Does ILG have a retro "i'm playing"/recommendation thread yet?

Hi ILG!

I feel like, in the same vein as the 360 thread or Ps3 or Wii or DS or PSP or PC/Mac/Steam thread, there should be a thread talking about playing old shit, because it almost feels these days that retrogaming has become its own "platform" in the sense that it has its own market, and it's easier to play the games than ever via emulators/psn/virtual console/etc. I don't necessarily want to talk about, say, a PS1 game that's on PSN on the PS3 thread because I don't even have a PS3 and there are other avenues to play these games on, so can we have a catch-all "this is an old game I am playing and/or you should play" thread? To be honest half of the games I'm playing these days are PS1 games on my PSP or SNES games on my PC (or on my SNES too). Some of them I've played before, some I haven't, but I think a catch-all nostalgia/still-good thread would be good, and differentiate itself from a "best (insert old console here) game" thread because there's a big difference between games that were good in the era of, say, the PS1, and games that were on the PS1 that are good now. Games that hold up against the test of time vs. things that blew your mind THEN.

Does this make sense to anyone? If so, I'll start:

I recently got Suikoden I & II on my PSP via shady internet styles, as someone's totally converted the games for me via BT. I really wish the 2006 PSP remake had made its way to North America because these games are virtually impossible to find legit copies of nowadays. Suikoden I played a while back but that was back in the rose-colored glasses days; played it again now (just beat it today, actually) and while it doesn't 100% hold up to my placing it as the best game in the best RPG series of all time (I forgot how simple & kind of ugly & poorly designed some of it is) it is still a pretty damn good JRPG. I remembered Suikoden II being inferior back in the day but I just started it today and I realized how much they've upgraded on S1 that I may switch my internal ranking on the Suikoden games (as of last week it was 1-5-2-3-4).

WHAT IS OLD THAT YOU PLAYING

I recommend x 100000000 MASTER Of MAGIC

i.e. the greatest game in the history of all things

it is still pretty much the funnest thing ever

Ghost Recon for the 3DS left me fiending for more Julian Gollop, so I am trying to play X-Com UFO Defense via The Steam. h8 having to play in a window though. also h8 not being able to get X-Com Extender to work on my computer for some reason.

I am also still playing Sid Meier's Pirates: Live the Life but in reality I will probably never stop playing that game; it's up there w/ Tetris and God Hand and SMB3 on the shortlist of best games I've ever played.

oh and I'm'a use the $20 in Amazonbux I got free w/ Portal 2 to get the DS Fire Emblem game whenever it gets credited to my account.

i'm pretty much always playing marble madness

I've been playing Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga slowly for the last couple weeks. Cute game.

not quite sure if this counts but I'm finally getting around to the bionic commando: rearmed remake. very impressive but I'm so familiar with the original that the control differences are throwing me off!! hope hitler's head still explodes at the end of this one too.

also tried to start up a game of lufia 2 a few months ago and was really surprised by how well it held up. graphics, plot, etc are obviously quite dated and the whole thing is basically a big fetch quest. but the mechanics of it are really quite refined for the time. no random battles in dungeons, puzzles to liven up the exploration, and my favorite, your character moves FAST. it's really a joy to play and so many j-rpgs are still such a chore.

sadly, I was playing on an old SNES and I bumped into it or something and my save file got wiped out. bummer.

speaking of a chore I attempted to play Terranigma a couple months ago — hated it

oh yeah? how come? that's been on my list for a while.

really annoying battle system, tiny map — got to one part where I couldn't move on no matter what I did. I'm sure I'd forgotten some crucial step, but if it's so obscure as to be nearly impossible to find then the game isn't fun anymore.

One jRPG I *did* have fun playing was Star Ocean on SNES.

i've been playing PSP final fantasy tactics for about three months now. it's great to fall asleep to.
I've probably played tactics more hours than any other game ever.

yeah, same here. it's kinda weird that the sequels never captivated me in the same way. they had basically the same mechanics, but the stories/judges blew

my favorite, your character moves FAST.

big bonus from suikoden 1 to 2: you don't need to equip a rune to run (in 1 you needed to waste one character's rune slot and everyone only had one slot! fucking awful)

which is to say this comment OTM

James, doesn't the Steam version run DOSbox? Alt+Enter should put it into full screen, or you can change the dosbox.conf file settings.

