the_wizard_666

43 minutes ago, scaryice said:

I'm against it. If you allow them for this kind of convenience, then it's a slippery slope to allowing them for other things too. I don't think there's many games which even necessitate you to leave your system on for that long. A better use of your time is probably just doing a run on emulator with save states to practice, and then doing a real run without them.

I'm not sure about other emulators, but Mesen allows you to close out and then pick up exactly where you left off without requiring a load.  This means you don't have to save and load the state, and cannot reload if you immediately screw up.  This could be the happy medium here...you aren't saving, so there's no temptation to load, but you don't have to leave a console on for days or weeks at a time.

Haven't played much NES lately, but in the interest of keeping track in case unlicensed is added to the bonus section once y'all finish the main list, Baby Boomer was knocked off by myself and @Dr. Morbis earlier today.

50 minutes ago, G-type said:

The manual is 143 pages! I like simple arcade style games.

In fairness, a third of that is backstory, and another third is a semi-walkthrough that's structured like a "captain's log," so you can use it as a guide or to just add flavour to your experience.  Regardless, it's a fun game, definitely worth playing through.

The lack of votes for Starflight saddens me.  It's such a great game.  Pretty much what every Star Trek game ever made should have been.

Just curious, are these gonna get seeded randomly or in order of nomination?

So after some more gameplay, I have now exceeded the number of games the manual mentioned, and still get passwords.  Curious about this, I looked into the password system.  Apparently the game will give passwords up until $80,000 and then won't give passwords anymore.  With the Bullseye round, the most you could possibly get per round is $20,000, and would realistically be much lower.  So by the sound of it, you could have 5 rounds total if you played matches consecutively, per the manual, but the password system doesn't track the number of wins so they've hard coded it to not actually allow passwords after a point that wouldn't likely be achievable in fewer than 5 games (but in reality would take far longer to do).  I've played 6 games now and still have a valid password, and will likely need at least two more to get to 80K and confirm this development, but yeah, still no word on where the end of Family Feud would be.

Starflight

3 hours ago, Splain said:

Sorry I missed this. I always thought it didn't matter since the ending is the same, like you said. I'll add that to the chart, unless you or anyone else has some more insights about a better requirement.

Yeah, I tend to do the women's title since it's shorter and has fewer frustrating matches...I remember spending hours trying to beat some of the paths on the world and IC belts because the AI is cheap as hell But yeah, I don't want to do that if there's objections from the peanut gallery.  Also, if someone else wants to do it to chip away at their own personal progress,  I don't want to take away from that either.

So I'm working on Family Feud.  I've now won two games, took my password, and figured I'd mention it here since there are no requirements listed.  According to the manual you get passwords as long as you haven't won 5 games, so I'm presuming that would be the requirement.  I couldn't find any details about there being an actual ending for that, as every playthrough I saw had only completed one match.  But yeah, it's either done now or will be soon, depending on whether one win is enough or if you want all five to count it.  I'm not counting it on my own list until i do all 5, so it's still being worked on regardless, I just thought I'd mention it just in case.

WWF Royal Rumble is done.  Tougher than I remembered, but in fairness I don't recall ever playing the tournament, and there's no way to select difficulty on it like there is in exhibition matches and the Rumble match itself.  Also kind of amusing that I fought Hulk Hogan in the first match and the final one was against IRS At least they properly randomized it, unlike a lot of wrestling games back then.

Monopoly is done.  Kinda surprised it was unbeaten to be honest, since it's kind of a gimmie.  Played a full 8 player game against the computer.  Hoarded properties as much as I could, and leveraged the Water Works and one railroad to get massive property deals from the computer...Basically gave the sets away for all the rest of those players properties.  Also got one computer player to give all their properties and 90% of their cash in exchange for the games first set, a gamble that paid off as they never got enough cash in hand to build on them.  From there, I traded singles to get the last part of various sets so I could complete mine, notably giving away the yellow set in exchange for the green one, and then building straight away.  Thats when dominoes started falling, with every player dropping cash until I could fully build up.  By then there was no recovery for the computer players and they all fell in short order.

The one thing  keeping this from being a version I'll play much in the future is that, on multiple occasions, the same cards came up on Community Chest and Chance on subsequent landings, which shouldn't happen early in the game (I could see it happening after shuffling the deck once all cards are drawn, but not before everyone passes Free Parking, that's just silly).

