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    #16
    New review is finally up

    Format: Nintendo 64 Publisher: Takara Developer: Takara Release year: 1999 Genre: Racing Randomised Gaming reviewed the Japanese NTSC release Choro Q 64 2 on an original Japanese NTSC N64. Choro Q 64 2 :Hacha-Mecha Grand Prix Race was not released outside Japan. Note this game also supports the GB link feature with the Gameboy Color game Choro Q Hyper, however we are unable to test this feature due to not owning the GBC game. The game requires a controller pak with 123 blocks spare blocks on it in order to save your progress. Driving games have never been my foray so you will have to forgive me if I don’t cover this as in-depth as I normally do. Based on Takara’s real life toy range, Choro Q 64 2 is just one of a series of games that brings them to the digital world of gaming, with the earliest entry I could find appearing to date from 1984 and was released on the MSX home computer. It’s fair to say the series has had its ups and downs along the way with games in the series ranging from the very good, to the so bad you will want to have your memory erased of the experience. In Choro 64 2 case it falls into the category of not bad, but there are better racing games out there on the N64. Choro Q 64 2 itself is little more than an upgrade to it’s prequel game Penny Racers, which did receive a western release. Meaning if you enjoyed the first game you will quite likely enjoy this second outing. The start of any race is always a bit of a position battle The format of the game is fairly simple with players competing in Grand Prix or single races to win or steal car parts from the other players. Players get to choose the chassis of their first car and are given a basic selection of car parts, but that’s it everything else has to be won from races. So it’s a bit like Gran Turismo on the PlayStation only with toy cars. Grand Prix winners get to choose one car part after scoring 1st, 2nd or 3rd in the overall leader board, where as in single race the top three players get to take or give a part to the players in 4th, 5th or 6th place. There’s also a Time Trial mode if you want to improve your best lap time or just practice on a particular course. You start the game only able to race in the C class which restricts the number of modifications you can apply to your car. Winning Grand Prix and Single Races allows you to unlock further classes, though I found this to be rather slow going. Some of the impressive scenery from the eastern themed stage Choro Q64 2, features nine different tracks each with their own theme to them, with one being set in a forest temple and another in a spooky ghost town. Each track has its own music and all feel and look very different from one another. On top of this each track has two different weather variants and the option to race the course in reverse on both of the weather variants. On the downside, however, these variants are preset so only certain tracks have rain while others feature snow. Unlike some games these weather variants do affect the control and handling of your toy car, so don’t think that you can accelerate round the track when it’s covered in snow. The big game mechanic behind Choro Q64 2 is the ability to heavily customise your car. With players being able to unlock around 30 different car chassis, including some unusual designs like fire engines or a ramen seller truck added in for comedy value. Each one also come with a range of colours to select from and you can also rename your vehicle to whatever you want, it even includes the English alphabet in the renaming section. The customisation menu, even in Japanese it’s not that hard to navigate The more advance parts allow you to tweak the handling, acceleration and maximum speed of the car. On top of that you can also add accessories to your car as well, including things like police sirens, taxi signs and even a suitcase stuck to the top of the car. Accessories don’t just look pretty either they can also improve the stats of your car, so are well worth adding to your Choro Q. Finally, you can also add one special power, these range from defensive moves such as making your car invincible to attacking power that allow you to fire or slam into your opponents during the race. While you are limited to a set number of uses per race, you can replenish these and even upgrade your special power during the race to give you that extra advantage. But be warned as you won’t be the only player who has a special move during a race and the other racers will try their best to take you down during the race. With well over a hundred car parts to unlock, players will be spending quite a bit of time out on the race course in order to obtain them all. You will also need every advantage you can get from the unlockable car parts, as the default car handles like a lead balloon. Well maybe not quite that bad, but the handling is very slow, it might explain why the game includes a special move that allows you to turn your car 90 degrees. Holding down the R trigger and double tapping left or right on the analogue stick, performs what I can only describe as a barrel roll flip. It’s the only way you can navigate a number of track corners at any speed as you certainly won’t be turning around them, well at least not without ramming head long into a wall or sliding off road and watching everyone else pass you. The winter track was almost impossible to win without using the barrel roll technique as you just can’t turn around any of the corner in that track fast enough. It may well be that Takara had plan the games design to be like this, but if so it was a poor decision. As some tracks are less about racing and more about knowing at what moment to barrel roll your car to avoid the oncoming wall. While later car parts improve the turning circle of the car you won’t be unlocking the higher race car