Starting my replay of Dragon Quest 2 today! Got my notes ready 😎
I tried to replay this game last year (I beat it once, almost 6-7 years ago) but I got hopelessly lost trying to figure out where to go. I got the boat and ended up sailing the sea for hours trying to find something I hadn't seen before.
This time I'm preparing by at least allowing myself to have a map lol. Last time I refused to break down and look one up, but I also didn't feel like making my own, so I just got stuck and eventually quit. Gamer problems...
As usual, you can find the rules to the gaming quest over on this post! Otherwise, this is just a post that shares some of the games I've been playing lately. Let's have a look!
1) Dragon Quest - NES
I finally went back and saved the princess but I'm still a little bit stuck and grinding... if you've played the game, I just got into Cantlin so it's not much further to the end I think! I need to do some equipment upgrades and some more grinding and then it's off to the big ending dungeon!
2) Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima (AKA "Adventure Island") - NES
Pretty sure this game is notoriously sucky. My brother has always been very vocal about his hatred for it. I think it's okay, but you'll only ever get anywhere in this game if you know about the continue secret, which I just learned last year: on stage 1, jump up on the very left side of the cliff with the 'G' sign to uncover the Hudson Bee and then you can continue from any game over by holding the control pad and hitting start! It's still pretty tough anyway but at least it's reasonably possible with that.
This is another one like Ghosts'n Goblins that I can basically just occasionally bust out and play a little while when I feel like it, then put it away when it gets frustrating. I think I got to like stage 12 or something this time.
3) Pac-Man - Arcade
Not much probably needs to be said about this one. Picked it up for a dollar in the system because it's in the month that's going out into the $1 section. Fun little classic to kill a few minutes with!
We're still trucking along and the new system is workin'. Read the rules of the gaming quest here! Otherwise don't worry about it, just enjoy the games I played this time!
#1 was more Dragon Quest! I'm kinda plowing through this game, so I tried to chill out a bit and play other things. But I still played a lot of it. I forgot to take a picture but that's just how it is out here on this bitch of an Earth. I'm a few towns away from the ending though, I think (and probably a few hours of grinding away...)!
#2 was Ghosts'n Goblins, Famicom, which I decided I wanted to play because I hate myself. I beat this game a few years ago on the real NES, and it took almost 6 hours straight because I refused to give up. It's truly a painful game to play, but that makes it kind of good for what I'm trying to do. I can turn it on, play as long as I feel like on any given day, quit when I get frustrated, and never really run a risk of beating it anytime soon!
I'm currently stuck halfway through the second level, lol.
#3 was Demon Attack on the Atari 2600! I mostly used this game to just kill about 15 left-over minutes but I had a good time with it. Instead of quitting out quickly, I played for awhile and actually discovered some tips if you ever want to play yourself: make sure to always aim towards the back rows, and stay the heck away from the one demon that's always shooting. If you play, both of these tips' goodness will become immediately clear to you.
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That does it for this 'month!'
I'm now almost halfway through 1984 on my timeline. We're moving at an alright speed, but not blazingly fast. I'm okay with the pace and I think I'm able to spend a good amount of time on things so far, so I'm happy!
We'll see if that continues once games start getting much more interesting on average... if that ever happened truly.
If you care about the rules for the Fuzzy Gaming Quest, check 'em out at my pinned post!
If you don't care about the rules, this is a place where I blog about games I've been playing lately.
And that's the whole intro.
Game time!
All I have to report this time is that I spent half the time playing Dragon Quest, and half the time playing Super Mario Bros. "hard mode" (second quest after beating the game).
Super Mario Bros. hard mode was pretty fun. It's essentially the main game again with harder versions of stages appearing twice throughout instead of once. Also, all moving platforms are changed to the shorter versions. Also, all goombas are turned into beetle things that can't be hurt by fireballs. Otherwise, same game. Little harder. I almost lost, but I managed to beat it on my last life!
