Today is the six-year anniversary for Take On The NES Library!

The obvious theme for this year is that things have slowed way down – and I mean way down – but I’m still at it and I haven’t given up.  Nor do I plan to!  Just like last year, this should have been a year of great progress when in fact it was by far my slowest year to date, for a number of reasons that should be made very clear and very quickly.  Let’s look at the numbers year over year.

* This changed from last year because I must have amended some difficulty ratings.

That’s definitely a steep decline, isn’t it?

The same problems that plagued me last year are still present, and I suspect they will for the next few years at least.  While streaming on Twitch has been great fun, it has cut into the time I would normally have spent playing, and also changes how I play games, to some extent.  Requiring recordings of full games is the way to go moving forward, but the computer setup and video editing and all that stuff takes up more time.  My writing has also suffered as I’m now a full year behind on blogs, but that’s more of a motivation thing.  (Don’t worry I am still going to write up every game, however long it takes.)  All that said, the real reason for the slow output is all in the specific games I played.

Year 6 has been bookended by two very long games.  Ultima: Exodus overtook Ikari Warriors as my longest game in terms of days from start to finish, spanning close to 4 ½ months from Thanksgiving to early April.  I spent over 50 hours in gameplay time to beat it, mostly grinding enemies and trying my best to understand exactly how the game works.  It definitely surprised me in how long it took to clear it, and I still needed direct tips from Twitch chat to finish it off.  On the other, current end, I am nearing the end of a long season in Bases Loaded 4.  There’s nothing I can do there but grind it out until it’s over.  Even playing a lot of it offline, it still progresses slowly, mostly because I only bother setting everything up if I’m going to have at least an hour to play.  Now I did get involved in some other stuff that took up more free time, so it has been about four months since I started Bases Loaded 4.  Right there that is 2/3 of a year on just two NES games for this project.

The good news is that the middle four months of Year 6 is much more encouraging over the long term.  From mid-April through mid-July I finished 10 games.  That included some longer-than-average stints with The Uncanny X-Men and Lunar Pool.  10 games in a 3-month period are in line with some of my more prolific stretches in beating NES games.  That gives me hope for making better progress next year and beyond.  It really comes down to the random selections of the games.  There are plenty of long games left on the list that could come up at any time, or I might get a long stretch of shorter games and make a ton of visible progress.  I think I am going to stop setting short-term goals for myself on this project, aside from the overarching goal of just sticking with it.  This is a marathon, not a sprint, and I don’t care if I come in last place as long as I finish.

There were some special events and other activities that have taken up my free time.  In February I learned the speedrun to Rush ‘n Attack as part of an event in the Salsa Shack Discord and I spent a couple of weeks doing runs of that game.  The biggest thing for me was I got involved in a Dragon Warrior Randomizer tournament in late summer.  I streamed weekly races for about a couple of months.  I did really well too, finishing 3-2 in the first five rounds and losing in the subsequent brackets in the first round to the eventual tournament winner.  I think that is something I will remain involved with in the future.  In fact, I have been playing Dragon Warrior Randomizer regularly since the tournament because it’s fun to play.  I have also messed around with Earthbound randomizers which are extremely fun as well.  I’ve gotten hooked on some Switch games too.  I dedicated time to both Bowser’s Fury and Metroid Dread when they came out and I have sunk over 50 hours into Dicey Dungeons.  There is always time for modern gaming.

In a programming note, I have decided to discontinue the Year in Review articles I previously wrote.  They took a lot of time to put together that could be better spent elsewhere.  This year would have been a weird one to write up with so few games finished, plus I have just now gotten to the point where I would have written the article covering last year’s games.  Instead, I think it makes sense to use this space to cover some remarkable feats or surprises that happened over the last year of playing.  It will be brief, but I’ll do that now:

• The ending sequence of Ultima: Exodus was one of the most unexpected things I’ve seen in an NES game to date.  It was incredible.
• Bases Loaded 3 surprised me when I finished the game in one sitting.  The Bases Loaded series traditionally requires a full season of play, but the third game has a unique rating system and you have to get a perfect score against the highest level team to secure the victory.  I was able to beat it in only three games.
• I think my playthrough of Lunar Pool was the most impressive feat I accomplished.  You need to learn how to clear some specific stages well while also mastering the feel of the game to win all 60 levels in a row.
• The Uncanny X-Men might be the worst NES I’ve played through so far.  Truly miserable.

