koifish

This one won't be easy for me. Good luck all!

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I have no shame in saying this is my least favorite GB game so far in the contest, and perhaps my least favorite of all the GB games I've played in the last year, with the exception of true crap like Pit-Fighter or Escape from Camp Deadly. That said, here is my only entry. I won't subject myself to any more of this one!

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it's not a Konami game boy game if it isn't cruel to the player!

In all seriousness though, this is a common problem in GB, especially in the earlier releases. Dragon Slayer 1 got a port to GB which is infamous in this regard. Not only is it very slow and clunky, it also takes something like 2-3 hours to finish one segment, so the game can end up being impossible to clear. More to the point, it's believed to even be impossible to finish on real hardware, with some even claiming that trying to beat it caused their game boys to overheat and fail.

I forgot how much drudgery is in Pokemon. I am tempted to just go 1st grader on this and ride my starter in every fight. Never fails in the story mode, gym leaders and elite 4 alike go down hard to a 10 year old with an overleveled charizard packing four fire-type moves.

Lingo is done. Was really annoying that you basically just rely on luck to win the end game.

I've started Pokemon Red, planning to beat it before April.

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Mario Land 2 is done. It's been years since I played this game. It was fun to revisit, but looking back, I do feel like the levels are a little too short. It's a nice meaty game for someone's first time in Mario though, I'd recommend it for that purpose, as it was my first Mario game too. The only bummer is for the player who gets frustrated when they see that you lose all your boss wins if you game over, but hey, something has to pad the play time, right?

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Will Wario Land 2 GBC cart be accepted, or is only the grey cart allowed?

Also, would it be a problem if I played Link's Awakening in Japanese?

Wow! That screenshot is huge. I'm doing this on retroarch on ubuntu right now, and it is way bigger than I expected. Not sure what's up there. Let me know if it's an issue.

Here is Super Mario Land. Another fast one. I resized this screenshot before posting it.

Well, I'm just gonna get going and see what happens.

Here is Space Invaders. Pretty easy.

Not sure if I should replay games I played last year or only do new ones. Either way, I think we should aim for 250 this year!

Hi Red, yes, it's here. I wasn't completely sure if it was required, since getting 1000 on hard is a prerequisite for unlocking very hard in the first place. There is another pic somewhere but I can't find it right now. I actually had to unlock it twice because of the bit I mentioned early in the thread about how quitting in-game doesn't save your score.

I'm sorry also that this pic is so blurry. The other one is clearer but I can't find it. Either way, this one shows the rounded shape of the flower in the corner as well as the 1016 in the top-right.

Christmas saved me from lesser play, I got a final score of 2233 with this, but pretty much stopped playing. Thought I would come back to top it and never did. Bummed, I thought I would finally get 1st on this, but hey, still decent scoring.

That's pretty funny. I remember when I thought the SP screen was a really bright light, now I feel like it's worthless unless it's a modern superpower cell phone with a giant screen.

Feel like I might be posting the last completion of the year here, but I finally finished the Champ course of Ultra Golf and got the coveted 'Champion.jpg' award. Really, it was just a shot of my guy holding a trophy! Feels like a raw deal. Either way, I had to play one hell of a game to get there. The game seems to treat golf like its Mario Kart, with magical super-players rubber-banding around to match your score. Even after a very fortunate set of wind conditions on two par 5s which resulted in two eagles, the AI player to beat was ALSO given eagles on those holes. In the end, foe 'Jack' and I tied, but as I had held #1 for longer (or something), I was given the title.

Overall, a good golf game. I think Nintendo's Golf is much more challenging and engaging, but Ultra Golf has less frustrating putting than that game, so I think it's about even. I think that Golf has a slightly better interface though, one big thing being that in Ultra Golf, if you are on the edge of the green, you default to sand wedge, and if you want to use the putter, you have to aim the shot, choose the putter, then it resets you back to the aiming screen, and if you decide to undo your current putting aim and try again, then you are automatically set back to sand wedge, and you have to redo the extended putter selection process, which gets annoying when you are used to a smooth, unified interface like on Nintendo's offering. Also, the one thing I really dislike about Ultra Golf is that you can't end a tournament midway, you have to finish it through. I think that's really dull, and a big pain when you screw up and know for sure that you won't win. At least NES Open Tournament Golf gave you some kind of award for your troubles. To be fair, however, NES Open Tournament Golf came out years later, on a much more powerful and memory-packed system, so that comparison doesn't hold much weight. Still, I think my issues vs. Nintendo Golf are more worthy of consideration, given they came out on the same system and around the same time.

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First entry for the record, 1513, my third new high score of the day from practicing very hard.

I need to practice my thumb movements more, the rapid left to right movements needed for this game at very hard are sometimes too close and I flub them up. Other than that, it just comes down to getting "in the zone" and letting your practice pay its dividends.

