Tuesday 30 May 2017

Game #2 Abandoned After >2 Hours - Game & Watch Gallery 4

Game and Watch Gallery 4 is a collection of mini games. These are based on the games from the Game and Watch series, very old single-game LCD handhelds produced by Nintendo. You may have noticed that this is entry number 4 in the series. Well, the previous 3 are on Gameboy/Gameboy Colour, so this is the only one we're playing for the challenge. It also has one of the lower metacritic scores, 71, just making it into the list.


There's no story mode. I haven't "completed" the game (in terms of reaching the credits, which are in the game). I haven't unlocked all the games either. But at this point I'm not having any fun, as I just find the minigames too slow and frustrating. I've played more than 2 hours, and played all the games unlocked so far. So I'm pronouncing this as "done". I may come back to it at some point if I feel like it, as I think part of the problem is that the game isn't really designed to be played intensively towards the goal of beating it and moving on. Here's what I've got to say about what I've seen so far:

Saturday 27 May 2017

Game #1 Complete - The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

Minish Cap is a pretty great game in the 2D Zelda tradition. I actually prefer the 2D Zelda games over the 3D Ocarina of Time and descendants. The game has excellent graphics and music, and mostly strong gameplay. I have played Minish Cap before, at least twice as far as I remember.

Thursday 25 May 2017

Intro to the Challenge

I'm going to play through 255 of the best games for the GBA. That's 4.9 years at a rate of 1 game/week. I'm not sure whether that's a good estimate yet.

To get the list, I took the games with >=70 score on Metacritic, filtered out some games in genres I don't enjoy (mainly sports simulators and serious racing games). That conveniently came out to 255, and since that's a significant number in gaming, I decided to make that the title/theme of the challenge. Here's the finished list.

This self-challenge was inspired by internet sites like CRPG Addict, who is playing every CRPG ever made in chronological order, and NESMania, where speedrunner "TheMexicanRunner" beat every NES game ever made. I wanted to do something similar for GBA, but (according to Wikipedia) there are over 1000 GBA games, which made playing them all a bit much. So instead I came up with my arbitrary challenge list via the method above.