Summer Games Challenge 2018 - begin when ready!

[Key-Glyph]

I've been chipping away at Carmen Sandiego these past few days, rising up the ranks enough that the resident dog Stretch waits up for me at the office (aww) and the Chief's secretary winks when I arrive (ew). And then...



HNNNGGGG! I'm close!!

I have to admit, the game is feeling like a slog at this point. I'll get more into why after I've completed it, but suffice it to say the individual missions are sooo long now, and I've thought I was one step away from the final showdown five and ten quests ago, so I'm really burnt out. This has been my only ray of hope.

I also had the chance to start Startropics last night. Liking it so far.

Excellent to hear! I'm going to be joining you on the StarTropics train after I've caught Carmen.

[alienjesus]

I played some more Resident Evil tonight.

I started from the Gold Emblem puzzle in the mansion, defeated a big snake (or rather, let Richard do it for me), killed a crimson head in a crypt, got knocked out by a crazy zombie lady in a wooden shack in the woods, made it to the outdoor residence, killed a big shark and poisoned a big plant. All in all pretty good progress.

Ammo situation feels a lot more reasonable after the residence - I'm rocking about 20 shotgun shells, plus I have a magnum with 9 bullets, a solid 20+ rounds for the grenade launcher and about 60 handgun bullets.

Health items is also a little improved, got a few herbs and things saved away now. I have run out of ink ribbons now though, so I hope there's plenty of new items in the mansion for my return visit.

[Key-Glyph]

1. The Last Express (DOS)
2. StarTropics (NES)
3. Maniac Mansion (NES)
4. Lemmings (GEN)
5. Metroid Fusion (GBA)
6. LOOM (ScummVM)
7. Tetris (GB)
8. Resident Evil: Code Veronica (PS2)
9. Ultima III: Exodus (NES)

10. Where in America's Past is Carmen Sandiego? (DOS)

Yessssssss.



So, this is the first time in my life that I've caught Carmen Sandiego. It feels pretty awesome, but man was it a test of will to get here.

I'm not sure if it's exactly the same with every installment of the series, but in Where in America's Past, you run into a lot of issues managing your warrants. The basic format of the gameplay is this:

• 1) Go to a place;
  2) Ask the locals for clues as to where the henchman went next;
  3) Jump to the next place;
  4) Repeat, until you corner the crook.

So, sometimes you'll get an extra notification at a location, which is a clue about the actual henchman's appearance. When you have enough of these to narrow down the suspect, your Chronoskimmer can compute the data and issue you a warrant for the appropriate person, which you need to make the arrest. It's actually a really fun mechanic, and I'm going to admit that when my warrant finally issued for Carmen herself my heart sped up a little... but unfortunately it seems like this one aspect of the game wasn't balanced quite right. The appearance clues don't pop at every location, and sometimes you'll get the same ones over and over during a mission. This is a real problem in the beginning of the game when you only have a few jumps before you have to make the arrest, and it's super frustrating in the later ranks when you've spent 20-30 minutes on a case and gotten so many repeat clues that you haven't been able to pinpoint the suspect by the end. In both cases you basically falsify a final clue in the hopes that you'll wind up with the right warrant (shh, don't tell the Chief), and if you don't, well, them's the breaks.

I also wish this game had been shorter in general, and had given me some indication of how close I was getting to Carmen before the final rank. I had to complete 40 missions before I caught Carmen on the 41st. 41 missions! Geeze! If I'd known that I might have stretched the experience out over the whole summer instead of dedicating myself to finishing it before moving on. I guess Broderbund was expecting kids to work on these titles over extended periods of time, possibly in school or library settings where game time would have hard limits.

Regardless, very fun to finally have this childhood dream fulfilled. Also, Carmen is a personal hero, so I like to imagine I turned her in just to break her out and join her crew. Mahaha.

Tomorrow I start on StarTropics because dear goodness do I need to get myself in front of a console instead of a computer.

[Nert]

So I typically have at least two games going at a time, decided to kick off with Life Force and Banjo Kazooie, so far enjoying both. It's nice having the contrast of light hearted collectathon to memorizing a tough shooter.