classes until you can win every race. The rain and mud not ideal driving conditions for the jungle stage Grand Prix and Single Races have you racing five opponents around the track. The CPU is fairly decent and does require some level of skill to beat, so don’t expect to win races until you have a decent idea of the track layout for each course. The CPU also likes to ram into you a lot, but luckily the default spin attack power up you start with is very good for getting rid of the opposition fairly quickly. Camera wise the game offers three angles, the standard 3rd person behind the car view, which is a little to low to the ground for my liking as it makes some track turns a bit hard to see. A far distance car view, which is the best angle in the game for seeing the track and last, but not least there is the front of car view. Which is the worst angle in the game as the camera moves with the car in this view, which makes this camera angle only usefully if you want to make yourself dizzy or discover if you suffer from motion sickness or not. As certain moves like the barrel roll turn or certain special powers, spins the car around or upside down in a 360 motion, which the camera duly follows in the front of car view, disorienting the player at the same time as you watch the camera perform three quick 360 degree spins. So while the game has three camera angle to select from only two are actually usable in races. Do not adjust your set, the first person camera during the barrel roll turn, upside down fun! As for the design of the tracks themselves they are fairly impressive for the 32bit era of gaming. Each track feels very different from one another, and while some of the easier courses you can floor the accelerator on, others require a lot more planning on when to turn or barrel roll the corners. Added to this, many track’s feature traps for the player to avoid, the Halloween stage features swinging scythes and Guillotines. While the Japanese castle stage features giant homing ten ton weights and while the winter stage has snow drifts and avalanches for the player to deal with. On the downside however a number of these traps are almost unavoidable which can be a bit frustrating from time to time. Fortunately, the CPU tends to also fall for many of the traps on each course slowing its progress, so it’s not all bad news. Added to this the CPU cars also have an amusing habit of running over their own mines and traps they have placed on the course. Annoyingly in Choro Q 2, most mines take the form of grey colour pins and small bricks, which also have a nasty habit of blending in a bit to well with certain tracks. Take evasive action, snow boulders from the the winter stage. As with any good Nintendo 64 game, Choro Q64 2, supports up to four players via split screen and includes versus races, but this just boils down to players racing against one another without the CPU controlled cars. You can also choose to do single races that include CPU cars in multiplayer, but Grand Prix and Time Trial modes are both unavailable. The jewel in the crown of Choro Q64 2 is the ability to create your own tracks via the in-game editor. Which helps make up for many of the game’s short coming as it adds almost infinite replayability to the game. While your limited to what you can do with it, the editor is easy to use and has a good mix of track parts to choose from including tunnels, hills and split paths. There’s also a 3D view in the editor which allows you to adjust the height of the track. Once you’ve finished you can save your track and either time trial it or races your friends on it, sadly you can’t race the CPU on any homemade track. The track editor in action The only real draw back is that you need a controller pak in order to save your in-game progress and with it taking up 123 blocks you will need one just for this game. Choro Q64 2 does have an internal cartridge save feature ,but it’s only used for saving course and lap times. So if you do want to pick this up I highly recommend you buy a controller pak to go with it, else you won’t be saving your progress. Toy racer or cheap imitations? Choro Q 64 2 is a hard game to sum up, it’s not a terrible game in anyway, but neither does it set the world alight. It’s one of those above average games, that has some nice mechanics and features, but just can’t compete with the big hitters. It’s not the worst game in the Choro Q series or the best either putting it in the uneasy middle ground in all aspects. Nintendo 64 fans and gamers would do better in tracking down copies of F-Zero X or Diddy Kong Racing. Sadly for Choro Q64 2 there is quite a few better N64 racing games than it, which makes it hard to recommend and if you are a Choro Q fan, then you would be better off with the excellent Saturn game Choro Q Park. Doing a test run on a homemade track That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy Choro Q64 2 and if you can pick it up cheaply and don’t expect it to blow you away and revolutionise gaming then you will likely have some fun with it. If you did like the first game Penny Racers, then this is worth owning as it improves over the first game in every way. That then, begs the questions why are you playing Penny Racer in the first placed when games like Diddy Kong Racing exist? Still if you fancy making up your own racing tracks on the N64 then this might be the game for you. Unless by chance you happen to own a Japanese N64DD Drive and the special release of F-Zero X for it which featured a track editor on it. Which for most of us mere mortals is highly unlike due to the cost of owning this very expensive add on these days. Review by Random Gamer Riven. Twitter: RDGamerRiven E.mail: [email protected] Follow Randomised Gaming on Tumblr, for video game, art, reviews, features, videos and more. You can also follow us on twitter and subscribe to us on YouTube for even more Randomised Gaming content.