On the plus side, it can handle 8 players instead of only 4 for the 8 bit versions, so it's a better party game in that regard.  Also, on other versions the computer will mortgage everything before declaring bankruptcy, forcing you to either unmortgage or pay the fee, but here they calculate it, and if they won't make it up, they don't bother mortgaging everything and you get the properties unmortgaged (though buildings are still sold off).  It's a small but nice touch imo.

Starflight is done.  I had intended to do  a full run with just whatever in game notes I acquired, as I'd previously beat it with a guide.  Then my battery decided today was the day to crap out.  And knowing that there's only two things that need doing, and that I'm a lazy ass that doesn't want to start over, I opted to follow a speed run to get it done.  It's unfortunate, since it's a fantastic game, but it is what it is.  Honestly, aside from the resource mining, the game is functionally Star Trek, and should appeal to any fan of the series, as this is basically what every Star Trek game ever made should have been.

4 hours ago, Khromak said:

Couldn't find this guide on Gamefaqs, do you have a link? I skimmed through the only (AFAIK) NES guide on the site and couldn't find any details of this (which team/pitcher to use, which pitch to use).

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/nes/587113-bases-loaded/faqs/30570

It's under "Special Pitcher Trick." Hawaii has two pitchers that can do it, which is ideal since you have to rotate between games.  Using passwords after each game can offset this as pitcher rotation isn't saved, but if you want to play multiple games in succession, inputting the password after each game is not ideal.

5 minutes ago, Tablew/chairs said:

I beat treasure master, I didn’t do the bonus world because because entering the password is annoying and I didn’t see anything in the victory conditions saying you had to

I would argue that the bonus world is the entire point of the game and should be done. But I don't know what precedent has been used previously.  @scaryice what do you think?

1 hour ago, Sumez said:

Otherwise "maze game" covers a lot of ground considering that brand of arcade games super popular in the very early 80s that the game descends from. 

My dad referred to RPGs as "maze games" because they felt like wandering through a maze to him.  Pretty much any game involving exploration (including games like TMNT or Simon's Quest) were classed as "maze games" to him.  The point I'm making is that I would hardly call that a genre, it's just something old people would say when they didn't know the actual terminology.

Bomberman would probably fit more as a straight action game.  There's no puzzle element to it really...you kill the enemies and go through the door.  Even more heavily action oriented action-puzzlers like Kickle Cubicle still had a degree of having to solve the puzzles, as the player would have to figure out the right path through the level, and could easily fail if they made a mistake.  Bomberman hurts a player for poor execution, and has a time limit that can cause a player to fail, but the player can't fail because they didn't figure out how to go through the door.

The Lawnmower Man? No idea  

2 hours ago, LHCGreg said:

Dragon's Fury is done. I used the password feature to save scum to a billion points and beat the final boss. You can get a password any time by pausing and pressing A. It saves number of balls and score, but nothing else (not ball position or the state of the table). I used the options menu to set the ball speed from the default of fast (which is very fast!) to slow (which is more like "normal"). I took a victory lap after beating the boss and played normally without save scumming and got my best normal score ever, 91.9 mil.

There's not a lot to do in this one. You'll spend most of your time in the middle screen trying to shoot into the holes to change the face in the middle for bonus stage 6 or destroy the wall on the left for a random bonus stage. You can't worry about scoring if you fall to the bottom screen, you just need to focus on trapping the ball with a flipper and then going for a shot back up to the middle screen. I couldn't intentionally go up to the top screen, it was just something that happened sometimes. The default ball speed is way too fast, I recommend changing the speed in the options menu.

It probably took around 20 hours total to grind out the billion points. I learned partway through that if you reset the console, it remembers the last password you got and will autofill it for you. It's still a good idea to record the password every 10 mil or so in case of a crash, which happened to me once when resetting.

Is maxing the score required for the ending or did you just do massive overkill for its own sake?  I'm curious what the requirement is so I know whether to go for it or not lol

8 minutes ago, Daniel_Doyce said:

How about total # of cities conquered after 20 hours of L'Empereur? I'm sure everyone will LOVE that idea

But what if you can beat it in 10?  Also, it'd be hard to enforce rules like no resets without video proof, and that'd probably also be the only way to ensure the time frames.  I love the idea of getting the Koei games some love, but I can't see it working as a weekly contest game.