Dragon Quest continues plodding on. I'm really glad I picked a modded version of the game with double XP and double gold, as I've played the game before and even now, it's still grindy. But I'm already almost in the home stretch after something like 3 hours, so it did shorten the game (it's not that long anyway for an RPG (8-10 hours?), but that's because it's one of the first console RPGs ever anyway). If I ever play this game again in the future I'll almost certainly play it this way again.
Hey, look, if it ain't broke (I'm actually having fun playing games and not forcing myself like a weirdo), then don't fix it (change the system and force myself to play some other games, like a weirdo).
And I managed to save all my FuzzyBucks this time!
Avoid video games that use extrinsic motivation. A video game should at least mostly rely on intrinsic motivation, meaning that the playing of the game itself is the fun part, not the reward you get for playing the game. If you don’t enjoy the gameplay, but you want to earn lootboxes, you’ve fallen into the intentionally exploitative system operating within so many games nowadays, and you need to find another game, because you’re not having fun.
It doesn’t sound serious, but this kind of thing can make depression way worse if you’ve already got depression.
That’s also a core difference between a game trying to exploit the human brain’s tendency toward gambling addiction and a game that exists to entertain.
Like, it may sound like I’m reaching, but op described (pretty closely) the operation of gambling addictions. It’s also why the depression aspect is so real. You’re feeling a withdrawal, of a sort, when you can’t play the game.
As usual, the short ruleset:
- I can only play games older than the “current time”
- Games cost FuzzyBucks to add to playable collection
- I get $100 FuzzyBucks every “month”
- A “month” passes when I play games in my collection for 2 hours
- Some games are not in the correct dates (I have evenly spread out libraries over console lifespans to give maximum choice in each month)
Current time: May 1984
And onto this months games!
1) Dragon Quest (1986, Enix) - NES - $60 - 69 min.
Are you sure? Also, heh, funny time number. HEHEH.
Finally! An RPG to whittle time away on. I've been looking forwards to this dropping since the beginning so I could use it during slow months. Unfortunately, I've shot myself in the foot by opting into a double XP modded version of the game. I did this because I've already played this game twice in my life and it is 95% grinding anyway. Still, I hope I can make it last until the next good, lengthy game (probably Final Fantasy?).
2) Golf (1984, Nintendo) - NES - $40 - 24 min.
I figured this is another one that's somewhat fun that I've played before and kills twenty minutes. It might be fun to try to get around a par score in it. This is probably one of my favorite golf games of all time (it's just nice and simple)... but I wish there was some music.
I'm not really that big on this game tbh, it's a fairly uncomplicated little "run n gun" kind of thing and I suck at it so I can barely entertain myself with it for like 2 minutes. I had a pretty good couple of runs to get 8 minutes out of this bad boy. I mostly picked it up because I'm making it a point to go back and snap up all the $1 games as I go along that I might want... I'm only a couple months out from the $2 price raise though, and it's all up from there.
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That's it for this "month!" I foresee more Dragon Quest in the next one... and maybe the next one... and maybe the next one.
Short ruleset:
- I can only play games older than the "current time"
- Games cost FuzzyBucks to add to playable collection
- I get $100 FuzzyBucks every "month"
- A "month" passes when I play games in my collection for 2 hours
- Some games are not in the correct dates (I have evenly spread out libraries over console lifespans to give maximum choice in each month)
New Current Date: April 1984!
Another 2 hours, another month. Let's see what I played most!
1) Super Mario Bros. (1985, Nintendo) - NES - $0 - 58 min.
Okay, so I had a grudge with Super Mario Bros. from the other month. I got to 8-4 and died on Bowser lol. So I decided to have a fresh spin at it a little bit later, and interestingly, I managed to even get the lives counter up to the crowns through normal play! I made a save at the harder "Game B" so I can give that a try some day. Why not?
2) Gradius (1986, Konami) - NES - $60 - 44 min.
This one's even further out of time, I know. Refer to the last bullet point in the rules!
It took a few tries but I played through the whole game. I had a moment of weakness and put down a save state before the death tunnel right at the end of the game... and I had to reload it a couple times... the good thing about this is, if I want to kill another 40 mins to an hour, I can definitely play again with the goal of doing it all in one shot.
