Retro Gaming Thread

Why no 7th Saga or Tales of Phantasia on the poll? I demand representation for my pet RPGs of the 90s!

Is Ultima Online considered retro gaming being released in 1997?

I think the official definition of retro game is being old enough to drink in all 50 states. So Ultima Online is retro in 5 weeks!

Kicked some cubes in my day

NES game of the day was RoboWarrior a very competently executed game but that sadly is of the school of the asshole japanese game design. The prime example of that school of design is Tower of Druaga. The idea is that the game gives you no clue as to what you are supposed to do to reach the win state, so endless trial and error is required to discover the obscure mechanisms that allow you to progress.

So in RoboWarrior, a game that outwardly looks like a sci-fi Bomberman (your character can lay bombs and the top down grid based levels have breakable and unbreakable blocks) in the first 15 minutes I found myself stuck in a totally dark cave and then found myself stuck as the side scrolling level reached a wall of unbreakable blocks and you are like... wtf is going on? Reading the manual proved of little help... it told me the exit of the levels are in the top right and that a key is needed and that it is located near the end of the levels. Also that you sometime need a chalice to beat the levels.... That's great but what's up with the dead end cave and the unbreakable wall that I tried to break with bombs? Well... my backlog is too big for this shit, so I checked GameFAQs... it so happens that the cave is a bonus area, except you need candles to see a little area around you for a while or use a rare lantern to make the whole thing bright infinitely. So basically if you enter without one of those you are SOL: you need to wander in the dark hoping to find the exit. And the unbreakable wall? Well you need to bomb the right block... three times... yep...

To continue with the assholery of this game's design, some levels have a start, a middle section and an end, with the middle section looping infinitely until you find the aforementioned chalice hidden in a breakable block. Good news: it's always on the same spot. That's a principle of the asshole japanese game design: it leaves you flailing in the dark, but when you find something, it is rock solid. So beating a level the first time can take ages, but when you know how to beat it it is pretty fast. Oh and it better be pretty fast, because, Lost Planet style, the health of the character constantly depletes... oh and its bombs are in limited supply. So basically when you try to destroy everything to find a chalice, you run out of bombs (despite the occasional 10 bombs pickup and single bomb drops every enemy kill), so you have to wait for random enemies to fly through the level from right to left to kill them and get one bomb at a time, making the progress very slow as your health depletes and depletes... Backlog is too big: I played with level maps to know where the chalice are.

The pinnacle of the assholery though comes when you reach levels - not optional bonus caves, but actual levels - that are in the dark. If you did not reach them with a lantern, you are SOL. You can go at them for a bit with your stock of candles, but that will not lead you far. That's basically when I called it quit: I reached the dark level 6-3 (about two third into the game), used my last lantern and died near the end of it. When you continue, you end up at the start of the level you died in, with the equipment you died with, possibly with half your bombs? Anyway, I found myself in a pitch black level without a lantern. Basically SOL (notice how assholery and SOL are the two keywords of this review). Fuck that noise. I guess I could restart, but yeah... Backlog is too big and there are Let's play on youTube.

Szlia said:

I think the official definition of retro game is being old enough to drink in all 50 states. So Ultima Online is retro in 5 weeks!

Click to expand...

Ah interesting!

I have always hoped they're revive BaseWars for the modern era. I loved that fucking game. Was like baseball + mech commander.

God gamer still at work: Gremlins II: The New Batch: The Videogame by Sunsoft on the NES got beaten. This is actually a pretty cool video game adaptation of the movie. You get rather impressive cut scenes to tell the story, the theme of the levels, the enemies and Gizmo's weapons (you get a new one after each level) are very fitting, the music and visuals are nice, controls are pretty responsive, enemies do not respawn, what's not to love?

