Being separated from my main game consoles for a while, I pretty much played exclusively on my DS over the holidays (aside from some brief turns at Guitar Hero at a friend’s). It at least gave me a chance to finally catch up on some of the older games I have for it:
Super Mario Bros 3 (GBA): I last left off at the beginning of World 5, and made it up to stage 8-2. I was hoping to finish it off, but that stage is a door maze that I couldn’t figure out on my own, so it’ll have to wait until I get a walkthrough.
While playing, I started to wonder if my platforming skills were declining. I had to take advantage of the GBA version’s feature of allowing continues to get past a lot of areas, sometimes needing multiple continues just to get past a single world. Then again, I didn’t do so badly at Super Mario Galaxy recently…
Picross DS: I killed a lot of time working on more of the puzzles, and finally finished off all of the built-in puzzles, including the extra levels unlocked after level 10. There were a couple that were particularly annoying (9-J and 10-K in Free mode especially) and wound up having to use the starting hints for those, but the rest weren’t really all that tough.
Puzzle Quest: I’d been meaning to get back to this one for a while, and got my Knight up to level 18. Battles still largely feel random though, and one fight can go horribly while the next against the same foe is a piece of cake. I’ve uncovered a lot more map locations, done quite a few quests, bought all the castle upgrades, gotten some decent equipment, and fought one boss (the two-headed ogre), but I’m not sure how far along I really am.
Elite Beat Agents: The very last mission (with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”) had been troubling me for quite a while; I’d usually make it past the spinners, and then fail quickly due to some very long, twistily-placed markers. I figured I’d give it another shot, and it started out much the same way. I stuck with it longer than I usually would have this time though and eventually beat it after around ten tries. Whew. I then played on the next-higher difficulty for a while and made it to just past the Christmas mission before running into trouble again. I think that’s enough for me anyway.
Mario vs. Donkey Kong (GBA): I’d almost forgotten about this one, and upon starting it up I was fairly close to the end already (near the end of World 5, out of 6). After starting to play again, I remembered why I stopped, though; the stage I was on was a fairly tough one that needed precise timing to keep a key from falling off a moving conveyer. I finally beat it, but was losing lives rapidly. I’m not sure if it’s just the stages getting tougher or if again my skills have degraded, but I had to go back to an earlier stage to ‘farm’ 1ups just to keep going.
I eventually beat World 6 and the final boss fight, but then discovered that that then unlocked a series of ‘plus’ worlds and a set of ‘expert’ stages. The plus worlds even play differently in that there’s only one part to each stage instead of two, and instead of picking up the key yourself, you find a mini-Mario with the key who then follows you around. It’s different enough that you need new strategies for the plus worlds at least. With these extra stages there’s a lot more to the game than I expected, but I’m still going to consider it ‘completed’. The plus worlds and expert stages are tougher, and I’m not sure I can make it too far through them.
Yoshi’s Island DS: This was another one where I’d stopped playing at an annoying part; it was an autoscroll stage with giant chomps crashing down and destroying the ground, leading to a lot of falling to my death. I finished that one and a few more stages, but wasn’t really feeling motivated to continue much further for some reason.
Super Mario World (GBA): I couldn’t remember where I’d left off in this one, so I started it up and found I was still doing the Special stages. I only had two left: Outrageous, which was annoying because of those irritating bouncing fires, and Funky, which had a lot of those sumo stompers and various Chucks near the end, and I eventually wound up beating it by getting a Yoshi and flying over most of the stage. After beating those two, I had uncovered every exit in the game and was rewarded by a small cutscene and some graphics changes — the overworld turned from green to brown, shells became Mario heads, and possibly others.
Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones (GBA): I tried to continue on in Chapter 6, but my obsessiveness over not letting any characters die (since it’s permanent in this game) had me restarting it over a few times, and I eventually gave up. I think I might abandon this one anyway, since I want to get to the Fire Emblem game for the Gamecube and then import that save into the Wii game.