Mother 3 is sorta retro by now, right?

Also, I found a copy of SimTower at a goodwill for $5, so that got loaded in.

i'm sure i got simtower free from abandonware site. cant check on my phone right now

<3 Mother 3 so much

After seing Another World is something like $3/$4 on GoG I decided I'm going to play through all of Flashback again as soon as possible. I should also, considerably more related, play Another World as I don't think I ever completed it.

yeah, I picked up another world on gog as well. flashback is great and definitely the more polished of the two... but I really love AW from an aesthetic angle.

Your friend and mine

man oh fucking man I love Sim Tower. ELEVATORS.

I was thinking of busting out my v old laptop for some early '90s Maxis action. Sim fucking Tower. Did anyone ever play Sim Earth? I "beat" it when it first came out (everyone left the planet (spoiler? (just like in Sim City 2k))) but I tried playing it a few years ago and could not figure out how the fuck to play it.

Speaking of unplayable oldschool – how the hell do you leave the bridge on that TNG game for the SNES?

I only play old games really mainly because it is cheaper and I don't feel like I can justify shelling out £40+ for stuff realistically I will never get a chance to play. Lately:

Front Mission III (PS1) - I'm about 25 hours into this. Good stuff, but like all JRPGs I seem to spend about 50% of my time mashing the start button to try and get the inevitably awful dialogue/cutscenes to go away.

Ring of Red (PS2 - I guess this is retro now?) - yep I'm on a bit of a mecha trip at the moment. This is a really unusual turn-based/real-time hybrid strategy game. Unfortunately, the missions take hours and I kind of temporarily gave up halfway through mission 8 or something when I realised I had irrecoverably cocked things up. I'll go back to it though.

Shadow of the Collossus (PS2) - I've been accumulating PS2 games lately because they seem to be just getting cheaper and cheaper. I loved Ico loads - I'm not a great believer in the "games are art" thing, but Ico is the nearest thing I have played, so I have high hopes for SotC.

Earthbound (SNES) - I fired this up a while ago, but couldn't get into it. I keep downloading loads of old SNES games that sound great on paper or for reasons of nostalgia, but they are always a little too dated for me to get into. I've got a whole bunch of old recently translated SNES JRPGs sitting around on my PC like Live a Live and Bahamut Lagoon, so there is hope yet.

I've also been trying to get my hands on a PAL copy of Fire Pro Wrestling Returns (PS2), but it only had a very limited release in like Portugal and Italy and all the copies I find are going for silly money. If anyone has a copy of this that they wouldn't mind trading/selling for a reasonable price I would be v interested...

Ghost Recon for the 3DS left me fiending for more Julian Gollop

I did not realize that Gollop did that game... ohhhhh man. I kind of want a 3DS now. I didn't even care until I saw this message. I have played a fair bit of UFO-D on Steam, I actually prefer the window to a fullscreen situation because the resolution is so low that it looks like utter junk in fullscreen. You can definitely make it FS in Steam, though, I just forget how.

One jRPG I *did* have fun playing was Star Ocean on SNES.

There's a remake on the PSP that I played a bit of. Tried to play the SNES ROM w/ all of the translation files & various packs of craziness that it takes to emu that game and gave up ages ago. Anyone who wants to try it, I highly recommend that PSP thing instead -- may not be the "original" with its retro tastiness but it's at least the same game. I think they also remade the PS1 sequel!

i've been playing PSP final fantasy tactics for about three months now. it's great to fall asleep to.

Man the number of times I have literally fallen asleep while playing FFT or Tactics Ogre on th PSP in the past year or two... embarrassing. Such good stuff.