My only serious beef with the game is that there is a good bit of platforming elements that are rather finicky. With a 2D semi top-down view and Gizmo's pretty stocky sprite, it is often difficult to feel exactly how late you can jump when reaching the edge of a pit (especially when moving up or down). Add moving platforms and conveyor belts and you take more than you fair share of dives (from time to time you also make a jump only to get knocked back in a pit...). It seems the devs noticed that too and put a band-aid on it: you get a balloon that flies you out of pits the first time you fall. It's nice and not nice at the same time, because since you get to fly for a decent while with the balloon and get some invulnerability frames upon landing, more than a "oops do it again" item, it becomes a "let's save it to bypass that whole tricky section" item. In fact, in some of the later stages I would just kill myself and restart the level if I fell in a pit and consumed the balloon too early! Note that when you don't have a balloon, falling in a pit hits you for half a heart (you start with 3 that can be boosted to 4) and send you to the very edge of the pit you fell in... usually setting you up perfectly for another fall if you don't take a step back first! Not nice!

It should be noted that this is a game that is notoriously hard and frustrating to speedrun because the movement of the enemies is extremely random. In casual play, it manifests itself in flying enemies often taking annoying paths that make them hard to attack them all the while cornering you. It's the good kind of annoying I guess, because it prevents things from getting dull even if you attempt it for the 20th time (and since the game is reasonably challenging and has infinite continues - and even passwords! - you will play some of the later levels many times before beating them!). So much AI went into the basic enemies that nothing was left for the 4 bosses though as they are pretty neat looking, but somewhat dull (well... except the electric gremlin, that was a stressful fight!).

A shortish (9 stages with 3 trivial ones and 4 bosses) but pretty cool game that is all about balloon and health management (no health drop in stages, but always a shop where you can buy health... sometimes).

Currently playing Section Z on NES, but before I am done with it let me share this gem from the game's manual: 'SECTION Z created by CAPCOM... premier world-wide arcade game designer... features colorful state-of-the-art high resolution graphics'.

That sweet sweet 256x240 resolution!

Well turn my TV to channel 3 and call me Susan

Szlia said:

Currently playing Section Z on NES, but before I am done with it let me share this gem from the game's manual: 'SECTION Z created by CAPCOM... premier world-wide arcade game designer... features colorful state-of-the-art high resolution graphics'.

That sweet sweet 256x240 resolution!

Click to expand...

You must hate yourself. That game was like RoboWarrior on the Japanese FUCK YOU school of asshole dev design.

moonarchia There is a notion of exploration / trial & error, but the mechanisms are significantly less obscure: you have a choice at the end of each section as to where to go next, it's just that it's not much of a choice the first time around, more of a shot in the dark (better take notes though or you will wander randomly for a while!). There are a couple things I am less happy with, but the main logistical problem is that there is no code or save or whatever so you have to beat the game in one sitting. As a result I did not touch it today because I knew I did not have a long enough chunk of time to beat it (though I suspect going through the part I already mapped out will be significantly faster).

Section Z is a lie! There is no Z section in it! Anyway, there were some controllers and some curse words flew around, but I beat the game. This is a pretty solid game, but there is a number of little things that are a bit annoying that come with the strange systems they use for health, weapons, damage dealt and received, etc.

The core exploration system, as I mentioned above, is pretty straight forward. Each section of the game is an horizontal auto-scroller. You control a flying robot (or dude/dudette in armor?) that shoots left with B and right with A. At the end of each section there are two warp beans that take you to a different section. Some of those beams are 'locked' and finding a section with a generator to kill unlocks it. Some levels only have a single exit. Some levels have bosses / mini-bosses in them. Voilà. There are 60 sections in the game that are structured like a chain of three sausages of 20 sections each (by that I mean you navigate within a set of 20 levels until you can reach the Boss that is a choke point that leads to the next set of 20 sections). This is a pretty neat design and the closest thing to a shoot'em-up metroidvania I can think of.

