It's been a while, but I've got back to my Summer Challenge at last. I felt like I needed a bit of a palette cleanser from Fire Emblem before I jump back into that, so I went with some shorter form stuff this evening.
I kicked off with
Mario Golf for N64. I started this last year for Together Retro, but only made it as far as the second tournament. I was out of practice and couldn't remember how to play, so I jumped into the first tournament again to get the hang of things.
I had some terrible luck with weather - rain on about 50% of courses and lots of strong winds made it so it was actually quite a brutal reintroduction to the game. I ended up finishing the game with +2 over PAR, scoring me 2nd place overall. Not too bad, but I'm gonna need to improve substantially to finish the game
Speaking of needing lots of improvement, I followed up Mario Golf with some
Samurai Shodown. Oh my, this is quite tricky. I tried it on Normal and got the floor wiped with me from the outset, so I pussied out and chose Easy, and my gods it didn't help much. After a few failed attempts where I copped it on one of the first 2 battles (the game has limited continues I was very unhappy to learn, so no breaking through this one with a lot of patience and endless attempts like most fighting games), I finally managed to get a decent run going, where I died on the 7th match, against Ukyo.
That means on my very best attempt at the game, I managed to beat 6 out of 13 opponents whilst using 3 continues. On Easy.
Man, this is gonna be rough. It is fun though, I love the atmosphere and the music too. The character designs are a bit generic and forgettable in general, although a couple of them are cool enough. I played as Nakoruru if anyone was wondering - the small rushdown characters are normally my thing, although I found Samurai Shodown is a game that rewards one careful big hit over many small ones, so maybe I should try someone with a bit more range instead.