That about wraps it up for this year’s reflections post.  While I’m not surprised that I’m still plugging away at this, six years of this is starting to feel weighty and significant.  Such a long way to go, but I’ve come so far too.  I look at my shelf of games daily seeing plenty of exciting games left to play and probably some more gems and surprises buried in there too.  It keeps me going, definitely.  Thanks for reading!

Today is the five-year anniversary for Take On The NES Library!

It feels like this should have been a year of great progress.  We are living in COVID-19 times, with many people like myself not going out much.  I am still working but I get to work from home full time now.  Without having a commute to worry about, plus staying at home in general a lot more often, it should lead right into having a huge year and beating a lot of games.  The thing is, I have played a lot of games, maybe more than in years past, but it did not translate to more NES completions.

The new yearly tradition in these reflections is to look at project progress stats as a whole.  Let’s look at the table:

* I must have updated some difficulty rankings or miscalculated because this average came out higher than it did last year.

There are two things that jump out at me.  First of all, I completed 30 games this year, my second to lowest output over these 5 years.  The other thing I noticed is that my average difficulty took a nose dive, still above 5 but creeping closer to that mark.  How could both of these things happen when I am likely spending more time playing games now?  I have some reasons why.

1.  I played longer games this year.  This was something I stated in last year’s post, but it was also true in Year 5.  I had quite a few games cover two weeks, including some in the 4-6 week range.  I had a 2-month span where I only finished 3 games total.  That certainly will limit how many games I can clear.

2.  The longer games I played this year were easy, but very lengthy.  During last year’s anniversary reflection I was in the middle of Bases Loaded II, which required 79 wins.  I could win games in 10-15 minutes by the time I learned how, but it is quite a slog.  Same goes for Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? which lasted almost exactly the same number of cases with similar time to solve each one.  Those 2 games in particular took close to 2 months between them.

3.  I started recording complete playthroughs of every game.  To keep things simpler before, I would only record a full game if it was short enough to complete in one sitting.  I decided to change that this year, only to have a few games go over 10 hours long start to finish.  I still do not have a dedicated recording setup, so I have to put everything together in the family room and tear it back down at the end.  That time cuts into the actual playing.

4.  I started streaming on Twitch this year.  This has been the best part of this year’s progress.  I played offline because I wanted specific recording settings that I could not get while also streaming.  It turns out all I needed was a tool change and some setup to get it to work for both simultaneously.  Streaming is really fun, I am beginning to form a community, and I have made a bunch of friends this year on Twitch.  These are all good things, but the interaction with viewers takes a bit of focus away as well.  Not a bad thing!

5.  I started speedrunning.  I have long admired speedrunners and what they can accomplish, and so I have replaced a little NES completion time with some speedrunning.  I picked up TMNT as my main speed game, and additionally I spent a month preparing for and participating in the Big 20 race that happened in September.  (Which, by the way, I took 22nd place out of about 100 players.)  I see now first-hand why people commit their gaming time to speedrunning.  It is a lot of fun, and the community of runners are some of the nicest people I’ve met online.

My goal for Year 6 is to cross the 200 completions mark.  I get the feeling that it might be a difficult goal to achieve.  I’m still dealing with limited time for playing due to family commitments.  I still want to do speedrunning stuff periodically, including some community events with other streamers.  I also know that my next NES game is a long RPG that will probably take me a couple of months to clear.  I will have to push hard and stay focused, but I know I am up to the challenge.  It helps that I am having more fun than ever with all this!

Saturday was the four-year anniversary for Take On The NES Library!

In last year’s anniversary reflection, I commented on how it was my most prolific year to date in terms of games completed and how I hoped to keep up that kind of pace going forward. Specifically, I thought in Year 4 I could beat my average in completions per year. It turns out I hit EXACTLY average. This year I finally got around to creating a table showing progress year-over-year, so let’s take a look at that:

(Note: It must be some sort of rounding thing in that my estimated end date is now two days earlier.)

