Retro Gaming Thread

My personal favorite for pc controller these days is 8bitdo SN30 Pro+ (G Classic model with the superior dpad). DS4 works fine for Steam/Uplay games and is still a hard requirement for Remote Play, but for anything else I use the 8bitdo now.

It's extremely customizable, works perfectly with Bluetooth, and has the correct stick/ dpad placement. Also easily the best pad for the Switch as long as you can live without amiibo support.

Not sure if this really counts as retro yet but I'd say anything that needs emu is fair game... so, anyone tried Demon's Souls via RPCS3 lately? It runs perfectly fine until I get to the start of the tutorial, then crashes, apparently while loading the shaders it just compiled. The guide on reddit is a year old so was wondering if anyone had tried it more recently.

mkopec said:

I remember I bough a little china device that let me plug in my SNES controller to PC back when I did the whole MAME thing. It worked well for the games. If I remeber correctly, this was a few years ago, lol, I seem to remember that I was also using my logitech USB controller for MAME too, it was fully programmable too kinda resembled the PS4 controller if it had a baby with the XBOX controller if you know what I mean.

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8bitdo mostly makes SNES style controllers. The SN30 Pro+ is sort of like the evolution of that design, that also has more modern features like analog sticks and triggers, fully customizable sensitivity/deadzone settings, turbo modes, grips like dualshock, etc.



That's the "G Classic" version which is the only one with the really nice texturing on the d-pad.

Just played through Breath of Fire (US version on the Switch's official SNES emulator). I played the japanese version at the time of its release so... a little more than 26 years ago. Meh. I did not have clear memories of the game so I was curious to check it again in english to be able to have a better grasp on the story this time around.

Well.... it turns out the game is aggressively mediocre, even more so in this day and age. Just about all the gameplay mechanisms are poorly thought out or poorly balanced. Equipment management is a nightmare because of the clunky interface and because of items that often have hidden stats and effects. All fights, even boss fights are the most mundane thing imaginable. The plot is nothing much (though there are here and there traces of things that could be interesting) and its delivery is extremely crude. So crude in fact that it's often very unclear what is at stake and what you are supposed to do (I don't have much patience these days, so I checked a walk through as soon as I was stuck for more than 10 minutes, but I really wonder how I reached the final boss back in the days - though I don't think I actually defeated it because to do so you need the secret within the secret within the secret...). The world is also without much flavor, with many npc in any area sharing the same blurb of text....

Playing this the past few days, my theory was that all the development efforts were put in having a world more "alive" than in other jrpg of the time by having animated enemies, characters that actually have swings that connect with the monsters or skills that can be used on the world map (fishing, digging, punching trees to get fruits, shooting arrows at wild animals that roam...). It's original alright, but even with these, the game is not that impressive when you realize that Final Fantasy V (and its grandiose mode 7 fueled cut scenes) was released a year before it !

Amusingly, despite how meh the whole thing is, the game ends very confidently, prophesying that it is the first step in a long saga. I guess Capcom was right on that front since 5 other games got released in the decades that followed. Maybe some of them are good ?

Szlia said:

Just played through Breath of Fire (US version on the Switch's official SNES emulator). I played the japanese version at the time of its release so... a little more than 26 years ago. Meh. I did not have clear memories of the game so I was curious to check it again in english to be able to have a better grasp on the story this time around.

Well.... it turns out the game is aggressively mediocre, even more so in this day and age. Just about all the gameplay mechanisms are poorly thought out or poorly balanced. Equipment management is a nightmare because of the clunky interface and because of items that often have hidden stats and effects. All fights, even boss fights are the most mundane thing imaginable. The plot is nothing much (though there are here and there traces of things that could be interesting) and its delivery is extremely crude. So crude in fact that it's often very unclear what is at stake and what you are supposed to do (I don't have much patience these days, so I checked a walk through as soon as I was stuck for more than 10 minutes, but I really wonder how I reached the final boss back in the days - though I don't think I actually defeated it because to do so you need the secret within the secret within the secret...). The world is also without much flavor, with many npc in any area sharing the same blurb of text....

Playing this the past few days, my theory was that all the development efforts were put in having a world more "alive" than in other jrpg of the time by having animated enemies, characters that actually have swings that connect with the monsters or skills that can be used on the world map (fishing, digging, punching trees to get fruits, shooting arrows at wild animals that roam...). It's original alright, but even with these, the game is not that impressive when you realize that Final Fantasy V (and its grandiose mode 7 fueled cut scenes) was released a year before it !

