nerdynebraskan

Shockwave is done. I'm generally fond of Sokoban-style puzzle games, but this one was just too obtuse for its own good. I leaned heavily on walkthroughs, although I was able to find some hidden warps on my own in some of the intermediate stages. Luckily, you can skip to Level 40 of 50 pretty quickly with the abundance of warps. I know I skipped almost 2/3s of those stages.

Low G Man is now done. I finally got over the hump and killed the teleporting boss tonight, then I got stuck on the last level for a little while. The platforming is seemingly impossible, except the walker vehicles have a special move that allows them to jump like crazy. If I hadn't found a PDF of the game's manual online, I would have never figured that out. I can definitely see how this game was programmed by the same people who did KickMaster and the G.I. Joe games, but I can't say that I would recommend Low G Man. It plays like a half-baked alpha prototype of especially G.I. Joe. It has a lot of interesting ideas that they later got right in A Real American Hero, which is probably the most underrated run-and-gun on the NES. But the execution is just so poor in Low G Man that it wasn't much fun.

I've been trying Low G Man for the last few days. I've generally been able to brute force my way through, but I've been stuck on stage 5-1. I figured out quickly that you can fall all the way to the right and avoid all the floating enemies, but the boss is still so brutal. It's hard enough to get rid of the minions before they drain half of my HP. But then I'm still left with a randomly teleporting boss throwing fireballs that I have to awkwardly harpoon at least 30 times to destroy?! Does anyone have any tips?

Yeah, APBB is definitely clunky. The thing about dunking is that there are only four animations in the game: 1) You go up to dunk alone and hit it. 2) You go up alone and fail. 3) You go up with a defender, but he's too far away and you dunk in his face. 4) You go up with a defender, and he blocks the shot. If there is no defender close to the basket when you initiate the dunk, you will get Option 1 or 2 randomly. You will usually hit it, but it's not unusual to fail 3-4 times in a row. If a defender is nearby, you will get option 3 or 4 but it is NOT random. Thus, I try to get a defender just barely into the shot because that's a guaranteed bucket. And honestly, once you acclimate to the game and lock your strategies into habits, you'll never lose a game again. I reliably win each game by about 50 points, and I probably only had to play through about 20 games to get there. It's an easy game to exploit. EDIT: Oh, and PS: Even if you win all 35 games, the game will glitch and give you a final record of 34-1. I've done this three or four times now, and it's always the same. It's a nitpick, but my OCD for perfectionism is always irritated with that last screen.

I believe that you only need to win at least 3 of your 5 games against each team. I think you have that right. Although the announcer will tell you in the post-game babble that even one loss might cost you the championship. At least until you get about 25 wins in, then the script changes to "well, your championship is guaranteed..." I get my basketball games a little bit confused when it comes to gameplay. I know that I prefer to dunk in APBB. It's more reliable than shooting from the floor. Experiment with timing until you let a defender into the frame of your dunk, while still being too far away to block your shot. They only have one animation for that scenario, and you'll score 100% of the time. I get the stealing mechanics confused in 8-bit basketball games. In some games, passing is essential to keep defenders away, and in others passing is a way to get stolen from more easily. I want to say that in APBB it's better to try and run up court without passing. I think I generally get more steals on defense selecting a fast player, covering the ballholder like a shadow, and spamming the steal button.

Thanks for the kind words. I must admit that I've wondered about what it would take to hit 1000 points in a year, but it doesn't seem likely for at least this year. I tend to lean on games that I know well to rack up my points, and the only game left that I can beat reliably is All Pro Basketball. It's in the same category as the Clemens baseball game, in that it's an easy clear but too long and kind of tedious to do. Except I have more enthusiasm for Clemens, as I prefer RBI-style baseball games to any kind of basketball. There are a handful of games on the unlicensed list that I've beaten once or twice before, but they're pretty tough and I don't know them that well. There are still some pretty good games on the list that I'm interested in learning, so I may still find a few more to do. But we'll see how much time and energy I have to learn new games...

