Mastery #12: Family Feud (NES)

     I know this is number 12. It's only number 12 because I didn't really think about doing this until the 12th game. But that's how the cookie crumbles hahaha. Besides that, my goal this year is to master 20 games. For a quick understanding, but I play retro games on a emulator and using specific emulators I am able to earn retroachievements. This is prominently done by hex-code conditions in the game & is totally free to sign up and start earning your own achievements. RetroAchievements. With that quick blurb out of the way for the 12th mastery (4th mastery of the year) I choose Family Feud for the NES.

    Family Feud the show holds a unique spot in my heart. I love Steve Harvey, and although this one doesn't have Steve Harvey I still couldn't help but to hear his voice sometimes when playing the game. Even as going as far as writing down silly answers just to imagine what his face would be in that response. Granted it only made me laugh but sometimes it was ways to keep my sanity in this utter bullshit of a game. That's right, I just called this game utter bullshit. Because it is. Allow me to explain in detail. This game came out in 1991, but most of the answers seem closer to 1989 questions/answers. Already anyone can imagine that the answers would be different from than to today. Like the question "Name something you put on a Pizza" would probably have Pineapple as one of the answers with today, but in 1989? Hell no. I'm not even sure if Pineapples were even invented yet...(I know they were). But when I get questions like, "Name someone who has to listen to problems all day long" and I put "Therapists" and get zero points. I can't help to get mad. And please note that I still don't know what the highest answer is. This question was during fast money & it doesn't tell you what the number 1 answer is. Friend, Boss, Teacher all warranted zero points the only thing I got SOME points on was for the answer "Judge". Even than that only rewarded me with 4 points. Even with this being 1989 I am sure it was a known profession and I understand all the answers from Family Feud are gathered from surveys not professionals.

    Even with all the bullshit I still overcame the challenge. Granted I feel I should've accomplished this much faster than I anticipated but the journey this game put me on is what really started to make me think about blogging my journey through earning retro achievements. The amount of research and data collecting that went into this game is more than I was expecting. I won't lie since all these games have to be played on a emulator I used this to my advantage. Pausing the game and searching for answers is not only available but to be expected to earn these achievements. Call it cheating if you want, but I welcome you to try and get all these answers right by memorizing or just knowing what people's answers were in 1989. But when playing this game & having a 3 strategy guides open with all different types of answers to the questions, I kept finding myself stuck with questions & no answers on the guides. The guides were rather pretty big too, so it surprised me when I came across so many questions that there were no answers on the guides. This lead me to search even deeper online thinking 'There has to be a place where all the answers are'. I didn't go on some long extensive search deep into the dark web or anything but simple searches through Google & DuckDuckGo gave me no answers. I did happen to come across someone else's work for questions on the Family Feud's Achievement page which helped out immensely filling up some of the gaps of questions that I was missing. But even still I would come across so many that literally stumped me. This led me to start my own database of questions and answers, what I didn't expect is just how many questions this game had. With the total of 4 strategy guides open & my 500+ lines of questions/answers on my personal guide I was still getting questions I never saw or had answers too. This opened me up to a new found respect for this game. To how much bullshit it pulled by stealing questions by answering the most abstract answer ever just to win the round, to just calling game over without going to the next round when there is only a 20 point difference, the amount of questions this game has just seems to have no end in site. It's impressive just how many questions this game holds and how often it would throw different questions at you. It's RNG is better than Spotify's or YouTube's RNG algorithm.

     

    Most of the achievements were easy except the last two. Last two being "The Overachieving Family" & "The Perseverant Family". Other achievements to this game can be found here: https://retroachievements.org/game/1680. Winning the fast round with $200 always seemed easy to me when watching Family Feud. But when playing the game with these older questions caused a lot of headaches for me. But it also started making me learn about new things in life. Like different pet birds, what different types of roofs are made of, no one's grocery bill was $150. This is something else this game really caught my attention on, the fact that I was ending up trying to research online what some of these answers might be. Which opened my mind to new and different things. The other person who ended up helping me out a lot about this game is Megan. There were a handful of times I found myself with two wrong answers & only one answer left on the board asking Megan for the final answer. Many times she would be right other times she would give me two answers & I would choose the wrong one. 

    On one of my last runs of the night I was able to finally achieve the last two achievements needed. Although it wouldn't go without issues, first being my cat Stark stepping on the keyboard during gameplay. And not just any key, he pushed the space bar, which on the emulator it fast forwards the game. It wasn't like he did this at a time where there was nothing going on. He did it during the question time, so not only did I not have the chance to read the question I didn't have the chance even ring the bell to answer. The other family ended up answering it and passing the play to my family which than left me frantically trying to get my cat off the keyboard in the nicest way possible. By the time I did finally get him off the space bar I was already down two wrong answers and one more would of given the other family an opportunity. Luckily the question was one that was on my list of questions I happen to capture so answering them was easy.  After winning "The Overachieving Family" achievement I was entering what I originally thought would be my final round. Nervously hoping that the question the game would throw at me would be ones I have answers too. In previous runs when getting this close to the end of the game the game would throw some crazy curveballs my way by asking a question I had never seen before. But this time around it was a bit more forgiving, easily being able to get to the fast money part all I need was to win this and it would have put me over the $20,000 limit and earning "The Perseverant Family" achievement. But of course the game throw the a curve ball my way, in the fast money section it asked me all questions I had no good answers for. Including "Name someone who has to listen to problems all day long" which it was at this time I was finally able to get some points with the 'Judge' answer. But I didn't win it, forcing me to play against another family. The last family I went up against was named Trump, at the time I laughed cause I was thinking, "Oh great this is how I know the game is going to cheat me". But to how unclimactic this may sound but the game just threw me the most simplest questions. I mean this was like 3rd grader doing a 1st grader spelling bee. After that it put me in the fast money once again & just like the questions it tossed me in the round, once again I was able to smoothly slide through the last questions pushing me over the $20,000 limit.

   

    

    Thank goodness the game was able to spell Congratulations correctly. Although the only thing that makes me curious about this ending screen shot is that the 'leave' is written in a different font & color making me wonder if there is an alternate ending to this game or what? But with all of that said this was a quick over view of my journey collecting all the achievements for Family Feud for the NES. May the family ASSCHEEK forever be remembered in Family Feud NES History.