Yeah, it's a lot to read and probably takes an awful amount of time, but it's also interesting. After all, I can't see myself trying all of these games myself, but reading about them (or maybe watching the occasional SNESdrunk video) gives a good enough idea about most of them. I'm also looking forward to the second half of the ranking.

As for this competition it seems like the SNES isn't all that popular around here, is it? Or at least it seems like the NES is the platform of choice here.

Anyways, two more games off the list: Cybernator (https://imgur.com/a/tX0I3sk...) and Super E.D.F. or Earth Defense Force (https://imgur.com/a/UwaIujp...)

Both are good to great games. Cybernator, aka Assault Suit Valken, really surprised me with it's good gameplay and a mostly fair and fun challenge, unlike some other Konami games. The controls take a bit of getting used to, but once I did it was really fun. However, if I wanted to make it through the game, I had to progress very slowly and carefully or otherwise it might have found myself surrounded by enemies or losing too much hit points. Some levels were also very long and quite difficult, so it took me a few tries until I finally got to the end. I think it might have even been the good ending. Also, I noticed that the character artwork seems to have been done by Satoshi Urushihara, the "Master of Breasts"! Too bad that all the anime character artwork has been removed from the US release of the game.

I played Super E.D.F. on the Switch online service and enjoyed it quite a bit. It's decently challenging, even for a shmup, since it's a very fast game and doesn't give you much time to get used to the game. Luckily there was a way later on in the game to basically exploit the slowdowns, so that I could actually manage to evade all the crazy amounts of projectiles that came towards me in the later boss fights, especially during the final boss fight. But it shouldn't be cheating since I just used the homing atom bomb on level 5. With this, your option homes in on the enemies and blasts them at point blank with two explosive shots. This is apparently too much for the SNES hardware since this causes massive slowdowns. So during the final boss fight I would switch between this and a different option setting to get a good balance between damage output and slowdown during moments of heavy fire for staying alive. And while E.D.F. may have some slowdowns it actually looks really good for an early SNES title. Some levels had really beautiful and detailed backgrounds with several layers and of course parallax scrolling. There was also always a lot of on-screen action, which I thought was damn impressive. The music is quite nice as well, although I have to admit that I was constantly so busy staying alive that I never really got to enjoy the music or backgrounds. Haha

Edit: I also gave X-Kaliber 2097 another shot and finally beat it, after I had one attempt where I lost all my continues on the last boss, had only 1 life left, reduced the boss to 1 HP and was about to kill him, when I took a wrong step and died. Game over. All over again. Anyway, finally finished this one as well. And it's not really a classic. You basically have to cheat the AI, learn some patterns and hope for the best. The ending is also pretty underwhelming as well and there isn't even a highscore list or something to reward you for your efforts. This game could have needed a little bit more polish.
Anyways, here are the pics: https://imgur.com/a/j2KarVU...

Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits is done. I felt like playing some Robotron and noticed that the default high scores for every game were pretty low, so I went ahead and played them as well.

What are the conditions for beating Puyo Puyo Tsuu? I have been playing it on NSO in scenario or tower mode on normal difficulty and got the normal ending. Apparently there is also a good ending, if you manage to beat the game with a certain score and without continues. So is the good ending required or is the normal one sufficient? Or even a completely different mode?

Generally, if you get credits you're good. If you get a Konami style "do better" ending, you're not

Okay, after the credits and all it said Let's try with "No continue" and "EXP more than 180,000" before you meet Satan. So I guess this is such a Konami style ending?
If so that would be really really tough. You easily have 20+ levels and doing all of those without a single game over sounds insane. Well, maybe I'll try it casually in the future.
At least the game is super cute and funny.

I have beaten two more games:
Mega Man 7 (https://imgur.com/a/JOOiqzB...)
Illusion of Gaia (https://imgur.com/a/2FFFJER...)

I even managed to beat the bonus boss in Illusion of Gaia pretty easily this time around. Apparently you can just use that Whirlwind Dash or whatever it is called to lunge straight at the boss and hit him 1 to 3 times. Since this move makes you also invincible you don't even really have to worry about his attacks.
Apart from that I really love this game. It still feels great to play and I dig the weirdness of some of those story moments. However, at certain points in the game you have to wait way too long for something to happen or for the text to scroll, which can be a bit annoying, especially on repeated playthroughs.

This was the first time, that I've beaten MM7. I always saw this game back in the day in magazines and marveled at the beautiful artwork. And the game still looks absolutely beautiful and has some great designs, like the robotic T. rex or pumpkin. I also enjoyed the levels and most bosses, sicne they had clear patterns that you could learn and master, but at the same time they were complex enough, that the battles were still engaging. However, Wily's second form was brutal and took me many, many tries until I've finally beaten him. This made me also realize, that this game has way too many attacks, where you can basically just sit there and wait for enemies to hit you again or wait for the condition, like being frozen, burnt, shocked etc., to go away. This was annoying, but overall only a slight blemish on an otherwise fantastic game.

