Beat every Game Boy game - 2020 - 225/497

[Tanooki | 4,932]

Is that what euro games are worth too?  I've got a few from both regions.

[MrPeaPod | 121]

F-1 Race completed

[koifish | 555]

Vegas Stakes will go down very soon. Turns out once you get to the high-roller casino and get a money edge, you can basically just steamroll your way to victory. I'll explain more later but right now I have 5 million, only an hour or two more left at this point to beat the game.

[Splain | 2,561]

15 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Is that what euro games are worth too?  I've got a few from both regions.

Euro games are all listed individually with their own point values. Anything that got a US release or variant is listed as a US game because I'm racist. 

I'm on my phone because internet is down. I'll update when it's back up.

@BriGuy82II ordered a kit lol.

[BriGuy82 | 765]

2 hours ago, Splain said:

Euro games are all listed individually with their own point values. Anything that got a US release or variant is listed as a US game because I'm racist. 

I'm on my phone because internet is down. I'll update when it's back up.

@BriGuy82II ordered a kit lol.

You won't be disappointed. It's incredible.

[koifish | 555]

Vegas Stakes is done. Poker is the easiest money-maker. You have trouble at first because you have to play smart poker for most of the game. Trick the dealer, get them to lower their guard, make big gains when you can, bluff your way, etc. It is slow too because there is strict betting limit.

Once you hit Laurel Palace, however, you have no betting limit. You still have to play scrappy to get the edge on the house at first, (you'll have 100k vs their 500k) but once you hit a million or two, you can then just steamroll the AI. They will rarely turn down bets, so all you have to do is learn when they will fold, then you can identify that they won't fold, despite all good judgment saying otherwise. In those cases, the dealer will always match you, even going all-in. All you have to do then, is make sure you have a really strong hand (or can reasonably believe you will win in high certainty) and then you just bet more than the dealer's total money. They will all-in immediately, the cards will be dealt out, and then (unless you read the situation horribly) you will bankrupt the dealer. You will be kicked back to the game select menu, but you can immediately go back to poker and the dealer will have another 500k to be drained. Just rinse and repeat about 20 times and you will beat the game.

 

The final screens are interesting. In my case, I can't post all of them, because they involve your character name, and as with many games, I made my file name a curse word for laughs, and I'd prefer to keep this a clean thread XD

Here is one of them though, found it interesting that Iwata was listed as executive producer. I suppose HAL did make these though, so maybe bgb00006.bmpit isn't as strange as I thought.

bgb00002.bmp

[Splain | 2,561]

Wow, great job! I ought to resurrect the GB strategies thread, this is good info.

I beat Wordtris, as much as it can be beat'd. There's no ending screen to speak of.

[bronzeshield | 293]

Took down 4-in-1 Funpak: Volume II with unexpected ease, considering that I'd completely forgotten the rules of cribbage and dominoes and still don't really understand either of them.

The first solitaire game went my way, dominoes somehow worked out, I got a Yahtzee -- excuse me, a "yacht" -- right away, and then I beat cribbage on my second attempt.

[BriGuy82 | 765]

Mega Man II

 

[Splain | 2,561]

Slammed out Dr. Mario to show off the ips screen. It's all true, this thing is amazing.

[koifish | 555]

On 3/12/2020 at 8:05 PM, Splain said:

Wow, great job! I ought to resurrect the GB strategies thread, this is good info.

I beat Wordtris, as much as it can be beat'd. There's no ending screen to speak of.

Thanks for reminding me, I still have my bombshell notes on Battleship if you're willing to see them. Just recall though, it totally changes the game, and may ruin it if you dig that authentic experience in the GB version.

 

I started playing James Bond 007 and Baseball. Hopefully I will clear those without much trouble.

[Splain | 2,561]

1 hour ago, koifish said:

Thanks for reminding me, I still have my bombshell notes on Battleship if you're willing to see them. Just recall though, it totally changes the game, and may ruin it if you dig that authentic experience in the GB version.

 

I started playing James Bond 007 and Baseball. Hopefully I will clear those without much trouble.

I'd personally like to see them. Battleship gets frustrating when the CPU keeps pulling out special weapons when it should already have run out, and the manual states that certain ones literally don't miss, "to keep the game challenging." So it's a little inauthentic already lol. It's fun for a little while, but I'm too much of a sissy to ever get very far.

James Bond 007 is a neat game. One of the hardest parts is having to get a certain amount of money in the casino, but I doubt you'll struggle with that, heh.

[koifish | 555]

19 hours ago, Splain said:

I'd personally like to see them. Battleship gets frustrating when the CPU keeps pulling out special weapons when it should already have run out, and the manual states that certain ones literally don't miss, "to keep the game challenging." So it's a little inauthentic already lol. It's fun for a little while, but I'm too much of a sissy to ever get very far.

