Can Sega-16 Beat the Last of the Genesis, Sega CD, & 32X Libraries in 2021?

[Barone]

I don't know what the win condition would be, myself. Barone was in the middle of a playthrough on Hard about a month ago.

And I'm still trying to accomplish it.

You only get the real ending if you finish 1st in all courses with a given car type. Each car type will have its own "ending" (it's just a glorified replay with credits).
As the US version doesn't have a save RAM, you would have to do it in one sit in real hardware. It's pretty doable for the Formula car, easy for the stock car and a real bitch with the prototype one.
Then you still have all the mirrored tracks which are enabled when you finish 1st in all regular tracks with any of the car types. I didn't reach the part of beating the mirrored tracks but I guess that they have their own glorified mirrored replays for each one of the car types.

So, IMO, you need to achieve those six endings in order to consider the game beaten. The gameplay really changes a lot with each car type, so I don't consider beating the game with just one of the types a valid completion, much less if only the regular tracks. The 3rd and 4th tracks are really challenging with the prototype car, but not so much with the others.
If you finish the game only using the stock car, for an example, you'll probably get your ass kicked when using the formula car and even worse with the prototype car.

IDK if that's a overly assine way to see it, but that's how I see it.

[bmwsvsu]

I've attempted Pirates Gold game many different times through the years and today I finally beat the game, completing all 10 quests.

When you retire, you get a series of screens. I've combined them all into 2 screenshots:




There are 4 difficulty levels and each time you divvy the plunder, you can advance to the next skill level if you like. The higher the skill level, the higher the difficulty, but also the higher your gold portion is next time you divvy. I started out at level 1 and advanced to level 3 towards the end of the game. I chose the time period of 1640-1660, English nationality, skill at fencing.

I think this is one of the most overlooked, underrated games of the system, probably due to its rarity. There are so many different strategies you can use to play the game. As time goes on and you age, your health decreases and as that happens, the fencing battles become tougher and tougher to win. By the end, I was in poor health and don't think I could have done much else.

My only gripe about the game is that it becomes tedious when you have to find and rescue 4 different family members. If I had designed the game, I would have had only 2 of those types of quests and replaced the other 2 with things like capturing a Galleon and completing a mission. There are various missions throughout the game like delivering letters or capturing pirates but those do nothing more than advance your position of nobility.

I completed this game on Fusion using no savestates and only using the games built-in saves. I started it 2 days ago and completed it today.

[goldenband]

^What a great way to join the site! Very nice work -- it's been quite a while since one of those longer simulation games has been taken down (with the exception of Benjamin's recent Power Monger victory).

@Barone: Thanks for that info. So as of now, you've beaten all the regular tracks using the Formula car, but not their mirrored versions -- right? If it came down to it, that'd probably be enough for our purposes, but I'm willing to hold off if you want to go for the grand slam.

[kikenovic]

Bart vs the Space Mutants is a game I finished in the late 90s on the NES. As many know, the biggest handicap is in the control scheme, but once you get used to it you acquire some jumping rhythm.

I didn't know it existed for the Genesis until I tried it on an emulator a while ago. If I remember correctly the controls are even worse than the NES version. I'll give it a shot tonight on a real Genny and see how that goes.

[Bottino]

I'm going to leave my password from Lotus Turbo Challenge here, for anyone interested in finishing this game: Mallow.
There's only two races left, but the game is bloody hard and after 64 races of Top Gear and 6 stages of this game I need a break of these Gremlin racing games.

I think we have a good chance of clearing at least one of the libraries this year and it would be nice to see more members in the game, but I guess endless discussions about the 'Market' and the WiiU are much more fun...

[Barone]

I'm going to leave my password from Lotus Turbo Challenge here, for anyone interested in finishing this game: Mallow.
There's only two races left, but the game is bloody hard and after 64 races of Top Gear and 6 stages of this game I need a break of these Gremlin racing games.

I was playing this game in brief sessions between the VR Deluxe marathons and, boy, is it hard. And in a bad way. It's overly frustating and there's very little you can do in some occasions.

But it's another case where the original difficulty level was raped and made brutally hard for some $tupid reason; the Amiga game is nowhere near as hard and frustating.

I think we have a good chance of clearing at least one of the libraries this year and it would be nice to see more members in the game, but I guess endless discussions about the 'Market' and the WiiU are much more fun...

Members: 7,834
Active Members: 500
Active Members which play MD/Genesis games: 100
Active Members which play and finish MD/Genesis games: 50
Active Members which play and finish MD/Genesis games without save states: 25

[goldenband]

Bart vs the Space Mutants is a game I finished in the late 90s on the NES. [...] I'll give it a shot tonight on a real Genny and see how that goes.

Nice, I wish you luck. IIRC StarMist had a pretty good handle on that and was able to beat it back in 2012 for his review.

I'm going to leave my password from Lotus Turbo Challenge here, for anyone interested in finishing this game: Mallow.
There's only two races left, but the game is bloody hard and after 64 races of Top Gear and 6 stages of this game I need a break of these Gremlin racing games.

Board member Slutty managed to get to the last race, but got frustrated and dropped out of the beat-'em-all after that. (Don't let it take you out too!)

Members: 7,834
Active Members: 500
Active Members which play MD/Genesis games: 100
Active Members which play and finish MD/Genesis games: 50
Active Members which play and finish MD/Genesis games without save states: 25

Active Members which play and finish MD/Genesis games without save states and are willing to slog through games that are often about as far as you can get from a "Greatest Hit": ???