Front Mission III (PS1)

Aw yeah. Have you played Front Mission 1? It was remade on DS, and there's a decent SNES ROM translation out there as well. I like it even more and there's a song that plays in the shops that it dope as fuck, little Rhodes midi piano style tinkling all up in.

Earthbound (SNES)

I can understand this. I have had many, many aborted attempts at playing this game, because apparently the last act of the game is completely worth it, but I've never done it. I managed to borrow a legit copy and it is the furthest I ahve got (some of my attempts were thwarted by imperfect game-blocking emu bugs). Maybe this summer I'll dive back in. I want to beat it before I ever play Mother 3. Which I also want to do. Also re: Bahamut Lagoon, deeeeeefinitely check that one out, it can be played in bite-sized enough chunks & is pretty excellent iirc, haven't played it since... like... since the translation came out, possibly before I even had broadband access.

there's a song that plays in the shops that it dope as fuck, little Rhodes midi piano style tinkling all up in.

Earthbound is really frustrating to get through, but yeah, it's probably worth doing, especially if you want to play Mother 3 (even though there's no real connection, it's more thematically). If I were you I'd try emulating again, with generous use of the speed-up key to get through the more frustrating dungeons (and boy were there a lot of those) and a lot of grinding, despite the ability to avoid battles.

SoTC is awesome but you already knew that

Front Mission Shop Jamz:
http://lamda.bluelaguna.net/front-mission-ost-soundtrack/24%20Shop.mp3

(if link doesn't work use this one - click on "24 - shop" and then the second mirror)
http://bluelaguna.net/music/front-mission-ost-soundtrack/mp3s.php

truly one of the greatest little jams in vg history.

the little phrase in the song at 1:15 -- it is so familiar that it must be from something -- but i can't place it. it is one of the best things ever.

ok, that rules.

speaking of which, earthbound has one of the best vg soundtracks around imo. and it's totally worth playing! the game just oozes charm like no other. some of the dungeons are frustrating, sure. but there's also a tension/release aspect to completing them that is really satisfying. to me, anyway. maybe I'm a masochist.

shadow of the colossus is totally top five all time for me

ditto

Only part of Earthbound I hated as a kid was the goldmine with the third-strongest moles.

i've been playing the Super Famicom game Umihara Kawase. it's a cute puzzle platform game, with a hookshot kind of like Bionic Commando but with elasticity & recoil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cYbKdESqvI

Have you played Front Mission 1?

Not yet - I think I might pick up DS remake though. FMIII is supposed to be the most accessible one, so I thought I'd start with that.

This is nerdy but has anyone f'ed w/ rom hacks at all? This week I ended up finding two really good ones of Super Mario World: there's Mario's Keytastrophe, which is a more puzzle-based game where you have to find the key on each level and bring it to the keyhole; and then there's the cumbersomely named Super Mario World 2+ 3: The Essence Star (to parse the title, it's the third game in the 'Mario 2+' series). This one is really exceptionally well done imo (perhaps bar the corny writing, but it's admittedly not much worse than the dialogue in the Mario RPG games which it extrapolates from). The levels are often admirably well-designed, there are new game mechanics that are clever, and tbh it's the only 'fan' game/hack I've ever really enjoyed playing. I'm 34% into it and very dedicated to beating this game. Here's a video of one of the 'castles' that might be a spoiler but is still probably worth watching if you think you might be interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL-nBcaqSJA

Might be old news for some, but new and exciting for me, as I didn't know any of these games were actually good and this stuff hits the nostalgia nerve while also being fresh and challenging, but in a familiar way. It seems like the community for these sorts of hacks is fairly small and I don't really know a whole lot about them other than these two, which were the only two I saw that appeared worthwhile. But after seeing two very creative games like these, I have to admit I'm really curious what else is out there. Does anyone know about these?

umihara kawase rules! but man, it gets so difficult in the later stages. super, super tense. was playing recently and noticed that my jaw hurt from clenching my teeth like crazy during a particularly stressful playthrough!

ps1 port is a bit easier but I think I prefer the physics in the snes game. ps1 port is... floatier?

