Give and Take

I promised I'd mention the 9 games that I have yet to finish. I want to save that for when I have more time.

Right now I'll mention the 2 I've had flirtations with in the last few days.

First, Nobunaga's Ambition II.

I started getting into this, figuring I'd strike while the iron was hot since I was used to that Koei feel from slaying Bandit Kings. The good news is that the game feels pretty much the same so far. The character set-up is almost identical and the general feel of the game is very similar to BKoAC. The bad news is that the whore froze up on me again when I was creating codes for it.

Luckily I learned from my mistakes with Bandit Kings and wrote down the codes as I was making them. The only problem is that I should have stopped after 10 codes but tried for 12 and that's when FCEUX decided to seize up. So now it's personal with Nobunaga's Ambition II. You have drawn first blood and are no longer just another title on a list. It will be all the more sweeter when I get around to kicking your ass...or I will just be in line for even more heartache and gray curlies.


The other game that inspires a bit more hope in me is the insipid Ultima: Warriors of Destiny by FCI.

I started playing this a couple weeks ago using Andrew Schultz's FAQ. If you don't know Andrew he is an RPG guru...and puzzle game wizard...screw it, the guy can break down pretty much anything we find difficult and make it seem easy. Anyway, he wrote a pretty straight-forward guide for Ultima: WoD. I had played this a bit years ago and couldn't get past the crappy controls in the first hut.

This game became like a shit-stain in my favorite boxers to me. You want to wear them because they were cool but now you don't really want to don them because of the evil skid mark that won't wash out. You also don't want to throw them away, so you just keep them at the bottom of the rotation and whenever you get close to having to wear them it triggers the alarm to do more laundry.

But I digress. The game stayed at the bottom of my games-to-beat mental list, being replaced by various Famicom, PAL and Famicom Disk System games that were a hell of a lot funner to play than the double handful of American NES games left to beat. So when I tackled Pool of Radiance a couple weeks ago I made the decision to attack Ultima: Warriors of Destiny.

Again, I started by making a few codes for it. The usual, infinite health, infinite items...I wanted to set myself up for as smooth a gaming experience as I could. It took me a good 10 minutes to actually get comfortable with the controls and then using Andrew's FAQ I made some pretty good progress, making it to Lord British's castle. Wow, I'm actually making progress on scrubbing the shit stain out! Let's work on the edges first then go for the heart!

Went through the castle and found the magic carpet, which the FAQ says is a really nifty item. Cool, can't wait to use it. Raid the rest of the castle for stuff, visit a few scum bags in the jail then head outside to test drive the carpet. OK, the FAQ said to put it in my visible item spot on the screen, but for some reason the screen keeps saying NOT IN COMBAT. C'MON MAN!!! WTF?!? I can't equip this fucking rug to save my soul, so I do a "magic carpet" word search through the entire FAQ and it seems like this is the 1 indispensible item you need to get past many areas later in the game. You have to use it so much in this game the word probably turns up more in the "Control F" search than the fucking word AND. Argh.

I try everything and nothing gets it to work. Finally a guy on one of the code boards I go to tells me I should turn off all the codes, die, then try to use the carpet. Yeah, like that's gonna work. I try it and....HOLY SHIT I'M RIDING THE FUCKING RUG LIKE ALADDIN!!!

Ok, now I'm excited. I am officially on board for Ultima: WoD and if I can figure out which cheats were preventing me from using the carpet I can progress further. Maybe I will just play through it without cheats. We'll find out, but now I can get back to rolling in Ultima: Warriors of Destiny and possibly wittle the games left to beat list down to 8.

On a related note, the wife knows I am back into hardcore NES gaming. The day I had the Bandit Kings migrane I was supposed to do all kinds of laundry and shit but I created a blog and watched Notorious (Hitchcock version, not that hip-hop shit). She assumes my current lethargic state is from staying up all night playing video games, so she tells me I need to stop. I shouldn't be wasting my time with stupid shit like this. "But you should be excited, I only have 9 left to beat!! I've been working on this since, like, long before I met you." Bad choice of words. The rest can be left to your imagination, but needless to say I need to lie low for awhile then strike again. Damn you Bandit Kings for kicking my ass and blowing my cover.