Retro Gaming Thread

That was was the shit at the time. My best friend had a Neo Geo and a 3DO. Fuckin' spoiled!

So I played The Silver Case as a remastered version is available o PS4 (also Steam etc) ! It's a PS1 adventure game initially released in 1999 in Japan. It was the first game of Grasshopper Manufacture, the studio created after Suda 51 (of Killer 7 and No More Heroes fame) left Human. Since I am both stupid and very curious I already played it a few years back on PS3 when the game was available on the japanese PSN store. It left me with a strong yet mixed impression, so I was interested to play it in a language I understand significantly better. Suda 51 being the marvelous weirdo that he is, being able to fully read the abundant text of the game resulted in my understanding of the plot going from 10% to maybe 60%

So anyway, what is this about ? It's an adventure game where 90% of your time is spent reading text under static images, 5% of your time is spent moving from nodes to nodes in crude real time 3D environments, 3% of the time is spent watching animated or filmed cut scenes and maybe 2% of the time is about making choices and trying to find what to do next to advance the story... There is only a handful of minimal puzzles in the game, several of witch can be skipped (I think it's an addition of the remaster since the puzzles were pretty damn tedious - legwork and code insertions) ad there is no failure state. There is also no branching paths, multiple endings or anything of the sort. So yeah, we are in the realm of the barely interactive visual novel, so it's all about the story and the way the story is delivered.

On these two fronts, the game is literally extraordinary. The story is set in 1999 in a fictional version of Tokyo and we follow the investigations of a special police units and their dealings with... let's say the ripple effects of a serial murder case that happened years priors. With the somewhat classic form of a police procedural, themes of information control, behind the scene power struggles, cyber crime, internet based social and anti-social behavior are significantly more relevant that your average video game fare and at time surprisingly prescient (notably a sub plot about private footage of an idol that is sold and streamed on the Internet). As the game progresses, we also venture deeper and deeper into the wacky semi mythological semi sci-fi territory. My taste for this kid of thing is limited, but the fact that it is rooted with events and characters that give a strong sense of reality (at least at first) still make the journey interesting.

The delivery of that story is also where the game is striking. First, it goes for a kind of episodic structure with cases forming a number of closed sub stories that also advance an overarching narrative. In a very strange structural and developmental twist, each chapter unlocks a sister chapter that takes place at the same time, but with a different protagonist and written by someone else ! So each detective case, writte by Suda 51, where we play a silent protagonist is informed by another chapter, written by Masahi Ooka and Sako Kato, where we play a garrulous former journalist turned sorta PI (note that these scenarios are 95% about the guy receiving e-mails, writing e-mails and writing diary-like memos). The visual delivery is also some insane designer fever dream. A typical scene will have a window with the 3D environment (note : characters are never depicted in those), one or two windows with drawings of the characters (paintings that are not your run of the mile anime style), another with the text and lastly one with the movement/interaction UI, all of this over some abstract animated background loosely themed by chapter. It gets weirder when suddenly some video clips start pop'ing, sometimes themselves composites of film footage, animation and CGI... To top it off, the game never hesitates to play with this visual grammar to distort it or subvert it in surprising ways.

At times it's very confusing : characters engage in a dialogue you don't understand about something you don't see and highlights on drawings make it tough to keep track of who says what.... Another low point is that not only the story gets at time very wacky to the point of being inane, the writing itself (possibly not helped by the translation) is often lame, with incessant cursing, terrible pseudo philosophical bullshit and other cringy garbage. But when things work.... oh boy do they work ! Huge chunks of the 3rd case that features a kid looking for his missing friend make for one of the most poignant and human thing I have ever experienced in a video game (see video below). The introduction of one of the later chapter that consists of a kind of morning TV news segment with a reporter asking people in the street what they think about the current killing spree of the serial killer is also a stroke of genius that really makes most game stories feel extremely inconsequential in comparison.

Even if people around these parts are scared of the A word, I should add that the remarkable music by Masafumi Takada really cement the whole project as an undeniable piece of digital art. The chapter selection screen of the remaster also features full lengths remixes of some of the tracks of the game : the police cases themes remixes being handled by Akira "Silent Hill" Yamaoka (who left Konami for Grasshopper Manufacture a few years back) and the PI cases themes remixes being handled by Erika Ito (see below).


So to conclude this overlong post : The Silver Case definitely falls in the "I am very glad I played even if it's a flawed mess, but I could not in earnest recommend it to everyone" category. If you feel curious or adventurous and want to explore the fringes of what video games can offer as a medium, by all mean try it out. What I would recommend to everyone though is to check some youTube video of the game and/or its music, just to get a sense of what we are talking about here.