James Bond 007 is a neat game. One of the hardest parts is having to get a certain amount of money in the casino, but I doubt you'll struggle with that, heh.

 

Indeed, casino should be okay. I was okay at the ones in Pokemon too.

 

The Game-Killer Battleship Secret:

The trick to solving battleship is that the enemy doesn't have truly random layouts to the boats. The game chooses ship layouts from a pool of possible pre-defined layouts, so while you don't know what the layout is when you start, it is pretty easy to figure out if you already have a map. That's how I realized it, I was playing the game in a second screen on my PC while working on other things, and inevitably I would get absentminded and accidentally launch an attack on a square that had already been scanned by sonar. Since sonar markers don't get recorded on the screen, I would forget the ship was there, or that I had spotted a ship. As such, I began using an excel spreadsheet to mark where things were, and afterward I would just move down to a new cell section to create a new map for the next level. Eventually, I started to see repeated patterns, and realized they were just reusing maps. It makes sense, given the limited scope of the game boy hardware, that a "true" random would not only be very impossible, but very taxing on the hardware to attempt. As such, they do what tons of games did over the decades, creating pre-defined sets of data to define the ship layouts.

 

My trick is thus two-fold. 1. You gain a list of ship mappings from experience. 2. You use sonar in specific squares to identify what mapping you have.

 

1. I already have a ship map. Consult it in the attachments below. The 1 means it's a Hit, the 0 means it's a Miss. I color-coded it to show the ship outlines. It needs cleaned up (there are some incomplete maps early on, and some duplicates possibly as well) but is otherwise good to go. Maybe someone super-nice wants to clean it up for me to use in a GameFAQs listing?

2. What I found worked here was grouping ship maps into groups based on what the four center squares contained. If you use the square sonar, you can read the four middle squares. Note the pattern from hits and misses, and compare to the known maps. Any known that match it are possibly correct. This technique allows you to essentially cut the possible map group down to a 16th of what it was before (in theory; not every possible layout of four squares exists in the game). From there, just look at what maps have the same pattern of four center squares, pick out known ship locations from the map, and attack them in-game. If you get a hit, then you can confirm that map is correct. It only takes a few hits typically to find the right map. I would usually use one of the 5-shot spread weapons for this role, because you could hit multiple spots at once, and get more confirmations to prove/disprove which map you got in that level. You could also use another sub sonar, but I'm still debated as to whether it is a better idea to save your sonar for the end (in case it's a new map and you have to find the enemy sub, which is a pain in the butt once all your weapons are expended, and frequently this will be the case by the end) or if it is better to sonar in the beginning. I feel like it's better saved for the end, because the enemy is fast to kill your ships, but slow to kill your sub (barring extreme bad luck), so I would probably use guns first, sonar later.

 

There it is, the game-crushing secret to beating GB Battleship. I give them credit, had I never been absentminded and not written them down, I would have never discovered the maps in the first place. Amusingly, I felt on some later fights that even with the maps I only barely won. The AI can really be brutal, and I wonder how far they tested the game as far as being able to be completed. I admit also, however, that I may have just had bad luck in some matches. Once you have the maps 100% down, and you confirm a map is being used presently, it's pretty easy to make swiss cheese out of the game. Some of my hardship was just not knowing the map yet. Perhaps now it would be easier, I leave it to someone else to give the game a try and report back on how the map treated them.

game boy battleship map.ods

[Gaia Gensouki | 1,072]

I have beaten Kirby's Pinball Land! This was a really tough one. I have been playing here and there for quite some time, but could never even reach King Dedede. I am not sure if this game is just so hard or if I maybe just suck at pinball games.

[Splain | 2,561]

5 hours ago, koifish said:

 

Indeed, casino should be okay. I was okay at the ones in Pokemon too.

 

The Game-Killer Battleship Secret:

The trick to solving battleship is that the enemy doesn't have truly random layouts to the boats. The game chooses ship layouts from a pool of possible pre-defined layouts, so while you don't know what the layout is when you start, it is pretty easy to figure out if you already have a map. That's how I realized it, I was playing the game in a second screen on my PC while working on other things, and inevitably I would get absentminded and accidentally launch an attack on a square that had already been scanned by sonar. Since sonar markers don't get recorded on the screen, I would forget the ship was there, or that I had spotted a ship. As such, I began using an excel spreadsheet to mark where things were, and afterward I would just move down to a new cell section to create a new map for the next level. Eventually, I started to see repeated patterns, and realized they were just reusing maps. It makes sense, given the limited scope of the game boy hardware, that a "true" random would not only be very impossible, but very taxing on the hardware to attempt. As such, they do what tons of games did over the decades, creating pre-defined sets of data to define the ship layouts.

