Finished Gundam Wing: Endless Duel (SNES)
Story Mode with Vayeate

This is a Gundam-inspired fighting game released in Japan only. You can play as several of the Gundams from the show. Gosh this game has so much graphical polish and the soundtrack is A++++. For this I played through the story mode and recorded it on my capture card.

I got this replica cart to play it

From playthrough (recorded with my awesome new capture card)--

Deathscythe and Epyon if unlocked are very over-powered in this game. In general the mechs are not very balanced. Still, my regular tends to be Vayeate because it is my favorite from the show. Life would be boring if everyone playing Street Fighter was Zangief, right?? Vayeate has a couple good features- this huge space rifle-like thing that can be used as a bludgeoning weapon, plus a few attacks that go diagonally.

Animal Crossing (for Gamecube) contains a functional, hidden Famicom emulator

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Don't use tool-assisted gameplay as a sole reference for good non-tool-assisted strategies.

Look online to find a good assortment of Super Ghouls N Ghosts videos and gameplay footage. Great! Find one. Looks good. All levels. They take no damage. A very skilled player, for sure. As I looked more closely, something was off.

1) The player had a very inconsistent level of skill.

They could always handle dense 'bullet hell' situations, but took many tries to jump onto a ledge. Ledge is simple and flat and not hazardous.

2) The player was unfazed with many serious 'close calls'.

Close calls' are a part of this genre of game, as well as some understanding of hitboxes, but these are extreme cases. In most circumstances, a typical human player* will react to 'close calls' by slowing down, leaving more space and using more caution.

3) The player performs normally-very-dangerous maneuvers, with some knowledge from the future that those maneuvers are safe.

For example, jumping straight into collision with a boss while attacking it. Normally that would be lethal. But if you know that your attack will be the finishing blow to kill the boss, and death disables its hitboxes, then it's fine.
Since this game has no health bars, a human player cannot exploit the last-hit-to-kill-the-boss without keeping a mental count of hits. A boss fight is a stressful situation. It's hard for a human to keep a mental count during it. And think of cost versus benefit. If the player is skilled enough to last the whole fight landing attacks safely, what's one more? Is the opportunity of that suicide jump worth the mental tax that it takes? Not really.

After digging through Youtube comments a little, I found out that the run was indeed tool assisted. I've been burned by this before. They don't put 'tool assisted' in the title or description or anywhere obvious before posting it, so you don't know. Don't be tricked! I would play better too, if I could rewind and replay parts...

Finished Wonder Project J (SNES)

What it is- Pinocchio: the anime game

The scientist Geppetto has constructed a robot named Pino, part of a special family of robots called Gijin. In a tragic and sudden surprise, Geppetto was captured by the evil rulers of the kingdom before he was able to finish Pino's programming. You play as Tinker, a magical fairy who guides Pino toward being able to rescue the kingdom and his creator Geppetto.

You don't control Pino directly, but Tinker. Tinker can direct Pino left or right, or tell him to stop; signal to him "right!" or "wrong!" She can tell him to interact with an object, she can pick up and move objects.

Interactions with Tinker comprise the building blocks with which Pino learns language, combat, good manners, sports, musical instruments. And how not to eat the cat. (In my 1st playthrough he hoisted the cat up into the air and into his mouth and it disappeared. I think it's a glitch, but he gained a bunch of health from it, so... I dunno...)

Another game never released in the west. It turns out there is not much of a market for these sorts of simulators. It was tantalizing reading about this in Nintendo Power magazine but there was no typical way to play it.

Playing it in the late 90s / early 2000s was difficult because it was only available in Japanese and there didn't yet exist any English-language guides. Fortunately the gameplay is very all-ages friendly and visually explanatory, so it worked well as a learning tool for some words and vocabulary at that time.

Graphically it was all about really layered, complicated backgrounds and big smoothly-animated characters. Oh, and voice acting. In an SNES game. When Pino learns something, he actually says "Wakatte wa!" (Got it! / I understand it). There's a poignant moment where he says "Arigatou... minna". There were maybe 5 or 6 voice clips like that. Voice acting in SNES games exists but it's very rare. I really want to know what percent of the cartridge was dedicated to storing wave file sound.

Today there is a 100% complete fan translation. A really good one at that. I'm glad to be playing it now!

Became Immortal in Deathwish (PC, Telnet)

MUD, MUSH, MUCK, and MOO, or MU*/ M** are classes of text-based multiplayer game which tend to be played over Telnet protocol. Originating from a time where there was Internet but no web browsers, many MUDs were popular in the 80s and 90s and some are still played today.

Deathwish has been continuously online since '94, making it one of the oldest MUDs still in continuous operation.

Once called "Aaezure Odyssey", I played it in the late 90s and early 2000s. The idea of playing a game over the Internet was really appealing, and graphical online games-- while some existed-- were a bad experience over the local dial-up. To describe this experience accurately, I didn't have an Internet-capable computer at home for most of this, but it was a nice treat getting to play this game at my friend's house, free computer hour at school or at the library. I had a friend in grade school where we'd sit down at her computer and play this game together and it was overall a good time.

In the game's early days, the name Aaezure Odyssey was adapted because Deathwish was off-putting for some people. Since then the game has reverted back to its original name.

In 2001ish our family "upgraded" from a modem-less Apple II/c to a Windows 98 computer with working dial-up so I got a lot more opportunities to play these sorts of games. I tried out a lot of different MU*s of many different genres. But I never found one I liked as much as Deathwish.

