nerdynebraskan

The issue with those two games is that you get an ending every time you play. You can lose all of your money in the casino (CP) or get yourself killed in two minutes with nothing to show for it (P!), and you simply get the worst ending. In that way, both games are somewhat analogous to an adventure game like King's Quest V or Shadowgate, which has a whole bunch of bad endings triggered by dying on one of the many traps.

I've tried it a bit, and yeah, it's tougher than it looks. I got stuck on the second level for about an hour before I called it a night. The animal companions are a cool gameplay mechanism, but their abilities are pretty limited. The game would be easy if they played like Yoshi or the Adventure Island sidekicks.

I think the only dangerous enemies in the game are the super ninjas. There's no reliably legitimate way to beat the ones that require a shitload of shots to kill. You just have to hoard a bunch of the music boxes, since they put the ninjas to sleep. The last stage before the final boss is the only brutal one. By the third or fourth loop, you need to have 3-5 music boxes when you reach that stage; and always focus on killing the ones with the outrageous HP first when you stun all of them. You don't want to pick off the weak ones first, because their deaths spawn reinforcements that won't be affected by the music box you've already used. Kill the tank ninja, and then quickly eliminate 2-4 of the glass cannon ninjas before the music box wears off. Let them all swarm you, then use your next music box. Rinse and repeat. It's cheap, but so are they. The game's difficulty is poorly balanced.

It's only about a two hour commitment. 124 stages, but most can be beaten in 45 seconds to a minute apiece.

Arkista's Ring is done.

Xexyz is done. I was struggling with the dragon boss, Horrza. Luckily, I found a YouTuber who found an easy-to-reach safe spot. You just line up with his lower gun when he enters from the right, move all the way left, and just lay into him. He'll shoot you once almost instantly when he enters, but doesn't seem to shoot at that height again in the fight.

I will probably start Little Ninja Brothers in the next week, unless someone has already started or REALLY needs to do it for the first time. StarTropics is definitely worth doing once, but I was disappointed with how cheap the level design was for a first-party Nintendo game.

Have you done LIttle Ninja Brothers before? I've done it a couple of times, but I've definitely been feeling like it's time to do it again. I'll leave it to you if it's your first time, but I was probably going to start it in the next week. I was mildly interested in doing Faria for the second time again this year. StarTropics I've done once, and still don't have much desire to revisit it. Battle of Olympus I tried for a couple of hours either last year or the year before, and it didn't have much appeal for me. If you or @Gaia Gensouki have yet to do Dragon Warrior IV, I strongly recommend it. I did it two years ago, and I had a ball. It's long as hell, but it's so much fun. Every 8-bit RPG enthusiast needs to play it through at least once.

Code Name: Viper is done. I played it on Easy as usual, but I just 1CCed it for the first time. I can't brag too hard, because it was on easy, but it did feel pretty good. I may have done a spontaneous happy dance, but since I'm alone the world may never know for sure.

It's just that we burn through about 10 games a day through late February, and it's easy to feel like a juggernaught. And then the low-hanging fruit all disappear and we start going days between completions, and then weeks... The worst was in 2021, where we fell about a dozen short. And those scant few games lasted several months, and we still didn't rally to finish the job. That was our second or third fastest effort ever, until we stalled out completely.

@NESfiend This time of year is pretty euphoric. The first 500 or so really do go quick. It's the last 100 or so that are really brutal.

Casino Kid is done. Also, I just looked at the Guerrilla War manual. I had no idea they'd hidden that menu there. I wonder why SNK didn't just put that out openly?

I was trying to work on it right as I got busy. I was last trying stage 4-1. I grew up with the game, and found nothing easy about it beyond the Stage 1 levels and the first boss. Am I missing something?

Wrecking Crew, Ice Climber, and Gyromite are all endless arcade-style games that can be looped for high scores. Gyromite just has itwo completely different game modes, so both are required. When there is no clear ending, we play one full loop and break the built-in high score. The established rules are quite consistent for this type of game. And yes, I also consider the level select on the title screen to be a primitive continue menu. I have never seen an option to skip levels in Guerrilla War. Is that activated with a cheat code? On the latter paragraph, I'll also tag @Tablew/chairs as someone I think has beaten at least the entire set of licensed North American NES games. But there are many others like myself who have done at least 1/3 to 1/2 of the library, and it's not like we have the same blind spots.

Ninja Crusaders is done.

Khromak nailed it above, but I want to add two more points: 1) I think developers add cheat codes for different reasons, but if that code wasn't advertised there's a good chance it wasn't intended for consumer usage. I could see the continue code for Super Mario Bros (the closest analog to Kung Fu Heroes) or the 30 lives code in Contra being added by programmers testing the game who didn't have 100 hours to learn the game as intended but still needed to be sure nothing was broken when they released it. 2) I really think being given the option to skip meaningless regular season games in the season mode of sports games is a weak comparison. In Tecmo Super Bowl, you have no direct control over the CPU's difficulty. It just ramps up gradually with every game you win. Skipping the regular season and choosing a top-2 playoff seed with 12+ wins is not just a way of putting yourself three wins away from the credits; it also throws you straight up against the most ferocious (and sometimes unfair) CPU difficulty with no time to acclimate. And that can be a nice challenge for experienced players. It's definitely analogous to using warps, where you're trading practice time for a chance to beat the game faster.

Puss N Boots is done. I wasn't planning to do this one again this year, but it's ridiculous to see it still on the board this late.