essence star looks like fun. bookmarked.

yeh i'm playing the Super Famicom one, managed to luck into a cheapish BIN on ebay a couple of months ago. there is a DS version as well, never made it out of Japan of course.
Essence Star looks good, might have to track it down.
find it fascinating that people take apart old carts & flash the ROMs to play hacks & unofficial translations, that's some serious dedication to the form when emulation is so easy these days - you can buy them from places like here, here and here

as i'm having a bit of a psx-psp personal renaissance nad i started looking for old "best ps1 game" lists that might interest me. I found this:

http://psx.ign.com/articles/080/080401p1.html

Now I'm no big IGN fan, especially from back in the day, but it is interesting -- some of these games are completely whatever now, due to getting iteratively better over time (or being outshone by competing games). I bet if they remade this list now it'd be insanely different.

This is sort of why I made this thread -- looking back, some games were sort of the pinnacle of the line of games that came before thme, and some were just stepping stones. I mean, Tenchu 1? Driver? Madden 2000? Medla of Honor? Definitely great at the time, but entirely irrelevant now.

I finished Suikoden I & II over the past couple of weeks. Thinking about Vagrant Story, Vandal Hearts, or the Lunar games next -- none of which I have actually played before!

love Suikoden. i remember renting it for a couple of weeks from Choices a long time ago though i never got around to finishing it. it's one of the games that Psycho Mantis mentions when he reads your memory card in MGS which blew my mind at the time

yeah i guess in hindsight the PS1 seems like more of a transitionary console than a groundbreaker, the few games that were groundbreaking and are worth revisiting are largely outnumbered by the games that were pretty much just prototypes for further developments

i grabbed a bunch of old Famicom shoot em ups recently after playing Twin Bee in an arcade for a good 20 minutes. Star Soldier probably the best of the bunch, top down space shooter, simple power-up system, cool music. think it's Hudson Soft. enjoyable despite the fact that I completely suck at shmups

yeh Star Force is alright. have you played Crisis Force? that's probably my favourite Famicom shmup.

Still slogging through Front Mission III. I thought I must be near the end, looked at a walkthrough and realised I had another 20+ missions to go :(. Can't believe this thing has whole almost completely different set of characters and missions if you decide to do X rather than Y in the very first part of the game.

In theory I love the idea of SRPGs, but in practice I have never been able to finish one. Determined to finish this one though, even if it takes me all year. At least in FMIII you don't have the mindless grinding that did for me in Tactics Ogre, which was ridiculous. You literally had to setup an automated training mode and leave the game to play itself for a few hours to have any chance of progressing later on.

Does anyone have any recommendations of games that have mechanics like a Japanese-style SRPG but instead of having an 80+ hour grind, can be completed in 15-30 hours and then replayed?

played Crisis Force a while back on emu, I remember it being exceptionally fast for a NES game. it came out quite late didn't it, like 93 or something? i'll have to look out for a cheap cart

Salamander was another one I picked up, side scrolling R-Type kinda thing but I think I like it better than R-Type, great power ups, something about the graphics and the way the levels progress give it a kinda Metroid feel. wiki sez it was called Life Force in the US

xp

oh yeh Salamander, nice see-though cart as well! think it was a Gradius offshoot - Gradius 2 is worth looking out for as well.

yeah, life force/salamander is my jam. love the music and the whole "flying through a stomach" aesthetic. it's also balanced in a way few gradius games are. the way you can grab stray options that slowly fall off the screen after you respawn is a nice touch makes powering back up waaaaay less of a drag. this was re-introduced after many, many years in gradius 5 (which is amazing btw) on the ps2.

recca is also kind of mindblowing. practically a manic shmup running on nes hardware.

and any shmup by compile is worth playing. here's a nice rundown:
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/aleste/compile.htm

gun nac is def top-tier for the nes and the guardian legend is a really cool shmup/action rpg hybrid.

and definitely try the pc-engine star soldier games if you dug the nes one! final soldier and soldier blade are pretty great.