In Life Force I've made it to the second boss without dying, and the gradius effect is definitely there. Death=instant reset for me. It gets really tough powering up again half way through a level. But regardless I do really like the power up system and the way you can switch it up a bit depending on the situation. I enjoy a good challenge and I'm not disappointed.

As for Banjo, I cleared the first level, got all the jiggies and bottles' abilities. Missing one note but didn't feel like looking around for it. Entered the second level, treasure trove cove, but haven't gone in yet. As a kid I played DK64 and definitely see some similarities, so far I feel like Banjo does a better job with the collectibles, not going too far with it, but I find the platforming and movement more fun in DK. Thank God for Talon Trot, the movement was painfully slow up until you get that move. Not sure if I like it more than DK at this point, it's too early in.

Definitely happy to be playing these two so far

[Key-Glyph]

It also has some proper troll moments where you have to jump across the screen transition gap but there's no block on the other side so you instantly die without being able to react, which is fun.

Yeah, I just hit one of those. I was not happy.

So far StarTropics has been really charming. It obviously owes a lot to The Legend of Zelda, but its atmosphere is totally different, so to me it feels fresh. I like the two styles of gameplay -- roaming about in the overworld versus hack-and-slash in the dungeon -- although I guess I wish the overworld sections had more exploration and less "talk to person A so that person B will let you through the gate, the end." Still, though, so cute, so endearingly 1990s wacky.

But back to the instadeath. Man, dying in a dungeon is such a pain. If you lose a life, you start at some predetermined point in the dungeon with the minimum three hearts, none of the special items you may have picked up, and no way to exit to the overworld (unless you've lost all your lives). It is really hard to recover from this. I've been trying to figure this fire boss out and I make a little bit of headway each encounter, but when I inevitably die I basically have to wait until I game over so I can walk back to the nearest village, fill up my health, and then give a real potentially successful attempt another go. It's frustrating. Especially with the existence of troll moments.

Speaking of which, there's an item in the dungeon that gives you a random number of extra lives. I just got -1! -1 lives! It took a life away! Bah StarTropics, bah!

Here's hoping this fire dungeon is a weird imbalanced area and the rest are more intuitively designed like the first three or so. How ya doin' with it, ESauced?

UPDATE: I just figured the boss out and I laughed at myself.

[alienjesus]

More Resident Evil tonight. Spoilers ahead!

I picked up at the residence after killing the giant plant boss. Made it back to the mansion and encountered some hunters. who killed me.

Reloaded, did the same again. I took Popo's advice and started carrying the grenade launcher with me to use on hunters. I found an MO disc, killed a giant snake, and got a wolf and eagle medal. Then I went into some underground tunnels.

In the underground tunnels I found the leader of Bravo team, who informed me there was a traitor and then was shot by a mysterious assassin. I then killed a giant spider and went deeper underground, where I ran into Barry. Then I encountered Lisa, who is an invincible Zombie, and Barry betrayed me and ran away with the lift leaving me stuck.

Anyhow, I got out, found an altar and Barry, who attempted to shoot me but lost. Then I gave him his gun back so he could help me defeat the Lisa boss fight. Barry is a bad-ass, and thanks to him I won without taking damage.

Now I'm in an underground lab, and based on what I know about the game, shouldn't be too far from the ending.

Spoilers over

After that, I decided to chill with some Crazy Taxi. I had a good time, but then either my disc or dreamcast decided to start playing up - the music kept skipping and cutting out, and the game would be slow to load various areas of scenery, leaving my taxi dirving through empty space bouncing off of invisible buildings. Very furstrating. A quick disc clean didn't seem to help, so I'll come back to it later. As for 'beating' the game, I guess maybe the Crazy Box stuff is what I should be doing, but in all honesty I think I'll just call this one 'unbeatable' and play it a few times to count it done for my summer challenge.

Next up after Resi is likely to be Shenmue 2, assuming that my Dreamcast co-operates with me.