Some new games on the Switch official NES and SNES emulators means me spending some time playing them. Played through Rygar again since in this US version it's possible to kill the last boss. Still think this game is weird and rough. The bosses you need to spam-kill are dumb. Maybe I was in a bad mood, but while some of the music is great, some tracks are really tiring fast ! Anyway, the game I was curious to play was Operation Logic Bomb. It's a game I played a bit back in the day in Super Famicom japanese import (Ikari no Yousai ) and that I always wanted to revisit for several reasons. First, it's a pretty neat top down (well 3/4th top down view or whatever it is called) action game, with multiple main and secondary weapons offering some strategy depth and second, it's a strange narrative game in a sci-fi world contaminated with dimensional anomalies and you recover recordings of past events that play out as little game engine puppetry. I also remembered it to be pretty confusing so I was curious to play it in english to finally understand what was going on !

While the game was still a mostly pleasant experience, many of my hopes were showered cold. First, there is no text in the game so, english version of not, the global plot remains pretty damn confusing (though some details are clear, like when you recover a fight log from the broken part of a boss that, when you later encounter it, misses that part - pretty cool ! ). Second, the game is surprisingly short. You get new weapons
that allow you to progress past some obstacles (bouncing shot, decoys, mines, fire thrower) but this gating mechanism is basically used once per weapon instead of enriching the gameplay through the whole game. The depth you could hope is also hampered by the extremely small enemy selection (off the top of my head, 5 plus a couple special ones and mini bosses and bosses).

In the indie game thread I made a comment about the kickstarter effet : games that do the bare minimum to meet their pitch. Oddly, Operation Logic Bomb, made decades before kickstarter was a thing, has the same vibe. Many interesting ideas, a cool setting and presentation, but the final product feels like a proof of concept rather than a full game. I am not sure if Jaleco is still around or if they became a pachinko company, but in an ear when we get sequels and remakes of '90s games, a sequel/remake of Operation Logic Bomb could be pretty neat. As it stands, the original game.... a bit meh. (EDIT : Jaleco is dead and buried, but an indie japanese studio bought the rights for all their catalog).

2 side notes : There are three boss fights in the game and the first two are damage races which is a bit lame. They look good, but the fights are not too good. You have three lives to beat the game, but playing on the Switch you have the replay feature which obviously reduces the total time needed to beat the game as you can basically avoid the Game Over. Still, I did not use it much except of learning the final boss and attempting the boss before last until I realized I should take a continue and damage race it from full life.

Oh! 3rd side note : Games that are in pure top view make it very clear where is what : the Z axis is just nixed and voilà, bullets are where they are, the character is where it is, if they overlap you are hit. With these 3/4th top down views, the Z axis is not nixed, but is kinda inconsistently approximated so it's a bit ambiguous if a bullet will fly past the character eve if it overlaps with a part of its body or if it will hit it. That's a bit annoying considering the core of the gameplay is shooting at things and dodging bullets.

uniqueuser said:

The Horde, came out on 3DO first.

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thank you it was driving me crazy

Are these Arcade 1UP machines worth a shit? Anyone have one? The Star Wars and TMNT cabinets are tempting me.

Metalhead said:

Are these Arcade 1UP machines worth a shit? Anyone have one? The Star Wars and TMNT cabinets are tempting me.

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I have a modded SF2 and unmodded Rampage. The short answer is if you can find a deal they are about the coolest room decorations you can get. Also worth it if you would enjoy modding it as a small project and don't want to go down the full size rabbit hole.

As a gaming machine they don't really hold up. The small size makes them uncomfortable even if you set them on something and the stock parts are pretty bad. I have heard the newer ones are higher quality but haven't seen them myself.

I will make it simple for you though:



You know you need this.

Njals said:

If I ever find a Street Fighter II cabinet under $200 I'm jumping on it. It's apparently fairly easy to hack and load your own roms onto it and the 6 button layout lends itself to almost every mame game out there outside trackball titles.

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You missed it. Walmart was selling one for 150 a few months ago.

With heavy assistance of the replay feature I played through Earth Defese Force on the Switch SNES emulator. We are talking about about the 1991 horizontal shm'up by Jaleco, not the super campy (and suposedly very fun) serie of 3rd person shooting game of the same title.

The notable things about this game is that it mixes several gameplay elements that are not that common in shmups, but can be found, usually separately, in oher games : the ship can be hit several times before exploding (3 times, that is refreshed after each stage and can be replenished or even expanded during play in some rare situations) but you have a single ship per credit, the ship's speed can be adjusted at will between three different speeds, there is no power ups during gameplay but you chose one of eight (?) weapons before each level, there is an experience system based on destruction, weapons (or possibly levels) offers different types of option placement and/or behavior that can be chosen at will.

