I had written this at the Official MAGFest site, but it somehow got gobbled up (Or I never actually hit “post”), so here they are again, in a slightly modified form.
We’re exactly two months away from MAGFest (The official title for this year seems to be MAGFest: The 7th Fest) now, and I’ve been doing a bit of practicing on the challenges in hoping to better my third-place finish from last year. My basic thoughts to this point:
- Maybe it’s because I haven’t spent as much time with them, or maybe it’s because they’re on games I’ve never played before, but so far, it seems like a lot of the Normal challenges are actually harder than the Hard/Expert ones, even moreso than last year (Where there was some overlap between the extremes of the difficulties, which isn’t a bad thing necessarily).
- I have the feeling that what was supposed to be one of the pseudo-impossible challenges (You can probably guess which one) was not tested as thoroughly as it should have been.
- I can’t make the Athena save state work. I had this problem last year too. Odd. Apparently, Athena is bored, so she decided to foil any attempts to start at any point in her game that isn’t the beginning.
- Unrelated to this year in particular, I should tell Metal Dream that I want a Dr. Mario rematch, preferably when I’m running on more than four hours sleep. It won’t change anything about last year, but it may make me feel better about my thoughts that I essentially handed it to him rather than him taking it from me (Again, not that how he won it matters).
Two months left! Woo!
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I totally agree with you dude, some of the challenges haven’t been tested a lot and are harder / easier than they look and haven’t been placed in the good difficulty. Yet again, it could be because we’re proficient in those games and it could seem impossible for someone who is not used to those.
I don’t know if it’s the ones you’re inquiring about but for me, Castlevania 2 is a joke ( especially when I think that I’m not able to finish Pro Wrestling lol ) I wonder if there’s anyone who will finish the expert challenges for Metroid and Punch-out (Maybe tysoncode will pull it off)
Athena doesn’t want to work for me either…I’ve tried to re-download the ROM but it didn’t help. Weird huh? Maybe we should bring that to Ryan’s attention
Dr Mario rematch? It would be cowardly from my part to back down from the challenge eh? Sure thing man, if you want your revenge and get a peace of mind from that match last year, we can do it sometime at Mag!
Peace out!
Metal Dream
Author
Yeah, some of the challenges are a bit easier than they should be for me personally (Ninja Gaiden II’s Expert challenge, like the original Ninja Gaiden challenges last year, was something I had actually worked on on my own as a sort of personal challenge years and years back) just because I’ve played them before. Another factor is probably the fact that I’m presently spending more time on the Hard/Expert challenges, even the ones I haven’t played before, just because there are more points to be had there.
And yeah, I see you figured out the secret (Or at least A secret) to the Castlevania II challenge, which was indeed the one I was talking about. My thought process was basically “You can lock Dracula down with the flame and Golden Knife…wonder if you can do it with holy water too.” and after about 5 minutes and some experimentation, I had my answer.
No clue what’s up with Athena. I have a couple other savestates that behave strangely, though that may be the source I got the ROMs from (Which, oddly, was missing the US version of Contra entirely O.o). I should re-download those once I finish out my once-over of the list (Minus ones I know I can’t/don’t want to do…is three points really worth the agony of learning freaking Bad Dudes? ;)).
As for some of the other pseudo-impossible stuff, I couldn’t even beat the “easier” Tyson challenge last year, so I’ll leave that one up to the pros of the game and hope I can make up the points by tackling some of the other weird challenges no one else bothered with a la last year. I may look into some of the others though.
And cool, Dr. Mario rematch it is then! Preferably sometime before Sunday morning, heh. Who knows, you may well be better than me at it anyway…but I’m pretty sure “Me on sufficient sleep” is a lot better than “Me on little enough sleep that I may well have been better off staying up all night”. :P
M7 WOO!
Looks like I’ll need to change the difficulty of the Castlevania 2 challenge down to Hard or Normal. Never knew that you could lock Drac down with the holy water. I’d get rid of that item to make it more difficult, but it’s the one weapon you must get to complete the game.
Any other challenges that seem mis-ranked for difficulty?
I’ll double check the save states on the site; let me know which ones don’t seem to be working.
Bad Dudes is quite possibly one of the greatest NES games of all times. It’s so horribly awesome, how could you not want to waste hours of your life wanting to mastering it?
[…] A few entries down, I gave my preliminary thoughts on some of the MAGFest VII Challenges. In the comments for that entry, Ryon, who’s running the booth, asked me if I thought any of the challenges were mis-rated besides Castlevania II. Because it seems like my comments have actually caused this challenge’s difficulty to be changed, and because I don’t want to seem as though I’m colluding with Ryon to change some of the difficulties for my own personal gain, what follows is the entire text of the e-mail I sent him regarding this, with his replies interspersed throughout. […]