as for ps1 games, I've dipped into a few of these articles on jeremy parish's site:
http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Site/GSQ8TableOfContents

these obviously aren't all online yet but they will be with time. seems like a good list and it does make me want to bust some old faves.

read through the nes one a few months ago:
http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Site/GSQ5TableOfContents

the quality of writing varies pretty wildly (most of these folks are not professional writers) but there's still a lot of worthwhile stuff in there. really dug some of the more historical articles like the one about various nes big-wigs. just wish there were more of them. there's no shortage of game reviews out there.

the whole "flying through a stomach" aesthetic

yeah it's this kinda claustrophobic element that puts me in mind of Metroid a bit, I think. judging by some of the videos I've watched on youtube the later levels look nuts, I need to get better at this game

i've heard of Recca, wasn't that one of the first "bullet hell" games? developed for some hardcore Japanese gaming tournament or something

thanks for the recommendations

yeah, I think batsugun and the early cave games popularized the "bullet hell" phrase but recca def predates those games. it's really a pretty amazing showcase.

don't know the backstory but I think it was created for a tournament, yeah.

Does anyone have any recommendations of games that have mechanics like a Japanese-style SRPG but instead of having an 80+ hour grind, can be completed in 15-30 hours and then replayed?

I recommend the Fire Emblem games for the Game Boy (Advance maybe?), they only had like 40 missions each, and they were tough esp. if you wanted to avoid perma-death for cool characters but ther was no grind anyway

i'm not trying to retain value or anything, i've just been lazy about turning on the PS2. it's actually not worth much---*checks amazon* what the hell!? oh wait, my copy was already open, never mind.

currently playing Final Fantasy II(j) off the Dawn of Souls GBA cart. it's an ok number increaser. has a basic ask/learn/show conversation system similar to some early ultima games.

xpost speaking of God Hand I had a free second to find this:

http://i.imgur.com/AlK00.jpg

um, division is not accurate?

99 year old who plays Bomberman every day!
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xk1b83_bombergran_webcam#

I'm casually playing Final Fantasy III (or VI)

i am also playing this game!

i (finally) finished up the last of the three post-river lethe storylines and am back at narshe

baldur's gate 2 son. yall jrpg bitches are on notice. this is the real shit son.

i really want to play jagged alliance 2 on my mac, but it seems like a lot of work to get it working. anyone have any experience with the Stracciatella project? Link: http://ja2.monkeyphysics.com/home/osx

Fallout 1&2 changed how I played and viewed RPGs, where you were rewarded for bumping up non-combat stats with more bits of narrative and unlocking different avenues of solving the same problem.

It's been years since I've played it, but BG2 has similar design, right? I know that Planescape and KotOR certainly do.

Funfact: apparently iPhone autocorrect will fix the capitalization of "KotOR" for you

Yes; that is what helps make it (IMO) the greatest role-playing game ever created.

i personally liked BG1 more than BG2 but i know that's a minority opinion. i think im generally really biased against infinity engine games. also that was when BioWare really kicked the relationship stuff into high gear, which is... not my favorite thing they do.

i liked BG1 more than BG2 too!

i thought a lot of the BG2 aesthetics, like character portraits, were really ugly and unappealing

IMO BG2 was the best implementation of the whole romance thing; you could actually change a character's alignment if you romanced her successfully, which blew my mind at the time

I'd sort of forgotten about the whole relationship thing in BioWare games, so in my recent playthrough of DA:O, when the elf assassin dude started hitting me, I hit on him back to see what would happen... was kind of not expecting that cutscene

haha!

just could never get into BG, despite my massive undying love for Fallout/Torment

Burning through Symphony of the Night for the first serious time in probably ten years. So fun, although the second castle is a lot...duller than I remembered, a little too much empty space really with nothing left to discover. My big goal this time is to beat Galamoth without using the Shield Rod/Alucard Shield trick, and maybe to find a few of the super rare crazy swords. Anyway, it's fun smashing skeletons and stuff to unwind after work.

