So today is day 91 of my 100 NES games in 100 day challenge. Fortunately for me though I finished my 100th game a few days back and successfully completed my second 100 NES game in 100 day challenge!!! What started off with many fairly simple games (children's titles, and game shows mostly) ended up being pretty satisfying overall. I played a lot of great titles that I have been neglecting like Gemfire, Nightshade, Bucky O'Hare and many others. Since my last update these are the game I have finished though:
One of my favorite publishers Taito, put out a cool little puzzler appropriately called Puzznic. In Puzznic you have a time limit in which to figure out how to match 2 or more colored gems together in order to clear the entire play area. What starts of as very simple matching eventually becomes pretty tough in the later few levels. Its a very simple premise and even though you have a time limit that only really matters if you're worried about score. If you just want to progress to the next puzzle its quite a relaxing game as you can take your time experimenting until you come up with the right solution.
In addition to the regular Puzznic game there is also a Gravnic mode. In Gravnic you have the same goal of matching gems, but instead of sliding the gems around the screen individually you change the gravity of the entire room causing all the gems to react at once. If you check out my video you'll see that I spent well over 7 hours playing Puzznic/Gravnic in order to solve all the puzzles. For an NES game I feel the packed a lot of value into this little puzzler. Would have been great to see a 2-player mode, but if you like solo puzzle games its definitely worth checking out.
Track & Field II is a game that I've actually been plugging away at for weeks now. I've mentioned in the past that I don't like using Turbo controllers and that made this game extremely challenging. In fact I'd rank it among the most challenging games I've been able to beat when playing it with a standard controller. The final day of the game was the most taxing for myself with both the Archery and Horizontal Bar giving me a TON of trouble and countless failed attempts. The game is fun when playing against human opponents, but its pretty frustrating when playing to win the single player at times. Not to mention that I had to take 1-2 week breaks in between my attempts to let my poor fingers recover from the massacre they endured by mashing the A button so much. In fact I literally tore a chunk of my fingernail during one attempt. Glad to be done this one.
After Track & Field II it was nice to slow things down again with something like Swords & Serpents. Its a fairly basic First Person Dungeon Crawler. Just the speed of game I was looking for at the time. There is a dragon at the bottom of a 16 floor dungeon and your goal is to slay it. Simple as that. Each floor has a different little theme or trick to it to spice things up a bit. There are check points on the 1st, 5th and 10th floors, but otherwise you must use warps or stairs to traverse down to the bottom. The password system as Bombatomba has pointed out is pretty brutal in this game though. Each of your 4 characters has a code as well as your overall game, and in addition to that you have to rename your characters each time you start the game up. Because of this it takes 3-5 minutes just to start playing again each time. Other than that little hiccup and the 9th floor which I wasn't a big fan of the game was a lot of fun. Very simple, easy to understand, and fun.
To keep things on the same pace as I was still recovering from Track & Field II I popped in Tombs & Treasure. This game is a little hybrid of RPG, Point & Click Adventure, and Dungeon Crawling. Like Swords & Serpents Bombatomba has spoken a bit about it during his summer challenge last year. Like a lot of early adventure games I felt you lacked direction quite often and it was challenging to know where to go and what to do. Not the best example of any of the genres it takes on, but its kind of a neat offering overall. Worth checking out only if you're a big fan of any of the genres or just want to try something a bit unique.
What better way to finish off my 100 day challenge than by slaying yet another Dragon? I was very pleasantly surprise by AD&D Dragon Strike so I thought I'd check out the only other Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game I owned, Heroes of the Lance. Again I was kind of surprised by the style as I had assumed it to be a first person RPG or dungeon crawler of some sort. I was a side scrolling action RPG instead. You have a group of 8 characters who are represented by whomever you have place at the front of your team. Your goal is to traverse a dungeon and slay a dragon with a specific staff that you start the game with.
The team they provide you with is pretty diverse and features warriors, clerics, wizards, dwarfs, elves, etc. Lots of different classes and races to play around with. The game itself was much shorter than I had anticipated though. Once you figure out how to approach different enemies (such as attacking them high, middle or low or what spells are most effective) its a pretty simple game too. The last boss is huge and terrifying, but if you managed to keep the staff with you and use it on him it isn't really a battle. He dies in one hit from it. Definitely didn't do as much for me as Dragon Strike, but still a very interesting game and has been looking forward to trying the other 2 AD&D games.
Here is the full list of 325 NES games beaten since October 2011 when I started my first challenge. This 100 in 100 challenge started with Sesame Street Countdown and ended with AD&D Heroes of the Lance.
Future Plans - Take a short break from NES and play Batman Arkham Asylum with the rfgen community. Maybe play another modern game or two and then return to the NES, but at a much more relaxed rate. Still craving some slow moving games so I plan to check out some stuff like Wizardy or some of the KOEI games I've been neglecting.
