Have you ever played the army men multiplayer at all? Do you have the means to do so? I know my brother and I had a ton of fun playing army men and shooting at each other, but I can never seem to recall exactly which game. I feel like it had to be n64, but I just can't be sure.

I think I may have played it back in the day, that would have been the first game. But, honestly I don't really recall anything about it. Maybe next time Dave comes over I can convince him to give it a shot, lol!

I forget, after DK crapped out on me. I played through Cruis'n USA to relax a bit. Just noticed no one claimed it yet.

Cruis'n USA is beat!

I just cleared Episode 10 in Rescue Mode of Tetrisphere, so now you can mark it as beaten.

You ain't done Cruis 'n till you cruised all the way to the moon.
Try the sequels as well  
 

The whole aspect of beating the game can differ from person to person based on their perspective, so we need to draw a clear line (finish) that we call beaten.
It's like passing exam or getting your degree. "Did you get an A+?" "Nope, but I passed with B-" Though your parents might have wanted you to get at least an A-

I was asked or I offered to complete the list with end requirement, but even that is quite hard enough. Due to some vague games not even having an ending / credit roll.
For story mode games it is fairly set in stone... beat the final boss, the villain, the evil bad guy kidnapping all the damsels (cough bowser) followed by credits.
In short, we settle for (as the speedrun community call it) : Any% - The quickest way of getting credits from a cleared savefile, by ANY means possible without using EXTERNAL devices.
This means you can use No external cheatcodes, gameshark etc. But you are allowed to set the options as you so desire. If you want to put it on easy mode. Go ahead, as long it gives you credit roll!
Some games just tells you to try Normal before you get any credit, meaning you need normal or harder in order to beat it. (The message now try a new challenge after the roll will still count as beaten, since the game simply tries to challenge you)

Tetrisphere can be completed in many ways (every way that gives you an end cutescene and credit roll)
- Rescue 1-1 to 5-10, 8-10 (cutescene) and 10-10
- Puzzle mode 1 to 100
- Hide & Seek (episode something 1-1 to 3-10 orso)
- etc....
Since you are done just doing the Any%, which in this case is after Episode 5-10. Though it feels short and easy, some games just are that simple to beat.
However, do not stop if you enjoy the game! I surely didn't!

Hope this clarifies the matter  

I can speak for most of the wrestling games only WCW Nitro has credits.

Backstage assult - has three belts associated with the three difficulty levels, the belts show up on the character in the select screen. So, win all three to beat the game.

WWF Attitude and ECW Hardcore - are the exact same game. Win all three belts in story mode and do the title defenses to beat.

WWF Warzone and WCW Mayhem - Just complete story mode.

Wrestlemania 2000 has a credit role after completing the road to Wrestlemania mode
 

Are the other two THQ games the same, WCW/NWO World Tour and Revenge? I have never played any of those. 
 

Good info, I've entered those wrestling game requirements.

I guess the thing I'd expect from our list of requirements is basically Any%, as long as you followed a legitimate path to something that you could reasonably call an ending. I don't know how I feel about "any means possible" if it includes glitches and the like. Would a zero-star run of Mario 64 count?

Tetrisphere is a tough situation because yes, it gives you credits after 5-10, but no, it doesn't really "seem" like an ending. Why is there a credit roll after 5-10?? There's also now a solid history of people beating 10-10 so I don't want to cheapen those wins by easing the requirement.

Of course it would be neat to use a higher baseline of using middle/higher difficulties on all games, to keep from getting bad endings and skipping big chunks of game content, but I can think of a couple games I beat last year that I wouldn't have even touched if I knew I had to play on Hard or get the good ending. As we decided last year, we don't need to make it harder on ourselves.

MeridianPrime, unless you want your own list, you don't need to type up a requirement for every single game. There's a lot of them (maybe 150 or so) that I'm already confident about. And I'm still slowly adding requirements as I happen to discover them. If you want, I can remove the ones from the table that I'm not 100% sure about, so that only the ones with gaps are the ones that still need info.

I don't remember on those it's been a long time since I played those.

 

If that's the case, why do we have to play Shadows of the Empire on Medium? It gives the true ending, sure, but by that logic you should require 101% of DK64, among others. Vigilante 8 is another - why not simply beat the game once, rather than with every character? Surely "beat the game" counts as... beating the game?
 

