Finished Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts (SNES)

This one, I streamed it live on Twitch. Thanks to those who joined in! The playthrough consisted of going through all levels of the game, beating the last boss, then doing all levels AGAIN and beating the new final boss to get the "real" ending. Completion time: about 2 hours 16 minutes.

This game was released by Capcom in '91, making it very early-gen. It is notorious for being a finicky oldschool 2D platformer. It is all about double-jumping and its unique flavor of double-jumping is hard to get used to. It is easy to take damage and taking two damages kills you.

Something I like about this game is how it's easy to just dive in and play without much time commitment. No long, annoying cutscenes, no tutorial, you just sort of blast right through. I practiced this game a bit while listening to an audio-book and it was a nice way to keep myself occupied. As some telegraphing is sound-based it's not super mute friendly but you can do it.

It has some things going for it: the art direction is good for the time at which it came out, and the early and midgame levels are creatively designed.

The game is severely held back by the amount of content recycling. Enemies, bosses, level progression. The hardest-to-forgive is how it forces you to effectively play through the same content twice to get to the ending.

I don't recommend this game. If you want a sense of what its art direction has to offer, play a different but related game Demon's Crest.

Finished Yoshi's Island (SNES)

In this, 'finished' means 100 points on every stage of all worlds including the extra stages.

The extra stages include some Kaizo level nonsense. I'm thinking particularly of Hit That Switch. I did Hit that switch while streaming though. Darn, I should have recorded it...

This game is different from the usual format. In it, instead of Mario controlling Yoshi, Yoshi must escort the infant Mario around. If Mario becomes separated from Yoshi he makes a terrible noise, so there is a strong non-gameplay incentive to not let that happen.

This is the game where it is apparently revealed that Mario and Luigi are twins. Is this canon?

Finished Kirby Super Star (SNES)

Kirby Super Star consists of '9-games-in-one'. 'Finished' here means '100% completion'

The concept and envrionments of Kirby are so darn cute I want to hate it but I just can't.

Finished Pilotwings (SNES)

Is it possible to make a game entirely in Mode 7? Yes

Pilotwings is very earlygen SNES. It showcases the capabilities of Mode 7 graphics (texture-mapped plane which can be scaled/rotated/perspective transformed) to get something of a faux 3D. There are six flight modes: small plane, skydiving, rocketbelt (like a jetpack), hang-glider, helicopter, and some thing like a wing suit.

Defeating the first four courses unlocks the 'expert' mode, where the courses have some difficult twist (ice and snow, night, strong winds, etc) plus other difficulty adjustments. Clearing all expert courses clears the game

Too bad flight simulators are a dead genre. ("something something Microsoft Flight Simulator", Microsoft Flight Simulator is older than I am) ("something something indie games" . okay) Unfortunately I think that to make a flight simulator marketable nowadays, it needs to have combat elements incorporated. Thinking about it, the last-released flight sim I remember playing was Il-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey on Xbox 360 which had reasonable mainstream success. That one takes place in a war scenario obviously with the shooting mechanics you would expect.

Pilotwings did not make the cut for SNES classic but maybe the IP will get picked up for the Switch.

Ogre Battle is one of the best RTS franchises of all time. Which is surprising since it is a console game. You play as army leader <your name here> organizing a rebellion against an evil empire. The game consists of micromanaging how your army units are formed, where they go, who they attack. For each character in a unit, you pick out equipment, formation and role. Battles themselves play out automatically according to what attack policy you use, but you can also interrupt the flow of battle to issue some commands.

What makes this game so great is the gameplay and level of polish. The gameplay is complicated enough to be immensely replayable, without feeling bogged down by too many shoehorned-in mechanics. The polish comes from the nice pre-rendered backgrounds in the battle scenes, character and spell animations with a lot of frames and a lot of variety. Ogre Battle 64 really nailed this type of art direction imo, but MotBQ is where it all started.

The in-battle and out-of-battle gameplay are very different from each other- it changes from this customizable turn based thing to your typical RTS with an overworld map. The closest other game I can think to compare it to is Bahamut Lagoon (NOT Lagoon different game)

The game has thirteen different endings depending on decisions- some picky, some irreversible- you make throughout.

A long time ago, I rented this game repeatedly but I wasn't able to beat it. Some jerk rented it after me and over-wrote my save. IIRC they also named the overwriting character "BUTTS" or something dumb.