The first problem is that not all weapons are created equal, so while you have variety, not many are in truth practical, especially because there is a feedback loop effect : a bad weapon that does not allow you to kill many enemies get you less experience and so stay weak and lags further and further behind the game's difficulty curve. The two other problems are like core sins. Shmups are about two things : movement and patterns. EDF fails on both accounts. There is a big friction issue with the movement (hi Tim) in that you can't feel the ship's weight in the highest speed and the lowest speed is not adapted to the pace of the game, especially because of the size of the hitbox. When it comes to patterns, the game is just infuriating : enemies can enter the screen from every direction and often waves are designed for the natural movement to lead you to spots where enemies enter the screen. The relatively big ship with a full hitbox (even if your options can "eat" bullets) also give that frustrating R-Type feeling that just 3 bullets and 2 enemies are seemingly impossible to dodge. As a result, mastering the game legitimately is all about memorizing all the enemy waves and, well, while I am sure it gives a big feeling of achievement when you manage to do that, I am not spending that time, especially when you only have 3 credits to do so and, as such, are doomed to start from the beginning again and again and again just to learn a little bit more about the later stages of the game. So I nope'd and used and abused the replay feature and even like that it took a while !

In an odd design decision, it should be noted that the final stretch of the game that consists of three bosses is extremely hard, yet, accidentally trivial : killing bosses nets you a lot of xp and filling your xp bar after you reached max level gives you additional shielding for your ship, so with the appropriate weapon you can just damage race the bosses... that's a bit lame....

While the game will not win any award for its gameplay and the originality of its enemies, there is something pretty original about it that's worth noting : in rare but notable occasions it uses a modicum of background storytelling which is both unusual and cool. The first level for instance just takes place in a cloudy sky, but very slowly the sun sets and the palette changes and we go from day to night over the duration of the level. In a later stage, we witness in the background the destruction of space colonies (this kind of idea is brought even further in later games, like the one of a kind Silpheed for the Sega-CD a couple years later), in another the SNES mode-7 is used to show us slowly approaching a base on a planet's surface. It's not much, but this kind of things are a big part of the charm of retro games. Today, just about anything you can think of can be done. Then, you had strong technical limitations, but still a thirst to try and do more, show more, evoke more, in spite of these limitations resulted in original techniques truly specific to the medium of video games.

Szlia said:

With heavy assistance of the replay feature I played through Earth Defese Force on the Switch SNES emulator. We are talking about about the 1991 horizontal shm'up by Jaleco, not the super campy (and suposedly very fun) serie of 3rd person shooting game of the same title.

The notable things about this game is that it mixes several gameplay elements that are not that common in shmups, but can be found, usually separately, in oher games : the ship can be hit several times before exploding (3 times, that is refreshed after each stage and can be replenished or even expanded during play in some rare situations) but you have a single ship per credit, the ship's speed can be adjusted at will between three different speeds, there is no power ups during gameplay but you chose one of eight (?) weapons before each level, there is an experience system based on destruction, weapons (or possibly levels) offers different types of option placement and/or behavior that can be chosen at will.

The first problem is that not all weapons are created equal, so while you have variety, not many are in truth practical, especially because there is a feedback loop effect : a bad weapon that does not allow you to kill many enemies get you less experience and so stay weak and lags further and further behind the game's difficulty curve. The two other problems are like core sins. Shmups are about two things : movement and patterns. EDF fails on both accounts. There is a big fiction issue with the movement (hi Tim) in that you can't feel the ship's weight in the highest speed and the lowest speed is not adapted to the pace of the game, especially because of the size of the hitbox. When it comes to patterns, the game is just infuriating : enemies can enter the screen from every direction and often waves are designed for the natural movement to lead you to spots where enemies enter the screen. The relatively big ship with a full hitbox (even if your options can "eat" bullets) also give that frustrating R-Type feeling that just 3 bullets and 2 enemies are seemingly impossible to dodge. As a result, mastering the game legitimately is all about memorizing all the enemy waves and, well, while I am sure it gives a big feeling of achievement when you manage to do that, I am not spending that time, especially when you only have 3 credits to do so and, as such, are doomed to start from the beginning again and again and again just to learn a little bit more about the later stages of the game. So I nope'd and used and abused the replay feature and even like that it took a while !

In an odd design decision, it should be noted that the final stretch of the game that consists of three bosses is extremely hard, yet, accidentally trivial : killing bosses nets you a lot of xp and filling your xp bar after you reached max level gives you additional shielding for your ship, so with the appropriate weapon you can just damage race the bosses... that's a bit lame....

