Uncharted Waters is done. I played it twice for the Koeiathon last year and this is the last time I'm ever playing it.

I'll start on RotTK 1 next.

All hail Sir Pissjug!

I have been struggling over the past few weeks to beat Castlevania III and after many, many tries and cursing I have finally beaten it. It is easily one of the most difficult games that I have managed to beat so far. Out of all the many difficult levels, level 7 was definitely the hardest and most frustrating one and it made me give up on the game for quite some time. Constantly having to wait for those blocks to fall and to climb that tower was super annoying since I had to repeat those parts over and over again until I eventually managed to make it through that level after way too many hours of trial and error.

The doppelganger boss also drove me cazy since I only had Alucard as additional character. So what I did was exploiting a cheap trick to beat him. I would wait for him on the middle platform and hit him once or twice with the whip before running away and jumping on one of the platforms to the left or right. Usually he follows you and jumps up as well, which makes it hard to dodge him. So whenever he tried you jump up, I would switch my character while the doppelganger was in midair. This would reduce him to a blob and cause him to fall down. Then just rinse and repeat.

Compared to some of the earlier levels and bosses, Dracula luckily was quite manageable after learning his patterns and thanks to the axe that I used during his third form. Anyway, this game was really difficult imho and I think that Konami crossed the line between a fun challenge and punishing difficulty every now and then. If there weren't unlimited continues I would probably just have given up. I am also not sure if I would really want to go back and try the different routes.

Nice job! The game was made harder for the US version, just like Konami did with Bayou Billy. You can read a really long list of all the changes here:

https://tcrf.net/Castlevania_III:...

Thanks! This was an interesing read. It is always amazing to see the many major and minor differences each version had back in the day.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms 1 is done. I'll work on Bandit Kings next. It's a real slog, so you probably won't hear from me again until the weekend.

I managed to beat King's Knight!

This game has some good things going for it, like combining a shoot 'em up with an RPG or having four playable characters with a few differentiating characteristics and nice, fluent action. But this game is overall very rough around the edges and has several serious flaws. One of them being that this game is too cryptic about what to do and what the many different power-ups are even good for. This is one of those games, for which you definitely want to have a manual or guide to help you out.

But even after I looked for a manual online, I still wasn't prepared for some of the curve balls that this game threw at me as soon as I made it to level 5. Because level 5 is when all surviving characters band together to fight an evil dragon and save the princess. But what neither manual nor game tell you, is that you absolutely need to have all four characters in your party or you will 100% not be able to beat this game. Why? Well, there are two instances in this level where I was confronted with a dead end. No matter what I tried, which way I went or which character I used, I could not get past that dead end. This is because you have to have every character in your party and you must have certain power-ups, that the game calls elements. In each of the first four stages there is one of every type of element hidden somewhere. And only if every character survived and you have found all the elements across those four stages can you cast a spell. But only certain characters can cast a specific spell and only in one specific place in the fifth level. This is way too cryptic and almost impossible to figure out by yourself. The designers could have made it a bit more obvious, maybe by foreshadowing the circumstances under which a certain character can cast a spell in that character's level. Maybe the sorcerer should have had the water level due to his spell only killing enemies in water. Or the thief could have had a section with those invisible mazes and not the knight! Instead the developers throw all of these random hazards at you, that you have never encountered before and your only option is to learn by repeatedly dying and trying over and over again.

What is even worse, is that they have the audacity to let you play the fifth level, even if it is technically impossible to beat it! And the game never tells you this! And to top all of that, when you have a full party, they form a rhombus, which makes them much easier to be hit. Yet only one of them attacks at the same time! At first this made me try the final level with only one character as this is much easier. But since you need a specific character at specific parts in this level, you must have them in your party swap them in at the right time by stepping on swapping tiles. While you are on one of those swapping tiles, the characters stop and slowly change formation. Meanwhile you still get attacked by enemies and can easily die. Imagine my anger, when I finally made it to the final boss after a few hours and then dying, because I accidentally stepped on a swapping tile and couldn't move while he barraged me with projectiles. There is not even any form of post-hit invincibility in this game. So a swarm of projectiles can kill you in one go. Great! But not only that: there are tiles that swap your characters randomly. So you might need the thief or the monster to progress, but no matter on how many swapping tiles you step, you do not get them due to bad RNG thus ruining your current attempt. This is absolutely ludicrous! They should warn you in advance or not even let you play the fifth level unless you meet the minimum criteria for success. Also, there should only be one of those four characters on screen and you should be able to swap them out freely like in Castlevania III. This alone would have made the fifth level much fairer and more fun.

Anyway, this game made me quite mad, even though there are some good qualities buried there. If only they had given the game a bit more polish. Then it might have been really good for a game from 1986, if only a bit short. But at least I have beaten another game from my backlog.

Anyone have tips for Best of the Best? I've got a character with max stats and am hitting a brick wall on the last fight. Tried it for many hours over now and am not getting anywhere close to winning that fight. Any cheese strata anyone knows or safe methods?

Mike Matei recently beat this on his stream. The game absolutely infuriated him and he advised people to not play it, haha.

 

I have not been following his streams recently so I had no idea. But I just quickly looked into his Youtube recordings and it looks hilarious. I might have to watch more later.
Also, while playing I actually thought that this game might make good AVGN material. Maybe we will see it in the future?

I watched a lot of his king's knight streams and it seemed absolutely infuriating to him. He had to make maps with pictures of the screen to find the items, and spent a metric ton of time on the final level.

Could definitely be a good AVGN episode, though I imagine they've already got a lot of ideas

I love how Square was trying to promote King's Knight as a classic, bringing it back for FF15 and so on. Reminds me of how Nintendo always tries to include Urban Champion in with their other hits. Those two games will never, ever be classics.

In other news, it looks like Daniel Doyce has already clinched the Koei crown for the fourth straight year! There's no way he can beat his previous point totals, since the games are now worth less due to him beating them all so early the last two years.

Koei champions
 

2012	monkoftheages
2013	WashYourFace
2014	smick	25
2015	WashYourFace	28
2016	Daniel Doyce	29
2017	Daniel Doyce	76
2018	Daniel Doyce	79
2019	Daniel Doyce	36+

 

What are the victory conditions for City Connection? I have beaten the first seven levels and was back in New York again, but the level was different from the first time.

Edit: Added foto.

I think that's good enough to call it beaten. City Connection is one of those games where the definition is a bit murky, because Tasvideos counts it as 16 stages. However, the people who speedrun it consider stages 1-6 to be one loop. That's what I've counted in years past, so it makes sense to keep it like that, I guess.

Just wanted to update that I have started playing L'Empereur finally. Put a few hours in yesterday to learn the ropes. Started from scratch again tonight and am feeling ok with it so far. Pretty close to wiping Prussia off the map and have also just started an assault on Denmark and Sweden. If those go well my alliances should allow me to recover from those campaigns before taking on Austria. Feel like it will be smooth sailing as soon as Austria is out of play.

Hells yeah! Just don't mess with Britain at all until you've taken care of the rest of Europe.

Space Shuttle Project done. Beat this for the second year in a row, a simple "game" that can be completed in 90 minutes or so. Pretty easy for an 8 pointer. If you think of it as an educational game, it's good by those standards. But it's not great compared to normal NES games. The music is nice, though.