Vide Games I've Beaten - Part Two

I'm just gonna stick to two systems this time and make this rather short.

N64
I bought this system specifically for one game, and only ever purchased one other game for it. I got distracted with the Playstation. (Which I'll tackle another day.)

Donkey Kong 64This was the game I bought the N64 for. Great game. I keep waiting for it to come out in the Wii store so I can download and play it again. Another game worthy of its own blog post.

Kirby and the Crystal Shards 
...And this was the "other" game. I normally love all things Kirby, but ugh. I think this game was seriously made for 5 year olds. I've actually blocked most of it from my memory.

Super Mario 64
I think almost everybody who had an N64 played this. I borrowed it from my cousin. Moving Mario around in 3D took a lot of getting used to. There were too many places to go - how would I ever find my way around? Those first 3D games were quite a system shock, weren't they?


And now we come to another short list... Most of the games I owned for this system were remakes, and therefore not worthy of my list.


GBA

Castlevania Aria of Sorrow

Great game - one of my favorites of the series. I got every single soul you could get...some of those took forever. But I had no life back in those days. Because you definitely need to have a lot of time to kill in order to complete a lot of games fully.

Castlevania Harmony of Dissonence
Because you can kill Dracula AND tastefully design a room. You go, Juste Belmont.

Castlevania Circle of the Moon
Probably my least favorite of the Castlevania titles I've actually beaten. This game is so hard! And the card system...yuck. It's one of the few games I put down for a long time and actually picked up and finished without starting over. I was not about to go back and deal with all that level up bullshit again.


Next time...I'll tackle the Playstation. And the RPGs are gonna start coming to town.

Video Games I've Beaten - Part One

So in my blog about Super Mario Galaxy I mentioned I was going to embark on a quest to make a list of every game I've ever beaten.

Quest complete.


This is only part one of the list - although I haven't beaten an overwhelming number of games in the twenty or so I've been playing, I didn't wanna go and list them all at once. So today we're cover the earliest systems: NES, Genesis and SNES.


Here were the rules of list:

• Finishing the main story of the game and seeing the ending counts as beating it. I didn't have to do all the extras/side quests/whatever.
• ROM games are okay as long as no cheats were used.
• It didn't have to be a game I played alone.

Here are some things to remember when you're reading this list:

• I did not own a lot of games as a kid at all. 
  
• I relied very heavily on looking at the games I own in compiling this list. Over the years I've traded in some games and forgotten about others. I know some games got left out.
• I play a lot of games you can't beat i.e Animal Crossing, Mario Tennis, etc.
• I didn't count games I replayed when they were re-released on another system.
  

Okay, enough of that. Here's the damn list.


NES

Super Mario Bros. 
Yeah, the original, of course. I can remember my struggle to get past "Cheep Cheep Land", which was what I called world 2-3. But finally I made my way all the way to Bowser's last stand...and I ran on him/used the elevator. (I don't remember. This was a long time ago.) And I rescued the Princess once and for all. And I was stunned at what I had accomplished. I was expecting some kind of major payoff for this - not being told I could replay the game with fuzzy beetles in place of Goombas. Oh well.

Super Mario Bros. 3
Still one of my favorite games of all time. I owned one of the earliest issues of Nintendo Power that was basically nothing more than a full walk through of this game. In the days before the internet, that was a big deal. Remember the hands in the last world? Did they scare the crap out of you, too? Where were they coming from?!

Barbie
This game deserves a blog all it's own. The story was anything but deep, but for a little kid some of the game play was pretty difficult. One of the last levels involved jumping on a bunch of narrow music notes that were hovering over a moving platform that took you all the way back to the beginning if you fell. Oh, and did I mention that Barbie jumped like a stiff piece of plastic, too.

The Little Mermaid
I was a little girl, and little girls had girly games. I was obsessed with The Little Mermaid, so of course I owned the game. Goes to show you how early they started making movies into video games.

Maniac Mansion
I didn't beat this until I was much older, and I'm glad of it. How scary was this game? That creepy blue guy finding you and locking you in the basement. And don't even get me started on how hard it is. If you don't have the right combination of kids, forget it.


Genesis

Crystal's Pony Tale
This was a ROM. Shut up.




SNES

Super Mario World
I still love this game. I could replay it over and over. I actually finished everything you could do in this game - star levels and all.

