Finally beat River City Ransom on NES. I think I had gotten pretty far on the GBA version back in October of ’04 but I don’t think I ever finished it (certainly not on NES). I remember borrowing this cart back in middle school from a friend two streets over. Never understood it, never even came close to beating it.

This time around was a bit different. Fired up an emulator from bannister.org for OSX and plugged in my USB NES pad. Authentic experience with scanlines, noise, screen warping (tube TV bubble warp) and the real freaking pad. Was a blast. Totally uber’d. All my stats were 63/63 and 127/127. Which reminds me … why did NES use 8-bit numbers and get away with it, 0-63 is 64 as in River City Ransom, 0-127 is 128 as in max lives in Ninja Gaiden with the Game Genie code, 0-255 equals 256 as in max rupees in Zelda?! Well wikipedia explains it better.

UPDATE: I went back and found my old save state from River City Ransom EX (gba remake) and found I was on the last area. So I mopped it up. Ha, beat it twice.