    It's for Choro Q64 2 on the Nintendo 64 the sequel to the game Penny Racers

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      #17
      Newest retro review now up Boxing Legends of the Rings, this is one game you didn't want Santa to bring you.

      Format: Super Nintendo (Also on Mega Drive) Publisher: Electro Brain Developer: Sculptured Software Release year: 1993 Genre: Sports / Boxing Randomised Gaming reviewed the United Kingdom PAL release of Boxing Legends of The Ring on a PAL Super Nintendo. The sport of Boxing has seen it’s fair share of video games over the years. However few boxing games have gone on to be well remembered other than the Punch-Out series. Boxing Legends of The Ring is no exception and after just an hour of playing it, you can easily see why this is consigned to the vault of history. The game is a bit of a licensing nightmare as the name of the game is actually using a license from “The Ring” magazine. Which I should point out is still going strong even today, as the title suggests Boxing Legends of The Ring features a number of legendary boxers. With Sugar Ray Robinson being the biggest name in the game, other included boxers are Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Jake LaMotta, Rocky Graziano, Roberto Duran, Thomas Hearns, Sugar Ray Leonard & James Toney. While the absence of Muhammad Ali is rather noticeable this is likely due to licensing issues and the fact that he had his own named game released at around the same time. On first impressions the graphics are pretty decent, till you notice that most of the boxers look very similar  Not that it really matters to much as this is one of many sports games, that remind me why most titles in the genre sucked in the 16bit era. It’s just another terrible example of how not to make a sports game and all the licenses and famous boxers it uses can’t save this weak excuse for a video game. There’s no point in sugar-coating it either so I might as well just get on with the KO punch. If you were unlucky enough to purchase this game in 1993, then you had just been suckered punched by the retailer, who was robbing you blind. Curiously, I learned during my research the PAL version of the game was only released in the United Kingdom, but when you consider Germany was the only European country getting Capcom games like Final Fight 3 and Megaman X3 it’s a bit of a bum deal. Boxing Legends of The Ring, is a realistic style boxing game that ends up making the game a bit to realistic so matches end up being incredibly long and boring. After the fairly decent opening introduction, where we see the faces and names of the boxing legends included. You are greeted with a rather bare bones menu screen, from the outset it’s clear this game didn’t have a lot of time or money spent on it. The bland character selection screen is a no thrills affair There are three modes in-game Exhibition, Career and Battle of the Legends, along with a selection of options, including the rather bizarre option to turn off the menu music, which is possibly the only redeeming part of the game as the music is at least half decent. Made even more odd by the fact there isn’t any music that plays during a match, only menus. Exhibition matches are your standard versus match affair, where you get to pick your boxer and fight either the CPU or another player. You can also change the number of rounds per match and each boxer has slightly different stats, but with no unique moves or animations for each boxer the minor changes in stats have no real effect on the outcome of the fight. As with any boxing game you win the game by either getting a TKO by flooring your opponent three times in the same round or getting a KO which can only be done by using a power punch to floor an opponent while their health is at rock bottom. Players are limited to a maximum of three power punches which you earn after every round and for knocking down your opponent. Rounds last a total of three minutes in real time and should all rounds past without a KO then the winner is decided on a judge’s decision based on a number of factors included how many punches you threw, knock downs and percentages of punches that actually hit your opponent. A rare occasion where the opponent hits the canvas  The moves list is pretty limited with only seven different standard punches available for all the characters. Fights amount to little more than you hitting the buttons in a random order and hope you land more blows than the other player. Fights are on a 2D plane, but at a slightly odd isometric camera angle, making it so you only ever see the back of one boxer. This however, limits the available dodge moves to both players as you can’t move around your opponent. Resulting in you only having the option to back away from your opponent when close or block their high and low punches. Unless you want to try and push your opponent back to their corner by barging into them which leaves you wide open to any type of punch. Players can also Clinch, which allows you to regain health and stamina, but so too does your opponent limiting its use to desperation defence only, as otherwise it just slows down the fight. The health and stamina systems are just two of the many problems in the game as well. Health is shown by the boxer portraits in the top left and right of the screen. As your health where’s down your boxes face becomes more bruised and bloodied in the portraits, until it starts flashing to indicate they are about to go down. What’s annoying is that the character sprites in the lower half of the screen have no form of damage decays, forcing the player to often look up at the characters stats while trying to dodge or throw punches at the same time. As your opponent’s sprite will look as fresh as a daisy even when he is about to go down to the ground. The clinch is a great way to heal your boxer and slow down the fight The stamina system while a novel idea doesn’t quite work, as it depletes far to quickly in-game. It’s designed to make the matches more realistic ends up removing the ability to punch just as you try to throw that crucial knockout punch. The stamina system works so that every time you throw a punch it decreases and to increase you have to wait about five seconds for a slight increase to your stamina by dodging or blocking punches. While this is fine for the early rounds where you start with a full stamina bar in later rounds you often have to sit out almost an entire round to fully regain your stamina. As once your are out of stamina you have to wait for your stamina meter to refill in order to throw another punch. Problem is that in order to get enough stamina back to be able to put a good few punch combos together you will be waiting about 30 seconds. The real killer here is that health increases at just as fast rate as stamina, which makes for some seriously frustrating moments. As you will often find in the later rounds of a match that just as you are about to lay down the KO punch you’ve run out of stamina and by the time you’ve regained it. Your opponent’s health will be fully restored. This can be heart breaking as you quickly watch your opponent go from KO status, back to full health in a matter of moments, while you wait on your stamina to recharge. There is no long-term health damage over the course of the fight to make matters worse. Meaning either boxer can be restored back to full health so long as they avoid punches for long enough. The end of round breaks also heal a fair amount of both boxers health and stamina, along with getting up from the canvas after a knock down. Your stamina constantly running out every fight, is just one of the many annoying issues in game  All in all, it just becomes a hugely frustrating exercise of trying to knock out your opponent before your stamina depletes. Add to this highly defensive A.I. on the harder difficultly and no form of counter punch system, makes KO'ing or even