Roger Clemens MVP Baseball is done for another year. And with this completion, I believe I am also setting a new single-year record for completions and becoming the first in the history of this thread to go over 900 points.

@Khromak, you are well on your way to a Top 3 finish. Keep it up! RoboCop 2 will always rank high on my personal list of biggest NES disappointments. I loved those movies as a kid, although as an adult I only enjoy the original. And the game for the first movie is one of the best movie adaptations on the NES; it's a quick, smooth action game that is actually true to its source material. But RoboCop 2's game is really aggravating. Being forced to replay a short level over and over because you didn't meet your production quotas is just not fun. Also, I'm now 12 games into my Roger Clemens MVP Baseball season. I'll endeavor to play through the season in 6-game chunks until it is done.

Has anyone started Roger Clemens MVP Baseball, or is anyone about to? I can start it in the next week if no one else speaks up for it.

Ok, I finished the Famicom Merciless hack last night. The difficulty never returned to how it was on the first third of the game. The enemy placement, when and where it was changed, sometimes seemed to be easing up on some of the built-in challenges of the original game. Camus was no longer the boss on Chapter 20, so he just charged right into my army with the other paladins and I got to swarm him on neutral ground. With the castle bonuses, he's probably the single most dangerous enemy in the original Fire Emblem. His stats were buffed in the hack, of course, but on open ground (and with the army I had 20 chapters to build) I took him down on my first try with no casualties. Chapter 22 was also made easier with changes to enemy placement. The five Pegasus knights start right on top of your army, which was maybe supposed to be some kind of special challenge. But I had brought four archers into a map dominated by enemy fliers, so I cut them all down with barely a scratch before the end of Round 1. And then I had a couple of rounds to prepare for the other half of the starting army. C22 has the most brutal enemy advance in the original game, especially since you have to be aggressive to try to save Gato's village from the thief on the back end of that army. But C22 in Famicom Merciless doesn't even have a thief! He was replaced by an enemy priest, which is more powerful offensively, but also negates any sense of urgency to get to the northeast corner of the map. And the allies I continued to gain in the latter part of the game were really tough, if not outright overpowered. The Triangle Sisters started out almost as strong as they usually are in the original FE when you get them to L20 P knights, and they were pretty much maxed out on all stats by the time I got them here to L10 Dragon knights. Lawrence is pretty much invincible if you can get him some magic defense. And Ellis/Elice actually starts as a priest, instead of the cleric she appears as in the original FE. She's such a liability in the original game, but she was actually useful and dangerous right out of the gate in the hack. Oh, and the Miracle sword? It wasn't exclusive to Marth in Famicom Merciless! I passed it from him to Kain in C22 just juggling items around, and saw that he was eligible to use it. He made good use of it for the rest of the game. Its eligibility must have been changed from Marth-only to sword-wielding characters with a high-enough Weapon Level stat.

Well yeah, I have obviously logged most of my Fire Emblem hours playing "hacks" in the sense that I've mostly played the English-translation patches of the two 8-bit games. And actually I think I've only played through Gaiden once. It did have some interesting changes to the formula, but in general I liked the first game a lot more. Enemy crit rates are definitely a point of irritation and anxiety, to be sure. I tend to position troops in such a way where the glass cannons can't be reached by enemies, and those who are in front can withstand critical hits from the enemies in their range. Of course, it's not always that easy. I had Raddy as a Level 10ish Hero crossing the mountains 2-3 turns into Chapter 24, and an enemy sniper just walked right up and killed him in one shot. Moments like that just piss me off like crazy.