 

My trick is thus two-fold. 1. You gain a list of ship mappings from experience. 2. You use sonar in specific squares to identify what mapping you have.

 

1. I already have a ship map. Consult it in the attachments below. The 1 means it's a Hit, the 0 means it's a Miss. I color-coded it to show the ship outlines. It needs cleaned up (there are some incomplete maps early on, and some duplicates possibly as well) but is otherwise good to go. Maybe someone super-nice wants to clean it up for me to use in a GameFAQs listing?

2. What I found worked here was grouping ship maps into groups based on what the four center squares contained. If you use the square sonar, you can read the four middle squares. Note the pattern from hits and misses, and compare to the known maps. Any known that match it are possibly correct. This technique allows you to essentially cut the possible map group down to a 16th of what it was before (in theory; not every possible layout of four squares exists in the game). From there, just look at what maps have the same pattern of four center squares, pick out known ship locations from the map, and attack them in-game. If you get a hit, then you can confirm that map is correct. It only takes a few hits typically to find the right map. I would usually use one of the 5-shot spread weapons for this role, because you could hit multiple spots at once, and get more confirmations to prove/disprove which map you got in that level. You could also use another sub sonar, but I'm still debated as to whether it is a better idea to save your sonar for the end (in case it's a new map and you have to find the enemy sub, which is a pain in the butt once all your weapons are expended, and frequently this will be the case by the end) or if it is better to sonar in the beginning. I feel like it's better saved for the end, because the enemy is fast to kill your ships, but slow to kill your sub (barring extreme bad luck), so I would probably use guns first, sonar later.

 

There it is, the game-crushing secret to beating GB Battleship. I give them credit, had I never been absentminded and not written them down, I would have never discovered the maps in the first place. Amusingly, I felt on some later fights that even with the maps I only barely won. The AI can really be brutal, and I wonder how far they tested the game as far as being able to be completed. I admit also, however, that I may have just had bad luck in some matches. Once you have the maps 100% down, and you confirm a map is being used presently, it's pretty easy to make swiss cheese out of the game. Some of my hardship was just not knowing the map yet. Perhaps now it would be easier, I leave it to someone else to give the game a try and report back on how the map treated them.

game boy battleship map.ods 16.63 kB · 1 download

 

This is crazy to me. The game seemingly makes random hits when attacking you, and it has to pseudo-randomly select which pre-defined layout to use in each game, so it seems like it should have been possible to randomly place each ship. But I don't know anything about GB programming specifically. I'm sure the phrase "noone will notice" got tossed around a bit during development.

Great find!

[Splain | 2,561]

Super Chase HQ. More fun than Chase HQ.

[Tanooki | 4,932]

Very nice.  I hope they do a GBP panel at some point, and I could find a clean red shell.  I'd do do a Virtual Gameboy with that screen as that looks fantastic.  Good job on that one, it can get tricky.

It's also nice to see more people getting that screen.

[koifish | 555]

I feel that VB love. Was just playing it the other day, actually found out my Flash Boy cart might need repaired, but can't confirm until the weekend at the earliest.

 

Baseball is done. After several unlucky finishes, beat the Bears 12-6. I feel like the game would be much better in 2-pilayer, but even then, Bases Loaded for GB is way, waaaaaaay better. Not sure why, only idea is that Baseball was a launch title, but Bases Loaded was a 1990 release, so not far off.

[Splain | 2,561]

4 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Very nice.  I hope they do a GBP panel at some point, and I could find a clean red shell.  I'd do do a Virtual Gameboy with that screen as that looks fantastic.  Good job on that one, it can get tricky.

It's also nice to see more people getting that screen.

Supposedly there's one in the works. I'll tell myself that I don't need one, but I love the GBP form factor and I'll probably get one eventually, let's be honest.

2 hours ago, koifish said:

I feel that VB love. Was just playing it the other day, actually found out my Flash Boy cart might need repaired, but can't confirm until the weekend at the earliest.

 

Baseball is done. After several unlucky finishes, beat the Bears 12-6. I feel like the game would be much better in 2-pilayer, but even then, Bases Loaded for GB is way, waaaaaaay better. Not sure why, only idea is that Baseball was a launch title, but Bases Loaded was a 1990 release, so not far off.

Yeah I was seeing your posts on Planetvb, unfortunately I don't know what the problem might be. Hmm, I could send you my flashboy+ if it might help you troubleshoot (confirm that a certain USB cable works, etc) Unless your new pad really is cursed, lol.