TKO'ing your opponent next to impossible. Forcing you to go for a long haul fights and hope to win via a judge victory. This rapidly becomes very tiring and incredibly boring as the longer fights, can take up to an hour to finish. The CPU opponents also have a somewhat limited set of combos and while punches aren’t sign posted, you can work out roughly what combos they are going to do, even if it means taking the odd direct punch. Before you can work out that they are doing their two high and four low hit combo. It’s a pure memory game and eagle-eyed players will soon start spotting punching patterns, the higher level opponents almost become like a turn based game as you wait for them to finish their combo before it’s your turn to reply. This shows up the complete lack of a counter system which this game badly needs, as titles like Super Punch-Out included a system where certain punches would act as a counter punch if timed correctly. Which gives a far more realistic approach to boxing as it allows a skilled player to dominate another by countering their punches. The Career mode, which is supposed to be the main mode, just makes these problems worse by giving the player a highly underpowered boxer to begin with. As you would expect from Career mode your objective is to be the best fighter in the world. However, aside from a few customisation options it’s little more than an arcade mode with a few options. Customisation options are so limited you have to wonder why the developers even bothered to add it The fact that if you lose more than twice in career mode, you end up with a straight game over screen, doesn’t give the player much room to learn. You get a choice of three preset boxing types Street, Military and Olympic each with slightly different starting stats, along with the ability to adjust the power of the various punches. Appearance wise all you can do is alter the skin colour of the preset boxer, you can’t alter how his face looks or the weight category he can compete in. It’s pretty much just a ladder of opponents with the odd boxer asking for a rematch after you beat them. After every fight, you also get to increase some of your stats but that’s all there is. The kicker in career mode is that if you don’t pick the right starting stats for your boxer you will quickly find yourself in an unwinnable fight early on. Starting with a decent punch power and stamina set up is a must if you want to win. While there is a password after every fight, you have nowhere to train up your stats or practice your boxing before you step into the ring. Forcing you to restart the whole mode if you haven’t trained your boxer right. Judging by the amount of passwords written all over the manual of our review copy by a former owner, they must also have had the same trouble. Things get a bit easier once you max out your boxer’s stats, but it’s a bit of a rough ride until you do. Finally there is legends of the ring mode, which is little more than an eight player tournament. Only with the restriction that CPU players are of the higher difficulty and you must go 12 rounds in each match. Fortunately, you can also choose to play as all the boxers in this mode or skip CPU only fights. As I made the mistake of watching a CPU match, only to watch the fight last 45 minutes with the defensive A.I. making it about as fun to watch as paint drying. A mind numbing example of a CPU match Graphics are above-average with well drawn sprites that show quite a bit of detail including the referee who appears at the start of every match. Problem is that there isn’t many sprites, most of the opponents looks the same, there is only one referee and the end of round girl who walks across the screen during the break is the same sprite just with a colour pallet swapped. The perspective on the far boxers waist line to his chest doesn’t look quite right either. The blood and sweat effects from the punches look like someone using the airbrush feature in a paint tool, with a quick flash before disappearing. Neither is helped by the lack of any damage decals to the actual character sprite. The only effect of interest is the blackout feature which attempts to simulate the effect of a blackout just before you hit the canvas. Problem is it looks like someone got confused with the term “blackout” and instead it seems to emulate a power cut to the arena. As it causes the screen to fade to black with only your boxer visible, it quickly goes away however, if you managed to regain just a fraction of your health, without being knocked down. Someone forgot to pay the electric bill! Boxing rings all look the same as does the background crowd, who do the usual types crowd animation of camera flashes and cheers as the fight goes on. The only real change is the placement of the HBO TV channel advertisement at the top of the arena. The only redeeming feature of Boxing Legends of The Ring is the in-game music, which does a decent attempt at trying to prepare you for the trials ahead. Sadly it’s only used on the menu screens, which is a shame as it would help make the matches a bit more bearable. The other impressive feature is the voice samples included in the game, Michael Buffer’s catch phase “Let’s get ready to rumble!” is heard at the start of each match. Along with the referee issuing orders to the boxers, and shouts from your boxer’s coach can be heard as the fight goes on. It’s just a shame there isn’t that many sample and that the rest of the sound effects are terrible. There’s just a handful of grunts and damage sound effects that are the same for all boxers. Again I can’t really fault the controls as they are responsive and handle well. The collision for the fights is also pretty decent and you can always tell when a punch is going to connect or not. Sadly while the basic gameplay mechanics work great and I can point to plenty of games where the controls and collision are far worse. The design of the game to go with them just doesn’t work and what you have is a boring and slow experience. The newspaper that appears after every fight in career mode keeps track of your progress The only real fun you will likely get from the game is the two players mode. As beating your mates at any game is always fun, no matter what the game. It’s also the only aspect of the game that Super Punch-Out doesn’t do better, as it didn’t feature a two player mode. Ding, ding, thirty seconds in and we already have a winner! If you purchased Boxing Legends of The Ring back in 1993 you were anything, but a winner. The game isn’t a patch on the NES release of Punch-Out and in 1994 when Super Punch-Out was finally released this game was given the knock out punch it deserved. Super Punch-Out still remains a timeless classic, yet Boxing Legends of The Ring is just another example of a terrible 16bit era sports game that deserves never to see the light of day again. There is little to like and even less to say anything positive about, it’s like the no-hoper boxer who has a shot at the title only to go down 15 seconds into the fight. Quite frankly surviving one round in real life with any of the included boxers would be more fun than playing this digital disaster. Super Punch-Out the finest boxing game on the Super Nintendo and worth every penny unlike Boxing Legends of The Ring. Certainly managing to play this game for more than about an hour deserves some reward in its own right. Let alone the amount of time I’ve had to sit through and suffer this monstrosity. To some this all up in one sentence, why are you not playing Super Punch-Out on the SNES? Now you will have to excuse me I am off to find a dust bin, as that’s where this 16bit relic belongs. Review by Random Gamer Riven. Twitter: RDGamerRiven E.mail: [email protected] Follow Randomised Gaming on Tumblr, for video game, art, reviews, features, videos and more. You can also follow us on twitter and subscribe to us on YouTube for even more Randomised Gaming content.


