The List

Here's the list of every game I'll be playing- eventually.

The List

Friday, April 29, 2011

Ahh... I did a bad thing

Sorry about the drop-off in posts everybody, I'm getting a new job right now, and a few other things have cropped up as well.

Played through DK Country, half of the thing is written, plan on posting it and getting things back on schedule on Monday.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Power Moves

Okay, now for a bit of an oddity; Power Moves.


Except I accidentally held Ctrl again after Ctrl + I instead of Shift, and did Ctrl + P, which prompted my desktop to inform me there is not a printer installed.

...It was startling.

Anyway Power Moves. 

This is like a... B-list fighting game, I guess. Pretty derivative of Street Fighter and a few others, with some pretty racially insensitive characters, to boot. It's not that this is the poor man's Street Fighter- we had two SF games- it's just a bit.. Different.

I do love the characters, though. Let's give 'em a look:


 Hawaiian. 


Kenyan.


Japanese.


Russian.


Chinese.


The Spaniard.


Thai.

Oh, and I, Joe, am an American. 

The combat basically consists of move about, one punch, one kick, a throw, and two special moves: a projectile (back, forward + punch + kick), and a utility move (forward + punch + kick). The pattern's easy to memorize because everyone has the same god damned move list. So after a while you end up just getting lazy, backed in a corner, waiting them to use a utility move so you can melt their face with your Hadouken rip off. 


Pictured: Joe, Ladies' Man 

There is one hurdle, though. And it is a MASSIVE one.


Ranker, the boss. The only other American in the game, and he is a complete douchebag.


He's fast, strong, and he has two killer techniques- Tsundere Beef, and Yawn, Sah. (Okay, it's really Thunder Fist and Ground Strike, but we didn't discover this 'til many years later- it's exactly what he sounds like.)

Not only that, but his regular punches take fight priority over your super-duper-double fisted air strike utility move. What's that? You finally managed to catch the muscular bastard in the air and wen to give him a fist enema?


Too bad- the underside of his thigh made contact with your wrist. DOWN.


 It does feel good though, when you finally manage to put him on the ground. You ever get in a fight with your dad? Like a fist fight? Did you manage to hit him? Yeah, it felt kinda like that... Even though you know he's about to get up and obliterate the very idea of your existance

Oh, and when he does crush you, he remains poised, and gives a stoic thumbs-down. 


Jackass.

Needless to say, I did not overcome my childhood on this day- these games are MUCH harder than I remember; not sure if I'm getting dumber, or it's just because I'm having to use the keyboard instead of the luxurious plastic contraption, but I got cleaned today. This game is what I spent the majority of my time doing.  

But aside from all that, one of the biggest reasons I love this game? The music and samples.

The voice samples they use for this game are simply... Incredible. If you're into ROMing, download Power Moves next time you get the chance, open the options, select sound test, and enjoy yourself- you won't regret it. 





Alright, so, next session I move on to some more games, maybe some Lemmings, I dunno yet- I do, however know the first BIG game I'm going to cover will be... 

Here's a teaser: 


Did you just get goosebumps?


The Lion King

Okay, do NOT judge me, but this game was completely awesome when I was younger- I spent hours every week, on the side, beating this thing. Of course, back then I had a bit of a fetish for anything Lion King, with my brother, but I like to think it was the rich gameplay, and the... The...


Ehh, it was mainly the music and Pumba. And Scar.

Oh, holy shit, Scar. I had this weird obsession with Scar when I younger- Scar, and Anthony Hopkins, both.


Greeaat shot of some dramatic tension toward the end of the game... I only wish they had put some more of Scar's voice acting in...


Oh, and a shot of me getting mauled, shortly thereafter. Neat.

Now, I'm not going to say that it's a rad game, but my nostalgia while playing it made sure I had a blast the whole way through.

There is one, little thing that always bothered me...

In the game, there's a code you can put in that unlocks some stuff- level select, mainly. What bothers me is that the code is 'B, A, R, R, Y'. Like a Berry. Because they're in the jungle. Isn't that clever? Except that 'Barry' is the name of the guy who comes into JalapeƱo Tree four times a week for a Russian Bulldog, not a delectable jungle treat that lions don't even partake of to begin with. 


Agh, so much nerd rage... Does that bother anyone else, really?

AAAHH!!! Real Monsters

Okay, first off: no this is not one of those cherished childhood memory games I was talking about earlier; I just hadn't heard of AAAHH!!! in such a long time I had to check it out.


The game's not fantastic- a team-based platformer- but really, why's anyone playing this game? Because it's friggin AAAHH!!! Real Monsters. Kinda has a feel that reminds me of Norse By Norse West, for some reason, but WAAAY dumbed down.

I told myself I was going to make it past at least two levels in, but couldn't- it was a blast running around as Ickis, but there were bigger, heavier things to move on to.

Starting on The List

While normally, the thing to do would be to calmly and methodically tackle a 700+ item list alphabetically, or, lacking that, just starting at the top, I couldn't help myself. I spent the last four hours playing a few of the games that stuck out from my childhood, and holy SHIT are they harder than I remember.

It's not too bad, haha, but I had to struggle to make any progress with 'em. I'll be doing each game individually, in just a sec.

The List

The List is not compiled yet, but it soon will be. And maybe it'll look fancy.

For now, refer to here for the first half of the list.

NEW GOAL

So after realizing that the amount of fun I was having was severely limited, I've decided to turn my gaze from the NES to the SNES- the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the console I hold dearest to my heart. Super excited about this now- I'll upload a complete list of all 784 games that I'll be trouncing here in the coming year or so soon, but for now I'm going to set about searching for a new emulator.