I've also tried beating Seaquest DSV, since it's on the unbeaten list and not a sports game. Unfortunately this game is not only very obtuse and hard to get into, but also extremely difficult and unforgiving. It could have been a decent, maybe even a good game, if it had received a bit more tweaking. Having to redo a complete scenario after failing one of many missions is easily one of the shittiest things I've seen in a game in quite some time. And some individual missions are just soo damn long and hard, partially because there are way too many enemies, the time limit being too tight or even completely random obstacles. How are you supposed to avoid the gun fire of several enemies at the same time, while also activating a number of switches in a random order? And when you fail, you have to buy a new vessel (or dolphin) and start from the beginning, but without your timer being reset. This game can be so frustrating for all the wrong reasons.

Yep

I was unable to beat that bonus boss as a kid. Then a year or two ago I went back to him and did the same thing

Three more games are done: Terranigma, Neugier and Mega Man X3.

Terranigma is one of my favorite games of all time and it's always a blast to replay it. However, upon repeated playthroughs I've noticed that that the alter parts of the game are not so much fun to replay, since the townbuilding can feel like many sidequests with only very few dungeons in between. I didn't mind it during my first or second playthroughs, but nowadays that part gets a little bit boring. That's why I alternated between Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma, since the former is more focused on dungeons and fighting throughout the game. But this is nitpicking on a very high level.

Neugier is a very, very short Action Adventure game by Wolfsoft that reminded me a bit of Ys insofar as you're exploring and fighting your way through dungeons in an overhead perspective. But in Neugier there are no real experience points. Rather you improve your ground and jump attacks by using them frequently and beating enemies with them. You can also collect hearts or potions from enemies, that increase your HP permanently or heal your HP completely and award you a one-time refill of your HP upon death respectively. You get these only once from specific enemies, so you might want to explore every nook and cranny of the levels, fight every enemy and breack every chest/box open. There is also an interesting gimmick to this game: you get some sort of hookshot from the very beginning of the game, which allows you to push back enemies, transport yourself across gaps or to pick up boxes and throw them at enemies. However this feature isn't used too often. The battles are overall pretty shallow and there are only 3 pieces fo equipment you can find. Also, the game features only 6 levels overall! I beat this game in under 3 hours, which makes it the shortest Action Adventure/RPG kind of game I have yet played. This may be okay nowadays where I have a huge backlog of games, but I would imagine that back in the day it must have been very disappointing to get a new adventure game and finishing it in such a short amount of time. However the game awards you with a rank at the end of the game depending on how long it took you to beat the game, similar to Beyond Oasis/The Story of Thor, jsut much simpler. This is a nice incentive to replay the game and to pad out the length a little bit, but unless they give you a nice reward it would probably be pretty meaningless. What was quite interesting however was the story, whcih I enjoyed quite a bit. Yes, it's very short and therefore on a small scale, and yet I couldn't help but root for the protagonist. I liked that this wasn't yet another silent protagonist. Instead he was very proactive and nicely fleshed out, given the short playtime. Unfortunately the ending was quite sad and just to drive it home they added a depressing scene right at the very end.

Then I went on to play Mega Man X3. And oh my, this is not what I was expecting from the this franchise. Out of all the Mega Man (X) games I have played so far this may be my least favorite game. The levels are just long and plain boring, both visually and from a level design perspective. The sprites and backgrounds may look decent by themselves, but they just repeat everything over and over with very little variation, which makes the bland and drab color pallete look even worse than it already is. As for the level design it's bogged down by equally repetitive and boring challenges of the same obstacles and enemies. And they don't even appear in interesting combinations to provide a fun challenge. No, most of the time you just encounter the exact same enemy or obstacle over and over again with just minor changes to the terrain. Also, the enemies are often located at sports where it's difficult to avoid them or their projectiles. Almost as if they just want to piss off the players. Every level is also filled with an empty room, where a boss fight might occur, and long, boring, empty hallways.

Then there are the boss fights. Usually boss fights are the highlights in Mega Man games, but here they are nothing more than cheap, dull, stupid, repetitive and boring. Just one adjective isn't enough to explain how awful these boss fights are. Almost every single boss in this game (if not indeed every single one of them) uses a variation of shooting a projectile and then lunging at you. So the usualy boss fights consists of nothing other than jumping over/sliding under a projectile and then jumping over/sliding under the boss. So in most boss fights I did nothing other than jumpin back and forth from the left and right wall and maybe shooting at the boss every now and then. This wouldn't be so bad, if the bosses didn't have so many hit points. They easily take 30 to 40 hits with the normal attack and since they are invincible for a short while after hitting them (longer than you are), these fights tend to drag on for what feels like forever. If you have the right weapon the battles may be shorter, but then they are almost too easy. Not to mention that it's almost impossible to tell, which weapon is effective against whom. So for the most part of the game I did not have/use an effective weapon, since I learned pretty quickly that pretty much every sub weapon is useless against bosses, unless it is the right one. This may also be the right time to point out that almost all sub weapons suck. There was only a single one that I frequently used, but other than that they were a huge disappointment.