My old character was definitely purged for idleness since it had not been logged on for about 20 years. I wasn't sweating that too much, especially since I wanted a new toon so that I could re-experience the whole game. The purging policy used to exist to save server space. It's not necessary now.

There were some artifacts of older times in the MUD documentation and in the MUD itself. It's a remnant of a very different Internet. I swear somewhere there was at least one :₋). In the connected documentation to the MUD there was a helpful page explaining terms such as "lag", "flame", and "newbie".

Fast forward to the current year. Log in, get past character creation and... there were actual other people playing this game. Not a ton, but... enough for it to shock me when I saw it. At odd hours, there would only be a few characters. On, say, a Saturday night, there would be 10-20 characters, with about 1-3 characters per human person. Seeing people playing and conversing with each other- this is on a MUD, in what is now the late 2010s. How? What is this? I'd type some 'about' command, and alongside the link to the normal hosted page, there was a Facebook link. What universe is this?

I rolled a mage as my main, and a paladin alt, partied them together and multi-played them in two side-by-side Telnet clients. The client I used had good support for scriptability so I was able to brush off my Lua, automate a lot of common actions and make the experience less grind-y and save myself some typing. Eventually, I had a cleric too, multi-playing three toons at once which is the limit.

There were moments in this game that were funny, fascinating, strange, surprising, and emotionally engaging. In some of the room descriptions and zone design you feel like there is entire world behind them even though it's just text. It was such an adventure playing through the mortal playthrough. See, I thought I experienced a good amount of it the first time I played way back. But the game is deeper than I ever could have imagined.

Since I had reached the level cap I was given the option to "remort" my character- meaning, reset to level 1 except with some interesting improvements- or become immortal. Becoming immortal revealed a new game. That game is basically a meta-game. It is something awesome and really overwhelming.

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 Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise (PC, DOS)

The Fatty Bear franchise is affiliated with the Putt-Putt franchise. Although Putt-Putt spanned many games, Fatty Bear was well liked and this game was re-released on Steam too.

A little girl named Kayla has a teddy bear named Fatty Bear and he and Kayla's other toys come to life when no one is looking. Since tomorrow is Kayla's birthday, the toys work together to make her surprise party a very special one. You need to help Fatty bake her a cake, decorate a sign, and ensure her present arrives intact.

Fatty can inspect things, and pick them up, and you navigate Fatty through the house to get cake ingredients, keys for doors, and other things that he needs. Clicking on objects makes them come to life and the animations are very entertaining and silly. Or, Fatty will have an animation with that object. Fatty is so cute!

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.

My first time playing this game on real hardware.

I treat the SHARP and 90s game consoles very differently.

The SNES I'll carry it any which way. Power it off unsafely, leave it on for days, use the reset in an angry manner, be negligent with carts and so forth. Also, the fat PS2 has been taken apart and "repaired" (ask me in person if you want more details about this).

However, the SHARP is different. I move it very carefully and keep it upright. Touch nothing unless necessary. All disks must be either in the system, or in protective cases inside boxes. It must always be transported by me, in my car, in a cool temperature. And, minimize the number of FDD transactions.

That last one is the biggest one and it actively affects gameplay. I play in order to minimize the number of FDD reads and writes.

The death penalty in Lagoon is not high in terms of gameplay setbacks, but it is high in terms of disk switching. Dying will reset the game back into the starting area (disk 1), from which you will typically need to insert disk 2 or 3 to resume your save- that's 2 disk swaps. And starting the game from boot requires 2 swaps across both FDD0 and FDD1. (boot + data1 --> user + data1--> user + data2). And then of course 1 save == 1 write.

Put it all together, and you want to have few, long playthroughs. Try not to save too much, but also really try not to die. Don't unnecessarily venture into areas which are stored on a different disk.

Is all of this strictly necessary? Maybe, maybe not. Is this founded? I think so.

All the while playing through Lagoon there is this nagging feeling in the back of my head like my days playing it are numbered.

Like the raw number of FDD transactions it can do is finite. While this is true for any piece of computer hardware ever, there is reason to believe it's much more imminent on this machine. With every seek, every read, every grinding noise that comes out of the FDD- that brings it closer to no longer working. I was especially nervous at the in-game disk switching prompts (besides the boot disk and saved game disk, the game is spanned across 3 data disks). All this was despite the fact this unit has had capacitors replaced and that sort of usual stuff. Eventually, this machine will break down and then the only option will be an emulator compatible with contemporary PCs.

The other problem is media and loading it. This is my second copy of Lagoon. The first copy I obtained several years ago. When I tried to boot it, the boot disk showed CRC fail. The data disks couldn't be read. While this was a disappointment, it was not altogether a surprise. This happens with old disks and FDDs from that time period. It's not even uncommon now. Recently when I was playing with the TRS-80 with my coworker, we tried loading some games from the late 80s on 5-1/4" floppies. We had about a 10% success rate and blew out one FDD where it started to smoke so we unplugged it for the fire hazard.

I'm extremely lucky for having acquired fully working games with fully working hardware. There are a bajillion things that can go wrong with 5 1/4" disks stored away for 30 years shipped from the other side of the world. If I try and play this game again in 5 or 10 years, I might not be able to. I have a bad feeling about this computer. It has already started happening where it will power on, render corruption, fail to boot into Human68k. I'm going to stay positive, and reflect on the good times on this platform.

Boot and resume save at gold cave

Ending credits

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.