Hi, my name is Jackson and I'm addicted to 8-bit Fire Emblem games. Wait, this isn't Gamers Anonymous? Seriously though, my fondness for especially the original Fire Emblem has led me into looking for ROM hacks of it. And unfortunately, there don't seem to be that many of them. I've played through Time For Tom a couple of times. It has some interesting ideas, and I appreciate that it has all-new maps and seems to feature a multiverse of characters from several different FE games. (Even though I've really only played the two FC/NES games, and don't follow newer games.) It seems to run somewhere between reliably glitchy and occasionally unstable, though. The hacker's ambitions seem to exceed his coding abilities, but how much can I complain when I'm playing a hacked game? I've played what I believe to be the whole game, but it's always crashed as soon as I take the last throne, so I've never seen the ending. I'm currently about 2/3s of the way through my first playthrough of Famicom Merciless. It seems to have been hacked by a Westerner, but the game is still entirely in its original Japanese text (which makes navigating the game a fair bit tougher!). I actually paused my playthrough to go and play through the original FE in Japanese so I could memorize the menus and item names. (I don't read Japanese; my memorization of the characters is quite superficial.) Famicom Merciless is a much less ambitious hack than Time For Tom. It seems to reuse the same maps and dialogue from the base game. Unit placement is generally identical as well, although I was pleasantly surprised to see some units were moved around on some chapters in the middle-third. The main change has been in beefing up the stats (generally strength, defense, and HP) of all enemy units on the board to make a tougher game. Some enemies have also had their weapons upgraded. Recruitable characters that start as enemies are also enhanced, which makes several of them much more useful. I know I've put a lot more effort into using and training Kashim, Roger, and Machis than I normally do on the original FE. Already-useful characters like Navarre and the Triangle Sisters are really powerful in this hack. The first third of the game was much slower to play through versus the original FE, as the enemies were just so much stronger than my party. It's pretty irritating when an enemy archer can kill Marth in one critical hit even if the prince had full health. Doga, who seems almost bulletproof in the first handful of chapters in the original FE, can actually be killed by two axemen even without critical hits. I have relied on ranged attacks while playing through this hack, between buying a bunch of extra javelins for all of my knights and using sometimes 3-4 archers on many maps. The game's difficulty spike reduced over the middle third. I have of course added better warriors and equipment, but I have also noticed that the longer battles with higher-HP enemies has also leveled up my troops faster than they normally would in the original FE. I've even had to bench many of my favorites early in the game as they were near-maxed out and it would be several chapters before I had access to promotion items to upgrade their classes. I've just reached Chapter 18 in the last couple of days, which is where Est joins the party and gives Marth the Miracle sword. I was confused and irritated as it seems that he's ineligible to use it! I don't know if the hacker created/raised a Weapon Level stat barrier, or if this is some kind of glitch. I'm really hoping there aren't similar shenanigans with the Falcion, because that would make the game unbeatable. But in general, I'm enjoying relearning the game with these changes. I guess I just needed to share all this with someone. I hope someone else is playing these, so we can gush/complain together...

Yeah, Kiwi Kraze is one of those deceptively brutal NES games. With the cutesy graphics, I was expecting one of those kid-friendly platformers with forgiving difficulty. Instead, we got one-hit deaths, mediocre power-ups, sadistic level design, and strict time limits coupled with no checkpoints in the second half of the game (forcing you to race frantically through a meat grinder just waiting to make kiwi nuggets out of you). I haven't been around here because I'm on a Fire Emblem kick. Has anyone here ever played the "Famicom Merciless" ROM hack? I'm about 2/3s of the way through it. I'm a little confused and irritated that I just got Marth's Miracle sword but he's seemingly ineligible to use it. Hopefully the same isn't true for the Falcion sword at the end, because that'll probably make the game unbeatable.

Wai Wai World is done. It's a shame that we didn't get the Konami All-Stars game here, but I guess it makes sense given that four of the six heroes you assemble are from Japanese-exclusive games (and Mikey from the Goonies only got one of his two video games released here). I wonder what kind of drugs the developers were on when they had the idea of Simon Belmont, Goemon, and King Kong tag-teaming against an alien invader. Like Hi no Tori, this was a game I picked up pretty quickly after I started collecting Famicom games, but it's one that I'm just now playing all the way to completion. The final boss is definitely a tribute to Contra, complete with reusing the original music from the final stage, and I just learned today that this game was actually released before the Famicom/NES port of Contra. So what a tease that must have been for the Japanese players who got this one at launch! I'll probably revisit this one at some point, but I'm going to try one of the newer English-language hacks. My ROM set on my Everdrive only has the really old one by Demiforce, which is not only incomplete, but it had some really obnoxious graphic glitches on the Gradius/Twinbee shooter stage which almost broke the game. EDIT: This completion should also tie the single-year record for most completions on this thread. My next completion will give me that record as well as the single-year points record (and subsequently, make me the first player to ever score 900 points in a year).

