I don’t normally like to give away the games I’m playing for this blog while in progress, but I’ve finally reached a game that is going to take me so long to finish that I think it’s worth mentioning and discussing.

The next game for Take On The NES Library is Ikari Warriors. I believe this is the hardest NES game I have ever attempted to beat, and it’s looking like a solid contender for the hardest NES game period. The game is pretty lengthy and challenging, but the real bottleneck here is there are no continues outside of using a cheat code. When all lives are lost, it’s Game Over and all the way back to the beginning of the game. My personal policy is to beat NES games on console without any cheat devices or codes that aren’t specifically called out in the game manual. I don’t want to do practice runs on an emulator either. I’m sticking with just the base amount of information as if the game was purchased on launch day. Some will call me crazy trying to beat Ikari Warriors this way, and that’s fine, but I believe it’s the purest way to consider a game beaten and that is what I am planning to stick with at all costs.

I have been playing Ikari Warriors for over three weeks and the furthest point I have reached is probably a quarter of the way through the second level. There are four levels in this game and the stages seem to go on for quite a long time. I am still trying to hone in my technique for consistently clearing level one since it keeps giving me trouble on many of my attempts. Success at this game boils down to memorizing the stage layouts and the only real way to do that is to repeat them over and over again. It is a very slow grind, but I am confident that I will beat this game even if it takes me many more weeks or even months to do it.

At this time I am not going to skip ahead to the next game while working concurrently on Ikari Warriors. I feel if I decide to skip ahead then I won’t be keeping up on my skills and that makes it more likely for me to just skip the game altogether. Passing on a difficult, long game even temporarily sets a bad precedent. If I am really attempting to beat every NES game then I am going to eventually need to cross paths with a tough game so I might as well take it in stride. Plus, I really enjoy having each new game revealed to me as I complete games and I’m not about to give that up just because I ran into a real nasty game to finish. I’ve beaten games in this manner before by just grinding out attempt after attempt, and I’m still motivated to put in the time on Ikari Warriors.

Now having said all of that, I don’t want to leave the blog dormant while I continue to whittle away at Ikari Warriors. I think it’s best for both myself and the project to keep it active in some capacity. Therefore, I am planning on posting some secondary content to bridge the gap. Most of these posts will be progress updates such as this one, but I also have some ideas for other features that will be more substantial. Mixing up the post types will give me more time to put together new content while also allowing me time needed to work on my main game. I have also decided to post an update every Friday from now on. That has worked pretty well for me in my main posts and I think some consistency is healthy. Hopefully you will agree and enjoy some more regular content on the site!

Here’s a small look at what’s ahead. Next week I will have another progress update. I have been long overdue for making some miscellaneous updates in past posts, so I will be working on that and I will have a summary of changes in the next post. Two weeks from now I will have a new feature to read! I have a few ideas to pick from and I’m not sure what I’ll do yet.

I created a thread on NintendoAge about my experience with Ikari Warriors if you are craving more detail than what I have provided here. If you want to play along with me and suffer through it, then by all means have at it!