For those of you who care, or would like to participate.

http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=31&threadid=106733

Wyndcrosser wrote:
For those of you who care, or would like to participate.

http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=31&threadid=106733

Well, the idea of playing and beating every Virtual Boy game is a nice one, but the specifics for “beating” a game definitely need to be worked out more, if this challenge is to be considered at all feasible, since a good bit of Virtual Boy games cannot be beaten and have no end. The original poster of the challenge wrote: “If a game has no ending and just repeats the same stages, then we’ll consider it beaten once you get to the point where it repeats and also beat the high score if there is one.”

Once he actually tries to sit down and accomplish the goal of getting to the point where the stages repeat in the games Mario Clash, Space Invaders, Virtual Lab, and Waterworld, I think he will understand how completely impossible his challenge is, maybe not so much for Mario Clash, but definitely for the other 3. I think the challenge needs to say that if a game has no ending, then one simply needs to beat each of the preset high scores for every single mode of a game, in order to qualify as “beating the game.” Even with that, though, I don’t think either Waterworld or Virtual Lab has an in-game high score that one is supposed to beat, and making it to level 99 in Virtual Lab would likely take a person more than 100 hours of continuous play, while making it to level 99 in Waterworld is a complete impossibility.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Even with that, though, I don’t think either Waterworld or Virtual Lab has an in-game high score that one is supposed to beat, and making it to level 99 in Virtual Lab would likely take a person more than 100 hours of continuous play, while making it to level 99 in Waterworld is a complete impossibility.

Not only that, you’d also have to be lucky for Virtual Lab not to reboot (is that just a myth or does it really do that?).

Also, I have just searched through its code and there is no special score that you have to get. The highest readable score you can get is 327670; after that, it displays garbage, and once you get to 655350 (which you can’t see), it starts at 0 again.

I’m not sure how you would get to level 99 (actually 100, but stored internally as 99) anyway, as I usually can’t get past level 7 or so.

HorvatM wrote:

Not only that, you’d also have to be lucky for Virtual Lab not to reboot (is that just a myth or does it really do that?).

Apparently, Virtual Lab only reboots if you play the game on one of the commercially released cartridges. Somehow, the rebooting problem resolved itself when the game was dumped, so if you load the ROM to your Flash Boy, that dumped version of the game should never reboot. To be honest, I have only ever played the game using a reproduction cart or Flash Boy, so I have only ever played the dumped version, and I have never seen the rebooting problem. I haven’t been able to get myself to play the commercially released version that I have, since I want to preserve its condition due to its rarity and high purchase price.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Once he actually tries to sit down and accomplish the goal of getting to the point where the stages repeat in the games Mario Clash, Space Invaders, Virtual Lab, and Waterworld, I think he will understand how completely impossible his challenge is, maybe not so much for Mario Clash, but definitely for the other 3. I think the challenge needs to say that if a game has no ending, then one simply needs to beat each of the preset high scores for every single mode of a game, in order to qualify as “beating the game.” Even with that, though, I don’t think either Waterworld or Virtual Lab has an in-game high score that one is supposed to beat, and making it to level 99 in Virtual Lab would likely take a person more than 100 hours of continuous play, while making it to level 99 in Waterworld is a complete impossibility.

Mario Clash does have an ending (when you get 999999), though Virtual Lab AFAICT doesn’t.

Back when I had free time, I played both of those, trying to beat them, or prove that they couldn’t be beaten. Every 100,000 points, Mario Clash says “good”, “great”, etc… and at 999,999, it goes to a cutscene where the enemies walk across the screen and it says “That’s it, you win” or something like that.

IIRC, Virtual Lab goes from 99 to “?0”. I played that game every night for ~2 weeks without turning it off, and eventually got there. I was sorta tempted to try for 255, but I wasn’t willing to sink several more weeks into it. Regarding the resetting… I think it’s real. It happened to me several times playing my original cartridge, though it never happened while playing it on my flash cart. My guess (completely unproven, though I keep meaning to take a minute to check), is that they changed the waitstates to 1, but use the standard 150ns ROM. That’s the only logical explanation I can come up with for why my flash cart (using 90ns ROMs) would work perfectly, but the original ROM wouldn’t.

