Recently I got into ripping the music from The Polar Express. I made an interesting discovery while doing so: The musician wasted a few channels in each song for the same instrument to take turns with playing the next note before falling back to the first channel. My guess is that they wanted that illusion of polyphony, but even when I truncated the decay and merged the channels together into a single track, it's not that clever of an illusion when played back. It hardly makes a difference with what they did, what a waste. I can only imagine how much extra depth they could have given each song with using those extra channels for something else.
For what console? It came out on several platforms. Also, could you visualize what you mean? I'm not sure I get it.
Made it to the last level of "Linea, The Game" before the DLC begins. Wow this is difficult, even with my controller! The DLC levels only get harder.💦️ [Update] Mere seconds after posting, I got this achievement:
Following the release of the Fallout TV show in April this year, I got the itch to go back and replay Fallout: New Vegas. I had around 112 hours on the game, most of them accumulated throughout 2014, but only had something like 10/75 of the achievements. I decided I'd do three playthroughs to get all of them. After modding the absolute hell out of the game to patch a load of game-breaking bugs out of the game, expanding its video memory capacity to stop it from crashing every time I opened a door, and making it playable (it now crashes once an hour instead of once every 2 minutes!), I completed my first playthrough in May. I now have every collectible achievement, every DLC achievement except for two of the Gun Runners' Arsenal challenge achievements, every quest achievement except for 2 of the 4 main storyline ending achievements, the 'beat the game on hardcore mode' achievement, and a bunch of gambling achievements. 50/75 achievements is pretty good innings for me, I think. I don't have the mental capacity to go back and get the rest right now, way too boring lol
I've been on vacation for three days now, and so far have beaten a video game every day. The first was Mickey's Dangerous Chase, a 1992 Game Boy game from CapCom. It was okay; quite short, and the second to last level was trial and error which was annoying. I beat it on my second attempt—it has infinite continues, so it's quite easy to beat, but I didn't fancy spending more than 90 minutes on it. The second was Imagine: Fashion Designer. This game has some fairly impressive graphics and functionality, but gameplay-wise it's pretty poor. I had to look up solutions multiple times, because the game says things like "The outfit isn't right" without telling you why. On the final level, you needed to create 5 blue outfits, but it turned out you could also create a single blue outfit and use it 5 times. xD Oh well, I beat it. For the third game I wasn't quick enough to take a picture. It was Stuart Little: The Journey Home on GBC. It is part platformer, part racer. In the platformer levels you need to collect things to beat the level. I found the controls quite awkward, and the level design wasn't fun either. I wonder if I've ever before completed 3 games in 3 days.
Yesterday I beat Microsoft The Best of Entertainment Pack for GBC. It features 3 Solitaire card games, a skiing game, an implementation of Conway's Game of Life including a competitive game based on it that has terrible AI, Minesweeper and a three-dimensional variation of tic tac toe. It was decent, I particularly enjoyed Minesweeper, which has three difficulty settings and quite some nice features. The tic tac toe game, which was the final one, was quite an anti-climax, as it turned out that the AI on hardest settings made it impossible to beat the game (at least on the 1x3 field setting, the original tic tac toe setting), so I decided to beat each field setting on the easiest difficulty, which offered no challenge at all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Here's a screenshot of my won Expert game of Minesweeper. Also relevant to this thread: I recently worked on an overview of all my games, with info on genre, developer, et cetera. My main reason to compile it is that I wanted to get an overview of how many games I'd beaten and completed. Here are those statistics. Note that column E means 'Beaten but not 100%', whereas column B means 'Beaten and/or completed'. As you can see, I've beaten about 2/3rds of my collection, and completed a bit under half. This is less than I'd expected, to be honest! It was also interesting to see that I have over 50 GBA games, but have beaten 3/4's of them! Not bad, I'd say. It makes sense that for GB and GBC the fractions beaten and completed are fairly close to each other, because on these systems (them being quite old) many games do not feature a distinction between beating the game and completing it, as there are no optional additional objectives besides beating the game kept track of.
This morning I beat Disney•Pixar Up on the Wii. I will write my opinion on the game when I've completed it. I have some way to go for 100%; I think it could be done in one play through the game, but there's a bunch of stuff I missed! Hopefully it won't prove too elusive.
I beat Celeste on Switch. I'd heard a lot of good about this game both before getting it and after it. It is quite fun! It will probably be a very long time until I 100% it, as I've heard some parts are extremely difficult. Might not do it at all, as I'm not one to spend an hour on a single screen!
Yesterday I beat Pokémon Trading Card Game on GBC. This is a really fun game! I'd got a few hours into it after buying it in (I think) 2019, but then my save got deleted and I gave up on it for a while. A few years ago I picked it up again and played through most of the game, but then got distracted. Recently I picked it up again to beat it. Most of the game was fairly easy for me, but I struggled to beat the four Grand Masters at the end of the game. After consulting a walkthrough I watched as a kid, I decided to build a 'Rain Dance' deck. I needed to grind for cards to do so, though, which I did. After beating the game, I still have quite a few cards to go, which probably will require a lot of grinding. However, the game features a lot of deck designs that you can build automatically if you have the cards. I think I'll try out all of these (provided I have the required cards) in the process of doing battles to get more cards. I've got 18 hours on this save file now, by the way. Let's see how many more it will take me to get all cards.
