I'm trying out Wario Land today. Still getting used to the pace. It looks nice and the music is great! I can also already see the usual Mario hidden exit stuff that I need to figure out.
Turns out alternating between Bravely Default 2 and Outrun 2006 Coast 2 Coast is some form of gaming nirvana. They complement each other so well that it distracts from the fact Outrun 2006's campaign run is strangely monotonous for such a banging game.
Finally finished up Tomb Raider 3, glad to get that white whale off my back. Despite all my misgivings about that game I still found it really compelling, there's just something timeless to the old tomb raider games and how the exploration is more like a puzzle, especially with modern games making traversal pretty much a QTE.
I realised I never played the TR2 and 3 expansions, they seem quite substantial, pretty much half the size of the main games. I might go back to them at some point, I really enjoyed the TR1 expansion.
Other than that I've been mainly playing contra 4 and Shiren the wanderer on DS. Contra 4 is a fantastic homage to the NES contra. It's got the crazy set pieces of the later games but level and boss patterns feel more like they are from the NES era. Gorgeous pixel art as well.
Shiren is just an absolute gem. I've managed to make it to floor 26 but got ganged up on by monsters that slap your weapon and shield out of your hand and a ghost enemy that was immune to status effects and kept confusing me. It's finally made me understand rogue games and I can see why the mystery dungeon series and rogue likes were so big in Japan before they took hold again in the west.
Played the first two London levels in Tomb Raider 3 and the level design is really starting to fall apart. Some good ideas but some really bad stuff as well.
The first Thames wharf stage is a pain in the ass. It's a good idea with having the level loop back on itself but it means doing the same slow climb back to the start of the stage multiple times when you complete an objective, or worse, miss something important. Took a while hour to complete which was a ridiculous amount of time.
The level has you making your way to a cathedral in the distance which was meant to be a stage but it was cut because it was too tough but left in as a secret stage if you get all the secrets. It's very obvious that it's been cut as one of the secrets gives you a Cathedral key which has absolutely no use and might have been left in as a hint about the level. The stage also ends with a Cutscene fight around a bell in some random house. It was very obviously meant to take place at the top of the cathedral as it's so out of place.
The next stage is Aldwych subway station. It's another massive level that loops on itself. There's some good puzzles but also loads wrong with this stage. There's a very easily missed key due to a poor camera (I walked by it three times), a secret with nothing in it on the PC version. There's a row of ticket machines you have to get a ticket out of but only one works and it has a small area where you can interact with it. There's no indication which machine works. There's also two doors where you have to be in very specific spot to interact with and it's so bad I thought the game had bugged (as did a lot of people online when I searched). There's a puzzle where you have to find an elaborate golden hammer and then use it to break a lock (Lara just does her open lock animation which looks stupid). There's also a subway train you ride to another area which is very unconvincing and has you enter and exit through a trap door.
This level took about an hour 40 minutes, mostly due to walking passed the key a lot and thinking the game was bugged. To put it into context no other level took more than 40 minutes outside of London.
After this Ive got the delightful Lud's Gate, a level that is far and away the longest in the game with an underwater maze that drove me nuts on the PlayStation.
Ive beaten the area51 and South Pacific stages of TR3 and I'm not on to the London stages.
It's very obvious that the south pacific and London levels were some of the last worked on because they are a great lesson in terrible level design and obscuring the readability of the stage with noise. There's just some flat out nonsense here and I'm surprised I managed to beat these stages on the PS1 without GameFAQs or YouTube.
There's a stage in south pacific with a climbing area that had me stuck for ages. Opened up a YouTube walkthrough of the stage and saw a massive spike in views at one area. Turns out that it was where I was stuck.
Basically you had to climb to the bottom of an area and jump backwards on to a platform behind you. However because of how the camera works in TR you can't actually look behind you to even see if that platform is there and there's no way to even see this platform from anywhere in the stage. I actually did try this but due to how small the area you need to jump into I kept hitting a wall, so there's a very small specific area you can jump from to land the jump.
Anyway London seems to be full of even more bullshit like this but to round it off it's a very unappealing stage to look at. At least the remake isn't as dark and full of garish coloured lighting in this stage as the original.
Absolutely loving this game, haven't been able to put it down since yesterday. Its a great one to show off the OLED Switches screen with all the dark areas contrasting with vibrant colours.
Last night I just finished up a rewatch of Twin Peaks since the Return first aired. Have that awful pining for a show once it's done feeling..
Decided to give Animal Well a go finally and the soundtrack is 100% Twin Peaks. It's actually eerie how similar it is after coming off the back of the show.
Loving it so far. The lighting effects are unreal.
Trying to keep my hyperbole in check just in case it really sours on me later on (unlikely), but genuinely starting to think Animal Well might be the first Metroidvania style game to unseat Super Metroid and SoTN at the top of the genre pile for me. At very least it joins them at the top of the pantheon. It’s just so ingenious, compelling and mysterious in many ways beyond even those wonderful games.
After a few beers in the garden, it was Mario time! With some Bubble Bobble on the side!
I keep meaning to get the last few stars on this save, but two of them are Tick Tock Clock and Rainbow Ride 100 coins.
Also playing Animal Well and Crow Country on Steam Deck which are Nu-Retro. Animal Well is brilliant!
The year-on-year userbase since the move to Vanilla must be a fascinating bit of reading.
Same, can't access it....Vanilla gonna Vanilla. It's taken years for this one yeah, maybe when I get back to DKC I can help move things along to 20k 😊
Can you access the first page of this thread? I just get an error any time I try.
Was trying to see how many years it had taken us to get to 10,000 posts with this one as we've never actually had a second incarnation of it!
