Summer Games Challenge 2016

[Exhuminator]

IIRC there is a way to get a bad ending and destroy the Earth. I hope you do that by accident just for laughs.

[CFFJR]

IIRC there is a way to get a bad ending and destroy the Earth. I hope you do that by accident just for laughs.

You're remembering correctly, it is possible to do that.

But, Ack is well past the point that it can be done, as it happens before the endgame. He's already deactivated the weapon in question.

[Ack]

Yeah, it is actually quite early on, in Level 2. You fire the laser without overloading it, and SHODAN thanks you for razing the Earth. Of course I did it!

[Key-Glyph]

Go Ack go! I am loving these super-detailed novelizations of your gaming adventures. (Also, I could have sworn Ack mentioned blowing up the earth by accident in one of his posts, but I've reread the past few about three times over now and can't find what I thought I read.)

EDIT: Ninja'd by Ack himself!

As for my progress... I finally beat Bases Loaded II. Here's a photograph of my three pages' worth of codes and biorhythm notes:

Since I was grinding away at this for about a month or more, and because I'd played over 80 baseball games by the end of it, I feel like I really, really know this title now.

Bases Loaded II is fun. Seriously. There's a reason why my brother and I would play a few rounds of it every summer of our childhoods, and why we would pack up and lug the NES to our annual two-week stay at a tiny beach house. With an average match lasting somewhere between ten and thirty minutes, you could easily snag a win or two while your parents were making lunch or picking up groceries and feel fulfilled. The game isn't particularly hard, either -- even when you're not trying. And on top of it all, I'd forgotten some of the ridiculous things my brother used to showcase to make me laugh, like making the first baseman toss the ball to himself, diving for no reason, using the bunt mechanic to make your batter dance, pegging the other team's batter with an extreme curveball... it really brought back some good feelings.

About the difficulty, though: what interested me a lot is that Bases Loaded II doesn't get any harder as you progress. There is no difficulty curve of any kind; instead, each opposing team seems to have something they're good at and something they're bad at. A team with tight fielding might kinda suck at the plate, a team that sucks at the plate might have a killer pitcher, and so on. The only consistent problem I had was with one pitcher for the D.C. team, who would throw crazy shit that involved my pressing more than one direction on the D-pad to get an occasional hit. Compared to that, even the World Series was a pushover: the danger there was simply that a ton of the L.A. batters were extremely prone to home runs. So, I just threw really slow pitches and relied on the outrageous outfielding instincts I'd honed over the many, many hours I'd sunk into this.

Another thing I learned this time around was that those cool-looking biorhythm things? Those actually matter. A lot. As a kid I didn't have the insight or patience to track my players' stats (I mostly just traced my finger along the animated sine wave visualizations because they looked awesome), and when I picked the game up this summer I thought I could maintain the same ignorance. NOPE.

The biorhythms are three stats that govern aspects of your players' performance: how fast they run, how likely they are to hit curve balls, how much power they'll hit with. After each game, each stat will have a value next to it ranging from -8 to 8. The moment I realized these things actually mattered was maybe the fourth of fifth game I played without changing my starting lineup. None of my batters hit a single pitch. I thought the game was cheating because I hadn't lost a match yet. Then I thought, huh, maybe I'll restart and change some players around, and boom. Clobbered the opposition. From that game on, I would mark down next to every password which players were fit enough to keep in the lineup and which ones needed some rest.

Once you've won 75 games, BLII immediately and jarringly declares you League Champion and moves you into the World Series. Then, once you beat the majority of the seven World Series matches, you're the World Champions. (They even give you passwords after every World Series game, so it's not like you have to do this in one run or play flawlessly. There's literally nothing at stake, except your time, and possibly sanity.)

I don't know if I'd truly recommend that anyone try to beat this game, but I will say that I did have a lot of fun. I hit some slouch periods where I started feeling numbed from doing the same thing over and over and over with no new abilities or twists to freshen the gameplay, and somewhere around game 49 I hit a player's block and didn't go back to it for about a week. But for the most part, spending nights in my Retro Room and listening to the PixelTunes Radio podcast while I ground toward the Championship was enjoyable, and I will probably look back on this with weird fondness someday.

If you do want to beat a game like this, I recommend two things: 1) do not set a deadline for yourself, and instead let yourself organically progress in spurts over weeks, months, even years, and 2) DO SOMETHING ELSE WHILE YOU PLAY. Got a backlog of CDs or MP3s you haven't listened to yet? Got some podcasts you've been wanting to get into? Have long-distance friends in other timezones you'd love to find more time to chat with? Bases Loaded II wants to give you that chance!

[alienjesus]

Some progress on Fire Emblem 1:

I first took on Map 11. This map has a fortress at the top protected by a couple of ballistae, some cavalry and a few other guys. This is all blovked off my mountains that only peg knights can cross, but there's no way Sheeda/Caeda could survive that on her own. The bottom right of the map was also mostly blocked by mountains and was full of Mercenaries. Caeda COULD take those on her own, so she cleared out all 8 of them for me, which was handy as she was a little behind on levels. I recruited Linde, who is a badass in this version. She was good in Shadow Dragon on DS, but she's excellent from the outset here - already giving Merrick a run for his money despite being 9 levels lower.

I was surprised to discover Ballista users in this game don't work like every other game in the series. In all other versions, including the remake of this game, they have incredibly long range to make up for their low movement and speed. This makes a map like this where they can pepper you with arrows as you approach pretty lethal. In FE1 though, they're like the armor knight version of archers - super slow, super defensive and super low movement, only they have a bow weapon that can hit 2 squares away, just like an archer. That's a massie downgrade from the 7-10 squares of later games, and make the ballista a joke when isolated - you can just walk right inside their range and surround them, although they're a bastard to kill with that defense.

I then did level 12 which was a pretty basic indoor map. 5 new recruits are inside a cell at the start being shot with arrows, so you have to rush to kill the archers and unlock the door ASAP. They also have no weapons, so the game wants you to arm them too, which I sort of did. They're useless and theres not enough enemies to worry about using them, so I just dumped so old weaponry on them from my guys as I'm running low on inventory space!

Chapter 13 was hell in Shadow Dragon because it features almost entirely Ballista enemies on a long straight path - moving forward would put you in range of about 14 of them at once, requiring tons of luck to get through - especially with the mages who were the best at killing the ballista. With the nerfed Ballista here it'll be a different kind of pain - they're not all that dangerous offensively, but most of my guys can't even hurt the fuckers with that kind of defense. My mages are gonna get a fuckload of EXP this map.

[BoneSnapDeez]

How many maps are there brah?

[alienjesus]

How many maps are there brah?

25. I'm not even half way

[Exhuminator]

The Scheme is a crazy game. I thought it was a Metroid ripoff. It is not a Metroid ripoff. If I can beat this sucker, this will be a fun game to review.

[BoneSnapDeez]

The rabbit hole of unlocalized side-scrolling retro action-RPGs goes pretty deep. There are tons and many of them are pretty rad.

[Ack]

Well, folks, it's done. Earth is saved, SHODAN has kicked the proverbial bucket, and I've officially completed both System Shock games. I'll do a write up in the Games Beaten thread in a bit. Short review: the game's fun. You should play it.

Also, it has come to my attention that I have officially beaten all 10 of the games on my Summer Challenge list. I believe this requires music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YehLQEp_88I

10/10 BEATEN:

Alone in the Dark
Call of Duty 2
Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra
Mortal Kombat 3
Sanitarium
Silent Hill
System Shock
Thief Gold
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter
Ultima II