The health/life system is a little more suspect and in earnest I am not sure I understand it totally. The basic idea is that you have 20 hp (a max that gets upgraded through the game) and that just about every bullet in the game does 1 damage BUT getting hit by just about every enemy in the game immediately makes the character crash to the ground. You then have to restart the section with 5 less hp and without the active power-ups you had. Now when you reach 0 hp, you crash, lose your active power-ups, lose a life and restart the section with 20 hp (I think). When you run out of lives, you can continue (infinity of those), and that sends you at the first section of your sausage (so section 0, section 20 or section 40), with 20 hp and no stored or , obviously, active power-ups. To gain hp, you can get random drops from enemies (for 3hp) or find secret warps inside levels that bring you to health regeneration rooms (for 5, 10 or 15 hp). Note you can also consume hp to use special weapons (I never used those so... yeah). A nice thing is that unlocked warps stay unlocked forever (as well as special weapons obtained, but... still did not use them so yeah).

The problem with this system is that it has a tendency to bone you hard. Losing power-ups because an enemy bum-rushed you, because you were too close to the edge of the screen when something entered it, etc is annoying as heck. Also, late in the game there is an absurd discrepancy between the 3hp health drops and your 99hp pool! As a result of it, I had like a 20min prep' time, looping through 3 sections, to top my hp before going to fight the final boss.

The weapon system is more straight forward, but somewhat broken. You start with your basic gun that fires single bullets but, this is important, just about as fast as you can mash (technically I guess you can only have 4 or 5 bullets on screen at the same time, but considering how fast they travel, no matter how fast you mash you will never have 4 on screen if you fire at an enemy that is reasonably close). Power Up are not random, they are in specific places in specific sections. There are three different ones: a wave beam (more damage than the basic gun, goes through enemies, can be mashed), a 3-way gun (more damage than basic gun, shoots in front and like 40° up and down, cannot be mashed) and a frontal energy shield. When you pick a power-up, it goes into storage (you can only store one of each) and can chose at any time to activate it (which consumes the stored power-up). If you happen to pick a weapon power-up that is currently active, it goes in storage AND you get upgraded to the (supposedly) ultimate 3-way wave beam!

The main problem with this system is that the wave beam is god, the basic laser is ok and the 3-way and 3-way wave beam is highly situational. As you can't mash them, their dps is dramatically lower than even the basic gun. Trying to kill bosses with the 3-way is just excruciating. In fact I voluntarily downgraded to the basic gun to kill some bosses! The other issue is that the power-ups do not respawn every time you visit a section: they spawn once per life... So managing your power-ups is super annoying, as losing a precious wave beam by crashing is a tragedy (in my 20min prep' time for the final boss I kept the basic gun as to not risk losing the wave I wanted to use on it). Also... fuck mashing. Mashing is just physically painful. I almost went for my NES Advantage for the auto-fire, but hot plugging controllers on the NES is risky business.

Now, there is a bit of assholery in the third and final sausage (if you don't count getting crashed by the locked warp beams that are color coded red). One is by design and the other is a bug. The bug is that there is one mini boss that, in phase two, turns into a spinning circle of a dozen little spherical ships. The circle moves around, but if it goes near the edge of the screen, a portion of the circle wraps around to the other side of the screen... I let you imagine how happy I was when I crashed to the ground after being hit by a screen wrapping ship... The one by design is a SPOILER. While exploring you end up in a pocket of 4 interconnected sections with no escape. Obviously, that means somewhere within these 4 sections there is a hidden warp. To make a hidden warp visible you need to shoot the spot where it is... and of course it's pretty easy with level design and enemy patterns to have a hidden warp pretty well hidden. That's the spot I reached in my first go at the game and decided to call it quit. I confess that since the backlog is what it is, I checked in which one of the section the hidden warp was before my attempt of the day.


All in all, Section Z is not a very fun game. The enemies are not very original or interesting. The weapons are a bit meh. Mashing sucks. The game systems are a bit annoying. There is a bit of assholery in the end... but still there is something that works pretty well with the sense of going deeper and deeper into hostile territory and exploring this maze-like set of interconnected tunnels. So while not fun, and even frustrating at times, it is a pretty satisfying game to play and beat.