That SOTE requirement is definitely a leftover of when I was going through at the beginning of last year with the "middle difficulty" mentality. I'm happy to flip that to "any difficulty." But looking at it now, there's no credit roll when you finish on Easy. There's a quick copyright screen and that's it. Should that count? Is there a credit roll when you beat it on Normal/Hard/Jedi? I don't actually know but there are probably playthroughs on YT.

As for Vigilante 8, that's a requirement that we inherited from past years. I guess the original rationale was that there's no credits or definitive ending screen after finishing with one character, so the idea was to "unlock everything" so that you could call it beaten. I've never played that game at all, so I just copied that one over from a long time ago. I'm happy to change that one too, if we're all agreed.

Both very valid point of views.

But that is the essence of my sentence : "The whole aspect of beating the game can differ from person to person based on their perspective, so we need to draw a clear line (finish) that we call beaten." 

It doesn't end with easy ending, normal etc, first endings, extra endings, bad ending, happy ending, true ending.
"Shadows of the Empire" Perfect example, same gameplay, same story, just a little harder for an additional cutscene. Would be more valid of an ending if there was like an extra level after skyhook.
Either difficulty remains Any%, but with the additional criteria Easy / Medium / Hard / Jedi.

Also we have to keep in mind that we aren't all champions in these games. Sure we have those excel in 1 way above the rest, but for the mayority it is simply playing to have fun and beat it in the process.
Shadows of the Empire on Medium isn't impossible for those that never played the game before. But who's judging when it is or not?
That's why we need to draw a line or go in detail for every game if we want to be happy about the players achievements and have actually people giving it a try.

Before we go into the depths of each and one of them. Here is another example. Some games are done on easy giving credits and the text "The End" on screen. If that doesn't count, what is?
On that same note, there are games that never say "The end" or any equivilent on any setting/ending.

*Mario 64 - 0 star is an ending* Just not the intentional way, but since you don't ask the player to record the gameplay. We just have to accept *by any ingame means possible*
We can't judge a 70 star run by telling you did the 70 most easiest stars > invalid... If a person knows the game so well that he/she literally hugs walls for 5 minutes to get the damn Damsel, so be it.
That is the way the game is made... with its flaws.

HOWEVER....

Since we finished this list once (2018) on any% as we desire. I would like to propose a new "beat the game" standard.
Play the game with the default setting. Meaning if the difficult setting on newgame starts on Normal/Medium. That will be the way you have to beat it. So no more toning down games. Challenging, yet doable and fair.
This include all standard settings (except sound).
For Tetrisphere I suggest to play - get credits at least once for every game mode. In 2018 we did any Any% (meaning any form of an ending), but if we want to "beat the game" (as we state in our topic challenge) I do have to say that includes every modes... as in Any% Tetrisphere... not just 1 mode like Rescue or Puzzle (as I would have done it). So you can actually say you have beaten the game. This way we make our N64 list for 2019 slightly more challenging but within all fairness of enjoying the game for first timers.
A game similar to Tetrisphere will be threated the same way obviously.

Please feedback on my idea.

I will try to check my games on a rainy weekend and start writing down all "beat the game" criteria for all the games.
Perhaps one year we will do a list for 100%... *kappa*

 

As for Vigilante 8. I have played the game with different characters and since the levels are different, I would say that beating the game with every character is playing a "new" mode or levels in someway. So it would be more inline with "beat the game" for 2019. To give an example where it does not have to be with every character >>> Mario Kart 64. You don't have to play with every characters since the game is the same, courses are the same etc.

Agree?

So if there are new things to do in a game giving credits. I'd say go for it before you call it beaten. This means that GoldenEye does NOT have to be beaten on 00 agent, since Aztec and Egyptian are bonus levels and NOT included in the storyline / new mode criteria.

Why do I get the feeling this ends up making a designed ending per game....

For me personally when tracking on Backloggery I consider "beating the game" as getting to the end, one way or the other. Bad ending, good ending, true ending, whatever. 

Maybe we can implement something similar, with a tiered approach, and different point values for different levels of completion where applicable. On Backloggery you have "Beaten", "Completed", and "Mastered". Obviously this would be far more work, but who knows, maybe people would be apt to go above and beyond if their completion were listed in tiers like that, perhaps even with the ability to bump people off the board with a higher tier completion, or a space for each or something. 1 point per tier maybe? Dunno.

Some games might only have 1 or two tiers, depending on the content.