How I managed an average number of completions this year is a bit interesting. I know that I played several games this year that took a long time to play. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this here before, but I’ve put my programming skills to use by having my master game list for my project in an SQL database. This lets me generate pretty much any kind of report that I want. I decided to look at how many games took me longer than two weeks to finish. In total, there have been 18 games like that. In the last 12 months, I have played 8 of those games, and I’m in the middle of another long one right now. My suspicions were right in that Year 4 has been the Year of the Long Game. Some of those were difficult games that took time to master, while others were just lengthy games, overall a nice mix. On the other end of the spectrum, looking at games that took a week or less to complete, there were 23 of them played in Year 4. That’s a decent number, but it ended up as my lowest percentage of all four years so far. This data suggests that I should have come in under my average this year. I think the difference between past years is that I spent less time in between NES games, often jumping from one to the next either same day or the next day. That is tougher to check in the database, so this is just a hunch for now. We could also be looking at small sample size issues as well.

The other new data point I checked up on is average difficulty rating. I crossed the 20% mark of games completed this year, so that is a large enough sample to see how balanced I am at rating relative difficulty. The numbers suggest that I am doing well representing the library as a whole. My 1 to 10 point system means that the average difficulty should be at 5.5. In Year 1, I hit that number exactly, while it has lowered slightly each year since. I certainly feel like I am getting better at beating NES games than when I started, so perhaps that is some bias I have toward that average trending downward. As long as it holds in the 5.x range, I will be satisfied.

I suppose this anniversary update has become an analysis of project metrics. I certainly had a good time looking at all the data and figuring out some trends, hopefully you did too. I’m already excited to see what findings I will have next year.

My biggest non-data-related takeaway from this year is that I am still having a blast combing through the NES library. This year featured some challenging games and some long games, but my enthusiasm remains high. Even playing games I’m not so crazy about, it feels like this is what I’m meant to be doing. To what end or purpose, I don’t know. I’m not setting the world on fire playing these games alone in my basement or anything. There’s not some grand lesson or divine gift given only to those who beat every licensed NES game. I just think this is a fun project that gives me something extra in my life to look forward to. Thanks for reading and following along on my progress. Here’s to another year!

Today marks the three-year anniversary for Take On The NES Library!

In the last anniversary update I reflected on how it was a lean year for the blog and how I wanted to start making quicker progress. I’m proud to say that in the last twelve months I have made good on that promise. I’ll get into the details shortly, but this third year has been my most productive in terms of games completed. I could have pushed it even further if not for one trend and one decision I made. I’ve thought about this year as the year of the 9, meaning there were several 9/10 difficulty games that showed up. I didn’t anticipate them being clumped together like that, but that’s how it will go sometimes. Some of them were ones I’ve gotten to learn very well after struggling with them for years, while others were surprise titles that took some time to master. I even had another 10/10 game in Q*bert that I finished significantly faster than I estimated. The decision I made to start playing some of my deferred games also held me back somewhat. I knocked out about a dozen of these games this year and some of them took me longer than a week or two to complete. A week per game to me is an ideal pace that I’ll probably never be consistent enough to meet, but many of my deferred games are titles that I would expect to be on the upper end of the duration spectrum. With those extra challenges and my ever-wavering schedule, I am pleased with the pace of completions and I hope I can keep that going through Year 4 of the project.

So how productive have I been this past year? In the past twelve months I have completed 43 NES games. Over all three years I am now at 105 games completed with a nice 35 games/year average. My completion pace is now at 10.4 days per game completed, and the whole project is estimated to take 6,983 days to complete. The new end date estimate is January 5th, 2035, so I have a little more than 16 years to go on the project at my current pace. Maybe next year I’ll make a table of all this information from year to year. I feel better about the direction this is trending now versus what it was a year ago. I don’t see why I can’t beat the average over the next year and keep pushing this project ever closer to the finish line.

I also noticed I have gotten more verbose in my writing this year. I don’t have hard metrics on this on hand, but I know at one point I tended to write about 2000 words per post and I know I’m over that now most of the time. Posts are routinely in the vicinity of 2500-3000 words, with some getting closer to 4000 words. Maybe this has something to do with the complexity of games I played this year, especially the ones I had planned to save until the end. I think it also has to do with my post format. My writing is extremely formulaic, following the same template I set up for myself in the first few posts of the blog. I find it helps keep me on track and ensures I don’t miss anything. I really don’t like leaving details or observations out. I haven’t received any complaints about my structure or wordiness here, so I plan on doing more of what I do best.