      Here's the horror in action:

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        #18
        New review up, this time for the USA only released Dreamcast game Armada.

        Format: Sega Dreamcast (USA only release) Publisher: Metro.3D Developer:Metro.3D Releaseyear: 1999 Genre: Shoot ‘em up / Space Trading Randomised Gaming reviewed the USA release of Armada on a European Dreamcast using a Xploder disc in order to play the game. Spaceman, I always wanted you to go into space, man or so went the Babylon Zoo song in the 1990s. As with so many Hollywood films Armada takes the storyline that the first contact the human race has with aliens is not a friendly one. Following a short war, the human race is forced to abandon Earth to the alien invaders known only as the Armada and hide amongst the stars as they try to rebuild. Thousands of years pass and the descendants of the human race have split into six different races each with their own unique abilities. At least that’s what the game said in the opening intro, the lore described in the manual is quite a bit different and would suggest that whoever wrote the manual didn’t talk to the game’s designers. Which doesn’t bode well for the story writing within the game itself. Although I’m being generous by even describing the thread bare dialogue lines of a handful of characters as even a plot or a story. In short the plot boils down to aliens bad, humans good, now kill all the aliens, quite why intergalactic alien races that have mastered space travel can’t be just friendly and welcoming I’ll never know. So the Armada as they are known appear to have conquered almost all of the galaxy and it’s your job to help defeat them. Armada is clearly heavily inspired by the Atari classic arcade game Asteroids cross with a little bit of Elite thrown in. Gameplay is rather unique as it’s a top down shooter like Asteroids, but adds in a free roaming element allowing you to explore the galaxy map and trade with various space stations that you find during your journey. The opening section of the game see the Armada attacking allied command Having booted up Armada, your first task is to choose which of the six different races you want to play as, each have their own different abilities and ship designs. The Terran race, have rapid fire and bonus armour, while the Eldred people have faster engines and get more experience points from defeating enemy ships. While you can’t purchased ships in-game, leveling your character up will cause the design of the ship to change. There’s a noticeable difference between the races, but in single player the differences are a bit muted unless you choose a race that gives you more gold or exp. In multiplayer, however, you can really take advantage of the different abilities to help you speed through the game, especially if you have four players in your team. The game starts you in the safe haven of allied command, an earth like planet that acts as the restart point if you die and as a place where you can resupply your ship. You can also converse with a number of NPCs who give you details on both the main story mission and bonus side missions for you to investigate. Once you’ve finished your business at allied command it’s time to face off against the Armada in space. The overwhelming numbers of Armada ships can be daunting at first Once in space you come under a relentless attack from the Armada, who have an infinite amount of re-spawning ships at their disposal. So get ready for wave after wave of incoming ships, as you fly around the galaxy. Like Asteroids, Armada uses a realistic propulsion and inertia system for your ship’s movement, so no sudden and sharp 360 degree turns. That’s not to say that your ship is unresponsive, it’s just that you have to plan a bit more ahead movement wise than you would in most twin stick shooters, which are all the rage these days. Another thing to be aware of is that your ship’s weapons are mounted on the front of the ship and only fire straight, so position and movement are key in battle. This isn’t a lazy twin stick shooter where you can shoot anywhere to hit an enemy and with certain Armada ships featuring front facing shields or the ability to phase in and out of reality. You will often find your position to an enemy is key to winning a battle, even if you are only offered a few seconds of peace before more Armada ships arrive. In combat you also have to worry not only about your armour but also your weapon energy which depletes as you fire. Quick thinking players however, will soon work out that to prevent this from happening you need to fire in short bursts as a long barrage of shots will soon see you out of energy to shoot. Players can also carry around three power pods which can be used either as a full screen bomb or as a time limited shield to block damage. Destroying Armada ships also rewards you with much need experience and gold, though gold needs to be salvage from the ship remains directly. Selling or trading items is the quickest way to earn cash fast, but you can also give other players unwanted items to help improve their ships. The player’s ship is also quick and easy to handle and moves very swiftly, your ship also has two types of movement speeds to help them move thought the stars. The standard propulsion which doesn’t drain weapon energy, but means that the Armada can keep pace with you. Or the turbo boost which outruns just about every Armada ship, but prevents you from using your weapons, on the downside you also miss out on all the gold and experience earned from killing Armada ships. In the long run it’s far better to defeat as much of the Armada as possible. As leveling up your ship is vital if you want to survive the harder missions. It’s interesting to see an RPG style level up system in this type of game, but it could have done with a bit more fine tuning. For starters you only really notice the change when you get a free ship upgrade, which happens when you return to your home planet when you meet the required level. Add to that the fact the level up system is poorly explained and there is also no indication on how much exp you need for the next level or what level will give you a new ship either. To make matters worse leveling up is a slow and grindy affair and you are better off farming cash instead and using the cash to buy upgrades for your ship via one of the space station throughout the galaxy. It’s dangerous to go alone, always bring some NPCs along Fortunately, even in single player you aren’t alone in fighting the Armada, NPC space ships will randomly appear as you play to help you in your fight against them. Smaller fighter ships will join with you and fly by your side until they are either destroyed or you return to allied command. While larger supply ships will request help for you to protect them as they fly to their destination, safely deliver them to their goal will net you some much needed cash so it’s well worth helping anyone out who asks. That’s until the boredom sets in as that’s all the NPCs ever ask you to do, there’s no trading in this game and certainly no stealing either so you can’t go raiding their ships. Which brings me to the mission structure, so far I’ve been quite positive about the game, but the mission and galaxy map structure are where the game falls flat on its face. As it’s an uneasy cross mix of genre, which suggests the developers couldn’t quite make up their minds as to what game they wanted Armada to be while making it. As despite, putting over