I 100%ed Up on Wii! I used an FAQ for one collectable, but otherwise it was quite straight-forward to complete upon my second go through it. I found this game quite mediocre. Music and graphics are quite good, but the gameplay lets down. It's a lot more fun when played with two players, though: if you don't, the other character is AI-controlled and you can switch between characters. The AI isn't great, though, and whereas it can be fun if your human partner messes up, it's annoying when your AI partner messes up. In general, the game feels a bit wonky. But I guess that's fairly common with licensed games. I have yet to try out the separate multiplayer mode. It uses the second gameplay type, where you fly a fighter plane (the rest of the levels are action-adventure/platformer style).
Well that was a fun game. Quite a challenge, but if you want a hard game, this is it. Not for the faint of heart though, especially when the visuals keep warping and distorting. I love how the music dynamically changed, depending on the direction/orientation you were facing in the 4D space. Instruments would fade in and out and the music would sound more "full" or more "empty" with drums, guitars, or other instruments adding to the music, or hearing just the basic melody~ I bought and I own the soundtrack, because it's that good! Marble Mode was such a surprise! I enjoyed that as an "midway" unlock in the game~ It really makes the courses feel different, especially with how you have to deal with the constant inertia of the marble as well as having to control your slice that you are in! Fun fact: Less than 3.5% of all players of this game get "For All the Marbles". It's the least achieved achievement out of all of them. That's how difficult this game can be. Note: Recommended requirements is a GTX 960 to handle this game. Any GPU prior may not work well! Integrated Graphics is not recommended! This is due to all the complex math done and the sheer number of polygons used to create the 4D levels and shapes! (End-Game levels will are even more taxing on your GPU than the earlier ones!)
Huh, that sounds like an interesting game! I'll look it up. And yeah, adaptive music can add a lot to a game!
I think you might enjoy the devlog series on Youtube by CodeParade! CodeParade, that's the developer, explains what he was working on, what he had to do, and just gives a general overview of that the 4th Dimension is as well as what "exactly" your GPU is doing in realtime when rendering his game at runtime. It's such a great series and he not only talks about the details in verbose detail, but he even mentions working with the musician who is working with him to make music for his game~ Note: Avoid the videos that say "spoilers" or "secret" or anything like that! If you plan on getting the game, you may want to avoid these!
After about twelve years, I finally completed Madagascar on GBA. The Adventure mode is the main part of the game, there you need to collect all coins to complete it. This is also what I repeatedly got stuck on as a kid, as some of the coins are hidden well off-screen (particularly when played on GBA: it was also released on DS). Recently, though, someone in a Discord server I'm in completed the game, and then I wanted to do it too! I did not end up using any guides. Then there's also the Bonus mode, which mostly consists of some of the special levels in the Adventure mode, with added toy penguins that you need to find before you can finish the level. Here, you are racing the clock, and for each level a time to beat is set. These times are rather tight, and some of them were quite challenging: first you need to explore the level and remember where all the penguins are, and then you need to route it well and execute it properly in order to stay under the time to beat. Overall, I think this is actually quite a decent game! It was a bit tougher to 100% than it needs to be, but really, when I tried it again this summer, it was more doable than I thought it was (as evidenced by not needing any guides after all!). Now, I also have the DS game... not sure yet if I'll do that one as well right away or save it for later.
I was just trying to find this screenshot, but couldn't remember whom I sent it to... then I decided to get it off here, but it turns out it's gone?
I thought I completed Pilotwings 64. But it turns out I did not! In this game, you receive scores. If you get a score above 90, you get a gold medal (it's actually a bit more complicated than that, but this will do). At first I was going for perfect scores, but the game is so challenging and sometimes finicky that it was frustrating. I took a long break, and then when I came back to it decided to go for gold medals, because it seemed like that was what the game focused on anyway (besides just passing the levels, which requires only 70 points). But it turns out that the intended way to 100% it is in fact to get a perfect score on each level! I am not going to do that, I think. I enjoyed the game, but the given leeway is very welcome, with how annoyingly precise it can be. It took me many hours (probably at least 10) to beat this game with all gold medals, and it would take me at least the same amount of time to get to perfect scores, I think!
I beat New Super Luigi U on Wii U yesterday, and thought I couldn't take a picture. New Super Luigi U was released as DLC for New Super Mario Bros. U, as a stand-alone game, and as a bundle with New Super Mario Bros. U. My brother owns the latter, which is how I've been playing the game every now and then for the past 8 years or so. There's still a long way to go for 100%, and considering that I only play the game a couple of times a year, you probably won't see a photo of completion soon.