Super Mario Bros. - The Lost Levels
Maybe you noticed, but Super Mario 2 was missing from my list. I never defeated Wart. But I did beat the REAL SMB2.

Kirby Super Star
Still my favorite Kirby game ever. I beat all the games that were included under the Super Star heading - my favorite being the one where you found all the treasures.

Donkey Kong Country
One of those games that definitely changed how I looked at games.

Donkey Kong Country 2
Probably tied for my favorite SNES game.

Donkey Kong Country 3
Tied with this. What a great game. Remember when RARE made good games? Me too...

Yoshi's Island
As much as I like this game, it was often frustrating as hell.

Super Mario Kart
Oh, the hours I spent playing this game. I guess you could argue that you can't really "beat" this game, but I disagree. If you beat the Star cup grand prix on 150cc - you've beaten it.




Next - N64, PSX and GBA.

How I Found Video Games, Or How Video Games Found Me (part three)

In case you're too lazy to scroll: part one part two

Part Three: Another Game In Town

As I mentioned at the end of my last entry, I wanted a N64 for Christmas. Why? Because a new Donkey Kong game was coming out for that system. A SNES was no longer gonna cut it.

I made it very well known that I wanted an N64. So come Christmas morning I unwrapped all of my gifts.

No N64.

But I can't say this was a video game system free Christmas. Why? Because my SISTER, who barely plays video games, got a Playstation. Yup. A Playstation.

Let me backtrack a minute. I still don't know why my parents chose to give the Playstation to my sister. I wound up playing it way, way, way more and currently have it in my home. Why they got the system at all was because my dad heard it was better or something.

Neither the Playstation nor the N64 were new systems at this point. No way. They were a few years old in fact. I didn't know much about the Playstation. The most I knew about it was from seeing the demo system in Toys R Us (I thought the controller was the weirdest bulkiest thing ever and I thought the symbols on the buttons was a strange choice.) and reading an article that pitted it against the Sega Saturn in an issue of Zillions. (LOVED that magazine. If they still made it, I'd still subscribe.)

Oh, and I also vaguely knew something about a game called Final Fantasy, but I'll get to that in a minute.

I was kind of annoyed that I wanted an N64 and didn't get one, but my sister gets this Playstation and doesn't even play video games. But being a video game freak, I consented to play it anyway, of course. We had two games: Toy Story 2 and Crash Bandicoot: Warped. I remember when I first tried to play Toy Story it told me I couldn't save because I didn't have a "memory card". This concept was foreign to me. Why did you need a separate thing to save the games on? I made my dad go out and buy one.

Back to my N64 saga. After Christmas I had acquired a good amount of money. I was in high school by this point, my senior year, believe it or not. (That SNES had lasted a long damn time.) We went shopping one day and we were able to leave when I spotted a video game store. I ran inside and the store was PACKED. But I saw a box that had not only an N64 but it was bundled with Donkey Kong 64. So of course I bought it. My parents were not pleased. But I was happy.

I'll make my thoughts on the N64 brief, because honestly, it was the most useless system I ever owned. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Donkey Kong 64 and the price of the system was worth the game. But I never really got into the other games for the system. In fact the only other game I ever owned for it was some stupid Kirby game that felt like it was for 5 year olds. I really was more interested in the Playstation. So I guess in a way my parents had done the right thing. (Pretty shocking, I know.)

Back to the Playstation. As I said before I had heard of a game on the Playstation called Final Fantasy. Some of my friends were playing it. They all talked about a guy named Sephiroth. My friend tried to explain it to me once but she got as far as it was about a guy named Cloud before my eyes glazed over and I lost interest. RPGs were not my thing. They reminded me too much of Link. Plus, they looked too complicated for my action/adventure themed brain. I was determined to steer clear.

My sister, however, was interested. She wanted this game. So she instructed my father to go buy it for us. (Dad was feeling extra generous this holiday for some reason.) He came back with Final Fantasy VIII. My friends, of course, had been talking about Final Fantasy VII. But we didn't know any better and neither had dad. FFVIII was the newest FF title out there. So my sister sat down to play.