Hi no Tori is done. I've long thought this was one of the more interesting Famicom exclusives (especially of the pre-1990 era), but this was my first time finishing the game. It's a fairly unique platform/puzzle hybrid. I did have to consult StrategyWiki for locations of the warps in particular. Navigating this game blind was a bit frustrating for my impatient adult ass who doesn't really have time to wander aimlessly in loops all day.

@scaryice missed @LHCGreg's completion of The Battle of Olympus on the last update. I tried to seriously beat M.C. Kids last year, and I found it much clunkier than it initially looks when you're just playing it casually. I struggled with it for an hour or two and moved on to something else. And I really consider myself something of a platform junkie. I don't know if I was missing something, or if many other players have similar experiences to me. There are still many games on the board that interest me, but I've been pretty busy with more important adult stuff. I've mainly been playing Pipe Dream and Wario's Woods to relax, as I haven't had much nerve to learn new games lately. Is anyone here working on anything for this thread at the moment?

Spider-Man is done.

The Super Mario Bros 3 challenge is done. I've been working on this one off and on for the last two weeks, and I finally got through a long-play on one life. My three previous best attempts had all stalled out at the end of World 6, but I do know Worlds 7 and 8 better as I've played them a lot more because of the way I've historically used warp whistles. It's not to say that I didn't feel tension in my chest through my whole go at World 8, though. I definitely had to create a list of notes for where I needed certain power-ups to comfortably get past certain levels on my first try. In case anyone is curious, here was my strategy: Use P-wing on Second World 4 castle (guarantees clearing the really high jump over the lava) Use P-Wing on World 5-8 and then cloud to skip 5-9 Have any tail power-up in World 6-2 and 6-4 Play World 6-9 instead of 6-10; it's much easier, especially with a fire flower Use hammer suit in last World 6 castle; it's the toughest castle in the game, but much more manageable when you can kill Thwomps and Boos Have some kind of tail (preferably P-wing) for World 6 airship A fire flower/star combo is enough to power through the first plant stage in World 7 (if I need another P-wing...) Bring a tail into the first World 7 castle Use P-Wing in World 7-8 Use cloud to skip second World 7 castle and music box to skip second plant stage, then a tail (preferably a P-wing) on last airship Bring a tail to the fast airships in World 8; P-wings are actually too risky because of some kind of off-screen death hazard that I randomly run into when trying to fly over all of that Use P-Wing on World 8-1 Use last two level-skip clouds on World 8-2 and mini-castle Use P-wing on Bowser's castle Oh, and @scaryice, I think you've shorted me half a point on your last couple of updates. The big clue is that my overall score and my bonus score don't match (one has an even number and the other is a .5).

Metal Slader Glory is done. I didn't know too much about this one, and hadn't played it before, but it was a very ambitious piece of software. And with this completion, I have set a new single-year points record. 875 points and counting! And yet, I have only clinched a third-place finish on points and could still finish second in completions for the first time in a decade. But only if anyone else wants to rejoin me in this thread!

Raid 2020 is done.

Gumshoe is done. This is easily the second-hardest of the Zapper games, and is really only realistic because of the unlimited continues. But it is another first-time clear for me, so that's neat.

I believe that Devil World is done. The Internet seems to claim enduring Round 10 is as close to completing the game as possible, as it loops forever but Round 10 is the first round where you face the stiffest group of enemies in the maze. That complement are supposed to just appear in every round afterwards, and that seemed true through my Game Over in Round 12.

Pizza Pop! is done. It's another first-time clear for me, on another game that was fairly short and not that hard overall.

Hammerin' Harry is done. It was a first-time clear, but it was honestly pretty short and not that hard.

Tetris 2 is done. I believe that I've clinched a Top 3 finish for the 10th straight year.