I used to have some of the screenshots up on my website under game endings, but for some reason I never reformatted that section when I updated the page style. There were some other screenshots that hadn’t made it to my webpage yet, which are somewhere (probably the dead hard drive from my old computer, or maybe 3 digital cameras ago’s Smartmedia card). I’m on vacation right now, but if I remember, I’ll dig for them when I get home. I should be able to find the old webpage pics for sure (might even have them on my laptop)… and I might have made a post about it here while I was doing it (probably ~2006-ish).

DogP

Yeah, I did have the Virtual Lab pics up on my site before… here they are. And now that I see them, I remember that it actually stopped at level “?0” (went “99”->”?0″->”?0″). Though after turning it off, I remember thinking that I should have played to 110, to make sure it didn’t switch to “?1” (in case it was just showing the upper two digits of 100, 101, etc… but a ‘?’ instead of a ‘1’ because it was too many characters or something). And maybe that’s not a ?… it kinda looks like it, but they’re pretty crappy pics.

DogP

Attachments:

1. 

   vlab2.jpg
   

2. 

   vlab3.jpg
   

3. 

   vlab4.jpg
   

4. 

   vlab5.jpg
   

DogP wrote:

Every 100,000 points, Mario Clash says “good”, “great”, etc… and at 999,999, it goes to a cutscene where the enemies walk across the screen and it says “That’s it, you win” or something like that.

Yeah, you remembered it rather well. Someone actually made a Youtube video of beating the whole game not too long ago. The end scene for beating the game begins at 1:56:32, and then he went on to make it past level 99.

Needless to say, most people will never be able to accomplish this feat, especially on a real Virtual Boy with no cheating allowed.

IIRC, Virtual Lab goes from 99 to “?0”. I played that game every night for ~2 weeks without turning it off, and eventually got there.

Aha… so you are the “brave soul” whom Brian Hodges mentioned in his review. I figured it would take at least several days to make it there, even playing almost every waking hour of each day. I think it took me about 5 hours or more to make it to level 15, and then I began to realize that it takes almost an hour or so to beat each level at that point because of how the stages are setup. I can’t imagine doing the marathon to get to level 99. My marathon runs in Galactic Pinball were grueling enough on me.

MIND=BLOWN.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Needless to say, most people will never be able to accomplish this feat, especially on a real Virtual Boy with no cheating allowed.

Yeah, it took FOREVER to do, though it was a fair game (I progressively got better and better). I’d say it took more time to get a 300 in NFB than to get 999999 in Mario Clash (effin’ 299 games… probably got 20 of them before finally getting a 300).

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Aha… so you are the “brave soul” whom Brian Hodges mentioned in his review. I figured it would take at least several days to make it there, even playing almost every waking hour of each day. I think it took me about 5 hours or more to make it to level 15, and then I began to realize that it takes almost an hour or so to beat each level at that point because of how the stages are setup. I can’t imagine doing the marathon to get to level 99. My marathon runs in Galactic Pinball were grueling enough on me.

Heh, yeah… that’s probably me. Though the game isn’t really that tough, once you get into it. The trick is to get large combos to skip levels, and of course use the pickaxe fairy (or whatever that thing is) to clear stuff. I actually thought the game was kinda fun (kinda pipe dream style), though poorly executed.

IIRC, sometimes I’d get levels that were just ridiculous, so I’d intentionally fail to get a new set. And I think sometimes pieces would fall into place and actually clear large portions… you could tell when this was happening, because the “curtain” would stay up longer, and you’d get an easy level. This is going from really old memory though (I probably haven’t played it even once since then).

The nice thing was being able to play it over a long period of time, and not having to worry about losing and starting over.

DogP