I, meanwhile, played through all of Toy Story 2 and all of Crash Bandicoot: Warped. (Both were enjoyable games, especially Crash Bandicoot, which was right up my alley.) My sister, in the mean time, was playing with Final Fantasy VIII. I find it horribly boring to watch other people play video games, so I had no idea what she was up to. She told me about how there was this guy named Seifer who teased this guy named Zell which made Zell flip out. And there was this cool cowboy guy named Irvine. She also had no idea how to play. She dragged Squall's dead body around for a long time because she didn't know how to bring him back to life. (The game eventually gave him some pity HP, I shit you not.) She drove around in one of those rental cars searching for the Tomb of the Unknown King for HOURS. Seriously, HOURS! I tried to help her find it, but we were both overwhelmed by this world map. It was nothing like the games we were used to. (Too much like Link.)

I avoided the game for awhile. But then something bad happened. I had beaten Donkey Kong 64, Toy Story 2, and Crash Bandicoot: Warped. The only game in the house that I hadn't beaten...was Final Fantasy VIII.

So out of boredom and boredom alone I picked up the game, mostly as a joke. And I don't remember when the joke ended and the addiction began but I quickly became hooked. I was all over this game. The junction system confused the heck out of me, it was ages before I figured out how to boost a GF, and forget that card game all together. But I found myself really liking the game. It wasn't like Link at all.

So I made it through Disc One and most of Disc Two with no major problems. By the time I got to the fight with Fujin and Rajin in Balamb the only GF's I had were the ones you started the game with. Yeah. I know. So anyway Fujin and Rajin kicked my ass all over the place. I tried time and time again but all I did was die. I got so frustrated I remember very well throwing the controller to the ground in a fit of rage. I was starting to not like this game anymore.

Then one day at the mall I stopped by the video game store and saw a strategy guide for the game. I opened it up and flipped through it. And there I saw everything I had missed, including a ton of GF's. I remember being amazed you could draw GF's out of some bosses. Well oh crap, I thought. I really messed up big time. So I bought the guide, went home, and decided the only thing I could do to play this game right was start over. So I did. And I will fully admit that I've never played an RPG without owning a strategy guide since.

So in the war of the Playstation vs. the N64, the winner was clear. Parents: 1, Me: 0. If it wasn't for them, I'd probably wouldn't have played a Final Fantasy game until years later, if ever. Weird, really. Go figure.

How I Found Video Games, Or How Video Games Found Me (part two)

Part One

Part Two: The Super Years

I remember being told to sit down in the kitchen one Christmas by my parents. All I wanted that year was a Super Nintendo. I don't remember what year it was, but the system wasn't brand new or anything. Anyway, I had already opened all my presents from "Santa" and there was no SNES to be found. But my parents had news for me. Apparently my cool Uncle (same uncle who got me a video game for my Communion present) was going to get one for me. But he didn't have it just yet. That was fine. I waited excitedly for my Super Nintendo to arrive, and when it did I set it up myself. My parents were very impressed. Nothing was about to stand between me and my new system.

I had played a little SNES at friend's houses and the one game I always played was Super Mario World. Well my bundle came with a game titled Super Mario All Stars. Included on the cartridge was Super Mario World, Super Mario Bros. 1, 2, and 3. And The Lost Levels, or the real Super Mario Bros. 2. I thought it was great to have all those Mario games in one place. Once again it seemed Mario would be the dominant game series for this console, but a new kid was coming to town.

But I had Super Mario World now, and that was what I played. I thought it was a great game and I still do. Yoshi quickly won me over. I liked to take him with me wherever I went. Yoshi, unfortunately, did not feel the same way, because he didn't care to join me in the haunted houses or the fortresses. Even after I fed him all those berries. Ungrateful dinosaur. I remember I was almost to the end when my cousin came over one day and somehow my save got erased. I still don't know quite what happened with that, but I was pissed. I remember saying something like, "Well I better start playing now! I want to get to the Forest of Illusion by tonight!" That's something only a nerd child would say.

This was the first game where I really wanted to do EVERYTHING. I was determined to beat all the Star World levels and find all the Star World entrances. I found all the secret exits for all the red levels. Some gave me more trouble than others. I remember finding out how to actually get to the secret exit for the Butter Bridge level drove me nuts. The first time I tackled the Special levels that had all the total 90's expression names (Tubular! Awesome!) I found them all really hard. I especially remember being frustrated by Tubular. In that level you basically had to float the whole time using those p-balloons, and of course there were tons of enemies and other stuff in the way. I felt like I played that level hundreds of times before I actually beat it. But I finally finished. I got through all the extra levels. And I was rewarded with...a different color scheme for the map, and some of the enemies changed their appearance. Not so great. But at least I could say that I finally finished everything there was to do in a video game.

