeper carts, keep more of the profits, and avoid pissing off previous star keeper owners

I'd be all in on that!  That's almost the perfect solution as the NES copies would retain their ridiculous values to appease collectors, and anyone else wanting a physical cart to play could buy the 60-pin version and use a converter (or his AV Famicom, in my case).

That would be a day one purchase from me...

1 hour ago, Reed Rothchild said:

I'm also thinking a 6.

The first one got pretty talked up at release, so I had big expectations.  Something to possibly join the pantheon of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Lord of the Rings.

It was not that.

While I do agree, I think that a proper comparison to those franchises, being that they were all trilogies, would involve the first three Pirates movies taken together as a whole...

Well you have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of games, so it's definitely a considerable asset in monetary terms.  Don't you have your collection (the games, at least) listed up on some website or phone app that shows their individual prices?  Because that would be indespensible for your neices in terms of valuation of most things.

Honestly, the best course of action would be to sit down with you Sister and give her a piece of paper with pertinent websites, apps, etc along with your login info and passwords and anything else that's important that you want her to know, then let it go and stop worrying about it and focus on more positive things!

Also, tell them about Jeff at the Trader, as you know he's always looking to buy out collections and I'm sure he would give a bereaving family the fair value that they deserve...

If I'm in the same city, I'd help them in any way possible, but as Gloves says, education is the key.  Make sure they know about pricecharting.com and maybe make a list of your 100 most expensive items, so at the very least they'd be protected from shady folks trying to get Little Samson or whatever for twenty bucks.

2 minutes ago, the_wizard_666 said:

I HAVE NEVER TAKEN CREDIT FOR THE WORK YOU DID.

Dude, I've known you for what, 20 years now?  Yeah, I told you a bunch of shit about one of my all-time favourite games many, many times in that span.  Again, the fact that you probably forgot 99% of it doesn't make it any less of a fact that I did, indeed, tell you about it.  You didn't use it when you played, fair enough. I'm not asking for any of that. I'm saying that I have freely volunteered info to anyone who ever had a goddamn question about it.  I've provided examples of communications.  Hell, I had over 500 hits on the word "Wizardry" from our back emails.  That does not include PMs on NA or other forums that no longer exist, nor does it include anything we discussed on the phone.  BUT it shows a pattern.  I have attempted two speedruns of the game IN YOUR PRESENCE.  Granted, I failed, but you had to have learned a few things about the game from that.

"You're welcome for the info" is simply me stating that I had provided info that helped you get to the point of writing the guide.  It in ABSOLUTELY NO WAY is me taking credit for you actually DOING THE WORK.  I could give a crap about you giving me credit for the myriad of tips and pointers I had casually dropped over two decades.  Not everything is a goddamn fucking personal slight toward you.

No, if someone mentions he wrote a guide about some subject, and then another person quotes him with the response, "you're welcome for the info," that is a pretty clear comment about who he feels is actually responsible for the information presented in that person's guide.  And if you felt otherwise, you wouldn't have posted these numerous walls of text relating all of the countless ways in which I had used you as some sort of indespensable Wizardry crutch when the guide was being written.

Anyway, best of luck with the completion of your KOD guide.  After twenty-odd years in the making, I'm sure it'll be one hell of a piece of work...

2 minutes ago, the_wizard_666 said:

Couple that with me having told you about accidentally landing on the path after triggering a teleport trap (which you alluded to in your previous post about my "accidentally bumble-fucking" my way to him), but okay.  I have notes from my childhood that detail the stone, that btw only drops from the Demon Lord fight (meaning I had found it as a kid), though clearly I had forgotten about that fight entirely.  Why would that happen?  Well, I would posit that's because the game in no way makes it known that the fight is significant in any way.  There is no way my 15 year old self would have known it was a secret boss fight, so I didn't earmark it as significant.  When I got the guide in '09, the blurb about the Demon Lord showed it was actually a post-game bonus.  Since at the time I didn't want to start from scratch, I played through on the Famicom version (which had some Japanese dude's save file with massively over-levelled characters) and found him with ease.  And given how often I would tell you about it in the eleven years between that and you writing your guide (I still have every email btw), not to mention having done it multiple times myself in that span, and yes, mentioning the teleporting possibility (because Malor cannot be used to traverse Level 6 at all, so it wouldn't normally be an option).

But lets get to the root of this - I was, and am, in no way trying to take credit for any of your actual work.  You did it, multiple times, and documented it beyond anything a normal person would do in the interest of helping others.  That's fucking awesome.  But I planted more than a few seeds over the years, and we both know it.