3) Space Fever (1979, Nintendo) - Arcade - $1 - 8 min.
This is basically a Space Invaders rip off that Nintendo pooped out in 1979. It's a bit of fun, I like the very colorful screen and the sound has been drastically improved (the UFOs are not so annoying), and also, the game has 3 game modes instead of just the one. Playing through all the game modes for a little bit apparently took 8 minutes. E-Z.
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I feel a bit bad about the "out of time" games and one might ask if it ruins the purpose of what I'm doing but after some short contemplation I decided no. I intentionally chose to space them out this way and I will live with the consequences!!
Really though, it is good to have more choice each month, otherwise this could get to be a real pain (the Famicom has barely like 8 games the entire first year of its release, spreading out the huge middle-years library allows me to have almost 10 a month for its whole lifespan). Ultimately, it doesn't matter, it's just the purist in me that wants to complain.
It's also the lazy part of me that realizes how much work it took to setup the spreadsheet with the games spread out, and I'm not doing that again. So I'm playing Super Mario Bros in 1984, too bad.
Another step of my journey through game history is complete, time to journal!
Short ruleset:
- I can only play games older than the "current time"
- Games cost FuzzyBucks to add to playable collection
- I get $100 FuzzyBucks every "month"
- A "month" passes when I play games in my collection for 2 hours
New current time:
March 1984
So let's check out what I played most this "month!"
This "month" I focused on revisiting the cheapest and oldest games, mostly arcade, because I was in the mood again, and because they cost a dollar now. I thought I'd go ahead and save up some money, but it actually made it a bit harder (most of these games can be played for 3 minutes tops). Next month I'll probably drop a higher amount on one of the "just released" titles right away...
This was one arcade game that fit well in this for once. You can credit feed this game, and it has a pretty hard second pass. Which means I was able to entertain myself with it for a solid 30 minutes, a full fourth of my time! It also has baller music that is really catchy.
I guess I'm old at heart because shuffleboard has always appealed to me. I'd like to play it in real life, I won't lie. But for now I spent over 20 minutes trying REALLY HARD to beat the AI at this stupid 70s shuffleboard game. It cheats so hard. But I eventually beat it in both modes. It took 20 minutes.
3) Sprint 1 (1978, Atari) - Arcade - $1 - 13 min.
I can't remember if Sprint 4 or Sprint 8 were in last month, but if they were, this is Sprint 1, the version you play if you don't have any friends. In 4 and 8, the other cars are taken over by AI, but you're also locked to one track for the duration of your play. In this game, you get to new tracks the longer you can keep passing laps, and an extended play (!!!) if you can get 150 points. Apparently all this content kept me entertained for a smooth 13 minutes.
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This month I reworked my pricing fall-off to make it more gradual, but essentially, if it's current month, it's $60. 1 year old = $40. 2 years old = $20. 3 years old = $10. 4 years old = $5. Older = $1 (no free games!!! If I completely game the system, which I will do because I have a problem, I'll ruin all the things it's supposed to help me with!)
I'm toying with the idea of adding thirty minutes to the required time every year. Eventually games will be complicated enough that killing 2 hours won't be so hard. We'll see!
So if you read my blog post last night that I made in a 1 AM fervor, you know about my new gaming system. If you don't, don't worry about it, here's the short version: I have a fictional currency for trading for games to play and a particular date of games I'm limited to in month increments.
The first month was January 1984, and I just finished it and am ready to move on.
So what did I play the most with my two hours? Here's the top 3!
#1 - Super Mario Bros. - NES - 48 mins
This one's actually 1985, but due to spreading the library out evenly, it ended up in the 1983 batch. No, it doesn't make sense. No, I don't care, THIS IS MY SYSTEM STAND DOWN.
I avoided buying this one for the $30 (I start with $100 each month) because it was pricey, but at some point I could see it was the only game I could sink my teeth into for a good minute, so I went for it. Glad I did.