Other related titles in this franchise are Tactice Ogre- of the same "Tactics" genre as Final Fantasy Tactics, Dynasty Warriors Tactics etc- and Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber

Dying 10000x at Lion King Souls: Ashes of Rafiki

Finished Super Mario RPG (SNES)

Do you remember back when Nintendo's first party titles tried to push the limits of the current technology?

Since I had done the "finish all my Super Nintendo games I currently own" I bought this new one. This game was not technically new to me since I played it all the way through as a child but I wanted to re-visit it.

I'm of the opinion that this game is the spiritual precursor to Paper Mario. They share the same role-playing elements and comedic style. Before SMRPG- and not counting weird outlyer games like "Mario is Missing"- Mario was a side-scrolling platformer and that was basically it. This was a first in having a Mario game with a character-driven story, EXP and inventory management, and so on. It has a very disctinctive level of polish, and so I think Paper Mario went on to build on this idea later.

SMRPG- which is top-down isometric 2D- achieves a "3D-looking style" through pre-rendered 3D graphics and creative ways of having planes overlap each other. You would not guess that this game was for a platform optimized for copying 16x16 sprites since literally nothing appears to have square boundaries. So many things have curved, irregular edges and unusual types of blending. The sprites all look like shaded 3D models because they are (were). One other game that comes to mind which used these same techniques is Donkey Kong Country 1/2/3 but SMRPG has larger, more varied worlds and characters and so I think it represents a greater level of achievement.

Given the sizes of sprites and envrionment with the lack of repitition or content recycling, I have no idea how they were able to fit a game of this size into 32MB. Performance-wise it was one of only a handful of games that were accelerated by the SA-1 chip though.

The game uses QTEs in all fights which keep things from getting boring or too grind-y.

In this game someone from the Final Fantasy franchise makes an appearance. In this playthrough I beat Culex, an optional boss- for the first time. I can see why this was optional. This was harder than literally anything else in this game including the final boss.

Japanese, USA and German respectively.

The Germans do not mess around with their box art

Finished Rocko's Modern Life, the SNES action game based on the '90s Nickelodeon cartoon.

I remember watching this cartoon thinking was pretty funny while also kind of gross because when I was little, I didn't like seeing eating of hearts, brains, etc. It looked really disturbing. Don't know if I'd find it gross now? Apparently the show also had lots of innuendos which had to have gone totally over my head at the time since I don't recall that.

The video game inspired by the cartoon is essentially escort mission genre. There are a bunch of puzzles and obstacles, and you must guide your silly dog Spunky to the goal (golden fire hydrant) at the end of each level.

Spunky moves indiscriminately, autonomously forward- but you can make him switch directions or pause in one spot for a short time, and manipulate the environment to affect where he goes. The game allows you to pause and view the entire map if you want, so you can plot out a course of which items and environmental features to use. Overall difficulty I think is low-med.

The environments and sprites are pretty sizable and visually consistent with the cartoon. There are lots of frames of animation in things. The game makes use of wavefile sound (actual voice clips). I don't have rosy nostalgia goggles for this cartoon, I don't have them for this game either, so it was just okay.

The game is not very long or difficult- I played basically the entire thing while on a Skype call with my mom. Now I'm finally running out of SNES games not-yet-beaten.

Maybe it's time to suck it up and get Ringed City.

A technical problem-

Need to play 3-player SNES game on emulator with two other people across the internet. (This is on a game which supports multi-tap).

Option #1: ZSNES netplay. Seemed appealing at first because I used it before with two-player games, with some success.
Why it doesn't work: No connectivity between three machines. Limit is two.

Option #2: Snes9x netplay. Seemed okay at first because it supports 3+ machines (or supposedly, however many you want as spectators). And, in some ways isn't as brittle as ZSNES's netplay.
Why it doesn't work: Horribly unsable, and if anything goes remotely out of sync, rather than recover it will reset the game for everyone. There are supposed to be syncing options other than resetting but those don't work, only resetting does. The problem is serious enough for it to be unplayable.

Option #3: Wii Virtual console. Seemed appealing as this game is really on VC.
Why it doesn't work: It won't let you play with other people over the Internet, with others in your Wii friends list as you might expect, only local (replicating the original). What a lazy port... It would have been such an easy grab of $10 x 3 dollars in this case.

Option #4: Use some random reliable screen sharing program to share the screen. (e.g., Skype)
Why it's not great: Only one player can play at a time.

It's utterly pathetic that #4 is the best option.

Does anyone have any other suggestions? If I absolutely have to use #4, maybe I can use some kind of stripped-down remote assistance to share out some keyboard input.

What to do?

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