Live Blogs Let Fate Guide Us: Barrylocke plays unexpected Game Boy Advance games

Barrylocke2011-09-28 00:14:41

Barrylocke here. You may have seen my Fire Emblem Draft Liveblog floating around here. While I was working on that liveblog, I thought of an interesting idea that I know has been dabbled in before on other parts of the internet.

I've played a decent amount of roms over the years, and while I make a rule to not play roms of the more recent systems, older systems that are no longer active are fair game for me. If any of you are familiar with roms, you may know that often times the rom's file name will have have a number attached to it. This number is the release id, and (correct me if I'm wrong) I believe it is used to show the order that games were released for a system.

Why does this all matter? Well this number makes for a clean way to randomly pic roms and try them out. The idea of this is for me to use a Random Number Generator to pick one of those Release Ids, and play the game that corresponds with it. I plan to play these games for as long as I can stand (which may, but probably won't) involve beating them. I originally wanted to do NES and SNES roms, but it seems that my romsites that I use don't have the release ids (or at least they dont have them listed that way) so until I figure something out, I'll be doing it with GBA roms.

Rules:

1. My site has 2810 different GBA Roms, so I will be going to random.org and having it find 1 number between 1-2810

2. I'll look at the number and find the corresponding rom. If the rom is in another language, I'll see if there is a corresponding english rom. If there isn't, I'll have to stick with it.

3. I play for as long as I can stand, and record my adventures here.

I may find myself posting pictures, and possibly links to video, depending on how I feel about this whole premise. Until then though, I just hope to have fun with it. If/When I manage to get it going for the snes and nes, I may possibly have those listed in other liveblogs of there own. We'll see.

That's about it for now! I hope to start very soon, and you may see more of this after the Fire Emblem Draft is complete.

Comments

SpellBlade Since: Dec, 1969

Sep 28th 2011 at 5:51:23 PM

Looks like it'll be fun.

JackAlsworth Since: Dec, 1969

Sep 28th 2011 at 7:24:51 PM

Does the site have hacks, or just standard games?

Barrylocke Since: Dec, 1969

Sep 29th 2011 at 1:47:54 PM

I know the site has hacks, but I don't know if it has GBA hacks. Chances are, if there are any hacks, they're for more popular games that hackers would actually want to hack, and as my next entry will show, the GBA had a decent amount of shovelware.

FreezairForALimitedTime Since: Dec, 1969

Sep 29th 2011 at 6:38:05 PM

I am in favor of this idea!

EndarkCuli Since: Dec, 1969

Sep 29th 2011 at 10:01:57 PM

Part of me thinks that this is a good idea, while another part worries that you'll eventually roll up a long & difficult game like Sacred Stones and lose interest just when the plot is picking up. Regardless, I wish you good luck on this endeavor, and I'll try my best to be here for future updates.

montagohalcyon Since: Dec, 1969

Oct 2nd 2011 at 8:58:48 PM

Sounds interesting. So if you find one in another language you have to try to play it anyway?

Barrylocke Since: Dec, 1969

Oct 4th 2011 at 12:56:46 AM

If the Rom has an English option, then I'll play that, so if I roll Fire Emblem: Rekka No Ken, then I'll play Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword (though tbh if I happen to roll that particular game, I'll probably reroll since I have a very extensive let's play of that almost done). If the game doesn't exist in English with neither an official version or a patch, then yes, I gotta stick with it.