#2 - Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack - Intellivision - 21 mins
Once I was getting to the last 20 minutes I realized I needed another non-arcade style game that I could play for awhile without fear of dying and starting over quickly. So I picked up Las Vegas Poker for a solid $5 out of my $100.
It entertained me for 21 minutes and I foresee it doing so again, so cheers to it. I like the shifty-eyed dealer dude. Also I turned 100 chips into over 1600 in this game so I'm ready to go to Vegas whenever.
#3 - Crazy Climber - Arcade - 11 mins
Mostly what I bought this go around were arcade games and this was the only one I played for a few loops. It's hard to play early 80s arcade games over and over again back to back, but they are future investments--they're fun to play once daily or something.
Crazy Climber I've never been very good at so I saw an opportunity to have some more goes at it. I'm still not good at it.
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So anyway, there you go. That's "month" one (it was literally a day)! So far the system is working fine. I foresee a problem already. Game selection is tight currently in these years because it's all Atari and early arcade and it's hard to find something to fill two hours.
Also, if you're wondering, I had $10 left. Yes, I bought that many $5 arcade games that I played for 3 minutes. I have decided to up the monthly budget to $100 from $60 for sure. It's all about balance!
Reworking the Fuzzy Game Quest ATTEMPT TWO ALREADY!?!
TL;DR, The short ruleset:
- I can only play games older than the “current time” I am in
- Games cost FuzzyBucks to add to playable collection, starting at $60, and lowering as they become older
- I get $100 FuzzyBucks every “month”
- A “month” passes when I play games in my collection for 2 hours
- Some games are not in the correct dates (I have evenly spread out libraries over console lifespans to give maximum choice in each month)
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Yeah I said I was gonna do it again, but okay listen this time I'm even more confident this one is going to work okay. JUST TRUST ME THIS TIME, IT'S GOING TO WORK.
I'd like to reiterate that any system I come up with for playing through game history is meant to solve a set of problems with me taking a trip through over 60,000 games in one lifetime:
- It shouldn't encourage moving too fast, or discourage moving slowly
- It needs to keep me from being overwhelmed by choice
- It needs to stay reasonably flexible (can't get stuck on something I hate, should be allowed to move around mostly freely)
- It should allow me to curate somewhat, not only playing "greatest hits" or getting stuck with a bunch of garbage back to back either
This time, I've combined a couple previous ideas I had to solve some of these problems. The first idea was to create a fictional currency I tracked for myself which I used to "purchase" games. I ran with this for several months a couple years ago and liked it. The second idea from before was to separate every game ever made by year, then by months, to breakdown the overwhelming amount of games into smaller chunks.
So this time, I've done exactly both.
I've started in January 1984 with this, because 1983 was the year the Famicom was released (my favorite console) and everything before that is hard to entertain myself with for a very long time. Also, very importantly, I can buy "Beat 'Em and 'Eat 'Em" for the Atari 2600 for a slick $30.
If you're extremely astute you might recognize some of these games are not set on their correct release dates! That's because I have intentionally spread the games out evenly year by year and month by month over the entire lifespan of the console, to create the greatest variety of choice each month. They still follow their general release date pattern however (chronological).
Notice the prices! Similar to real game prices, I've handled it like this, relative to the current month I'm in :
< 6 months old = $60
1 year old = $30
2 years old = $15
3 years old = $10
4 or more years old = $5
In this system, every time a month flips over, I'll give myself a $100 allowance, which means I can buy one game of the last 6 months, or two games from the last year... etc. Might make sense now why I started in 1984 since the Famicom came out in 1983! (I can "buy" more than one game!)
You might wonder when the month flips over: well, the last time I tried this I ran into two problems by setting the month flip to a certain time, say a real life week.
1) The week went by SO SLOW and by day 5 I was really pissed I was still forcing myself to play Donkey Kong like an idiot for the 10th time, doubting the system
2) The week sometimes went WAY TOO FAST because I was busy at work or doing school stuff, and suddenly noticed I missed an entire month of games and was overwhelmed by choice again
So in an effort to fix that, this time, the months are bound to how long I actually spend playing the games I "bought". For now, I've set this at 2 hours. If I entertain myself for 2 hours with the games in my collection, I'll move the date one month forwards, creating new variety for me to choose from. This encourages me to actually spend a little time with the games I buy and think out what I'm getting for myself. I have a feeling it's going to break a little if I decide to play an RPG though... But let's not think about that (oh no, the next system change is already in the air).