just past the opera scene in FFVI

btw can I just say that I started playing through FFVII for the first time in 14 years and... it's terrible

ha, i tried that last year and lasted 3 hours before i gave up

heh i replayed ff7 a year or two ago, and it was still confusing as shit

I've gotten a decent way into it, currently at Red XIII's village but the idea of continuing to play is just horrifying

aw, I've been wanting to play that because it's so acclaimed

you really had to play it when it came out. it was a game of its time.

is it the graphics?

and the controls

and big chunks of the story

although it does have one event that almost justifies the entire game

the graphics, but even more the aesthetics which have been explored in much better/more interesting ways but really stood out in 1997, not to mention that the jrpg + turn based combat still felt fresh to many gamers in 1997 + partially due to ff7's success are hugely overplayed now. i remember when ff7 had come out most gamers i knew my age (13 btw in 1997!!) had really never played a ff game. and those those kids had their minds blown and grew up to be a huge part of the group that insisted it was a great game. for little gamers in 1997 Aeris dying was their JFK moment no joke. I remember meeting a kid from a different high school a few years later and commiserating over her death (!!!).

xp i think the statute of limitations have run out on that spoiler btw

Yeah I knew about it and I've never played it.

I guess that game for me is and was Earthbound, but I didn't know anyone else who'd played it until I was older and meeting people online.

(13 btw in 1997!!)

oh ffs might as well call me Gramps

ff7 was the game of it's time. some moron in my class spoiled that spoiler for me when i first played it but i managed to enjoy it anyway

you should try it anyway corey

other things that made it important: first game i remember playing where you could have a romantic relationship w/ other characters that depended upon choices you actually made in the game. not the first, but rpgs w/ open worlds were pretty rare back then and the fact that the gameworld opened up and had all the side quests (chocobo breeding, the casino stuff, side quests, vincent + yelfie - SP? - optional characters basically!) was really important to cementing its reputation. but that kind of stuff is really really really old news in 2011

yuffie*

I also blame this game for "Yuffie's Chocobo"

still will rep for VI over VII any day, but VII had a lot of unique things going for it. in particular, the sheer bleakness of the game, thematically (culminating in... well...) is still pretty great

yeah, the romance and bad translation is pretty eye-rolling, but the crazy, someone non-sensical plot twists are still pretty memorable

Did I dream it or didn't someone once put the OP of this thread through one of those text-to-speech video hoonja-doonjas? Scanned through the thread and couldn't find it, made me :(

er... wrong thread sorry

just past the opera scene in FFVI

ive just gotten terra back in the world of ruin. ive been attempting to play all the main entries in the final fantasy series this year, in order, but im basically stalling on 6 cuz im not into the ps ones all that much and psx games are a pain to emulate.

just bought a Gameboy Pocket for £5 in excellent condition (including a sticker in the back that says "Kiss My Butt!"), going to buy Pokemon Red or Blue as i've never played a Pokemon game before and i'm curious to see how it all started. might mod it to add a backlit screen as well, although it sounds a bit fiddly.

gaaaah i fkn suck at megaman games ヽ( ｀0´)ﾉ

i think the secret is almost everyone does. tried to play MM9 recently, such shame

Yeah they're hard as fuck. Either they're much harder than the originals or I simply lost my Mega Man skills.

I've heard of Star Control only in passing, is this something to look forward to?

https://www.polygon.com/24070632/star-control-free-stars-ur-quan-masters-steam-release-date

Sounds like pretty much just the open-source port of Star Control II that's been around for years, but I love that game, so...
Not sure how well it would hold up today to newcomers, but it you like dorky space humor, top-down arcade shooter gameplay and taking map notes by hand on pen and paper go for it

I didn't know this Star Wars: Dark Forces remaster was incoming but I'm tempted, that game ruled.

Yeah got this wishlisted, I do like the game but the Trash Compactor level where you have to keep going down the garbage shoot and changing switches annoyed the hell out of me.

(The conveyor belt ice level is no picnic either)

oh it came out yesterday, didn't realise.

"chute" btw