16 minutes ago, Daniel_Doyce said:

I'll think about it, but it's really a matter of free time. Plus I suck at most non-nerdy games.

Is this the year a Koei game makes the weekly challenge? @BeaIank

I'm curious how we could even work a ruleset for Koei games that would work.  Maybe Uncharted Waters, maybe, but odds are it just won't work. 

I could see you do well in the puzzle genre though

1 hour ago, nerdynebraskan said:

Aside from probably not having the time, I don't think I'd be any good at it. I'm usually the kind of player that just barely limps across the finish line of NES games, and usually on lesser difficulty settings if they're offered. My skill level is far below most of the competitors here. I do well on this challenge only because I have a very broad knowledge of the NES catalog, and I generally fatten up on the cupcakes.

I consider myself to be an average gamer at best...hell, I can't even beat SMB1...but I won the sports genre in 2022 and do reasonably well in the puzzle genre.  Winning the tournament is tough as hell, but the weekly portion rewards consistently playing every week rather than perfecting every game.  If nothing else, I'd say give it a whirl...you don't have to post extreme scores every time, just post something and you'll advance in the leaderboard.

1 hour ago, Gaia Gensouki said:

Thanks for the invitation, but I will have to think about it. I participated in one of the previous years and went pretty hard on it, so that it took a lot of time and I'm not sure if I would want to do that again. Or maybe I have to be a bit more casual about it? I'll decide when the weekly contests start. I hope that we can knock out some more of these NES games here until then.

Casual would be the way to go, as seriously competing is a time sink for sure.  I have to say I enjoyed the contest because I got to play games that I never would've thought to play, and not only did well, but actually beat several of them.  I went through a full 82 game season of Tecmo NBA because the contest got me into the game...I never would've even played it had I not been competing.

That said, I took last year off because none of the games being played appealed to me in any way.  Most were games I either knew I didn't enjoy or had no interest in playing, so I skipped 2023.  I heard a rumor that The Punisher was being considered though, so I'll probably be back this year for at least one week

1 hour ago, Splain said:

WordZap. Great word game, one of my favorites.

I was actually excited to play that one...then I realized I don't own it   Maybe next year I'll have snagged a copy, as it seems like it'd be right up my alley!

Battle Arena Toshinden is done.  Honestly, this one surprised the shit out of me.  I'm not much of a fan of fighting games, and 8 bit fighting games with two buttons are generally the worst of the worst...but this was an extremely pleasant surprise.  Solid gameplay, excellent visuals, and great audio all make for a great game!  Didn't think I'd say this about a fighting game, but I'd actually consider replaying this one!

50 minutes ago, Tantalus said:

Mario's Picross is done. I bought about a dozen games back in late 2022 for the virtual console on the 3DS when they announced that the eshop would be closing. I put a couple hours into this game at the time, but then basically didn't touch my 3DS in 2023.

I remember seeing this game in Nintendo Power back in the day and it always looked intriguing to me, but never got around to buying it then. It's a fairly solid puzzle game, though I definitely prefer playing it in small doses instead of large chunks all at once.

After solving all of the puzzles, a Time Trial mode opens up. In the main game, the timer counts down and every mistake knocks an increasing amount of time off the clock. In Time Trial, it seems to pick one of the puzzles at random every time, the timer counts up, and the game doesn't have any indication if you've made a mistake. I did a couple of rounds to test it out. I've had enough Picross for the time being, but could potentially see myself spending more time on this mode in the future.

If you did it all in 2024, you should head over to the Game Boy completion thread.  I think it's still on the list there.  If you started it last year though, it sadly won't qualify there, but I figured I'd mention it anyway.

Street Fighter II has been put to rest as well.  Kinda meh TBH.  It looks and sounds fantastic, especially for a Game Boy release, but even just generally...too bad the gameplay is sluggish as hell and kinda bland overall.  Still, considering how bad 2-button head to head fighting games tend to be, I'd say it's one of the better ones available.  Worth a quick run, but more of a curio than anything.

Solitaire Funpak is done.  I always enjoy getting the chance to fire it up again, there's some great (and obscure) versions of solitaire that I can't find anywhere else.  Another decent time waster.