Also, I want to complain that this game does not save your score if you quit mid-game, only when you get Game Over. That means that when you hit 1000 in Hard Mode,  you need to then let yourself get 3 misses, rather than quitting the game outright. Don't make the same mistake I did! You'll kick yourself for wasting your time getting the first 1000 game.

I'm having trouble with photographing the score on Very Hard while still proving that I only have one miss. When the game is paused, your miss count isn't displayed, and when the game isn't paused, you can very easily either 1) get another miss, at which point it looks suspect that you have more than one miss, or 2) you might accidentally get more points just from the trampoline sitting in the leftmost position.

I'm troubled about this currently because my current best is 308 in very hard mode, but I didn't really have any way to take a picture that proved not only that I had 308, but that it was my first miss as well. @Red, what do you suggest we do?

I became intrigued by it this year, actually. Playing GB games on the hardware they would have been designed around is very insightful to me. You can't really understand reviewers complaining about Super RC Pro-Am being too blurry when you've only ever played it on an AGS-101 or CGB or similar screen.

Here's my score, 2618200. Just didn't love this game all that much, fortunately it was short!

Also, I'm sorry, but I just realized it wasn't with my score in the image. Hopefully you'll believe that a game that's more obscure like this one will not have very many score photos like this one, particularly ones on a DMG.

My bad then, sorry for sending everybody on a wild goose chase.

This is a very short game, so I don't imagine it will be tough to score attack, once you memorize the level layouts of course. The only problem I had with it is that it's easy to clear, but tough to finish without dying.

Also, I haven't booted it up recently but IIRC, it has difficulty settings. Do we need to play on a specific difficulty setting? If I'm misremembering then I apologize. @Red

I just didn't have much time for this game. I played last weekend, but then things were important elsewhere and I decided to put it away. Here's my only submission for this week, 194300. Hopefully I'll do a little better with the next one.

I've been seeing Skyrim mentioned a lot, and if I may, could those people tell me why they like it? If I may speak frankly, I really don't know why people like Skyrim. I do recognize that a big problem for me is that I find open-world games to be fun at first, but to quickly lose their appeal once you realize most of the massive world will just be actively skipped over for lack of novelty or value. My greater beef is just with what I perceived as the game's intent. It seemed like their goal was to do very many things, but in the process, they didn't do any of them particularly well. The feeling comes from the sensation that the role-playing is too thin, the gameplay too easy and simplistic, the exploration handicapped by the GPS map which tells you both where to go and what you've found, lest you fail to recognize something that they want you to see as significant. Finally, the whole point of the game, from what I have watched, seems to be to repeat tedium to make level numbers go up, as well as collecting and carrying every random piece of garbage you can fritter off with. I feel like overall, the game is made for someone who wants a huge timesink without much serious commitment, and who value quantity far more than quality.

Before I just come off as a curmudgeon, I will say that there are games in here which I didn't really like but which I can understand why others like them. Games like last of us, dark souls, I can understand the appeal even if I don't like them myself. Skyrim is just the big puzzle to me. I think the only prize I would give it is the Opposite Day award, the prize for the game with the largest disparity between praise won and worthiness of that praise.

11 hours ago, acromite53 said:

This year, its been the OG GameBoy for me. I know everything that is out there on the NES and nothing surprises me about it anymore. But with GameBoy, it is basically another whole NES library I'm new to! They are still 8 bit like NES but unique games. I love discovering these GB gems that are new to me. The 8 bit era on Nintendo systems lasted from 1983-2002! Incredible.There is so much new material to play and learn about. It's been a blast!

That's my pic as well. Before this year, I had no idea that so many rock-solid gb games existed. I just assumed with many others that there were a few good games, but that most were just inferior versions of home console games and that there was little reason to play them. I now find that there was a lot of quality to the gb, and it speaks through its library that it deserves its grand legacy.

Just now, RH said:

Ah, I didn't realize it came out in 2009.  Then I'll give it the title for 2000-2009.

It is a little confusing to those who don't remember, but Minecraft was one of the first big games I can remember to play the "early access" game (back before it was even called that). While they said the "full" game was released in 2011, he original launch was in 2009, I remember as I bought into the survival indev mode back in March 2010, I think I was buyer #9331 or so. Of course not too much later, the TF2 blog covered the new "minepit" fan level showing up in TF2 servers, and like that, the sales went from 10k to over 100k in about a week, and the rest is history. But alas, I do go on, and prove that anymore I am history too

Also, my other pick is probably going to be Splatoon. It is the first competitive shooter I have played in a long time that really felt innovative and wasn't just taking quake and  tacking on other genre elements. The original parts of it feel proper, and there isn't a lot of chaff to bog it down, just a very tight and streamlined experience. It was proof to me that Nintendo's still got it from a design perspective.