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Post by Sarge on Jan 23, 2020 13:24:02 GMT -5
Xeogred : I noticed there was a Lolo speed run at AGDQ this year.
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Post by Xeogred on Jan 23, 2020 22:08:07 GMT -5
Nice. Seems like a straightforward run and just brute force memorization of the entire game. Which is easier said than done, haha. It gets interesting when he starts doing some levels quick enough so that the timing of some of the enemies doesn't slow him down, having to wait for them to do another movement cycle or whatnot.
Did anyone check the Lolo's out this month?
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Post by Sarge on Jan 23, 2020 22:23:33 GMT -5
I was thinking about it, actually. I might dive in before the month is up, since I'm done with my Game Boy TMNT runs.
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Post by Xeogred on Jan 23, 2020 22:30:45 GMT -5
If you do I'll be curious on the levels that might stump you for a bit. I took screenshots of the ones that were tough for me. I'll never know how I played it when I was 3-4 years old and was pretty decent!
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Post by Sarge on Jan 24, 2020 0:02:05 GMT -5
I'm up to Floor 6 right now. I'm definitely having to engage the ol' gray matter. Password is CTZC, so... room 4. That's where I'm calling it a night. It took me 1.5 hours to get to that point.
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Post by Ex on Jan 25, 2020 0:54:40 GMT -5
Alright so I played some more "puzzle" games... WildSnake (SNES/1994) Apparently Alexey Pajitnov, the guy who invented Tetris, came up with the concept for this game. Alright, so some snakes fall down and you orient their shape. Snakes of the same color can eat each other, garnering points. Sometimes a "wild snake" falls down, which can eat any colored snake. Non-similar snakes just pile on top of each other. I assume if they reach the top, it's game over. That probably won't happen to you though, because this game is very easy. And this game is very boring, because it just goes on forever. The graphics are weak and music is monotonous. I played for ~ten minutes, and never came close to getting a game over. I ultimately quit out of sheer boredom. 3/10 Yoshi's Cookie (SNES/1993) [Also released on Game Boy and NES.] This one has two single player modes. In Action mode you are arranging cookies (in a grid) into columns of matching cookies, using orthogonic sliding. You have to do this quickly as more cookies keep generating into the grid. If the grid gets too high, it's game over. In Puzzle mode you are presented with a series of predefined grids of cookies, where you have limited amounts of moves (as opposed to limited time) to align the grid into matching columns and rows. Puzzle mode does indeed feel more "puzzle-y" than Action mode, and I finished 10 puzzles before I got bored. This game has acceptable graphics and decent music. Though both modes, Action and Puzzle, turned into stale cookies rather quickly. 6/10 Yoshi (NES/1992) [Also released on Game Boy.] Game Freak developed this, huh. In this falling block puzzler, Mario arranges four plates at the bottom of the screen. The player can change which plate is in which position by using Mario. The goal is to catch and complete Yoshi eggs. To do this, the player first catches a bottom half of an egg. Then tries to fill that egg up with various types of monster icons. Then the player drops a top half of an egg on top of the pile. This completes the Yoshi egg, and a Yoshi is born. Giving birth to Yoshis racks up your score. Well despite its uniqueness, competent graphics and smooth controls, Yoshi was really bland. Competent and bland, that's this game alright. I didn't really have any fun playing this one. Though I did manage to get the top score on my first attempt. So I guess I beat it? 5/10 Wario's Woods (NES/1994) [Also released on SNES.] IIRC this game was the final NES release that Nintendo published. Well in this falling block puzzler, Toad arranges enemies into patterns for bombs to explode. That is to say that colored enemies and colored bombs fall from above. Toad catches and rearranges these things by picking them up (or catching them mid-fall), and walking around, then placing things in the correct order. Basically you want to stack the same colored enemies into columns, then put a bomb of the same color on the column, to explode all the enemies. What makes this all get tricky, is that sometimes Wario shows up. Well he just causes general chaos for a little while. There's also a fairy and a crow, but enough about them. I'll say that the