The other fun thing about the month roll-over is that it gives me time to plan to buy something later. If I see something is in the current month, I may want to wait on it, or I may want to snap it up right now for an ill-advised $60. If I decide to wait though, I'll probably be a lot more hyped to really sit down and play it, once I've waited 6 (fictional) months to actually play it (it might end up being more like a week or two in reality, but nevertheless).
I've started myself out with $100 and started picking out some games to play with while I wait for the first month change. I certainly didn't want to spend $60 right off the bat on a Famicom game, so I started picking out some old arcade games and Atari 2600 games from the $5 years that I already like and figured I could play a little while.
The downside I see to this system is mostly that I have to run a timer every time I play games and if I forget I'm gonna have wasted time and not know what to put down (though I can probably fathom a guess at that point). The whole thing is also a little cumbersome (I'm sure you're thinking: "you are a psychopath, this is more than a little cumbersome," but listen--I like playing with spreadsheets almost more than I like playing video-games).
But all in all its doable and at least in the short term, it feels promising. I'm just hoping I don't break it somehow and hate it too soon. Lord Jesus just let me play a video-game for 1 minute and be happy.
Anyway, maybe as I go along I'll post about the games I "buy" or something. It'd be cool if anyone got into my weird little thing with me in such a way that they were interested in what kind of decisions I make or whatever. I bet I'll uncover some real stinkers.
Speaking of which, I haven't quite worked out how returning games works yet but in true game spirit, I'm thinking half-price returns. We'll see.
This is the first time I've ever blogged publicly about something like this. I usually talk to friends about it, but I just as often don't say anything, because when I talk about video-games I get hyperfocused and sometimes the conversation takes a long time, so I often feel like it's a bit rude to get people wrapped up in it. But I remembered I have a tumblr now and people actually blog on here sometimes, so: prepare to suffer.
To set up why I'm so weird about games allow me to explain: first of all, I'm obviously not neurotypical in some way I don't know but one day would like to figure out. SECOND, I've been playing video-games literally since I can remember. My first real memories of cognition are watching my dad put cartridges in the NES, and climbing on the bed to put our Thai bootleg cart in there myself so I could play weird sprite hacks of Super Mario Bros. So anyway, gaming has factored heavily in my life since the beginning.
Anyway long story short, this has led to, for a long time, me wanting to leave some kind of legacy behind me in the form of a trail of beaten-up old video-games. Often this takes the form of just wanting to curate out a collection (physical or unholy--I mean digital) that I can leave behind in some state of completion, but on top of that it comes as me wanting to sit down and truly spend time with the games that are most important to my history over the course of my lifetime.
This has led to me making innumerable 'systems' for approaching the task of having a humongous backlog of video-games (some might say longer than is completable than anyone in a life time, and I recognize this) and often these systems get replaced or revised for being inadequate in some way. The latest no-thought system on my part was the Fuzzy Gaming Quest, in which the goal was basically to play through games starting from the beginning of time and blasting through at hyper-speed, with the intention of covering as much ground in order to induce familiarity as fast as possible with arcade games from an era I've rarely played (but longed for in my old man's soul).
This was working but I quickly ran into a snag (after recording about 250 videos 😥): I wasn't spending as much time with individual games as I'd like by any means. On one hand, I was backlogging games I was enjoying just to get them out of the way and continue the progress. On the other, sometimes I wasn't sure how much time you'd even spend with a game to consider yourself familiarized enough to rank it in some way, without necessarily having to beat everything (who has the time?). Not to mention arcade games that have no viable ending for the regular player (Pac-Man, Galaga, etc).
So anyway all this is leading up to me explaining the next iteration of the Fuzzy Gaming Quest. Here's a picture!
