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

[CMcK]

I needed a game to test my new wireless controller for the OG Xbox. Fired up Halo. 2 hours later I was still sitting there engrossed! A genuine classic.

[egparadigm]

I needed a game to test my new wireless controller for the OG Xbox. Fired up Halo. 2 hours later I was still sitting there engrossed! A genuine classic.

It looks phenomenal in 4K on Series X via Master Chief collection.

I only replayed the games a little while back but I am already thinking of replaying Combat Evolved on OG Xbox after reading about the (not so good) changes made to lighting and mood in the Anniversary version.

[Baseley09]

Been starting up Saint Sword on Megadrive, face value, and also from Taito seems like a fantasy swords and sandals Rastan clone, but tbh it has more in common with Alisia Dragoon crossed with Altered Beast. Your character can pick up abilities to change into various half man / animal hybrids, so far seen a sentaur, merman and also angel wings which let you fly round the level, with a fair bit of verticality. Not just for laffs , you need to use the abilities to progress sections. Deffo more than meets the eye here.

[briareos_kerensky]

After softmodding one of my 3DS, I found myself playing English versions of games I previosuly only played in Japanese.
Somehow I started with Conception II, but couldn't last more than two hours, probably worse than I remember.
I got into Stella Glow again though, despite its many flaws, like when you spend more time watching enemies pass their turn in half of the missions, or when the game decides a key character has to die and one-shots them with a critical attack at extreme range, after a 30+ minutes-long mission.

[Cepp]

I'm a couple of hours in to a fan remake of Dragon Quest called Dragon Quest +. It's quite impressive although there doesn't seem to be a way to force it to recognise the D-Pad on on my PS5 controller, without first running it via Steam. It's relaxing and fun though, so worth the extra step.

[Baseley09]

It's almost criminal how easy it is to play isos on a ps2 now, plug a memory card in and USB stick with games on and bang, madness. I can recall a local electrician killing my original ps2 in the early 2000s trying to install a mod chip I got from Thailand. Picked up an ntsc-u fat PS2 a few minutes walk from my house for 20 quid, 10 quid freemcboot and here we are.

That said, last night fired up DoDonPachi Daioujou, minimal thoughts on it so far, I have the pc version and never really clicked with me.

Tried out Ibara for the first time, I had read some staff from Garegga worked on this, true or not you can see some influence here, enjoying this.

[wakka]

I should really get that sorted next time I dig my PS2 out. I have a very old school setup, with a modchip, a network adapter, a 3.5" IDE and a copy of HDLoader. State of the art circa twenty years ago

[egparadigm]

Still a good way to do it, notwithstanding the general lack of space on an IDE drive.

[Baseley09]

Finally got a 1.0 PCE system card to give Altered Beast CD a proper go, what an odd thing, chip tune music in levels with smattering of arcade samples, loading pauses 3 times a stage, there's more I did know all this going in but morbid fascination wins. Not entirely duff but certainly a waste of a release.

[egparadigm]

Warioland
Tetris
Oracles

[wakka]

I spy an Analogue Pocket being used...!

I really need to get around to playing the Oracle games.

[fallenangle]

Just finished Blood Omen: Legacy Of Kain on PC. Played perfectly, loaded quickly on my good old Windows 7 PC with a 4th gen i3 and on board HD graphics. No problems except an issue with the in-game joypad support. It is one I've come across before with games of this period where the monitor goes into sleep mode because the in-game joypad input is not being detected by the PC.

Three solutions to that: disable the monitor sleep mode or increase the wake time or do what I did and use Joy2Key. Clever thing with that is you don't need to go through the tedious job of remapping the whole thing. Just map the directional controls and the movement input will be detected by the PC. The monitor won't go into sleep mode and you can leave the rest of the joypad controls as is and those default to the in-game mapping.

Spent over two weeks on Blood Omen: LoK, a properly long game but not bloated, which I mostly enjoyed a great deal. Some of the tropes of the old school gaming (almost 30 years ago) annoyed me, like the instant re-spawning of the same enemies after a new screen loads and you go back. It also taxed my patience towards the end with the comparatively large number of enemies and a three or four part boss fight and no save points. However once I found the correct mix of technique and weapons it turned out to be surprisingly easy to get through with very little damage.

Quality voice acting and the story telling which, even if you didn't really care about it, is well written, coherent and succinct.

Genuinely good game still worth playing and now, AFAIK, I've finally played all the Legacy Of Kain games.