(But then again, a lot of perfectly respectable Sega CD and PAL games are left, and quite a few NTSC games as well.)

[goldenband]

Made it to Level 50 (of 80) in The Humans, so I'm getting there bit by bit.

Despite the occasional flash of cleverness, this game is a slog -- like a cross between Lemmings and The Lost Vikings that didn't come off properly.

[Bottino]

Board member Slutty managed to get to the last race, but got frustrated and dropped out of the beat-'em-all after that. (Don't let it take you out too!)

Nah, I'm still swinging here.

I've started to play Donald in Maui Mallard and I feel like this game isn't as good as I remembered it being...
let's see how that works out.

[kikenovic]

I played Bart vs the SM a couple nights ago. It is as I remember it, basically, the controls are worse than the NES. I couldn't get past level 1! It is more difficult to get rockets hit the mark, choosing items is a bit cumbersome, but at least the Xray is easier to access.

Don't take me wrong I'll keep trying, once I figure the "turbo jump" mechanics I know I'll breeze through this one.

[Bottino]

Hum.. let's see.



Donald in Maui Mallard
-1995 release
-24 Mbit cartridge
-Uninspired music
-Bad hit detection for your character
-Lots of cheap deaths, combined with unresponsive controls
-Blind jumps
-Average graphics;good animation; mediocre artistic design

This is a hard game, but it's hard mostly for it's unresponsive controls ( like when Donald is in it's Ninja form, you have to wait until all frames of his attack are finished in order to be able to move; or when I press the C button to make a jump and nothing happens and I eventually would die in some pit ) combined with a lot of parts where you need to run/jump away of some shit that's going to kill you instantly; of course you going to die a lot in these parts, since you need everything perfectly memorized in order to be able to succeed and the designers knew that, so they placed a 1-Up in the beginning of those parts. They're overly long as well.

In his Ninja form, Donald ( or 'Maui Mallard' ) has a special 'Dash' move, that you're only going to use in one small part of the game ( the last part of level 2 ). Isn't that brilliant?
Also, the designers felt the need to abuse the 'swing with the stick' thing.

The last couple stages and final boss are specially terrible.

Castle of Illusion, Quackshot, Aladdin are all much better games than this one and as much as I love platform games, I can honestly say that I had very little fun with this game.

[Raistlin]

The main complain with Maui Mallard I had was the password system. In order to get a passwort you have to collect a certain amount of money (noone know how much exactly). When you loose a life you'll loose all your money but it will nowhere be mentioned. So you only get a password if you clear a level without loosing a single life which is quite frustrating in the later levels. I needed hours to understand this system and always wondered why I did not get any code.

[Bottino]

The main complain with Maui Mallard I had was the password system. In order to get a passwort you have to collect a certain amount of money (noone know how much exactly). When you loose a life you'll loose all your money but it will nowhere be mentioned. So you only get a password if you clear a level without loosing a single life which is quite frustrating in the later levels. I needed hours to understand this system and always wondered why I did not get any code.

Hey Raistlin, thanks for the feedback. You know, I have the brazilian manual of this game ( which has a ridiculous bad and literal translation ) and there's no mention of that at all there; I was wondering what the hell I was supposed to do with all that money, since the game has no score whatsoever. All that I could figure it out was that the game game would give me a password everytime I didn't die on a level.

Another stupid thing about this game is the fact that even if you don't die, the only things that you carry for the next stage are your lives and any energy increase that you managed to find; all the Yin-Yangs and Beetles that you previously found are lost and you have to collect them all over again. Also, if you happen to die once, you lose all the energy increase that found.

I probably sounded too bitter in my evaluation of this game, but that's because for a 1995, 24mbit release this game should've been a lot better.

[goldenband]

To quote Flight of the Conchords, The Humans are dead:







Beaten on Normal difficulty (I think Hard just gives you a tighter time limit).

My first Genesis completion for the project in way too long, and a doozy. Getting through all 80 levels was a real slog. I freely took advantage of various minor tricks I found along the way: jumping off the wheel right before it hits the ground, for example.

Then again, it can be so hard to tell what's a trick and what's intended in this kind of game. I beat Level 79 by essentially bypassing the final obstacle, building a stack of humans so that I could just barely reach the prisoner. In another level, I got a human to an otherwise-inaccessible platform by building a stack that almost reached it and getting him killed by a dinosaur, so that he respawned on top of the platform. Are these the intended solutions? I have no idea!

Also, there's at least one undocumented behavior in the game that's critical to beating Level 51, and I had to look at a video (the only time I did) to see what to do. When your caveman gets into his throwing stance, press backwards (i.e. the direction he's not facing), and after a moment he'll change his throwing arc to make the toss go higher. This isn't mentioned at all in the US manual, and Phantar confirmed it's not in the EU or Amiga manuals either, but it is in the Jaguar manual oddly enough.

Either way, I don't think Level 51 is beatable without it, because you can't toss a needed torch up onto a platform otherwise, and the Internet is full of bewildered questions about this stage. It's criminal that the manual omitted that information!

[goldenband]

Got back to work on Marsupilami, and made it through the second and third areas. I'm playing on Easy this first time, so I'll have to redo it, but learning the tricks to each stage will make it much easier the next time around.

Also tried playing Gemfire but I wasn't in the right frame of mind for Koei complexity.