Bandit Kings of Ancient China

You don't judge the Evil Gao Qiu. You just don't.

I'm gonna save you a long explanation and about 15 years of on and off again frustration and give you the highlights of my 6 hour marathon with this "game" from last night/this morning.

It took forever to make cheats for it. Yes, I use cheats to beat games now, especially dickhead games like this that try to grab you by the balls like an ex-wife grubbing for child support. I never stated I was beating all these NES games fairly. I have a wife and 2 kids who monopolize my time (rightfully so), so I get scraps of playing time when they are either sleeping or off doing things because Dad is "too tired." Anyway, back to the cheats. I literally felt like Koei put a little devil bitch inside the ROM to bat away at EVERY SINGLE FUCKING EFFORT of mine to make a cheat or do anything right. I'm usually pretty good at finding the correct addresses to manipulate, but trying to make cheats for Bandit Kings was like a 3-legged cat trying to bury a turd on a frozen pond (see: Beavis & Butthead).

Whipon at thegshi.com discovered that his published cheats for this game were no good because he found out that the game's hex addresses change with every new game, so you have to make them special for each game played. FCEUX's normal cheat search simply did not work for ANYTHING on Bandit Kings, so I had to use the debugger, which was new to me and involves looking through thousands of hex addresses for the one value you are searching for.

After an hour or so I found the Popularity address!! You see, the only way to defeat the Evil Gao Qiu is to raise your popularity over 250, which takes forever because you get slaughtered before you can kill enough rabid wolves to raise it.

So, when Popularity gets past 250 and January comes around again the pussy Emperor gives you the Imperial Edict, which says you can now go after the Evil Gao Qiu. If the Emperor wants this piece of shit killed so badly, why do you have to waste time killing fucking wolves to get it?? The Emperor needs to get a set of balls, so it seems.

OK, we got the Edict. Now we can go into the Evil Gao Qiu's prefecture, kill him and get the ending. I'd been waiting 15 years for that Edict, now the fun part comes and I can slay that son of a bitch once and for all, right?. Nope. When you attack Gao Qiu in his prefecture he slips out at some point in the battle, but you still need to beat down his forces, as you will just have to fight them again in another Prefecture anyway. Battles take forever. Once you win you have to find him in another Prefecture, then he does the same damned thing again. He's more slippery than shower jizz.

About 3 hours into the marathon, FCEUX decides it's gonna freeze up and crash. When I reload the game all the cheats are gone (I managed to find values for strength, wisdom and all that crap only by checking the addresses near the popularity address). I almost gave up at that point but I said screw it and soldiered on.

I finally corner the cockbag in this one Prefecture only to discover that the one guy in my army that I managed to make a somewhat stable infinite troops code for (Welcome Rain) cannot pass over the water sections of the map because he doesn't have a boat, therefore I can't get past the water to the bad guys. I had to go back to my last save state from 30 minutes before and it took another 10 minutes to figure out I can have a guy make a boat and give it to my main guy.

The peasants revolted at one point because my loyalty value dropped to 0 and I wasn't paying attention. These peasants are a fucking nuisance. Just ask the two survivors at the end of Shichinin no Samurai. They should be grateful I'm protecting them from this asshole Evil Gao Qiu. Also, we get the point that he is Evil. Was he born Evil? Was he an Evil baby? Did he suck milk out of his mom's teat viciously while leering at her out of the corner of his eye? He must be destroyed!

Just when I think I have everything figured out, during battle my main squad (the one I made the workable code for infinite men) "gets tired" and can't fight for about 3 rounds. If you don't win the battle in 30 rounds you lose. Which one of the 45 fucking icons do you need to boost to keep your guy from getting tired? This is ridiculous. Whoever made this game was a worm.

The fucking wolves attacked my prefecture around 2am, so I had to waste a turn fighting them off. Every time you think you are ready to go in for the final battle and try planning ahead, some damned ridiculous thing like this goes down.

When I FINALLY got that little beyotch Evil Gao Qiu cornered between 2 MOUNTAIN RANGES, he manages to escape. I chased the asshole into an adjacent prefecture and he hopped back out into another one after one quick round of battle. I thought I was NEVER going to beat this.

Finally, during a battle I only brought Welcome Rain's troops into a prefecture to bait him out and managed to get into battle with him. When I got his forces down under 100 (the number turns red), he disappeared out of the prefecture again!!! I went back to the battle save state and figured "why not try the useless duel command" which worked on nobody during the entire game. It fucking worked!!!!! I finally got the ending after all these years and got to see one of the most elusive, hard-to-kill bad ass characters ever get beheaded.

I'm sure I missed a bunch of other annoyances in this game. I played the game on the hardest difficulty (5) because if there was a better ending than the youtube video I wanted to get it, but it was the same (other than the character you use and the date you capture Evil Gao Qiu).

I played this from 9pm to 3am and when the phone woke me up at 9am I had the worst migraine I've had in years and my vision was blurred, but it's worth it for finally knocking this piece of dogshit off the list. I was ready to give up several times but thought of the few people that have actually beaten this without cheat codes, so I kept going. I think it may have been so evil because the difficulty level was at 5...I don't know. I'm naming my next grey pube after the main programmer, by the way.

Now that Evil Gao Qiu has been vanquished in my gaming universe, he automatically gets first ballot honors into my badass Hall of Fame, along with such nasty scum like Mike Tyson, that dish rag slunt Dark Queen from Battletoads and the fucking Grumpasaurus from Muppet Adventure.