Heh! I beat Super Mario Bros for the first time ever yesterday! Being very familiar with the game through speedruns (the route using warps though) and aware of the continue code I thought this would be a walk in the park.... well it kinda is until you reach level 8. The last 4 levels (8-1 to 8-4) are big, have no mid way points, are extremely poor in power ups (three mushrooms and 2 one-ups in total) and have a number of tricky jumps and/or tricky situations. If you game over and continue you find yourself with 3 lives as small Mario at the beginning of 8-1 and suddenly beating the game is a very tough proposition.

I tried to go warpless to get some lives and power ups before reaching level 8 (and also to play through the whole game), I tried to setup one of these infinite lives trick with a shell and stair, but both failed. I had just one choice left: Git Gud. So well... I played, I raged, I quit, I calmed down, I played some more, I got gud, I got hammered by Bowser, hammered by the last hammer brother, burnt by the last podoboo while trying to jump away from the last hammer brother... and then I beat the game, jumping fearlessly through Bowser's fake hammers (he throws so many that most do not have hurt box!).

Playing through the game, I was surprised by a number of somewhat dated aspects and questionable design choices. The hurt boxes of the koopa and the hammers are wtf inducing. The lack of jumping off enemies is very odd for someone like me who is used to Super Mario World (also flying koopas redirect toward you after being hit!). The difference in jump distance is tremendous between a walking jump and a running jump so you often get surprised by how long or how short you jump. Every 16 pixels on every wall there is a spot where Mario kinda get stuck for a frame before falling if he hits it. You would think that it would happen rarely, but it happens all the time and it feels pretty janky (it allows wall jumps though!). In most modern platformers they add grace periods for jump inputs right before the character lands on the ground and right after the character runs off a cliff. I don't feel there is any of this in Super Mario Bros. so, as a result, there are often situations where you feel your inputs got eaten because you were just too early or too late for the very small window the game allowed.

Since all of this is compounded with level design that alarmingly often puts enemies or pits in what is the most natural landing spot for big jumps or for bounces off enemies, it's not exactly happy fun times all the time when playing Super Mario Bros. but not that many games from 1985 aged that well and offer such depth in character control.

The Megadrive is dusted and plugged so I played QuackShot (starring Donald Duck!). This is a treasure hunting platformer, with Donald disguised as Indiana Jones (using a gun firing plungers in lieu of a whip). The structure of the game is very neat. There are levels all around the world (only 4 available at first) and each level is in two parts, with the 2nd part usually requiring a story item or a new ability to access. So you fly around the globe trying to find what could open that pyramid or where is the key to enter the belly of a viking ship and since you can fly off and land at mid-way points, your progress is never lost even if you went to the wrong place.

As several other of these Disney/Sega games on Genesis/Megadrive the game is extremely beautiful for a game on that system (there are a lot of nice backgrounds, neat parallax scrollings and almost none of the ugly dithering often used to try and artificially expend the limited palette). Sadly, being on the Sega 16bit also mean you have to deal with its supremely garbage controller. With three buttons in line, A being dash, B being shot and C being jump, you often find yourself trying to press both A and C at the same time, which means an annoying claw grip, or putting your controller on your leg and use the buttons like on an arcade cabinet. The buttons themselves are also a bit dubious, considering how far and how hard you need to press them for it to register, but that's only minor annoyance when compared to the D-Pad. It's mushy nature makes it way harder than it should to hit up or down without getting a little left or right. In Quackshot that means making it extra hard to shoot up or to duck (!), which is needed to slide. In all fairness, the age of the controllers do not help and after switching to a less used controller things were a good deal better, but still far from perfect.

Anyway, not very hard, not very long, not super creative levels, but an enjoyable romp (once the controller is tamed).