Definitely a game that feels made for 2 players, though there is a 1-player mode. It gets more interesting and harder as you go on, with more varied enemies and obstacles being added, but eventually gets boring and repetitive. Mario's movement feels a little awkward and was hard to get used to. The game takes place in the sewers of New York rather than the Mushroom Kingdom of the later games.
Ms. Pac-Man
Platform played: Game Boy
Date beaten: Sep 29, 2023
As with the Donkey Kong arcade games, I'm counting "beat all unique stages" as beating it. There are four unique mazes, with three "intermissions" or cutscenes between them. Having checked Wikipedia to confirm that it's only those 4 levels, I think it's safe to consider it beaten. The game, of course, plays very similarly to the original Pac-Man. The gameplay, while simple, is fairly fun and addicting, but repetitive after a while.
Wizardry III: Legacy of Llygamyn
Platform played: SNES Emulator (Wizardry I-II-III: The Story of Llygamyn, with Rebalancing Patch applied)
Date beaten: Feb 24, 2025
This scenario is supposed to be the descendants of your PCs from the first game and I believe they inherit their stats in some manner but start at level 1. In the NES/SNES versions of course you just make a fresh party like with the second game. And it's labeled as the 2nd game in Japan for reasons explained in the Knight of Diamonds section.
This is the first Wizardry game where I felt like the maps seemed like they were trying to feel like real locations, such as the barracks and the moat, as opposed to just graph paper squares. Another interesting thing is that certain floors can only be explored by Good or Evil party members, so to complete the game, you have to either manage two parties, or constantly switch aligntments. Unfortunately, that fact is exactly why I got stuck... There aren't that many "friendly" monster encounters to fight so leveling up an Evil party becomes difficult.
I tried to switch my Good party to Evil to progress but found it very time-consuming and difficult since it seems there is only a small chance they will turn Evil even after defeating a "friendly" encounter, and friendly encounters aren't that numerous to begin with. But I eventually realized if alignment shifts are such a small occurence, it should be possible to have my Evil party level up by fighting regular encounters, without fear of them turning Good. So instead of trying to change alignments, I made two parties. Thus I was able to progress through the game with an Evil party to the ending. I will say though that figuring out how to win was quite confusing. First, you need to collect both the Evil and Good Crystals from certain floors - so far so good. However, you then need to combine them to make the Neutral Crystal. The guide I looked at said to do this by "using" the Evil Crystal with an Evil character who has the Good Crystal in his inventory. Perhaps that's how it worked in other versions such as the DOS or NES version, but in the SNES version, trying to "use" either of the crystals simply produces the message, "What?" However, I found that I could make the Neutral Crystal by going to the equipment screen - after sorting all equipment slots it then asked if I wanted to combine the crystals.
Now you have to take the Neutral Crystal with you to 6F, which is the final floor. There is a dragon called L'kbreth that will attack you (and is unbeatable) if you don't have the Neutral Crystal. If you have it, she lets you through. The next confusing part is that you must navigate the floor to find a certain statue and trade the Neutral Crystal for the correct crystal to win the game. Why is this confusing? Because there are THREE statues on the floor, each one gives you a "Crystal Orb," and whether it's the CORRECT orb is not revealed until you return to town with it. And since you have traded away the Neutral Crystal, you cannot get past to L'kbreth to try again unless you go all the way back and retrieve the Good and Evil Crystals all over again. Thankfully I saw this problem coming and was able to reload an earlier save state. Still though, this kind of trial and error seems odd to me (especially considering that in the original, the autosave would prevent you from using reloading a save in this way). Unless there was a hint somewhere I missed. Maybe in the manual for the DOS version?
Also, this is kind of a problem with all D&D-like alignment systems, but "Good" and "Evil" in this game are functionally sports teams. There is no difference in behavior between the two, both go around killing things in a dungeon.
The Portopia Serial Murder Case | Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken
Platform played: The fan translation of the 1985 NES version, on an online emulator.
Date beaten: October 2, 2023
Yuji Horii's adventure game that he created before Dragon Quest. This is considered by some "the first visual novel ever" (though not the first game marketed as a visual novel - that will come later) and is clearly a precursor to modern case-solving games like Ace Attorney and Dangan Ronpa. I played the game to completion, but did cheat a bit by consulting a guide, to avoid tedious pixel hunts. Unlike those modern games, there is generally no hint when there is something in the area you need to search for. While it is mostly a point-and-click adventure style game like the Ace Attorney series, it also a bit of a "dungeon-crawling" portion in the form of an invisible maze near the end (although there are no enemies or anything like that in the maze). Incidentally, an AI-based remake of this was released in the 2020s as a tech demo of an AI/LLM technology. It had bad reviews which at first I wondered if it was just due to the bias against AI, but looking into it, it sounds like actually is pretty bad - the funny thing is that it's way worse at understanding your prompts than the original. The issue of "text-based games understanding what you're saying" is like a solved problem that they then unsolved. Wild.
Game of the year: The Portopia Serial Murder Case is the standout here, being fairly unique compared to the other games. Wizardry III was fun, but not too terribly different from the first two games in the series - the idea of needing both a Good and Evil party is cool, but the implementation is lacking.