six hours into the main story the player is only ever given two types of missions to do. The first one is to eliminate a large boss alien hiding either deep in space or on a planet. With the other being to ferry a supply item from the home planet space station to another space station. That’s all there is for the main story and it gets really boring very quickly. The few planets you can visit are full of Armada ships The real kicker is also the difficulty curve, trading missions are little more than training runs to show the player how the limited trading system works, taking a few minutes to finish as you boost off to the relevant space station. The boss alien missions are a different matter however, while in four player mode you can gun them down in a matter of seconds in single player mode they are a much more menacing prospect. With you often having to level up and heavily upgrade your ship, along with recruiting NPC ships to even stand a chance against them. The reason for this is the game just doesn’t scale the difficulty to match the number of players in-game, making it a rather soulless grind in single player and a cakewalk in four player mode. Even in two player mode the Randomised Gaming team was able to quickly clear bosses thanks to the extra bombs and firepower you gain from the second player. To say this game has some yo-yo balancing is a mild understatement and if it wasn’t for the fact that you can’t die in the game, this would have had an unforgiving difficulty. So Armada uses an old arcade style life system with the player starting with three lives. As soon as you run out of lives, you are returned to allied command with your lives restored. There is no gold or experience penalty and the only negative is you have to travel back to where you were on the map, no great loss. You also increase your number of lives as you upgrade your ship, but it’s an odd system that just doesn’t fit the game. Armada just isn’t quite the right mix of arcade game or space adventure and neither feel that satisfying. Boss ships are often little more than a large version of one of the standard enemies To add to the problems of the mission system is the galaxy map, for the most part it’s just empty space with the odd planet and space station dotted around. There isn’t much to look at and there isn’t much structure either due to the Armada spawning everywhere, in this aspect again it plays like the old arcade games of Asteroids or even Sinistar. But when you add in a trading system and NPCs, you can’t help feel that the galaxy needs to have far better design. You expect to see different areas of space controlled by different fractions, while others are overrun by Armada ships and that there is a constant war going on as the six races struggle to keep the peace and the alliance together. Pirates, traders, smugglers, mercenaries, heroes and villains it’s what you expect to see, but it’s just not here. The lack of this type of structure in the game makes the story pointless and it makes you wonder if the developers should have just solely worked on the arcade side of the game. Certainly comparing Armada to something like Fusion Genesis on the Xbox360, which could have easily been done on the Dreamcast. The level design flaws becoming all to clear, Fusion Genesis is a game which plays very much like Armada, but it’s just a lot better in every aspect and the design of the galaxy in it helps bring the whole concept to life. As you watch ships dock with stations, mine resources of asteroids and have police ships scan you for contraband. Small touches like this bring the galaxy to life in Fusion Genesis and Armada just doesn’t have any of them. What Armada really needs is a high score table, but again it doesn’t have that either. The green green mist of space!? Graphics can be summed up by the phase “could have been done on the PlayStation or Sega Saturn”. There is nothing special about them in any way it’s all very basic 3D and doesn’t make use of the Dreamcast’s power in the slightest. The only point of note is that the Armada appear to have sprayed the entire galaxy with a green fog as the darkness of space has been replaced with this mist green. It looks terrible and I can only guess the reason for it is to hide some terrible background bug the artists couldn’t fix. The in-game sound and voice effects are to a decent enough standard that they don’t get on your nerves, with the groans and roars of the approaching Armada ships easily heard. The accompanying music does its job, but it’s not dynamic in any way and while nice to listen to, doesn’t really bare any feeling or relation, to what is happening on screen. It’s very forgettable and you will likely even forget that it’s playing in the background. Talking to the various allies at base is a good way to find locations to visit Certainly Armada is fairly fun in small bursts and four players mode, but it’s not a game that will keep your attention for hours on end. Towards the end of my time on the single player the game was starting to put me to sleep after putting about eight hours into Armada. The galaxy itself is a decent enough size, but with no in-game map your only way to memorise the locations in it, is to write down (Yes, I’m talking pen and paper here) the X & Y co-ordinates displayed on the game field when you find a location. The game’s manual includes the locations of all the space stations inside it, but that’s tough luck if your copy of the game is missing it. Everything else is left for you to explore, but aside from the odd ship upgrade and Armada infested planets there isn’t much to see out there. Is the human race doomed to fall to the Armada? While there is some interesting and unique ideas and design behind Armada, the execution of the game as a whole is pretty poor, for the most part it’s a wasted opportunity. The video game genre mix as I’ve mentioned across the review just isn’t quite right and a few changes here and there could have greatly improved the game. It’s easy to see why this didn’t get released outside the USA as while not a terrible game, it’s only just above average. Fusion Genesis on Xbox360 is a superior game in every way While there isn’t another game really like Armada on the Sega Dreamcast, had Metro.3D got the gameplay right, this would have been a game that would have been easy to recommend to anyone. As it stands arcade fans who want a four player shooter would be better off with something like Giga Wing 2. While serious shooter fans would be wise to pick up the superb Dreamcast port of Starlancer. While if you want to play a really good top down shooter, then Fusion Genesis on the Xbox360 is a much better game to spend your money on. There is more in-game screenshots of Armada in this review than there is on the back of the box it has a grand total of one, with two pictures CGI stills from the intro Armada ends up being a bit of a novelty on the Dreamcast, there just isn’t another game like it. If you can pick it up for £5-10, you will likely get some fun out of it as long as you’re a shooter fan. I think the thing that most interested me about this game was the fact that it was only released in the USA, a European release was rumoured, but never happened. For everyone else however, you’re best off avoiding Armada and picking up one of the other games I recommended. It looks like there will be no escape for the human race this time around, as the Armada rules here now. Review by Random Gamer Riven. Twitter: RDGamerRiven E.mail: [email protected]