Yeah I remember thinking it looked amazing but looking back at the likes of quake 2 now it looks garish and really ugly. Half-Life was the game I remember bringing back more natural looking lighting it more subtle use of coloured lighting.
Just noticed my above post was the 10,000 post in the thread - previously, under vBulletin Boards….this would have meant the end of the thread and the beginning of a new thread with a crafty name as voted by the forum users. Those new threads felt fresh, new, and used to invigorate discussion as a result.
Now, under the Vanilla platform (shudder), we'll just have massive, meandering, creaking threads with tens of thousands of posts in them, likely used by the same people all of the time.
Unless….the sage forum moderator here wanted to stick of the old system of 10k limits that is….
I loved the coloured lighting phase….was real 'wow' stuff on my Voodoo 3 2000 at the time.
Tomb Raider 3 just screams 1998.
Aesthetically the game is chock full of garish coloured lighting, putting it after the late 1997 release of quake 2 and the 3D accelerator revolution on PC where coloured lighting was all the rage.
There's a level set in Area 52 with aliens and spaceships putting it around the maximum hype point for the X-Files.
The only thing that's a bit of a stretch are the forced stealth sections in the London levels. Forcing stealth sections into an engine that can barely support the main gameplay elements let alone stealth is a very post metal gear solid thing to do. MGS was released in September 1998 in Japan while TR3 had a release of November. However considering the insane crunch the game was under (and how buggy and badly designed the stealth is) it might not be a push that it was shoehorned in last minute considering how much a month would be as a percentage of total development time.
Been a few years since I've done an actual disc change in a PS1 game.
I opened the box and Vagrant Story was sitting where disc 2 was meant to be. :eek:
Luckily Disc 2 was hiding underneath...
I'm only really going through it because I couldn't finish it back in the day because my memory card corrupted on the second last stage. This is revenge.
I've heard Last Revelation is a real return to form for the series but never played it. Chronicles is meant to be really bad but bad in an interesting way so I'm curious.
It never really occurred to me how quickly the Tomb Raider games on the PS1 were released one after another, that's a pretty crazy schedule alright.
1996 - Tomb Raider
1997 - Tomb Raider 2
1998 - Tomb Raider 3
1999 - Tomb Raider The Last Revelation
2000 - Tomb Raider Chronicles
I gave up at Tomb Raider 3 myself back in the day, was definitely starting to grow stale at that point. Don't even think I bothered finishing it.
Started Tomb Raider 3 in the remake collection and the game is just mean. So many bullshit moments to catch the player off guard and it's really not a good starting off point for people new to the series. The levels are also way too big.
It's very obvious that by this point the core design team behind tomb raider was getting very burned out with the yearly production cycle and there's a lot of stuff here that feels like it didn't go through polishing during the play testing.
For instance you have the choice of 3 stages after you beat the India stage but if you choose Nevada last you will end up losing all your weapons before the final set of stages.
Decided to move on to Final Fantasy IX over the weekend after finishing Chrono Trigger...just occurred to me that I'm actually kind of lucky given I haven't played it far beyond the first disc. Basically a PS1 era FF game Ive never played properly.
Hooked my PVM back up for it specifically. Was trying it on th big tv with a retrotink. Looked like absolute ass. I just don't think PS1 games can really work on a big modern screen, even with good shaders thrown at it.
The PVM on the other hand is jaw dropping. The FMV videos look absolutely incredible.
Been on holidays so haven't been playing a whole lot. Since I was starting a new handheld game I decided to stick with the DS for now and started the remake of the first Shiren game. It's a proper rogue-like, pretty hardcore but also quite approachable with some interesting mechanics that differentiate it from other games. I've gotten to floor 18 out of I think 50 floors so far. Some runs have been a disaster where I got beaten in the very first room but runs are usually relatively short anyway. There's also a surprising amount of humour in the game and little side quests that make future runs a little easier.
Also played a little of contra 4. Right old ball buster. Its great fun but there are some annoyances with the dead space between the top and bottom screens.
Yeah quite true, composite still looks great at that size.
Honestly I actually rather composite on this occasion. I've a million and one ways of playing Megadrive games in RGB. My Nomad is the only way I can see dithering effects in Megadrive games. The screen is so small it still looks nice and sharp too.
The mode button being linked up to the 50/60hz switch is also a great way to show people in real time the difference between PAL and NTSC speeds.
It's also the old composite mod, whereas the new ones use rgb. Still, even composite is a huge improvement over the stock screen.
… you weren't wrong on N64 Sin and Punishment. Officially have everything I care about on N64 now and it seems like I left the best until last. On the one hand I can't believe this didn't get a release outside of Japan. On the other hand… the sequel on Wii does not appear to have sold well either. We dont deserve to have nice things over here in the west folks.
Ah yeah you get all that by trading horns and bits and pieces in 65 million BC alright. Best of luck, it's definitely a game worth seeing till the end :)
It was back before the days of folks making handy drop in kits! Inviere modded it for me well over ten years ago now. I think the LCD was from a car reversing camera that a few of us bought from Dealextreme.
What Screen Mod do you have in the Nomad ?
yeah that’s the one.
I meant fire resist gear rather than levels but perhaps the same statement about ballance applies there too.
Will try it out.
I’ve never actually finished the game before despite owning it for years!
That's probably the Son of Sun boss in the Sun Palace?
He's actually not too bad once you figure out you can only hurt him by hitting one of the fire orbs around him at a time in single attacks. (Avoids him doing a big counter attack) He then does a roulette wheel type spin and the orb that can be hurt changes. Repeat until dead.
Chrono Trigger is really well balanced, shouldn't have to grind at all, just try not to run away from fights as you go through. If you're having difficulty with a boss it's probably more down to him having some trick to killing him rather than being under levelled.