controls are really good in this one, and the interactive elements via the programming is really impressive. (I doubt this was an easy game to code.) The implementation is fairly fun for a little while. All the same though, I got bored of this after about 10 minutes, after clearing many stages. Also during that time, I didn't come close to losing even once. 6/10 Columns Crown (GBA/2002) This one starts off with a long series of cutscenes you cannot skip. Tells a background story about who cares. Finally after all that, you can start playing. Well the basic gameplay is normal Columns. Nothing new here. Except the graphics and audio manage to be worse than the Genesis Columns games. Really I don't see any reason to play Columns Crown, at least in comparison to the Genesis versions. This just feels like a de-evolution of what came before. 4/10 if I'm being generous. - Well my fellow Club Retro enthusiasts, that all is gonna wrap up this theme for me. I'll freely admit, that the "puzzle game" genre is just not my bag. I certainly do enjoy puzzles in games... when they are part of a more complete package. Of course I enjoy solving the odd puzzle in say an action-adventure or action-RPG game. But a continuous series of extremely similar puzzles ad nauseum is not fun for Ex. I mean, I didn't mind solving puzzle after puzzle in the Professor Layton games, but those puzzles were continuously different from one another. Plus in the PL games, there's a plot to tie it all together.
To put a positive spin on this though, this theme got me to try all sorts of retro games I never would have sampled otherwise. And ultimately that's one of the core aspects of Club Retro. To encourage us to game outside our comfort zones. So in that regard, mission accomplished over here.
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Post by Sarge on Jan 25, 2020 1:38:30 GMT -5
I've managed to finish off The Adventures of Lolo. Took me around three hours to finish the rest of the stages, so 4.5 hours total. One stage, I definitely saw the solution, just executing it was rough. Actually, that was true for a few of them. The game definitely makes you use all the tools at your disposal, including blocking multiple enemies with one block (half-covering counts as covered, so you don't insta-die), or shooting an enemy twice to make them respawn at their original location. The last stages really make use of this mechanic. I actually liked this one a lot. I think I'll give it a 7.5/10. That's "very good" in my rating vernacular. It made me use the ol' noggin for sure, and I sat and stared at several of the screens trying to figure out my game plan. Xeogred: I looked at your screenshots, and you didn't really have the ones that really gave me fits. They were all at the end. Not sure why it took me a full hour more to finish. I didn't look at any guides at all, though, and no save-states, either, not that those would necessarily help much anyway.
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Post by Xeogred on Jan 25, 2020 18:55:44 GMT -5
Nice! Looking forward to your thoughts on the sequels, though definitely take a break haha. The half-covering blocks parts definitely had me stumped in the second half at times. I guess it's natural we'd maybe struggle with different levels in this kind of genre. Ex: Was always curious about a lot of those, but I never did and still have not made the effort to play them. Like you're getting at in the end there, this isn't our favorite genre for some of us. I mostly played more Dr. Mario and Lemmings... again, so I played it safe. lol For now, I must designate King Dr toei as our lead doctor. Someday may I rise again for the challenge...
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Post by Sarge on Jan 25, 2020 21:46:17 GMT -5
Xeogred: To be honest, it wouldn't surprise me if I had some leftover latent knowledge of the game from reading Nintendo Power and other video game books for so long.
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Post by toei on Jan 26, 2020 1:19:35 GMT -5
I finally made it to the last stage of Super Buster Brothers. I actually thought I had beaten the game for a moment and I got excited, because I thought there were 40 levels, but it turned out to be 40+1.
EDIT - God, I'm absolute trash. I made it to the final level again (which is 40 after all, not 41) with 4 full credits and somehow managed to fail! It doesn't even seem like it should be a hard level, but it's deceptive. You get used to the balls/bubbles behaving a certain way, but that level's full of little passages and elevations that modify their speeds and trajectories.
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