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          #19
          New review up is up for Angelique Special 2 and it's another retro Sega Saturn game, this one might be to hardcore for even the guys here! As I all know how much every one loves dating simulators.

          the fact the series is still going on the PlayStation Vita should be a crime against gaming the horror.....

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            #20
            Review for Sonic Advance 2 on Gameboy Advance is now up, one of the better Sonic games to appear in the last 15 years, oh how the mighty have fallen.

            If you never played it here a complete look at the whole game:

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              #21
              Why in the name of god did Nintendo insist on having that Z button icon permanently onscreen for the GB Player? Asshole decision.

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                #22
                Agree 100% don't know what they were thinking with that one, the emulation on the GBA player isn't 100% with some games either which really annoys me as well.

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                  #23
                  There's a new review up on the Randomised Gaming blog this one is for the not so great Rolo to the Rescue, feel sorry for anyone who had this as a kid:

                  Format: Sega Mega Drive / Genesis Publisher: Electronic Arts Developer: Vectordean Release year: 1992 Genre: Platformer Randomised Gaming reviewed the European Sega Mega Drive version of Rolo to the Rescue. It was played on both a Japanese NTSC Mega Drive at 60hz and a European PAL Mega Drive at 50hz. So last week after a couple of delays, I finally set aside a whole day to play and video Rolo to the Rescue. With only four main worlds in the game and sixty fairly small levels it wasn’t going to take more than a few hours or so I thought. Knowing that you could only see the true ending if the player freed all of Rolo’s friends, I foolishly set about trying to finish every level in the game. The first world took about an hour to clear all the stages and things where looking good for this to be finished after lunch. Then, after I got halfway through the second world, I hit a level that redefines the word frustration. An hour and two hundred lives later I finally cleared it, by which point my sanity had long since left me and I was turning the air blue. At this point I realised it was going to be a very long day and little did I know that many of the levels were just going to get even harder. I partly wondered if I had some twisted home brewed version of the game, with levels designed by fans of the series. After all, you only have to look at games like Super Mario Maker to see how fans, like to design insanely hard levels that suck the fun out of the franchise. You will be seeing the continue screen an awful lot, unless you plan to cheat or hoard extra lives. However, no this was an actual official level of the game, it was clear from this point onwards that many of the extra stages in Rolo to the Rescue had been designed by either a sadist or someone married to a dominatrix. Things then just went from bad to worse as the extra stages got harder and harder. One stage required you to perfectly time your jumps to dodge about ten flying bear traps that jump straight at you, another saw you being chased by about twenty ghosts, one miss timed jump and it was goodbye Rolo. While the progress required stages maintained a stable difficult, if you don’t venture out into the extra stages you will only ever see the bad ending. Something clearly Vectordean the developers realised and to squeeze out as much last ability as possible they just decided to make the game as hard as they could! Right this review is getting a little ahead of itself at this point, so why don’t we start at the beginning. Rolo to the Rescue is a game developed by a British studio called Vectordean who were best known, for the James Pond series of video games. Rolo to the Rescue even features a cameo from James Pond himself in Splash Gordon attire on one of the later stages. But this small cameo is the only real link between the two games. James Pond’s Moon mission cameo is a much needed chance to grab some extra lives, shame he doesn’t stay to lend Rolo a hand. From the opening sequence alone you can see the quality of the presentation and the in-game graphics. Rolo is clearly aimed at young children and the bright, bold colourful graphics clearly show this even if the game’s difficult doesn’t. All the animal characters have a very cute look with large eyes, huge smiles and colourful faces, even the enemies on the whole fall into this same design look. Bar the main villain McSmiley the ringmaster who has that classic Hanna-Barbera, Dick Dastardly look with the long moustache and top hat. The backgrounds are also well drawn in this game and feature a number of layers of parallax scrolling to boot within them. As nice as they look they are a little over used at times and a variant design for the forest and desert wouldn’t have gone a miss. The later city world, however, doesn’t suffer from this problem as much, due to it featuring quite a large number of background themes including a haunted house, circus and city at night theme amongst others. You have to give credit to the two artists who did the graphics, they did a superb job with the direction of the art. As Rolo’s sprite artwork holds up well even today and has a very British look with how he is drawn. The character animation is also very fluid and just watching Rolo’s run animation shows the care the developers took when drawing him. The game even has time to have a sense of humour, with Rolo adopting different hats to wear in the various world. Donning a Stetson in the wild west stages and an Safari explorer hat in the desert ones.   Despite the many flaws of Rolo to the Rescue, it’s hard not to like his antics at times. The gameplay itself is also very simple with the core of the game being little more than a straight up platformer. The twist here is that for Rolo to finish many of the levels he must first rescue all his friends. To do this Rolo must first find and defeat McSmiley on each level, doing so grants him a key which then allows him to free his caged up animal buddies. Once you have freed them all it’s on to the stage exit. While early stages are little more than a race to the exit. Later stages require you to take control of your animal friends in order to finish the stage. Rolo can keep three animal friends with him at any one time and each animal has a different ability. The bunny rabbit can jump super high, the beaver can swim in water, while the squirrel can climb and the mole can dig underground. All these skills will come into play on many of the later stages as you are often required to have your friends collect hidden puzzle pieces or access a part of a level Rolo himself cannot. A fifth friend the baby hedgehog at first starts life as an enemy of Rolo, but you can choose to reunite the baby hedgehog with its mother on one stage making all hedgehogs in-game friendly from then on after. Not to be out done by his friends Rolo himself can obtain temporary power ups as well to help on certain levels. The vacuum cleaner allows Rolo to suck up items and a glass of lemonade allow him to squirt his enemies with water for a short while. One of the funnier power ups is the helium tank which sees Rolo become a giant floating balloon. All of which you will get very familiar with as you try to unlock all the missing puzzle sections of the world map needed to progress to the next level. The world map, slowly reveals itself as you find the missing puzzle pieces on each stage. There’s a nice mix of platforming action and puzzles to solve in Rolo to the Rescue which on the whole isn’t a bad mixture. The main challenge for the game comes from the fact that if anything hits Rolo he dies instantly. Each friend he finds grants him an extra hit, but at the start of any level where Rolo begins alone you have to be very careful. Spikes, however, use the Mega Man gaming law of kill anything they touch instantly. As with most of the classic platform games jumping on enemies allows Rolo to defeat then, which is surprisingly realistic for a game in the platform genre, as an elephant landing on just about anything in real life would crush it to death. Here however, is where the first major problem with Rolo to the Rescue appears, as someone clearly didn’t correctly check the collision of Rolo. As he has no hitboxes on his front legs only his back ones, meaning that if only his front legs touch an enemy or land on a platform, the enemy will hit you and you will fall straight through the platform. Rolo having no collision on half his sprite is a big problem, which makes jumping on some of the smaller