After finishing Mystic Quest on the Game Boy, I started Secret of Mana on the SNES this weekend. So far, I have earned 10% of its Retro Achievements.

It has taken me 23 hours and 50 minutes, but I have just beaten Mystic Quest for the Game Boy. This was my second playthrough. I first finished it 32 years ago when the game came out (that playthrough probably took me a lot longer). I did not simply finish the story, though, I also got all 50 achievements for it that are listed on RetroAchievements.org.

I’m continuing to make my way through Mystic Quest on the Game Boy. I’ve moved past level 50 and I’m now approaching the end game.

As a long-overdue follow-up to my first PICO-8 game recommendation, I want to recommend one of the most impressive games ever to be made for the platform: Paul Nicholas' remake of the classic RTS game Dune II (which famously started the RTS craze in the ’90s). It is called UnDUNE II and it’s a so-called multi-cart game, meaning it utilises several cartridges that are daisy-chained and together make up the whole program. When you start playing, you’ll quickly figure out why this is needed. It is amazing that Paul managed to fit a full RTS game into PICO-8’s stringent limitations, even with this trick.

UnDUNE II is a faithful recreation of the original and includes almost all of its features. I’ve included a copy of the initial cart here, but to play the full game, you need all of the carts. You can get PICO-8 carts as well as stand-alone versions of the game on itch.io for free. But I would advise you to donate something to honour Paul’s efforts. He worked on this game for years and it is truly a monumental achievement of the PICO-8 world!

I’ve updated my Retro Achievements Page. I’ve got 26% of the achievements for Mystic Quest now.

I’ve added a separate page for my retro achievements to this site.

→ Achievements Page

I’ve recently bought a Miyoo Mini Plus, a small handheld that runs Linux and emulates several gaming consoles, including the Game Boy, NES, SNES and classic arcades. There’s great open source firmware for it, that I immediately put on mine. I bought this device primarily because it can run PICO-8 carts and thus allows me to test the game I am developing.

But, since the thing also plays Game Boy games — and magnificently so, being just the right form factor and shipping with all the fancy RetroArch video filters and such — I decided it was high time I replayed Final Fantasy Adventure (or Mystic Quest, as it is called here in Europe). Fun fact: That game motivated me to learn English back in school, as there was no German version. It’s probably the main reason I speak English at all.

Through all of this, I also discovered a very cool website that allows you to collect crowdsourced achievements for old games. It works perfectly with the Miyoo Mini, so here’s my first two achievements in Mystic Quest:

Fall to Earth (RA #28942)
"Escape from the Glaive Empire"

Damsel in Distress (RA #28943)
“Rescue the girl”

Elden Ring is an amazing game. I am currently on my second attempt at actually beating it and the more I play it, the more I admire the sheer attention to detail that went into it. Here’s one example:

Early on in the game, you meet a woman named Melina, who offers to become your “maiden” and guide you through the game. She gives you a spectral horse you can summon as a mount, but more importantly, she becomes your mechanism to actually level up in the game. With her help, you can turn the runes you collect from dead enemies into stats increases at the sites of Grace that you rest at (which are basically save points).

Now, this turns out to be completely optional. In the dialogue with Melina, you can actually turn down her offer and continue your journey without her. Which means you then won’t be able to level up at all throughout the game. What is amazing is that you can still complete most of the game that way, including beating all of the seven major bosses. At level 1. Why do we know this? Because FromSoftware players are crazy and one of them actually tried this crazy approach. Took him 30 hours and in the end, he didn’t regret a second of it. He’s just mad that FromSoftware didn’t allow him to actually finish the game in this insane way. The crazy bastard.

As I’ve recently played around with coding games for PICO-8 again, I’ve also been playing a lot of games other people made for the platform to learn about programming techniques and tricks other developers have used. While doing this, it has occurred to me, that I might as well start sharing some of the amazing games for this platform on my blog, so that other people can learn about them, too.

As a start, I would like to tell you about probably the most famous PICO-8 game: The hardcore platformer Celeste. The version most people know was built with Microsoft’s XNA, but the original version of the game, now called Celeste Classic, was a PICO-8 game. If you own a copy of PICO-8, you can load the following cart to play the game. Just download the PNG, put it into the carts folder of PICO-8 and run: load celeste.p8.png

If you don’t own a copy of PICO-8, you can play the game online here.