There are around 2k registered titles on RA right now with functional achievement sets. I’ve cleared up to now over one hundred of those. On the long run, I think that a proper end goal would be to try and do everything there is. I think it’s possible, as long as you have the right mindset and determination for it. Nothing is out of reach! A human’s ability to adapt renders all illusions and myths about skill cap obsolete.
I’ve cleared a good amount of old entries recently. Along with those, there is the addition of a few new entries as a part of my “Beat everything from my past” clean up! It’s a good progress, rad fest, good times.
Indivisible [NES]
Not really a part of my clean up plans, this soda city funk was more or less something I was curious about. It’s a de- make of that one game I know literally nothing about, apart from watching a few minutes of the gameplay and having seen the main character various times here and there.
This de- make is a short action platformer, with lots of barren rooms all over the place. You can punch, wall- jump, find an axe and use it to cling to walls and whatnot. The controls are alright I guess… But I really like the two bosses that you can fight in this game! Their patterns are fairly challenging and I had lots of fun battling them, especially for the no- hit achievements! They keep you on your toes all the time, which is something I enjoy in my boss fights when it comes to this sort of games. I don’t know how I feel about the secret boss and the fact that you can punch it fairly easy to death… The axe is legit a worse choice for that fight, isn’t it?
Finding the secret boss is probably one of the most enjoyable experiences I had from this game. In particular, I really had fun doing the difficult climb back from the end boss arena, which you need to do in order to be able to backtrack to one of the early parts of the game where the secret boss resides.
The normal enemies are pretty weak and of no serious threat whatsoever. The graphics of this game are pretty neat, but why do I get this vibe of a Chinese bootleg?… I honestly don’t know…
Soccer [NES]
Hey, now that is a classic! This game was all over the famiclone cartridges back in the days, I even used to own a version where the players and the cheerleaders where turned into anthropomorphic mice. It’s good old plain soccer, with a really annoying system for switching from one player to another. Generally, it all depends on the ball’s location, which can cause quite the chaos, especially if there are too many players around the ball.
This is one of the first games Me and my brother used to play on our famiclone. Although while he was viewing it the right way, for its actual competitive nature and trying to teach me about it, I was more than a determined that this game was actually a co- op! It was quite the bizarre experience, a dear memory which I still hold on to tightly. Other than that, I used to play this game mainly when I was upset about something, setting the game on lowest difficulty and just shooting goal after goal in the opposing team’s door until my anger goes away.
But then came the RA challenge, where I had to face the hardest CPU! Not even that, I even had to score up to six goals for one of the achievements! Seemed pretty hard at first, but as I said before, adaptation is such a strong powerful ability! Apart from that unique and silly goal that I’ve posted a video about, here’s a few tips on how to score easily goals against the hardest CPU in “Soccer” for the NES:
# If you decide to shoot from the center of the field, make sure to aim at the upper half of the goal door. Do it from far away, with the screen still obscuring the enemy goalkeeper. That way he’ll have less time to react to your shooting. You’ll need a good momentum in order to make a strong kick, which can be easily achieved if it’s done right after a receive. The problem with this strategy is that you can’t see the arrow for adjusting the location where you want to kick the ball at, so you’ll probably end up shooting at the downside of the door most of the time.
# Try to bring the ball at one of the sides of the penalty area and shoot diagonally, as the enemy goalkeeper charges at you. This one is pretty effective, as it tends to confuse the enemy goalie catch judgement quite easily, making the ball pass right next to him. The issue here is that it’s quite hard to bring the ball to the sides, with the hardest CPU getting in the way all the time and managing to steal your ball with ease.
The hardest CPU experience can be pretty frustrating, but as long as you pass the ball from player to player and you learn how to make the goal shoots I just described, it becomes… less frustrating. God, the game just gives so much priority to the CPU on higher difficulty…
Shadow of the Ninja [NES]
I used to play this game for a while when I was still a child, but I only remember briefly a few things from it. It was a game my brother borrowed from a friend, with the fourth and fifth, final boss being our gatekeepers for achieving success. My brother taught me how to deal with the fourth boss, bird – man Joey and in return, I did my best to reach and figure out the final boss. I don’t remember how I dealt with him back in the days, but I can say for sure that I didn’t play by his patterns. It was some sort of cheese that you do by staying on the left side, I can’t recall if tanking hits to a certain extend was involved. Whatever it was, it wasn’t as optimal as to just learning the boss proper like I did when I did this game recently.
So what is this game? It’s like “Ninja Gaiden”, but way more generous! No enemies to push you into pits, enemy re- spawn is adjusted better and health recovery items are way more common. Falling into a pit also punishes you with some HP loss! If you pick the whip weapon, this game becomes an easier “Castlevania”! But in general, the whip is way more effective due to its reach and damage output, even on its basic level, compared to the sword. I guess the sword scales a bit better towards the higher levels in terms of range and damage output, but as you learn the game, you’ll be mostly finding yourself using the whip. In this game, weapon level up is achieved by getting the same weapon pickup over and over, without getting the other one or taking too much damage. There are two items that you can pick, which give you a limited amount of ranged attacks. There are Ninja Stars, which just fly straight, but if your weapon is leveled- up, they just fly weirdly all over the place, usually missing their target, thus, wasting precious ammo. The bomb pick- up has a pretty brutal damage output. While being quite limited in terms of ammo, if you manage to save up on it and bring it to a boss, it just makes any fight laughable. Now the problem is, you can’t switch to your normal weapon until you run out of ammo. Honestly, taking up a few hits for the sake of making short work of any boss is pretty worth it. With all those health pick- ups and the boss fights restoring some to a certain extend, you can’t really complain about anything.
The controls overall are pretty responsive, but they do have a bit of delicate touch to them. Rushing is not really this game’s style, at least not until you learn the layout of the levels, that’s it. Enemies are pretty tough, but their patterns are easy to read. Even the final boss has some of the easiest patterns, which are made in such a way that lead you right from the start as to how you should respond to them. Maybe that’s just me now, I definitely didn’t thought so back in the days. During that time, the last boss felt like the most unfair thing in the world. Until I managed to beat it, that’s it! Those are the classic video game values we all grew up to love!
The story of this game is pretty bland, but the stage visuals, especially the backgrounds of the city stages are really freakin’ rad. God bless Natsume for their amazing work! The soundtrack is also really good, with my personal favorite being every stage track except for the final one! [What a weird way of putting this…]
I did play both the Japanese and the western release versions of this game. The original Japanese version “Kage”, has tougher enemies in the very first area. Those guys that run up to you take two hits instead of one like in the western versions! The western versions on the other hand add up additional enemies on certain spots later in the game, which… I don’t know. I guess they do make a little bit of a difference, but for this one, I’m just willing to settle on adding “Shadow of the Ninja” to the vault. Video games! Oh, that special attack I never knew about – Used it only once for getting the achievement for it! Never thought about it afterwards, don’t see any practical use for sacrificing half your health bar for a screen clearing attack.
This game ain’t that tough man…
Lab. Room 19 