Nugfish

6 hours ago, OptOut said:

***SPLAIN ALERT***

 @Splain is this thing on?

LEGO RACERS complete!

Gotta say, I'm really not much of a fan of this one. The races are an absolute clusterfuck of weapons and traps going off, it's basically impossible to get ahead of the pack, and the CPU rivals have an unbelievably unfair advantage, zooming ahead way faster than you can possibly catch up to them.

As far as I am aware, there is only one reliable strategy to win, which is to gather the boost power-up and collect 3 white LEGO blocks to activate the warp. If you can achieve this multiple times per race, you have a CHANCE at victory, but even then you can easily be fucked up by stage hazards and other racers fucking you over.

I wouldn't call this game unfun, but it's VERY unfair, unbalanced and ultimately very unsatisfying. 5/10 max.

I put a couple hours into this in 2021 and deemed it unbeatable. The Lego theme is great and I liked the asthetics, but you are dead-on with your gameplay critique. Beating this is an accomplishment IMO. Kazaa to you!

Also, I remember playing this as a kid and not finding it that difficult. It had to have been on a different console...maybe Gameboy Color?...

Monopoly

15 hours ago, bronzeshield said:

Does anyone know if Mia Hamm Soccer 64 has an ending in U.S. League Season mode? I don't know how many games are in a season in this hypothetical league, but I've beaten every team once and now it's started a second cycle (maybe I have to play every team at home and away?). I can't imagine it doesn't end, but only World Cup mode is documented on the web.

That's a tough one. World Cup mode is the only way I've tried before. Bassmasters 64 doesn't have any kind of ending after a season either. It just starts the next season immediately after you win the Bassmaster classic. It may not have an ending your looking for...

Command & Conquer

Super Bowling

Stairway to Heaven is probably the sole reason I became interested in the guitar when I was in high school. Two decades and a dozen guitars later, I still think it's a great song. With that being said, I am a sucker for rock/metal songs that have both, melodic and heavy sections. 

NFL Blitz SE

Ready 2 Rumble Round 2

Ready 2 Rumble Boxing

On to Round 2.

Fighting games are perhaps my least liked genre, but for some reason, I love boxing games...

Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue

Perhaps the most underwhelming bosses I've ever encountered...also N64 THQ games blow...

Wheel of Fortune

Road Rash 64

Knockout Kings 2000

Super Mario 64

Bust-a-Move 2

Bust-a-Move '99

Wetrix

Dr Mario

3 hours ago, Jeevan said:

i meant personal ranking   i volunteered to play the entire library and rank it like @Reed Rothchild and the snes library.  I will be playing n64 regardless of what happens with the thread.  

Ooooooooooohhhhhh, that ranking....No better system to do it on!

30 minutes ago, Jeevan said:

i can't, and most likely won't spend my time playing japanese games, i would be working on the NA library for the ranking.  That being said, idk about how many folks could/would do the translations or non translations.  Kinda hard to gauge without trying it though......

@Splain has certainly peaked my interest with his rankings idea. I am looking forward to that for 2024 and am very eager to hear about how we will be going about it. 

XBOX & XBOX 360, but with so many variants in the newer disc-based systems, it becomes harder to define full-set than any of the cartridge-based systems, which I find a little deflating at times

4 hours ago, the_wizard_666 said:

If that's the case, it'll be to their detriment.  They usually manage to knock off half the library, and that's with a small number of regular players.  They're two or three active competitors away from a breakthrough.  Look at how little love the SNES and Genesis threads get now.  That's the future of any non yearly thread.  

Edit: just confirmed via the archive that the SNES thread hasn't even reached the total number of completions that they had in 2018 (the last year it was annual).  While it's expected that there'd be a dip due to a reduced player pool at the start, the new folks finding their way here should be offsetting those losses and that they'd regularly complete at least half the library with the competition aspect  being there.

Would year 1: A-R & year 2: S-Z, or some variation of that be a fair compromise on the larger libraries?

23 minutes ago, Splain said:

I've had a couple ideas over the years how we could collectively rank a library, it would likely start with a very general phase of sorting each game into quadrants/percentiles, maybe with a handful of games serving as benchmarks (is the game better or worse than Superman? Glover? Mario Kart? etc) and we'd need people to really play the games, not just fail for 20 minutes and call the game bad. Like @the_wizard_666 was saying, to weigh in you'd need to have beaten the game (or maybe some kind of defined "adequate effort" to beat it, since I feel like I could fairly review Brunswick with the hours I've put into it, even though I've never won a tournament. We can discuss it )

Ideally we'd have enough people who have played enough games to fairly sort everything into quadrants, then further divide into smaller groups. Like a Top 10, Next 10, Next 10, down to Bottom 10. The thread itself would be for discussing individual games and where they belong. We'd need a good process for what to do when one person loves a game but someone else hates it, and they're the only 2 people who have played it.

I think these are great thoughts! I would love to be part of this. Discussing likes/dislikes of each game is probably my favorite part of the annual N64 thread.

2 hours ago, ZeldaFreak said:

It's just because (from what I've played so far, anyway) it feels almost completely random. I figure out a way to get a strike, and think "Cool, OK, that worked. Let me try that again." Then I try it again and something completely different happens. Even if I line up the next shot the exact same way, hit the accuracy and power meters on the exact same spots, it's impossible to predict what's actually going to happen. So it feels like skill is barely even a factor at play, it's just random chance. I understand not ALLOWING you to hit the same shot over and over and over again is in theory good, but at least doing that requires some amount of skill and timing to actually line it back up and hit the meters in the exact same place again (since if you're even SLIGHTLY off with either of the meters, the result will be completely different most of the time.) Doing it this way leads to it just feeling totally random which I never enjoy in any game.

Plus honestly I think I just don't like bowling games in general since the gameplay is just... I dunno. It's just so basic. Nothing about it is engaging to me in any way, haha. So for me it's a combination of boring + frustrating. If it was one or the other I'd be fine, it's the fact that it's both that is already making me REALLY not enjoy this one. Not to mention I generally prefer games which I can beat, ones that actually have an ending of some sort over something like this. The wrestling ones I honestly didn't mind at all, I had some legitimate fun with those, this is just... yeah.

Plus I don't generally go out of my way to play bad games so I haven't actually played very many to be fair, haha. I know there was infinitely worse games than this out there, it's just that of the ones I'VE played, this one's pretty shit.

For skins games, if they don't ever end (I got to frame 12 and by that point just assumed it was kind of endless) it says at the beginning when you boot one up that $250,000 are on the line. If they are indeed endless (sounds like they are based on what you said) the win condition could be to get to $250,000 before any of the other players do. That at least feels like it'd have more potential to be fun compared to getting 1st in a tournament if nothing else, haha.

My brother & I used to play this all the time and got to the point where we routinely shot 300s. Its not as random as it may seem, but it does require near perfection to win a tournament. Unfortunately, it wasn't as intuitive as I was expecting when I came back to it as an adult, but is is beatable. My strategy is throwing the Speed Demon at max speed and full hook on a tight line. The game makes sure not to put you back exactly where you lined up on your previous shot so you will have to adjust every frame. My brother always used the Strike Zone with a slower speed and wider line so I know there are other strategies that can win. Hope that helps you guys a little.

@Jeevan sorry for not responding last week. For whatever reason I didn't notice any alerts. I am out of commission on gaming right now, but keep up the good work everyone. We're so close!