Super Putty - This game was a gift. Super Putty was like some kind of alien or something. He was a blue ball of...putty that wasn't very interesting. It wasn't a horrible game but there was nothing about it I really found too interesting. I'd play it, get to a certain point, die, and then put it down. Not so super.

Zoop - They showed commercials for this game on TV all the time. Whoever made it totally wanted it to be the next Tetris. Only they failed. Zoop is a puzzle game. Only it doesn't have blocks. I think it had like circles, or something. As you can tell by my awesome description I didn't play this game too much. In fact I don't even remember how to play at all. Shows what an impression it made on me.

Donkey Kong Country - Mario was the main man in my video game life until the monkey came along. I don't remember exactly how I got introduced to Donkey Kong. For some reason I vaguely remember my dad renting it for me, and when I liked it, he bought it. At the time the graphics on this game were absolutely amazing. I'll never forget being so in awe of how "real" everything looked. At the time, this game really was pretty great graphics wise. And it was pretty great game play wise too. I liked the dynamic of Donkey and Diddy being a team and you could switch between them at will. The levels were fun, but not too easy (for me at the time.) I remember a level called "Barrel Cannon Canyon" that I'm pretty sure was one of the last levels in the first area of the game. Towards the end of the level you jumped in a barrel and then had to keep shooting yourself into different barrels to get across the way. There were a lot of barrels there, and they moved in all kinds of directions. I was not used to this kind of game play, and I could not shoot those monkeys into those barrels for the life of me. I even went as far as holding a ruler up to the screen so I could see when they were in a straight line. I'm embarrassed to admit that ever happened, but I eventually got the hang of it and I'm now proud to say I'm a monkey barrel shooting pro. I loved this game, so of course I grabbed the sequel that followed it.

Donkey Kong Country 2 - This game, obviously, is the sequel to DKC. Except this one was even more fun. Out of all three games for SNES I like your two playable characters in this game the best. Why? Because Diddy and Dixie are both small and easy to move. There's no hulking mass of a character in this game. Plus Dixie can use her ponytail to hover for awhile. I've always been a fan of that. This game had a 'Lost World' you unlocked with coins you earned from the bonus games. In order to complete the Lost World you had to pretty much complete every bonus game. Not such an easy task, considering they hid some of those barrels pretty damn well. My favorite world in this game was the Kremling amusement park. What I didn't like about this game was how if you wanted to save more than one time in a level you had to PAY for it. WTF, Wrinkly Kong? Fallen on hard times?

Kirby Super Star - 8 games in one! I remember that being plastered on the outside of the box. I liked Kirby so I was very excited to own this game. Especially when there were 8 games. Some of them were more like mini-games, but there were several longer 'full-length' games as well. Kirby had more powers than ever, and you could even have a friend play alongside you (or the computer.) My favorite of the games was the one where you had to find the treasure chests. I don't think I ever found them all.

Donkey Kong Country 3 - The third game in the ever awesome Donkey Kong series, and my favorite of the SNES bunch. This game just had so much to it. There was more than just completing levels and collecting bananas. There was even more to do than finding bonus barrels. This time you had to collect different items and banana birds and interact with bears. Yeah. Bears. Plus you actually needed Funky Kong in this one! Previously the probably pot smoking Kong had been kind of useless. But now you had to rely on him to update your ride in order to move onto to new areas. There was also a Lost World in this one, and it was the hardest one yet to find. I remember you had to ride around these four rocks that were in the middle of the water. And you had to do it in the right directions and a certain number of times and stuff. This game had some tough levels in it too. I remember one of the later levels had all the controls inverted. And I'm pretty sure you had to swim. There are two things I don't do well in video games - swimming and flying. So for me, swimming with inverted controls wasn't the easiest thing in the world at first.

This was another game that I wound up completing in full, but I have to admit it wasn't until years and years later when I had access to the internet. Told you that Lost World was hard.