[Xeogred]

Yeah, you're making really good progress in REmake. Hope you're digging it. *thumbs up*

[ESauced]

Here's hoping this fire dungeon is a weird imbalanced area and the rest are more intuitively designed like the first three or so. How ya doin' with it, ESauced?

I just got into the second dungeon and now I’m out of town. Hoping to make some progress this week when I get back. Looks like I have some tougher gameplay to look forward to.

[casterofdreams]

I failed to finish Megaman Battle Network 1 this weekend, something that was on my to-do list.

The reason is that the game used a game padding roadblock that stopped the story. Out of the 175 chips in the game I had to have owned at least 75 in order to advance the story (on top of a secondary requirement). At the time I ran into this roadblock I had about 50. It took a solid two to three hours to get the 25 chips I needed. Farmed money to buy chips, tried to look for enemies with dropped chips I didn’t own. Felt like I wanted to give up at multiple points.

I hope the rest of the series doesn’t have this roadblock. I can handle a one and done thing. Not six games worth.

[Key-Glyph]

• The Last Express (DOS)
  Maniac Mansion (NES)
  Lemmings (GEN)
  Metroid Fusion (GBA)
  LOOM (ScummVM)
  Tetris (GB)
  Resident Evil: Code Veronica (PS2)
  Ultima III: Exodus (NES)
  Where in America's Past is Carmen Sandiego? (DOS)
  
  StarTropics (NES)

I got a bit fixated on StarTropics these past few days and wound up finishing it tonight. I'm trying to decide how I should describe the experience. "Quirky" comes to mind, but doesn't quite cover it. I mean, I really enjoyed it, but it's just so bizarre, and I'm trying to understand how a big part of why I loved it is that I felt like it was punching me in the arm the whole time. Does that make any sense? Well, it makes about as much sense as the game itself does -- so I guess the two of us were truly meant to be after all.

Playing this game is to get the distinct impression you're seeing the 1990s American childhood experience as understood by Japanese developers, then translated back into English. It's using Babelfish to turn English into Japanese into English, but instead of words you're using culture. I firmly believe that excellent grad school dissertations could be written on it.

I have never seen something that has wanted to be a Saturday morning cartoon more badly than StarTropics -- not even some Saturday morning cartoons. You've got your cool kid toy doubling as your deadly weapon (a yo-yo), random trademark foods that are treated as if they're hilarious when they're a recurring theme (banana cream pies anyone?!), cool non-parent relatives doing cool secret science, aliens, plot beats that feel like they're supposed to be heavy but have literally no lore behind them, McGuffins that you (of course!) have to collect and combine into something without knowing what or why... and P.S., almost everything is a reference to soda. It's fascinating.

As for the gameplay, I got seriously hooked. Even when I was frustrated I never actually wanted to stop playing. The dungeon parts are much more puzzley than The Legend of Zelda, and I loved this, although I do have a bone to pick with how often the game groomed you into certain expectations just to subvert them in an attempt to make you pull your hair out. As a quick example, hidden paths through walls had a tell early on in the game that the designers decided to forego later on. And I don't mean paths that lead to optional stuff; I mean necessary paths. Sure, you will probably always find what you need one way or another... but you'll spend a half hour barking up the wrong tree and dying repeatedly before you realize how mistaken you were. And again, this is just one example. Oh boy do I have more.

What was nice was that when you knew the rooms' tricks you could blast through pretty quickly to where you died your last death, but redoing certain sections did get tiring. This was especially the case when the part handing you your butt had you exclaiming at the television, "What am I even supposed to DO here?"

My point is... this game gets under your skin in a good way. I would groan and mutter light insults at the instadeaths and trickery, but I never felt any real animosity toward it. It was like a sibling playing pranks on you. At first you're surprised, then annoyed, but then you decide despite yourself that it was ridiculous enough to be weirdly endearing. Mostly.

I was always delightfully befuddled by the writing, happy about making progress, and endlessly singing along with the stellar jams. Would I recommend it? Yep -- as both a wacky study in media presentation and a strange assortment of gameplay mechanics.