Ten there are all these hidden power-ups that you have to find in order to have a reasonable chance at the final levels. Well, it was almost impossible for me by myself to figure out what to do in order to overcome some of those obstacles. I had to consult a guide so that I could find my first rider armor or the improved legs and so on. If not for the guide I might have had to redo the same levels over and over again. This is also a way to pad out the length of a game: make the player constantly backtrack. This did not bother me so much in the previous games, but here it felt more like a chore than like actual fun. Part of that was also the boring music. While the individual tracks may not be that bad by themselves they're way too short and then go on to constantly loop the same guitar riff with the same short melody. Some of these songs were really grating and annoying, too. Overall I'm absolutely not a fan of this game and I can only reiterate that it's my least favorite mainline Mega Man (X) game so far. It failed at pretty much everything that made the previous games so good and fun.

Nosferatu is done.  Kinda tough game with unresponsive controls, but pretty satisfying to beat once you get the hang of it.  I played the Super Famicom version, but it seems the only differences are the number of continues and Japanese text.

For the victory conditions, how did you determine which games require a good ending and which ones any ending is okay?  In this game, if use too many continues, you get a bad ending and a "Game Over" screen.

 

Each and every one was a judgement call. A lot are starting to get hazy in my memory but I can review anything we wish

Seeing how much more participation the Nes thread gets maybe for 2020 we should just do the "Can NA finish SNES in a year" with bonus points for green games.

So I've finally beaten Joe and Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics via the Nintendo Switch online service.
For the most part this game is pretty mediocre. The controls feel a bit slippery and the jumping floaty. Meanwhile the levels are pretty simple and not overly creative. Of course there is the token ice level and fire level and so on. Then there are a few sections like a mine cart race and such that mixes up the gameplay, but these aren't anything special either. Don't expect anything like you would find in a Donkey Kong Country game.
On the other hand the visuals are pretty decent with some nice backgrounds, animation and big dinosaur bosses, that make hilariously goofy faces when hit. The music, while short and only featuring few tracks, is nice and fitting for this primeval setting.
However where this game falls apart is the length and the final level. There are only 6 levels before you fight the final boss for the first time. After that there is only a very short seventh level that transitions into a fiendishly difficult boss rush. Usually I don't mind them, since in most games you become stronger by collecting power-ups or gaining levels, so that a boss rush feels like showing off how far you've come. But in JaM2 you don't get any of that, so you have to beat EVERY single boss again, but this time without a single power-up. Meanwhile you don't get a single health recovery item and have at most 3 lives with 5 hit points each before seeing the game over/continue screen. This was just atrocious and single-handedly ruined this game for me. Especially the third boss, since his attack patterns are so random and one of his attacks is close to impossible to avoid. So he would usually drain the most of my hit points or lives. And at the end you have to face off the final boss again who also has a second form! To make matters even worse the final boss is indeed very difficult and it's just hard to even beat him since he randomly counterattacks, which you oftentimes can not evade. Or sometimes he would trap me in the corner and just gang up on me. He really sucked and this whole ordeal drained all kind of enjoyment and goodwill I used to have with this game. His second phase is luckily much more predictable and after some practicing I learned how to finally beat that one as well without getting damaged once. But constantly having to go through this seventh level and the annoying boss rush with the overly long entrance animations again was still annoying and nerve-wracking.
I'm glad that I've still managed to beat this game, but my opinion on it has totally soured and I can't see myself ever touching it again in the future.

A couple months ago I went through Uncharted Waters.  That was a marathon, requiring me to sail around the world many, many times.  Then I played through most of Might and Magic III, before my save wiped.  That was a marathon, with a huge, huge world to cover.

Why not make it three in a row?  This game took FOREVER to get through.

The 7th Saga




edit: and I guess I forget scary already played through it.  Ah well, no harm no foul.
 

2020 plans are up in the air right now. If we migrate to a new site, which seems likely, there might be some sort of reboot on what this effort looks like

Aerobiz done

Super Star Wars done

I have beaten Final Fantasy IV. I am not sure though if this even counts since it's technically a different game than FF II (US).

I just realized Sailor Moon is on the SFC list. I beat the French port of that game 3 times this year, with Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. As far as I know the only difference is the text is translated to French.

I guess green title Nolan Ryan's Baseball is done?




After a ten game season (where you play as whoever you want each week), it just moves on to the All-Star game.  And then it's over...

edit: actually it called it the "All Star" game, but those were definitely the two pennant winners. I won that game 9-0 thanks to a pitching meltdown by the AI so I'm definitely calling it good

Which Sailor Moon game?

And all SFC games are fair game.  I'm just adding them as they get cleared.

Updated. Gaia has broken onto the all-time leaderboard, and Red has moved up. I'll resort them when I get a chance.



Sorry for the sluggish update. I've been busting my ass playing games to write about, writing about them, and then migrating my writing to a new website.

The first one, I think its just called sailor moon.