Oh, and speaking of the emails, I have to thank you for getting me to actually check them.  The walkthrough that I had worked on for over a decade that was lost when my hard drive crashed...turns out I had sent you a copy back in 2011.  So while I lost probably around 40% of the extra stuff (monsters, etc), I recovered 90% of the walkthrough itself.  Oh, and here's an interesting bit from the "Boss Enemies" section of that guide:

  Hide contents

The Demon Lord (Level 6) - The game never expressly tells you to hunt for the
root of the evil in the dungeon, and not many adventurers have discovered this
elusive beast, but I can say that he does exist in a hidden portion of Level 6.
Only accessable by random teleport trap (if you're lucky), or more likely once
you've obtained a high enough level to face him solo, because to get to his lair
one must proceed through KOD's Temple, which in turn only allows you to enter
alone and with the full set of KOD's gear.  I can't say much about his abilities
or stats, because I have only faced him once and the available data is sketchy
at best, but I can say that he absorbed three shots from Hrathnir without going
down.  To top it off, he is usually accompanied by a Lycurgus as well as several
Greater Demons and Ferocious Fiends, making this one of the toughest encounters
in the game by far.
HP: ?  AP: ?  AC: ?  XP Value: ?  Abilities: ?  Disguise: Demonic Figure
  Reward: Demon's Stone

So yeah, keep telling yourself I didn't ever mention anything at some point.  Just because you completely forgot shit doesn't mean the shit didn't happen.

I don't know how you go from you "mentioning" stuff to me over the years (and long before I had ever played the game to know or care what you were even talking about) to you being responsible for the explicit minute details of every single aspect of the the Demon Lord that are so explicitly detailed in my guide.  How do you make that leap?  You told me you'd fought him and you told me how you triggered a teleport trap to get to him with your whole party; that's  literally it!

It's not like I'm trying to avoid giving credit where it's due; in my Romance II Free Generals Guide I take an entire paragraph to thank DraganAtma for all the information he provided, and I explicitly state that my guide would not even have been possible without all of his hard work... and that's the very first paragraph at the top of the guide!  I definitely give credit where it's due, and if I felt that you had provided even a modicum of that level of detail to me for my Demon Lord guide, I would have 100% given you credit for that, but you didn't.  You confirmed he existed and explained how one could get a whole party to him via a teleport trap, and that's it!  Then, after I spent hours writing a guide that spared not one single detail about every conceivable aspect on the topic, you type out, "you're welcome for the info," as if you were somehow the wellspring from which all of my information had come.

You're a fan of the game who speaks and writes passionately about it, and that's it.  If you actaully want to make a real contribution to the world in the realm of Wizardry KOD, then finish and publish your KOD guide rather than just taking credit for someone else's hours of work.  And if you ever do, feel free to reference my guide when you're detailing the Demon Lord; the more information we have on the internet for NES games, the better...

And speaking of the Evercade, do they have any exclusive games?  From what I've seen, the entire library seems to be compilations of games that the Evercade people have bought the rights to and then released themselves.  If this is the case (that every single playable Evercade game is a port of a pre-existing game on another platform), then even the Evercade's currently installed userbase and presence in the market has not yet hit the critical mass required to lure developers into wanting to make original games for the console; take a moment to think about that!

7 minutes ago, the_wizard_666 said:

I described everything to AdamL:

  Hide contents

WIZARDRY - THE KNIGHT OF DIAMONDS (ASCII) -A very difficult dungeon crawler game here from ASCII. You must collect all 5 of the Knight of Diamonds items. When you have all 5 you have to go to the deepest level (Level 6) where you will prove your valor and be teleported back to the chamber of Gnilda on the first level with the Staff of Gnilda in your possession. Now simply exit out of the dungeons and watch the nice little ending sequence, where you receive the Mark of Gnilda and your fellow teammates become knights. HOWEVER, reader Mike Zazulak (aka the_wizard_666) emailed me to tell me there is even more to this intricate game to discover. He wrote: "I just wanted to point out that there is something that can be done AFTER completing Wizardry: Knight of Diamonds, namely hunting down the Demon Lord. I only recently discovered this creature myself, as it's un- documented in any posted FAQ. I found out about it through the official mail order strategy guide. Basically, when you finish the game, collect all the KOD armaments a second time, then go through the warp that took you to the Staff of Gnilda with a solo character. This take you to a completely new section of Level 6, at the end of which is the Demon Lord. When you kill him, he drops a stone. When used, it will warp you back to the castle. I don't think this really does anything (haven't made it that far myself yet, my battery wiped itself and I've had to start from scratch...tried it on the Famicom version and nothing new happened), but it should probably be done once (he does respawn) at least in order to consider the game 100% completed." Wow, this means I will have to go through the game again at some point. Thanks a lot Mike, I thought I had this one licked! So if anyone has done this on the NES version, shoot me an email and even a pic if you can so I can get a look at this badass Demon Lord.

That's clearly me telling him how to get there long before you wrote your guide, as the update he added it was in 2009, but keep believing you figured it out yourself.

Again, props for doing the work.  But I provided info that got you there.

First, your info to him is erroneous as the stone does not teleport you back to the Castle; it casts Malor which sends you somewhere else in the dungeon based on cooridinates, after which it takes on an entirely different name and properties and casts a different spell, of which you make no mention.  And second, I don't see anything regarding the teleport method to get your whole party through, meaning your info is essentially useless as the amount of levelling required to kill the Demon Lord solo would disqualify just about anyone from choosing that method when a much easier one exists.