What you're looking at is essentially a 7 day scoreboard for various games that I selected out as important during my previous pass through the 70s and most of the 80s. These are all games I wanted to play more of or possibly log in a list.
7 days is my naive answer to how long I think would be good to spend on a game, in order to get competent enough at it to get a decent score and/or feel you've experienced your average game enough to go ahead and put it somewhere in a list. It might seem like overkill for a simple arcade game (though I'd argue you need to play repeatedly and give your brain time to absorb it to get the true experience), and it may seem like underkill for an RPG (though I'd argue that most RPGs probably aren't changing much more if you've been playing for 7 days already, but this doesn't forbid from continuing to play if I choose to), but this is my naive and probably flawed answer, anyway.
This is meant to serve the purpose of:
- Progressing reasonably fast (notice this is a list of basically banger games everyone has heard of, I will probably only include a few games here or there that are lesser known that I just happen to like--I'll also be avoiding some consoles intentionally that I don't particularly like (like the Odyssey 2, sorry, it's my list though--convince me otherwise if you like))
- Filtering into some kind of "best of" list (if I don't even want to play it for 7 days (in brief sessions), it must not be very good after all and doesn't deserve to be on any best of list I would leave behind me--games that I do get through the 7 days I should understand enough to rank competently enough to make myself happy)
- Giving me an excuse to spend more time on the games that really matter to me, today, in case I get hit by a bus tomorrow
- Giving me a target for when I'm able to comfortably say I've experienced a game enough and don't need to feel bad about moving on if I want to but still haven't "beat it," and also leaving room for playing more if I like (I can sort it, take it off the board, but finish it anyway on the DL) (Also, if I do beat it, I can stop there with the board)
- Satisfying whatever kind of ADHD thing I have going on by allowing me to keep a variety of games on rotation for some amount of time and not just getting stuck behind one game at a time
- Breaking game experiences down over multiple days to allow a longer time to think about them and grow accustomed to them, also to allow me to fit them into my busy schedule by playing Space Invaders on the toilet for ~10 minutes
- To leave behind a journal of high scores or information about how far I got in various games as I plod on
So, you may (rightly) ask: What's the point of all this? Why can't I just play games that I like and call it a day?
Well my first answer would be, "shut up I know you're right I just can't, my brain is broken," but my second answer, the one I would say aloud, might be that I really have always wanted to take a targeted approach to going through all of game history and that's what this is in service of.
I have no false expectations about getting all the way through game history up to now in one lifetime, at least not without sacrificing a lot of games in the process. I definitely won't ever get to the point where I'm always keeping up with contemporary games. It's lucky for me that I mostly fell out of favor with games around 2011 for various reasons, but really it had been a steady decline of interest since about 2005 or so. I have a shorter-hand target, but if I were to ever reach it, I'd like to keep going on, even if it means playing PS4 games in 2061 when I'm almost as old as my dad is now.
Anyway, your second question (and wow, if you made it this far) might be: "so what does this mean for your tumblr, which I care about intimately after seeing 20 posts, and was gutted when you temporarily took a break, and have been looking for meaning in my life ever since?"
Well, true believer, if you want I might post my 7 day high-score for various arcade games or something along with some pictures or videos of high points of the game (when I get to games complicated enough to have cool art). I haven't decided yet. I'm open to suggestions! I'd love to see people try to (and succeed!) at beating my scores (I'd feel like I influenced someone into maybe playing some old, great game they wouldn't have before deciding to just then).
If nothing else I hope it was interesting to see my thought process about this stuff.
If that's not true, I hope you were entertained by a write up of someone's journey ever deeper into video-game delirium.
And yes, I will get frustrated with the system and change it again in approximately a month.
More 4K arcade game wallpapers, this time it's "Berzerk" (1980, Stern Electronics)!
If Crazy Otto's after you, you can find refuge (and the full resolution version) in my folder of 4K game wallpapers!
... also the timing of this has nothing to do with "Berserk" or the passing of Kentaro Miura but rest in peace to the author of one of the greatest manga of all time.