Amusingly, despite how meh the whole thing is, the game ends very confidently, prophesying that it is the first step in a long saga. I guess Capcom was right on that front since 5 other games got released in the decades that followed. Maybe some of them are good ?

Click to expand...

I liked bof3 a lot. Starts slow and it doesnt do a good enough job explaining how important choosing appropriate masters for your characters is, but really picks up on the story after a bit.

Since Nintendo put Breath of Fire II on its SNES emulator, you can guess what happened next... I am pretty sure I had not played this one back in the days, but I was curious to see the evolution from one game to the next. Well... many design elements are still miserable. Item management is just as bad (probably not helped by the character limit typical of these early games translated from japanese that turn item names and description into, respectively, codes and enigmas). All buffs and debuffs are useless (the first because they offer negligible boosts, the second because any enemy deserving to be debuffed is immune to it), so the combats are not very interesting. On top of that the randomness of the battles and the absurd amount of them makes me wonder how anyone played this game without the convenient replay feature of an emulator (even my over-leveled party could get wrecked by random encounters if they decide to use their most lethal abilities).

While still not very interesting and still flowing poorly, the story is a clear step up from the first game. There is an ok beat to it, with each chapter being about a specific situation where someone is possessed by a demon that the player will ultimately unmask and defeat. To the credit of the game, it should also be said that the story is used to create a number of different gameplay situations. Sadly, while original, it is often extremely tedious, like having to heal an hailing queen by acting like an antibody (read : do 3 random encounters in every single room of a dungeon) or explore the mind of an aging and shortsighted character (read : navigate a dungeon without being able to see nearby walls). Also :

Something super annoying but typical of many RPG of that era is also that you get new characters at a set level that is invariably a lot lower than the average party level. Couple that with unused characters getting zero experience point and with a party composition that can only be changed at save points and you are forced to grind. Something more specific to the Breath of Fire games though is that each character has special abilities in the field/dungeon. In Breath of Fire II, it is mostly used for what is called "gating" in game design : requiring an item/ability to go further (think Metroid). That's all well and good, except when you realize you do not have the needed character in your party to be able to progress so you have to travel back to a save point...

The main novelties in this episode are a rudimentary town building element (as your city expands you can recruit more and more people to be shop owners) and a richer character combination system (you can recruit shamans that can be combined with your characters for a couple dozen possibilities). I must confess I had limited interest in both. The first because only two items are valuable (healing potions in the early game and ability points recovering potions in the late game) and the second because, once again, the interface makes it a tedious exercise of blind trial and error. Oh and now that I think of it there are several new characteristics like "guts" (represented by a number flames in the character's status page) and "condition" (normal, good, great). You also have a dragon tear indicator that pops up in some dialogue boxes and that changes color depending on.... the mood of the character speaking ? But, game design 101 : if you don't known what it is and can't figure out what it does, it's functionally the same as if it was not there at all.

To finish on a positive note, while the game is technologically light years behind some of the elaborate cut scenes found in Final Fantasy games of that era, there are still a number of pretty neat moments. There is a flair for the epic that still manages to transpire despite the limited tools at hand to convey the story visually (fighting on a crumbling bridge, the towers of a castle collapsing one after the other, running to confront the final boss, etc).

Metalhead promised me Breath of Fire III is good, but it's on PlayStation and, to be fair, if I wanted to play some PS1 RPG I would probably start by some other classics that I never played or beat like FF Tactics or FF IX (stopped mid way through), Vagrant Story (overwhelmed by it at the time), Xenogears (played a solid 10 minutes).... though the most likely candidates are Dragon Quest VII (love the serie but this one is supposed to be so-so) and a very odd game that I always wanted to play since I read about it years ago : Planet Laika (set in space and the characters are all humanoid dogs that are descendants of Laika, the dog the soviets sent into space in the '50s ? )

Parasite Eve is another one I stopped mid way through back in the days. I simply ran out of bullets. A bit of shame considering I still had access to the police station. Damn budget cuts I guess...

Vagrant Story I stopped when it felt like I had to craft and level a specific weapon for each monster type. I confess I have zero patience for this type of otaku oriented design (farm for items and then combine items and then level items and then get more items to combine with the.... NOPE!)

EDIT : Still, I am curious to revisit those at some point to see if things play out differently (I mean I beat Zelda II a few months back for the first time .... I still don't like it, but I was at least able to play through it instead of giving up after 20 minutes).

Hey what was that game that came out early on either PlayStation or Saturn where you had to defend fields from invading red monsters? There were like, stationary armsmen and archers you could put down.

The Horde, came out on 3DO first.