Father's Day: 52 games/year Challenge

[Luigison]

Between now on Father's day 2015 post 52 games played in said time period.  Each game must include at least one screen shot and at least a three sentence review.  Bonus points for playing with or in view of your dad and/or your son/daughter.  In the event of a tie the community (Fungi Forum members) will decide the winner.  Said winner may receive a game or equally valued merchandise totally less than $60 at the discretion of Luigison.   Feel free to post games as you play them or wait until the end to post them all.  In the event that games cannot be beaten, a minimum of 8 hours will be required.  Proof of game play may be required. 

[BriGuy92]

In the event that games cannot be beaten, a minimum of 8 hours will be required.  Proof of game play may be required. 

The goal is not just to play, but to finish 52 games, then?

[Luigison]

The goal is not just to play, but to finish 52 games, then?

Yes.  Sorry for not saying that directly.  You must finish/beat each game or at least play it for 8 hours.  Proof may be required. 

[bobbysq1337]

Time to fire up Action 52.

(Actually, I'll probably play something that someone could tolerate 8 hours of, maybe take some time to set up streaming software and stream the challenge on my Twitch channel that I've just used to screw around with the Minecraft streaming feature a few times.)

[bobbysq1337]

A bit late, but my first game is done, Sonic Colors. I was slowed down by not having time to do the final boss, so the next game will be shorter, and probably will be Super Mario Bros.

Have some 1080p screenshots

Edit: Wait, they're actually in 576p?

[BriGuy92]

Woo! Two weeks later and I've finished A Link Between Worlds. It's the first Zelda game that I've played in a while, and it certainly didn't disappoint. Well, except for the plot. "Ganon did the thing! Link, quick, do the thing!" And then it went and got really interesting right at the end, which was odd, but it was a satisfying conclusion all the same. The music was great, my favorite being the fantastic remix of the Dark World track from A Link to the Past (which, interestingly enough, sounds a lot like the one from Brawl). All in all, it was great fun. Now I'm gonna play some short games to get myself caught back up.

Anyway, here's some proof!

[CrossEyed7]

Finally beat a game! Shovel Knight, after 6 1/2 hours:



Stats:





I was a Kickstarter backer, so I've been looking forward to it (and telling other people to look forward to it) for a while, and it really did live up to the hype for me. Music is perfect. I'm not usually a huge fan of NES-ish graphics, but these are great (granted, they did take some liberties -- adding four colors to the palette, ignoring sprite flicker, using big sprites that would have had to be background graphics on the NES, and using a lot of parallax scrolling). Shovel-pogoing is really fun. I'd really like to see them go through with making a SNES-style sequel next.

Minor gripes: Shovel-pogo seemed a bit too easily triggered sometimes (that may just be an issue with the GamePad's D-pad). When I first started, it took me a little while to get the hang of the game's visual vocabulary for whether a pit was bottomless or not. ...Can't think of any others right now.

Now I need to go burn through some short games.

[CrossEyed7]

Game 2: Completed all puzzles in Picross e4, including the bonus puzzles unlocked by having save data from the first three Picross-e games.

The Picross-e games are all really nice, and e4 is the best. It's the first one to finally have puzzles bigger than 15x15 (only up to 20x15, and only a few, but still). My personal favorite feature, though, (which was actually first added in e3, now that I check) is the ability to use Free rules on every puzzle. In Normal rules, putting a mark on an incorrect square gets immediately marked as incorrect and gets you a time penalty. In Free rules, you don't know if you're right until you finish. I like that better both for the increased challenge and because I have times when my hand slips or I'm not paying attention for a second and mark a square I didn't mean to, and in Free rules, I can just fix that myself instead of getting a couple minutes added to my time. So anyway, yeah, if you like Picross but only enough to buy one game of it, e4 is probably the best choice (though if Mario's Super Picross is ever available on the Wii U VC in your region, that might be even better).

[CrossEyed7]

Game 3:



I don't know that I ever fully realized how short Super Mario Land is. With this run, which was pretty much all in one sitting, I took my time and died four or five times, and it still took less than 30 minutes. When I first got it back in 1993, I was terrible at it, and only ever beat it with Game Genie (Walk Through All walls, Infinite Lives, Always Big Mario. Always those three. Experimented with Always Have Powerball a couple times, but didn't feel it was as useful as Always Big.). There are still some places in the game that I don't know how you're supposed to get to without walking through walls.

Anyway, the game's length does make sense for a handheld game with no battery save, no passwords, and no built-in rechargeable battery or included AC adapter on the console. And now that it's a game you can download for under $5, it fits pretty nicely in the category of video game candy.

It's got a lot of unique stuff to offer. Where Super Mario Bros. had eight worlds that looked pretty much the same and even had several duplicate levels, each of Land's twelve levels looks and feels unique, as do its five bosses (even the three side-scrolling shooter bosses feel distinct). Also, I've always had an easier time with the physics of SML than the original SMB (though ideally I'd prefer SMW, or maybe SMB3 but without having to keep tapping B to float down with the raccoon tail). And the music is really nice too.

It kinda gets overlooked now, but I think it fully deserves a place next to the SMBs.

[Weegee]

Sounds like a solid 3/10.

[CrossEyed7]

Game 4:



Super Mario World was probably one of my first games, so it can be a little tough to get perspective on it. Its controls feel the most right of all the Mario games (though there's nothing wrong with SMB3's controls either, other than having to repeatedly tap B to float). However, it does kinda seem like it was rushed to make the SNES launch. With SMB3, they definitely went all out; with SMW, they improved on SMB3, but it could have been a lot more. Part of that's probably from a more rushed development time, but part of it is also from being a game at the beginning of a console's life versus one at the end of one. Still, it has a lot going for it. One of my favorite aspects of it is that it's the only Mario sidescroller that aims to make a whole coherent world that stays within its limited range -- there's no desert world, fire world, or ice world (though there are a couple of ice levels), because there wasn't a place for them, and there doesn't always need to be a place for every kind of thing in every game.