Joey Keeling, very excited.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Nope Nope Nope

Not blogging today, probably going to do the dishes and play some Pokemon.

...In that order.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

HAHAHA

HOLY SHIT.

Check this out.

It's a video of some guy beating 1942, for the big finale, which apparently contains "awesome, fireworks, 3-d graphics, and voice synth".

Skip to 1:55 and laugh with me.

Warcrimes- 10-Yard Fight and 1942

So I spent the last hour and a half or so testing out my new emulator- fceux. Has the same functionality as my GBA emus, can't complain.

The games I chose for the maiden voyage of this campaign were picked... Alphabetically. Ha. Anyway, I played through 10-Yard Fight and 1942 today.


10-Yard Fight surprised me- I'm not much of a sports gamer, so I was afraid this was going to be akin to Madden. The gameplay's not exactly thrilling- especially once you realize that once your player comes into contact with another player, they are essentially dead on the ground. There is something to be said though, for the excitement of winning your first touchdown, which happened to be right after kickoff, for me.


Each touchdown nets you victory over one half of each game- games progress from high school, to college, then to pro and finally super. I know it's supposed to be a Super Bowl game without the lawsuits, but my first thought was "Super Pro" and that's just... Dumb.





I don't have an image of my triumph over the black-clad super league team people, because I got my ass beat. After that disheartening little drop, I noticed a bit past thirty minutes had passed, so I moved. on.




1942. You look at the title and you see THIS IS A WORLD WAR II GAME. I know back then it was still pretty fresh material, but since then dozens if not hundreds of games  have been released that are WWII-central. Still though, it was kinda neat to see some original ideas on the topic.

You start off on an ocean liner, so I can only assume we're somewhere in the Pacific theater, which means Japanese. Ten seconds in, I realize holy crap, this is probably one of the first bullet-pattern games. While I can't be sure of that, I also have no idea when the more popular bullet-pattern games came out, so I'm going to assume my assumption is correct.

Nothing really overly exciting here- standard dodge / fire / upgrade sort of thing. You start with what looks like one of the original biplanes launched into a dogfight, (the kind that had the guns in front that were timed to fire to pass in between the blades of the propeller... Man that is cool...) and as you progress you can grab upgrades to firepower and even nab little companion ships that will tag along, even though they make maneuvering a bit more cumbersome.


Politically, the games pretty harmless, unless you're the type to let a bullet-pattern game ruin you life; (and I am) though I couldn't help but notice that all enemy planes are marked with a large red dot in the center of their plane. I'm thinking, Rising Sun? Divine Wind, and all that?


If so, that would explain why not a one of them has qualms with ramming their damned plane directly into mine. 


Oh my god, though, the music- it was fucking awful. You know how in rhythm games, they play a tone to indicate you've done something wrong? I thought that's what it was, at first; I seriously believed that that screeching noise was punishment for taking a glancing hit or something. The game is MUCH more bearable with Chiptune David's 'where am i' in the background, or some Falco Lombardi.

Here's a youtube video of some guy playing the game.

I think there're a few moments of peace where it's just the music, but the rest of the time it's drowned out by the addition of the smashing sound the guns make. Ugh... Just awful.

Later I'm doing 1943, 3D Worldrunner, and 720.

Clarifications

So I've already stated they'll only be the games released in the US and PAL regions, but I haven't really made it painfully clear exactly how poor I am; I am pretty severely impoverished right now. Ha. So I won't be attempting to track down and purchase every NES game- I'm just going to use an emulator.

Now, I'm also probably not going to beat all of the games, either- have you ever heard the term "Nintendo-hard"? Back then, when quite a few games were created with arcades in mind, companies made video games damn-near impossible to play without prodigious amounts of skill, so people put in more and more quarters, just to get their asses handed to them. No, I'm only going to guarantee a minimum of 30 minutes of every game in the library, even if I hate playing it. If I like it- like a lot of the games I'm going to play- I'll stick with it for a few hours and maybe even beat it. I'll upload screenshots of my victories and just blog about my failures.

Now aside from that, if this thing ever picks up any steam, (probably from 4chan's /v/) I could start doing live streams of games using Procaster, and invite people to come and watch me fail. I dunno, that's kinda a long way off.

Torrenting my first library of games right now, I'll check back in after I play five or so.

Contractions and an Idea

Is there a limit in the English language regarding contractions? Are words like couldn't've and can't've and shouldn't've allowed? Somebody find out and tell me, because I'm certainly not going to.

Also, an idea just came to me for a platform on which to stage this whole 'writing thing': I can play every game ever made for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and blog about each game, but only those released in the US and PAL regions.

For the list of games I'll be playing, I'll be using Wikipedia's list of NES games, if they have one... They do, and here it is. Wow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Entertainment_System_games

799 games... Wow... Fuck it, here we go.

If you happen to've (see? convenient) stumbled upon this and you have a game that's not on the list, or a foreign game you'd like to suggest, post it here and, after a review, it'll be added onto the list.

...Totally not starting on this right now, though. Tomorrow, we begin.

And Here We Are

Welcome to my second blog.

I've been missing having a blog for a while now, so here we are; I've had this idea to do a kind of forced frog march back to good writing habits by habitually writing in a blog a few times a week, to stretch my creative legs and hopefully make something interesting.

I know I said this is my second blog, but I'm not going to talk about the first one.

..What the hell is a gadget?