Here's some random game examples I might use:

Silent Hill 2:

• Beat: Get any ending
• Complete: Get the Good ending
• Master: Get all endings

Uncharted Drake's Fortune:

• Beat: Reach the end of the story, any difficulty
• Complete: Reach the end of the story, hardest difficulty
• Master: Earn all trophies (i.e. collect everything and beat it on the hardest difficulty)

Donkey Kong Country 64: 

• Beat: Reach the end
• Complete: 101%

Glover 64:

• Beat: Beat the game
• Complete: Collect everything

Vigilante 8:

• Beat: Beat the game w/ any character
• Complete: Beat the game w/ all characters including UFO
• Master: Beat the game w/ all characters on Unleaded

Just a fun though; I presume that a complete overhaul is out of the question, really just word vomiting here. But yeah, I'd personally go with my base "beat" requirement rules that I use on Backloggery. Even if it's a matter of that beating the game on Easy doesn't give credits, if the gameplay content is otherwise the same, I'd call it beat. It's more inclusive and certainly less daunting for those who are not great at games, but of course that means you risk getting people going "this LB is easy mode now", hence my thinking towards a tiered system. Challenge people and they will oft rise up to it.

I like the idea of play the game on default settings as the base win criteria.

I'm happy to go with the consensus. I think playing on the default difficulty (or higher) is also a fair way, as it probably offers the closest to what the developers expected players to experience.

And yeah, some games are pretty cheap and easy, if we boil it down to quickest possible win. Vigilante 8 would be over in 10 minutes if you just beat one character, for example, and for sure that game is well worthy of more than that, it's a great game! If you beat each other the characters, you unlock things anyway, including stages and other cars, which happens to be the main sort of progression in the game.

As usual, we need to balance fun, challenge, and authentic experience with making it desirable/possible for people to beat ALL these games in a year.

Edit: Either way, this is OUR list here on NA, so whatever we decide upon for each game will be the rules according to our competition here. There are few enough games we can literally go one by one if we have to and say what a fair completion would be. And it is only valid for this list, on this site. If there are other criteria for each game we can debate that, but what is added to the list is what we go by.

For Centre Court Tennis, I've used the standard "Win each of the game's four tournaments and become #1 in the world" every year that I've beaten it. If the game has a true ending or credits, I've never seen them; you just get a congratulations screen after each tournament win.

For All-Star Tennis '99, I'd say "Win a Tournament or win World Tour mode to get credits". The World Tour is probably the intended win condition, but it gives the exact same ending as a simple, user-configured tournament. The Bomb Tennis mode gives no ending.

Will the smartest man in the room please stand up? Jeopardy is complete!

I thought this was quite good at first, if a little barebones. The digitised sounds and graphics are tacky, but what do you expect for a gameshow?! Also, the questions were NOT easy, there are some real headscratchers in here. However, after playing the game just 3 times, I got several repeat categories come up. At first I thought, no big deal, but then I realized that the questions in each category were identical too! So basically, if you play this game more than once, you've essentially broken it...

Just a poor showing, really, it's only job was to ask a bunch of questions, how hard is it to just shove a couple thousand questions in a game, rather than a couple hundred... Sad!

Done with Namco Museum 64!

For information, 3 of the 6 games on this compilation (galaga, dig dug and Pole position) have default high scores to be beaten, while the other 3 (pacman, ms. Pacman and galaxian) do not. For those without high scores, I just beat the necessary score to gain an extra life.

This is a game that feels like it has a very arbitrary, criteria for beating it. But then again, what do you really do with a compilation of arcade games anyway? They're not really meant to be beaten, are they?

Well you beat Donkey Kong and Pac-Man when you get the kill screen, right? 
 

Aw man, that's my lead gone. Curse this SNES Contest taking up all my time!  

Good job bud, keep up the hard work!

Pacman has a storyline.
As you progress in the game there are cutscenes every now and than. That cutscene kinda of shows the progression of the story (with some imagination)
At the end the ghost is all "torn up". I considered that as the ending of pacman. But I agree... most of these games just have a killscreen eventually. But it is either a loop of x levels or intent to get the highest score and use up all your quarters at the arcade hall.
 

I think we all think in the same direction. Any% seems sufficient for this LB, a clear baseline of what a player needs to do. Yet giving the option and challenge to some for completing games on greater scale. Perhaps we can introduce a point system just for the extra incentive beyond the "beat all games". This means players can play an already completed game if so desired to claim that Badge with their favorite games. Not limited to just the first person...