So, in a nutshell your factually correct contribution is thus:

"when you finish the game, collect all the KOD armaments a second time, then go through the warp that took you to the Staff of Gnilda with a solo character. This take you to a completely new section of Level 6, at the end of which is the Demon Lord."

Congrats, man!  You successfully confirmed that the Demon Lord actually exists!  I only wish I had already stated in an above post that that was the extent of your actual contribution to the topic, but alas...

6 hours ago, zxdplay said:

I need to develop a whole set of systems now, including building an operating system, designing PCB, configuring development environments, making games, and a lot of other work.

No, you don't: the NES already exists!  You don't have to do any of the bullshit work that you outlined above.  You're repeating the same thing you did when you initially began posting on VGS: taking something very easy and simple and turning it into a complicated mess that puts everybody off and makes you look foolish.

@zxdplay If you want to make easy money for relatively little effort, do one of the following:

A) Team up with a publisher to re-release the NES version of Star Keeper, or

B) Develop a new NES game and then team up with a publisher to have it released

Both of the above options will not require you to leave your home; hell, they won't even require you to leave your computer desk.  Option A) will take you a few hours of back and forth emails, while Option B) will take hundreds of hours of programming, but both of these will make you money guaranteed!

No one is going to develop games for a console with a userbase in the single digits - NOBODY!  Make more NES games and the money will come rolling in (not enought to live on, but a hell of a lot more than you'd ever make from your current idea)...

18 minutes ago, the_wizard_666 said:

Seriously? I told you exactly how to get there.  That it was only accessible (normally) after completing the game.  That accidentally triggering a teleportation trap was the best way to get on the path to him because its the only way to get the entire party there.  Even showed you the exact route via the mail in guide.  Kudos to doing the work to document it, but I definitely had a hand in you actually learning how to find the bastard

You told me a story about how you accidentally bumble-fucked your way to him after having no idea what to do for decades, and that you had emailed Adaml to let him know that the Demon Lord actually exists; I never borrowed your paper guide or even remember looking at it; for that matter, I used my own map of the 6th floor along with a ton of research by way of hours of play-time to plot out the path in my guide and figure out all of the parameters surrounding his war party and the object you obtain after beating him.  You think I received all of those intricate details from a two minute verbal conversation with you?!?  Nice try, buddy; your input was confirming to me that he existed and that you found him via a teleport trap, full stop.

It was nice of you to take credit for my six or so hours of work by spending ten seconds to type out the words, "you're welcome for the info," though.  Almost fitting, actually, since it about matches the percentage of work you contributed to the guide...

6 hours ago, the_wizard_666 said:

You're welcome for the info btw  

Also like how I was the one who got it added to the Adaml endings guide too.  Not to brag, just bragging  

You didn't really have any "info" outside of confirming that the Demon Lord existed.  I ended up writing the guide exactly because of the fact that there was literally no information out there about him anywhere on the internet.  Even you, as a self-proclaimed Wizardry superfan, seemed to know absolutely nothing about it.  I did give you a shoutout, however, at the bottom of the guide for introducing me to the game...

I distinctly remember getting Blackthorne for the SNES and opening up the manual to a giant wall of text that went on for page after page after page; I mean, it took up like the first half of the manual.  I'm not saying the story was spectacular or anything, but seeing a company go to that much trouble to set the backstory for the game they had created left an indelible impression on my teenage brain...

3 hours ago, DefaultGen said:

Wizardry is done. This game is sweet. I put it off my entire life because I thought it was too archaic, but those PLATO D&D nerds were making interesting CRPGs before most genres even existed. With a little less dumbass Murphy's Ghost grinding and a little less instant permadeath, I'd recommend it to almost anyone. You get a lot of powerful spells pretty early on. It actually has nice progression and you don't feel like a chump half the game. It's my favorite NES RPG I've played so far.

Nicely done.  If you decide to do KOD to 100% completion and seek out the Demon Lord, I've got a faq up on gamefaqs that's got all the info about him you could ever need and a step by step guide on how and where to find him...

5 hours ago, Gaia Gensouki said:

Zanac is too long and way too difficult for it to be the best shooter on the system, imho. It also has the Gradius effect where it's almost impossible to make a comeback once you've died. To add insult to injury, the game spawns even less power-ups once you've died. So despite unlimited continues and passwords, iirc, I could never make it far. Personally, I think that Over Horizon wipes the floor with Zanac. But it unfortunately only released in PAL regions and Japan.

Zanac is super generous with the lives: you get well over 50 in a one-credit-clear (granted, I died like 20 times in my game since I'm rusty, but I still had 34 left when I was done) and it spawns you exactly where you died.  Furthermore, if you ram yourself into a blue block with a powerup as soon as you respawn (while you're still invincible), you automatically get your fully-powered gun back, mostly mitigating the disadvantage of dying and being powerless.  And since you can't go more than maybe five or ten seconds in that game without being offered a new gun upgrade, I'd say it's far more lenient about deaths than just about any other shooter I've ever played.  In the final analysis, it's like any game: if you play it enough the initial challenges you were having eventually end up seeming trivial...