Do you know about baseball games? I'm trying to rank every GB game and baseball is my worst genre. I think they're all bad because I'm so terrible at them, so I can't tell where they should be ranked, lol. It helps to hear that Bases Loaded is better than Baseball, that's at least something. @bronzeshield is our resident Tennis game expert.

[koifish | 555]

7 hours ago, Splain said:

Supposedly there's one in the works. I'll tell myself that I don't need one, but I love the GBP form factor and I'll probably get one eventually, let's be honest.

Yeah I was seeing your posts on Planetvb, unfortunately I don't know what the problem might be. Hmm, I could send you my flashboy+ if it might help you troubleshoot (confirm that a certain USB cable works, etc) Unless your new pad really is cursed, lol.

Do you know about baseball games? I'm trying to rank every GB game and baseball is my worst genre. I think they're all bad because I'm so terrible at them, so I can't tell where they should be ranked, lol. It helps to hear that Bases Loaded is better than Baseball, that's at least something. @bronzeshield is our resident Tennis game expert.

 

Well I appreciate your offer lol. NES Freak reached out and suggested that the USB port might have busted, and he might be willing to help me out with it, so I'm not too worried. At worst, I can emulate the games on my quest, or just play mario clash until the end of time (a good fate to have IMO!). At the same time, I'm tempted now to buy a couple favorite games just to keep them on dedicated carts. At this point, I really should just invest in a permanent copy of games like galactic pinball, just cuz that game is such great fun.

 

I'm not super knowledgeable about baseball or the games overall, but I do have a big niche interest in baseball games. From stratomatic and electromechanical pin games to the tabletop games and the early video games, the nature of simulated baseball has always fascinated me. I'm also a big fan of old golf games, though I admit NES Golf is one of my more challenging games to enjoy. I appreciate that it's a technical marvel, but the later famicom golf games are so much better that it's hard to enjoy the original by comparison.

 

Anyway, if you're looking for someone to play and compare GB baseball games, or to offer comparisons to other games, then I would be happy to help. Just tell me more about the expectations (written review, video, some kind of rules-based criteria, etc.)

[Gaia Gensouki | 1,072]

Kirby's Block Ball is done. While not as difficult as Kirby's Pinball Land it's still surprisingly difficult. Beating the borderline scores or highscores was very challenging and at times frustrating too. Especially stage 4 was annoying. But still a solid game. However, I think I've had enough Kirby games for now.

Edited March 21, 2020 by Gaia Gensouki

[Gaia Gensouki | 1,072]

Donkey Kong Land re-completed. This time around it went much smoother and was more fun, because I've now learned to always collect all four kong letters and to stock up on lives early. Thanks to that I didn't see the game over screen and didn't have tod o levels over and over again. But this does not eradicate the fact that this game has some problems on the gameplay side of things.

[BriGuy82 | 765]

Links Awakening 

This was the first time I have ever played this game. I can see why so many people love it. I played through it blind no hints or anything. I only found 18 sea shells though, I'm probably gonna look up where they all are to find out what happens at the sea shell mansion. Great game, wish I had played it growing up considering how much I loved ALTTP. I give it two thumbs up.   

[BriGuy82 | 765]

Wait wait wait, I missed the master sword and the boomerang? I changed my mind, links awakening gets two thumbs down.   .....

Just kidding... Although it is a little annoying .  Alot of those secret sea shell locations were very unintuitive. Unless you dug up every piece of land on the entire map. The master sword should've been more tied into the main quest. Maybe it should've been hidden in a dungeon. The boomerang thing is kinda lame too. I got the magnifying glass and the way it was presented it seemed like that would've been the end of the item trading. I didn't even think there was a next item. A little too unintuitive IMO.

Edited April 3, 2020 by BriGuy82

[Splain | 2,561]

On 4/2/2020 at 5:11 PM, BriGuy82 said:

Wait wait wait, I missed the master sword and the boomerang? I changed my mind, links awakening gets two thumbs down.   .....

Just kidding... Although it is a little annoying .  Alot of those secret sea shell locations were very unintuitive. Unless you dug up every piece of land on the entire map. The master sword should've been more tied into the main quest. Maybe it should've been hidden in a dungeon. The boomerang thing is kinda lame too. I got the magnifying glass and the way it was presented it seemed like that would've been the end of the item trading. I didn't even think there was a next item. A little too unintuitive IMO.

I read somewhere that there are actually 26 seashell locations in the game, but as soon as you find 20, the others turn into rupees. And I agree that the boomerang kinda feels like an afterthought. There isn't even room for it in your inventory and you have to give up something else to fit it. There are some funny tricks you can do with it though.