I imagine if you are reading this post, you are one of my few dedicated readers that have either caught up or are catching up with the now hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written on NES games. Thank you. I’m excited to see what this next year will bring!

Yesterday marked the two-year anniversary for Take On The NES Library!

The year 2017 has been a lean year for the website, and a large portion of that has to do with this being a fantastic year to be a modern Nintendo fan. As you know, the Nintendo Switch released this year, and I got my console and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on launch day. I will always make some time to play through some good first-party Nintendo games, but the combination of a new Zelda game and a new console that I can play anywhere has really given me the freedom to dedicate much more time to brand new games. It’s so much simpler to play the Switch upstairs in bed instead of playing on my TV. And my wife is happier that I’m spending more time with her versus playing alone in the basement. So far I have put over 150 hours into Breath of the Wild and I’m still not finished, and now almost all my attention has gone toward Super Mario Odyssey. Nintendo has absolutely killed it this year and I feel confident that this year will be remembered as one of Nintendo’s best years ever, perhaps even their strongest year.

So all that is to say that it has been a slow year in terms of progress on my project. I did have a strong end of 2016 with several games completed. Then in January I started grinding through the long season of Bases Loaded. That completion took up the first two months of the year. The end of Bases Loaded dovetailed straight into the Switch release. I still managed to beat a game every couple of weeks or so after that, up until October anyway. With the release of Super Mario Odyssey and some other commitments, I put the project on break for about a month. I’m now ramping back up into normal progress again. Rest assured, I am ready to get back to business and clear some more NES games!

On last year’s anniversary post, I ran some numbers to see how the project was progressing over the long haul. I’ve decided to do that again and make this a yearly tradition. This is going to read like some kind of corporate financial statement or something, but maybe you will find this interesting. Over two years, I have beaten 62 NES games. This averages out to a completion every 11.8 days, which is worse than the 9.6 days per completion from last year’s update. On the current pace, the project should take 7,888 days to complete from start to finish with an estimated end date of June 28, 2037. My slow pace this year added almost four years to that estimate. I have to believe that I will pick up the pace within the next year, and that the 24 games finished this year will be near the lowest output in any year for the life of this project.

Thank you very much for reading this and following along on this journey over the past two years. You have helped give this project life, and I hope that I will cover more games that you will look forward to reading!

Today marks the one year anniversary for Take On The NES Library!

What started off as an idea to get some play out of my NES collection has turned into something really good thus far. I wasn’t sure if I was going to get it off the ground at all due to the long time with building the website and structuring everything in a way I could be happy with. I spent about four months off and on figuring out WordPress and the design I wanted for the website, as well as randomizing and working the master game list. Finally on November 23rd, 2015, it was time to pop in Super Mario Bros. and take off on this long journey. The next day I furiously wrote and published my first of many blog posts and I have been sprinting ahead ever since. So far things have gone just as well as I could have hoped for. I have a very long way to go, but the fact that I am still going strong after a full year makes me feel pretty good about seeing this all the way through. I’m excited to sit down and play each and every new game and I hope to continue that enthusiasm for years to come.

Just for fun, I ran some numbers to get a glimpse of just how long this whole project may take. Though I have only written and published posts for 30 licensed NES games, I have actually beaten 38 games total. Now 2016 was a leap year so that makes 38 games beaten in 366 days, which comes out to roughly 9.6 days per game finished. I count 669 unique licensed NES games, so I am on pace to finish Take On The NES Library in 6,443 days. That makes the last day July 14th, 2033. Only 16 1/2 years to go! Of course there will still be other NES games to play aside from just the licensed games, so there is opportunity here for this site to never really have an ending if that’s what I want to pursue.

I also want to do some kind of special year in review post, and since I started this close enough to the end of the year I think that will be something I will write up in January. I think it could be fun to treat it like an award show and hit all the high points and low points of this project. But that’s for another day, so for now here’s to one year of Take On The NES Library and let there be many more to come!