(Retro) What have you been playing this week? Vol.2

[randombs]

Tokyo Bus Guide 2 (PCSX2)

Today was the longest session I’ve ever had with this game. Over an hour, at least!

It’s great fun. Wife wasn’t too impressed with my driving(read: crashing) but it’s nice driving around Tokyo. The emulator kept freezing momentarily at points so I might have to dust off my PS3 to play it, although my Series S controller is much mor xomfortable.

[wakka]

Zombie Army 4

The title sounds like a made-up videogame in a mediocre sitcom written by someone who hasn't played a game since 1983.

'What shall we get Timmy for Christmas?'
'He's asked for Zombie Army 4 on the PlayStation'
'Can't he just borrow it?'
'Oh yes, course he can, his gran's already got the high score anyway'

The game itself is like a mash-up of various other squad based horde shooters over the years. There's a big dollop of Gears of War, a generous squirt of CoD Black Ops Zombies, and a sprinkle of Halo's Firefight mode. The story is a sub-Wolfenstein mishmash of stuff about supernatural Nazi powers resurrecting the dead, with a Freedom Fighters style underground resistance force doing battle against them. The graphics are deeply, DEEPLY AA.

And you know what? It's fun! It plays really nicely, and delivers exactly what you would want out of this. It's not something I'd sit and play on my own, but I stuck it on Easy and played with a mate and we had a really fun, chill time. There's absolutely nothing original in here as far as I can see, and that's fine. This is a game that meets a specific need, for a decent playing horde shooter you can grind on with friends.

Also, it has a Venice level that really reminded me of House of the Dead 2, so that was nice.

Recommended if you want something to mess about on with a mate while chatting. It's perfect for it.

[randombs]

Get outta here with your current-gen nonsense!

[wakka]

Posted it in the wrong thread!

Can a mod please delete?

[dataDave]

Gradius III on the Super Famicom - managed to have some brief fun with it, despite the rather serious performance issues. By the time you're fully kitted out with options as well as your missile and laser choices, there's major slow-down and sprites flickering in and out of view all over the shop.

I feel like this game is held in some sort of a ‘classic’ regard but I really don’t think it is TBH.

I flashed saved my way through it a while ago and the slow down/flickering coupled with the inane difficulty, gave a less than stellar experience. I now pretty much avoid it like the plague.

Try it with the SA-1 hack. Every hint of slowdown or flickering is totally gone. It's perfect.

https://github.com/VitorVilela7/SA1-Root/tree/master/Gradius-III

There's some flickering on this video for some reason, but rest assured it's not there when played on real hardware or FPGA.

It took [MENTION=122]phillai[/MENTION] a fraction of the time to 1CC it. Something like three weeks compared to the three years it took him to do the same on Gradius V. III is by far the easier game.

[QualityChimp]

I've still not completed Gradius V, but I still adore it.

I'm a bit exhausted by the time I get to that slime level.

[phillai]

Gradius III SA-1 arcade mode is really how it should be played!
I love this game to bits! Still not easy though especially arcade mode or doing two loops on normal.

[fuse]

Was aware of the SA-1 patch but honestly had considered it at the time to be more of a masochist's mode. That Jaimers has posted a ridiculous is by-the-by (what a ****ing talent), but mad kudos for doing what you do [MENTION=122]phillai[/MENTION] ! Might have to take a look at how best to play it on a Super NT.

[CMcK]

Been trying out some of the unofficial Atomiswave ports on the Dreamcast. Metal Slug 6 is widely available elsewhere but it’s nice to see it on the DC. To be fair it struggles to mask the loading causing a fair bit slowdown. Shame.
Dolphin Blue is rather nice, got that MvC style of bright clean 3D backdrops and lovely 2d sprites on top. Fun game too.
Knights of Valour The Seven Spirits also has a lovely bright 3D / 2D mixture and is a sort of cross between a belt scroller and Dynasty Warriors. I really liked that one.

[Ghost]

Played through Dynamite Cop on the dreamcast and dear me this has not aged well graphically, game looks really janky and the enemy designs are certainly something, it wouldn’t surprise if the person who did the designs were on drugs at the time. Certainly not politically correct and probably would never get made nowadays. Game is still fun though and the Golden Axe reference had me grinning from ear to ear. Shame we don’t get these type of games much now, although SoR4 was fantastic.

[Cepp]

Giving Micro Machines V3 a try after trying it on and off many times over the years. It still has one of the best menus of all time, it's truly gorgeous. Gameplay is as brutally rote as ever, you go so fast its easy to fall off edges and its made more difficult by the camera constantly swinging around to show off the 3D stages.

Also playing Screamer but it keeps crashing in the same spot of the 4th track on real hardware. Not sure why, I'll probably use DOSBOX to finish it off. It's not the best playing racer but it has a lot of style and I like the software rendered look.

[fuse]

I played Super Metroid on my bank holiday Monday off. Started off as a quick poke about in the Super Famicom app on Switch, turned into a "I'll sleep when I'm done" play through of the whole damned thing. So, so good, still to this day. I feel like I replay Symphony of the Night pretty regularly, whereas I can't remember having played this for a long time, and despite remembering 90% of the game there were some bits where things were a little fuzzy in my mind. I enjoyed de-fuzzing those bits.

Straight off the bat I'd forgotten just how brilliant the intro is - that music that plays during the recap, how atmospheric the science lab is and how the colours change and it comes to life as you make your exit. Ridley, too - what an entrance. There are so many games that've cribbed from this since, when you start thinking about how this really was the first game to do exploration like this, it's mind-bending how well it is firing on all cylinders. One of the very best of all time.

And for the record - 3:40 on the clock, 65% completion, and with the animals rescued, because I'm not a monster.

[wakka]

I really need to play it. I never have - how bad is that?

Your impressions remind me of when I played Super Mario 64 through properly in full recently for the first time (not that you were playing Super Metroid for the first time, but yeah).

I was absolutely blown away by how a) it's better than about 99.99% of games since, and b) how much it has influenced those games. Just the wholesale invention of a genre, executed nearly perfectly. Incredible.

[fuse]

If it makes you feel any better, I've never finished Super Mario 64! I've played enough to be able to spot where its grubby fingerprints are over everything that's come since, though. It is kind of surprising when you go back to these groundbreaking titles though and see how much was just (and still is!) directly aped with only the most minor of iterations. Perhaps not the best example, but if Super Metroid had a 3D map, would we have had one in Symphony, too?

[wakka]

I read a line from Dan Houser where he basically said that anyone who makes 3D games and claims they've never ripped off Mario 64 is lying. The influence these titles continue to have on the games we play today is startling.