Yesterday was a good day for the hopes of completing the entire list. All four of those games cleared seem really tough. (I've never done any of them.) Kung Fu Heroes is especially rough, even though a tough-ass like @Dr. Morbis is going to be nonchalant about beating it. Even The Mexican Runner resorted to using the forbidden continue code for his completion of the game, which was disqualified here. Those 14 points were well earned. Castlequest and Castelian are really nice to be done with, as already discussed above. It's no surprise to see how many pain points were attached to those. And 3D Worldrunner is probably the hardest, seldom-beaten game that we've somehow cleared every year. It's a common game that a lot of people played, but it seemed like most players enjoyed the novelty of its graphics for a level or two and then gave up on it.

Any chance that y'all are going to take on the original Gauntlet, too?

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom would like a word with you, Big Man.

WFRR? is a great game with a miserable final boss fight. The randomization factor in item locations really boosts the replay value of the game. The graphics, music, and gameplay are generally excellent. I really only have two complaints with the game. 1) The controls are confusing for the weasels/joke screen. I wish that was a bit more intuitive. I usually get Roger killed a couple of times trying to remember the right button combinations for toggling through and then selecting the punchline for the joke. And more importantly, of course 2) The boss fight with Doom seems to be broken. The damage you do to him isn't proportionate to how long you charge your punches. It definitely is when you're in the mini-boss fights with the weasel in the straitjacket, and why else would your punches have a charge meter? Charged punches do more damage than uncharged ones, but it doesn't seem to matter with Doom whether you have one blue block in your charge meter or the thing maxed out completely. And unfortunately, it's awkward to control Valiant while he's charging his punch meter. If you could get appropriate bonuses for fully charging your punches before hitting Doom, he'd go down MUCH faster. I also think more of the game's items should damage him. The six-shooter, cream pies, rocket-propelled boxing gloves, bricks, and a few other things only seem to be used to irritate NPCs. It would incentivize exploring more of the world and farming full supplies of such items if you could safely whittle Doom's life bar from a distance with them. Even the fact that the bombs and exploding cigars seemingly do more damage if you start with your fists is an inexplicable quirk that may be proof of some kind of glitch. As it is, a fun and easy 30-45 minute game delivers you into a tedious and frustrating 20-30 minute final boss fight where... 1) You have to wear your thumb out awkwardly hopping back and forth across the catwalk to maintain the charged status of your punch in order to... 2) Play a desperate game of stick-and-move with a boss who seemingly has no pattern to his movement or attacks and... 3) Can do about five times as much damage as you can per attack, with both his fists AND a ranged projectile who FURTHERMORE... 4) Is invincible to any of your attacks when his sprite is in any of his "attacking" postures, even though he can go from vulnerable to attacking in a split-second without warning. 5) And if you can overcome all of that bullshittery and knock his ass off of the catwalk, you still have to kill him with the dip cannon. The catwalk is already an odd setting for the fight; why not just have Doom fall into a vat of dip? (That's basically the fate of the weasel gang's leader in the movie, but you don't have to deal with him in the game.) As it is, the game makes you collect and equip the dip cannon like any other item. Then you have to walk down to where Doom is lying on the ground, where he will lunge for you in a split-second. All other items in the game are successfully deployed by tapping the A button. If it's an appropriate decision, the item takes effect instantly and safely. But not the dip cannon! You have to hold the button down to have a chance, and I swear the spray is sometimes blocked if you're standing too close to Doom's machine (despite it not being at the right angle to run interference... another obnoxious glitch!). It's very easy to do everything right and still have Doom knock your block off in one punch. Instant death, and then it's back to the boxing match on the catwalk.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is done. I did stumble upon a tip that could make Doom a *little* bit easier. I was on GameFAQs trying to see if there was a map of the tunnels in the outskirts north of Hollywood. (I've only memorized the locations of the three tunnels closest to the street entrance, and the Will fragment wasn't there tonight. While I didn't get much help with that, I did see that someone posted on the forum there that bombs and exploding cigars (the only weapons that will hurt Doom besides your fists) seem to have greater effect if you start with your fists and get his health bar past the "T" in "STRENGTH" when you charge your punches. Then if you switch to the explosives, they seem to do a bit more damage than if you start the battle with them. You're still mostly stuck fist-fighting the guy for entirely too long. Of course, I knocked him off the catwalk on the first try with the explosives helping me out. But I let him land too close to the middle. When I got the dip cannon, he still killed me. I had to fight him again with just my fists, but when I knocked him off the catwalk the second time, he was further left and I had more space to melt him with dip.

The winning conditions are inevitably somewhat "inconsistent" because there's so little consistency amongst the games of the NES catalog. There's going to be potential ambiguity in any game with multiple difficulties, options, loops, etc. The base criterion for all endless arcade games is to complete one loop and break the built-in high score. The thing is that some of the really simple high-score games, like Duck Hunt, only have one unique stage. Donkey Kong has three unique stages. Dig Dug II happens to have 72 unique stages. I've never done Dance Aerobics or Jordan vs. Bird, but I imagine that they fall into the subcategory of mini-game collections without clear endings. With such a game, overcoming all the built-in stages or games becomes a measuring stick. My understanding of the Koei games is that they tend to have only one ending. The different "scenarios" function like difficulty options, affecting variables like how much time your general has to win his kingdom or how many rivals stand in the way of conquering your kingdom. I've never been a fan of golf games, but I understand that some of them have built-in par scores and some don't. Barring a clear-cut ending, golf games get considered like high-score arcade games. Play one loop (by doing each hole on the course), and surpass the built-in par score if there is one.

Alien 3 is done.

We're down to the last 200 games!