While the game will not win any award for its gameplay and the originality of its enemies, there is something pretty original about it that's worth noting : in rare but notable occasions it uses a modicum of background storytelling which is both unusual and cool. The first level for instance just takes place in a cloudy sky, but very slowly the sun sets and the palette changes and we go from day to night over the duration of the level. In a later stage, we witness in the background the destruction of space colonies (this kind of idea is brought even further in later games, like the one of a kind Silpheed for the Sega-CD a couple years later), in another the SNES mode-7 is used to show us slowly approaching a base on a planet's surface. It's not much, but this kind of things are a big part of the charm of retro games. Today, just about anything you can think of can be done. Then, you had strong technical limitations, but still a thirst to try and do more, show more, evoke more, in spite of these limitations resulted in original techniques truly specific to the medium of video games.

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I've been working my through EDF, slowly but surely thanks to the easy save feature on the Switch. It's fun to just drop in and play 5 or 10 mins without much investment. Enemies coming up from behind is kinda bullshit and makes homing missiles my go to.

I love watching this guys video's:

As I feared when its release was announced, I played through the entirety of Mario's Super Picross on the Switch SNES emulator. This is a game that at the time was never released outside Japan, because its predecessor on Game Boy, Mario's Picross, did not sell well in the US and Europe. It so happens that I have a nostalgic tie to Picross because I bought the Game Boy game during a trip in Japan back in 1995. Why feared you ask ? Well... because picross puzzles, also known as nonograms are a bit like sudokus, in the sense that they are solved through mechanically applying several methods. The only Eureka moments you get are at the beginning when you figure out the solving methods and after that it's a bit of a grind that rarely provides more than the most limited of satisfaction. They are literally time wasters, so a lot of time has been wasted....

I'll let you check the wikipedia article to understand the details of this type of puzzles, but the super short version is that you have to fill a grid based on numerical clues for each lines and columns. The easier puzzles use a 5 by 5 grid, the hardest (or at least the longest) are on a 25 by 20 grid. The game is roughly split in two : the Mario puzzles and the Wario puzzles.

In the Mario puzzles, you have 30 min to fill the grid properly and every time you make a mistake you lose an increasing amount of time (something like 2 min, then 4 min, then 8, etc). If the time runs out, it's game over and you have to restart from the beginning. Even without being familiar with the game, you can deduce the main quality and the main problem of this design. The main quality is that it creates a tension, albeit not a very pleasant one, when your time is running out and can't afford any error or when an error suddenly forces you to rush and focus to finish in time. The main problem, is that the problems are static. So when 20 minutes just went down the drain because of a game over, redoing the puzzle is even less satisfying than the first time, because you just start by filling stuff you remember rather than re-deducing. A less obvious problem with this design, is that there are situations in which the info you get from a minor penalty is worth more than the 2 min you lose.

In the Wario puzzles, there is no timer (well... there is a timer but it is counting up and there is no limit), but there is also no feedback when you make a mistake. Again, the good and the bad are what you would expect : there is a tension related to the uncertainty (am I doing this right ?) but there is also the very real possibility of making an error that creates contradiction way further down the road, making it impossible to easy find where the error lies, basically forcing you to scrap it all and start over. In fairness, successfully fixing a mistake in Wario mode is one of the most satisfying thing in the game, but it's more of a relief than a thrill I guess.

Something else that is a bit unpleasant, especially in some of the later puzzles is that it feels the tool set we have to solve problems is not enough. You are forced to explore "what if" scenarios and hope contradiction appear rapidly to invalidate them, or are forced to use "soft" methods, such as making educated guesses or using the picture being drawn as a guide (using things like outlines being continuous, etc). I have mixed feeling about this. Making good educated guesses is a proof of education, but guessing in a logic puzzle game is a bit.... strange. It should be noted that in the Mario puzzles you can take a hint at the start, solving a random line or column (or both ?) and during play you can buy such hint for 5 minutes. That also does not sit well with me as it feels like a game design crutch : "I am not sure that puzzle can be solved without guessing, so let's add hints to be in the clear !"

Something one can't complain about is the quantity of content. The finish line is pushed back several times, and, even after you clear it and get to see the credits, you unlock more levels and even gain access to secret levels. All those are more of the same, but in the end you get a big pile of 300 puzzles. I did not time the play through, but the clear times go from one minute to one hour, with an average at around 15 minutes maybe ? As I said, a lot of time has been wasted !

On a side note, being on Switch, I could play through it all while listening to some twitch stream or youTube videos, just like I played the GameBoy version during commutes. I have a hard time imagining who would play a game like Mario's Super Picross back in the days on their TV.

The only thing missing is NES, Genesis, and SNES support. This thing looks awesome.



Edit: I found this. Now it's a big no!

Many Heroes of Might and Magic fans and gaming experts are aware of the precursor of the HoMM series - original King's Bounty game. But recently I found another old game which used very similar mechanics as HoMM, but is basically never mentioned as its precursor - Hammer of the Gods.