I don't think I can call it the best Mario game, but it's really good.

Incidentally, I beat it in 17 minutes in this run. Definitely not world-record caliber, and not even my personal best (I once beat it in ~16 minutes on the Wii).

[CrossEyed7]

Game 5: The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse, SNES





This was the first game I ever beat. It's shorter and easier than I remembered (The other Mickey SNES game we had growing up, Mickey Mania, is still just as hard as it was back then, tho). It's a fun little Capcom Disney platformer. The music is well-done and will stay in your head for decades, there's some really great graphical effects, and the suits you get are all pretty fun and useful. Controls can take a little getting used to (as a kid, it was one of the games that always messed me up because you don't hold down Y to run (Fun fact: I instinctively held Y while moving in most SNES games, whether or not it was actually a thing in that game. In Bubsy II, which I rented several times, there's a hub world with teleporters to levels. When you stand on a teleporter, one of the ways you can warp into a level is by pressing Y. When you beat a level, you go back to the hub world, standing on that level's teleporter. So most of the time, when I beat a level, I would get warped back into the level when I tried to leave and it really ****ed me off, and I don't know if I ever realized why it kept happening but I just kept on playing)). Maybe someday I'll play it on normal mode.

[WarpRattler]

#1: Super Metroid

This isn't my first time completing Super Metroid, or my first time completing it since getting this copy, but I figured this playthrough would make a good opening post for this thread.

To be honest, I don't have too much to say about the game itself, despite it being one of my all-time favorites; anything I'd say would just be retreading ground covered by many people before me. It's an amazing game, and every time I play through it, I'm saddened more and more by how most other exploratory platformers ("Metroidvania" is a terrible term), and indeed most other games, ignore the design lessons Super Metroid was teaching twenty years ago. I plan to (re)play various other exploratory platformers for this challenge, and when I post about them here, I'll be writing about how they fare against Super Metroid. (Sadly, a lot of them are going to end up with me talking about their merits as action RPGs instead.)

[WarpRattler]

#2a: Astro Boy: Omega Factor (Birth)

No picture; I'll get one once I finish this.

Astro Boy: Omega Factor is one of three excellent Treasure games on GBA, and is the best of the trio. (The other two, Gunstar Super Heroes and Advance Guardian Heroes, might show up here later.) Omega Factor is a very fun beat-'em-up (with several shmup sections as well) based on characters from Astro Boy and numerous other Osamu Tezuka works. Like most modern beat-'em-ups, it has a character progression system; however, this one does not involve grinding. Instead, you gain points to apply to upgrades by meeting characters and adding them to the Omega Factor, which is basically Astro's soul.

This is the first of two posts I'll do for this game, and I won't consider the game complete until I do that second post. Omega Factor has an NG+ mode, Rebirth, that has a different storyline than the first playthrough, Birth, and the game isn't truly finished until you get the true ending in Rebirth, which involves completing the Omega Factor and defeating the true final boss.

[CrossEyed7]

Game 6: Donkey Kong Country





no but really





I'm pretty sure I've beaten this once before on the GBA version, but this is my first time going through the entire SNES version (though I did sample pretty much all the levels on the SNES when I was pretty young; we had a preowned copy where one of the files had beaten the game). I played it on an emulator on my phone (mostly during breaks at work) but I didn't use savestates (other than suspending and resuming; no reloading).

So I started playing this run when I was about a world or two into Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D, and have been playing though them simultaneously. DKC1's controls are a lot floatier than DKC4's, which threw me off for a while as I hadn't played it in a while, but I got back into it pretty quickly. Takes some getting used to. I'm also realizing now that they did design the game intending you to use your ability to jump in midair by rolling off edges. There's nowhere that requires it, but there are a lot of places that seem perfectly matched for it and reward you for it.

I don't know that I ever realized before that the animal bonus levels (the ones where you play as the animal and collect tokens to get extra lives) can be annoying. The levels themselves are fun, but the fact that it takes you out of the level you're playing and then drops you back at either the start of the level or the halfway barrel can be frustrating on later levels. Poison Pond took me a while (largely because of fish movement patterns that you kinda have to just memorize), and then one time when I finally got through the hard part, I got a third Enguarde token and had to do that whole section again.

You do tend to replay a lot of the same segments in DKC1 (if you, like me, are not great at it). DKC4's having multiple checkpoints per level is a really welcome addition. However, I do kind of like how DKC1 has save points instead of saving after every level, especially since, unlike Super Mario World, you can't always just go back to an earlier save point. When you get to a new world, you're gonna have to get through about three or four levels before you get to Candy or Funky, and if you're up against a level that you know is gonna take a lot of lives, you have to find somewhere in a level you've beaten where you can farm some lives and start-select out. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I think there is something about that aspect that I like. It feels more like you're fighting for survival in a new hostile world, and then when you finally see the path to Funky after all those levels, it feels really good.

Every level has something unique to it, which I consider a sign of a great platformer. Boss fights do leave a bit to be desired, though -- every one except the final boss is just a giant version of normal enemies. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but then even with only six of those, there's still ones that are just faster palette swaps of earlier ones. And Boss Dumb Drum, the third-to-last one, is just dodging generic enemies for a while until the boss kills itself. DKC2 improved on that, from what I remember (I've never really played DKC3, though I'm planning on getting to it later).

Should also mention that DKC1's music is pretty great and the graphics actually do still hold up in my onion.