Yoshi's Island - Oh, a game about Yoshi! And annoying, crying baby Mario! This was a solid title. I liked playing as Yoshi. What I didn't like was chasing down the sobbing baby Mario every time you got hit by an enemy. After awhile you just wanted to let the bad guys have him. I remember how you got a score at the end of each level based on how much stuff you managed to collect. It would be out of 100 points so I would equate the scores to school. So if I got 75 on a level, Yoshi got a C.

Street Fighter II - I don't know why this is even on here. This wasn't even really my game. It was my sister's, and I don't even know why she got it. This was the first fighting game we ever owned. I almost never played it. I could never really get into fighting games. I didn't have the patience to memorize all those different button combinations. Whenever I played this game I would play as E. Honda and just use his hand slap attack repeatedly. That always seemed pretty effective.

Zombies Ate My Neighbors - I didn't own this game, my cousin did. And together he and I teamed up (he as the boy and I as the girl, of course) to take on the masses of zombies, monsters, killer toys, vampires, giant babies, and chainsaw wielding maniacs that roamed the levels of this game. This game was awesome but it was hard. Whenever we were together we played it and tried to get a little bit farther than we did last time. We turned down the sound in level 4, the first chainsaw wielding maniac level, because it freaked us out. It took us a long time to beat the level with the giant baby stomping around. And the level with the freaky giant snakes in the ground really had us stumped. Plus if you ran out of bazookas, or god forbid keys, you were in a lot of trouble. And the worst part was there was no saving in this game! Instead there were long, convoluted Bomberman style codes that had whoever was watching (my sister and other cousin usually) fumbling for a pen. But these codes we did save carefully. We would need them for the next time we took the zombies on. This game is a classic.

Kid Klown - You probably know by now that me and circus related games don't go together too well. And this is no exception. This was another game that belonged to my cousins, and they didn't really like it. I didn't really like it either, but everyone got such a big kick out of me playing it (because of my constant cursing the name of Kid Klown) that I played it a lot when I was over at their house. Kid Klown is this stupid Klown that is trying to save this girl (who I think was another clown) from this evil guy who keeps trying to blow things up. There were different kinds of themed levels like they have in every other game. Stuff like a woods level, a lava level, a city street and an ice level. I remember the woods level best because it was the first level and there was no saving to be had in this fantastic piece of gaming history.

Anyway, at the beginning of this level, just like every other level, you see the evil guy setting up his explosives and dragging the beginning of the fuse really, really far away from it. If this guy really wanted to blow some shit up he shouldn't have made such a long fuse. Anyway, your job is to beat the fire to the explosive before it can blow the bridge the hell up. Along your route there will be many balloons. You have to grab the end of the balloons to see what's inside. Your object is to get the 4 suits: hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs. Some of the balloons hurt you and some give you coins and stuff. All you basically can do is move forward and jump. You cannot move backwards. So if you move past the end of a balloon even a little bit, you can't get it. This is where most of my cursing stems from. Also the fact that this game is just stupid. If you beat the fire to the end but don't have all the stupid suits (the point of this being...?) you literally watch as the bad guy sets up his explosives all over again! You literally stand there catching your breath and waiting for him to be done! Why not just kick him in the crotch and steal the stupid explosives?! No. No. Because that would make sense. The lesson - games involving circus things are bad.

Mario Kart - Wow. I seriously suck for almost forgetting about this game. Aside from Red Racer, which I played a couple of times on the NES (ugh), this was my first real racing title. And I loved it. Partly because of the the Mario characters, but mostly because it was just plain fun and not too hard. I like how there were different ranks you could play and there were plenty of different tracks. I fell off Rainbow Road tons of times before I got it down. I loved the Bowser's Castle and Ghost House tracks as well. The multiplayer aspects of this game also rocked, and I'm not talking about a second player in the Grand Prix. My sister and I loved to try and destroy one another's balloons. We could play that game for hours. It was one of the few games she'd play with me. Oh, and my character of choice? Toad, or Koopa. Give me small and speedy any day.

Yes, the super years were good years. From Mario I moved onto to Donkey Kong, gaining a new game obsession. I had to have all the Donkey Kong games. So when I heard there was a game coming out for Nintendo 64, I had to ask for one for Christmas. My parents, however, had other ideas...

Stay tuned for the final section of this saga - Part Three: Another Game In Town