platforms rather tricky. As you need to make sure his back legs hit any platform he jumps for. Unless you plan on taking Rolo for a pit diving exercise jumping into a bottomless pit. Trust me when I say Rolo to the Rescue is filled to the brim with instant death jumps in the later stages should you fail a jump. This sadly is not the only issue with Rolo’s jumping ability as he suffers from one of the cardinal sins of platform gaming or slip sliding away as I like to call. Yes, you’ve guessed it, Rolo’s controls start sliding as soon as he finishes a jump, forcing the player to counter balance as soon as they land. This makes landing on really small platforms a nightmare, as you have no margin for error. The combination of these factors makes precision jumping rather tricky and that’s not all the control issues either. The age old quote “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes” need not apply for Rolo as he doesn’t have to worry about taxes, but instead gets a double helping of certain death. To round off this trio of problems, is the delay in the jump, as true to being a huge elephant Rolo takes a little while to get off the ground. Or to be more precise after pressing the jump button he takes a couple of frames to get off the ground. Which during the run animation gives you plenty of time to slide off a platform long before Rolo ever takes to the air, even after you have pressed the jump button. It’s so bad in fact that you end up getting used to pressing the jump button long before you reach the end of the platform in order to jump at the correct point when Rolo does get there. Yes, as you can imagine Rolo’s jumping ability certainly makes for a unique platforming experience, one that will most likely see you banging your head against a brick wall in frustration. Assuming of course that you haven’t already thrown your Rolo to the Rescue cartridge and/or Mega Drive at said brick wall at a high velocity. There’s also the small matter of the camera having a nasty habit of rising up as you jump, so you can’t see the platform you’re jumping to. Forcing you to memorise the distance between your current location and where you want to be, as the parallax scrolling prevents you from using a fixed reference point. Let’s not worry about this issue too much however, as this game was clearly designed for sadist and most normal gamers at this point will likely be a quivering wreck in the corner screaming “please Rolo, no more, no more”. Makes you wonder why the ringmaster is so angry at Rolo, perhaps it’s his night-time activity with the ringmistress which likely involves black leather and whips. The roller coaster and mine cart sections provide a much welcome break from the standard platforming levels. The underlying issue here is that the broken jumping mechanics combine with a deliberate attempt to make some levels incredibly hard, causes major problems. So much so the term difficultly spike doesn’t even describe it correctly, this is more a mountainous spire of death. Meaning that only the most skilled and determined players will ever truly finish the game 100%. So if you don’t have the patience of a saint you can forget about finishing it without cheating. Clearly the difficultly is aimed at the bedroom locked children of the 90s, who would spend weeks on end playing and mastering the same game. Clearly the developers also knew this as well, as the game is packed with extra lives on almost every stage. In many ways the game clearly trolls the player as well, by putting extra lives just out of reach or by implying Rolo is mentally scarred forever if he doesn’t save all his friends in the bad ending.  Clearly inspired by Disney’s Dumbo, Rolo has also learned to fly with the help of Helium gas and no kids don’t try this at home. Smart players will even work out the stages, extra lives re-spawn on each time you load into the level. Indeed, in our case we found how to grab the three lives hidden on stage three (fall to the left side of the waterfall to find a secret teleport) and then we just repeated this stage over and over again until we had enough lives to hopefully finish the next level. For players that still struggle there is always the debug menu cheat, but when you have to resort to cheating in a game something is fundamentally broken. Partly this is likely down to the size of the game which with short levels and only four main worlds makes for a game you can finish on paper in a few hours. One playthrough video on the internet sees the whole game finished 100% in less than an hour. There is some nice design in this game as well, the art looks great and the mechanics behind how Rolo’s animal friends play is really good fun. It’s just that the core part of the game is highly flawed, one point that is interesting is the rabbit character has perfect jumping collision with his feet, unlike Rolo. Suggesting that both characters may be using the same collision and it made us wonder if Rolo hadn’t been the main player character originally. As the rabbit doesn’t suffer from some of the jumping issues Rolo has. Rolo’s far from alone in his journey and you will have to call on his friends from time to time in order to finish a stage. At this point it is worth mentioning the music, even if there isn’t a huge amount in game. While the world map and boss battles have their own themes, most of the stages just draw from a selection of random tunes. They’re nice enough to listen to, but the lack of different theme for different world rapidly causes you to lose interest in it. There’s the odd unique fanfare when you first enter some worlds, but that’s your lot. Once you’ve played the game for about an hour, you heard all the music in-game. The songs also tend to repeat on themselves very quick and after awhile of listing to them you may find yourself reaching for the mute button. While the jumping may be rather flawed the rest of the movement controls work fine, Rolo can also run using the A button to speed through each level. However, the game was clearly designed to run at 50hz and not 60hz meaning that on an NTSC Mega Drive/Genesis it runs way too fast. Something that was never corrected by Vectordean in the Japanese or US version of the game either. Bonus stages are a much needed chance to grab some extras lives or some old smelly socks depending how your luck goes with the present boxes. While Rolo does have it flaws, there is still a lot to like in the game. The levels are packed full of secrets too find and the explorative side of the game works very well. It’s always great to find a hidden cave full of extra lives or a shortcut to another world in the game. The boss battles are also nicely balanced as you fight the various members of the circus ranging from the clowns in a giant fire truck, the strongman and his weight and of course the final battle with the ringmaster. There’s also a lot of charm with Rolo and his friends and the ability to have Rolo’s buddies stand on his back is very funny to watch. The formats is all here for a truly great game, but the problems with the core game mechanics just bring it all crashing down. Is Rolo the master of pleasure or pain! Rolo to the Rescue would have been a game easy to recommend, had the flaws with the jumping controls been ironed out. As it stands, however, there are hundreds of platform games better than it. The 16bit era is full of games like Sonic, Rocket Knight Adventures and Ristar on the Sega Mega Drive which out classes Rolo in every area. There’s just no room for a platform game where the jumping mechanic is heavily flawed. It’s not impossible to finish the game, but it does feel like the developers, have tied your legs together, stuck a blindfold on you and suspended you from the ceiling. Before telling you “OK now jump to the other side of the room”. All in all it feels like there is a lot of needless effort required on your part in order to finish Rolo to the Rescue Looking at Rolo to the Rescue you can’t help feel a bit sorry for the artists who did a great job with the art style itself. It’s just a shame the level designers felt the need to make many of the extra levels as obtusely hard as possible to increase the last ability. This coupled with the bad jumping controls makes for a game that just causes you to want to rip your hair out. I’m amazed the developers weren’t violently dispatched by the quality assurance department, as this game would have driven just about anyone insane who had to play it for more than a month straight. The boss battles are one of Rolo to the Rescue’s high points and it would have been nice to see a few more in the game. Don’t be fooled by the smiling faces of the clowns they mean business with that fire truck. You do have to question what kind of monster would want to make a game that’s this hard for children. To be fair to the developers Electronic Arts may well have been the ones to blame for the difficulty. The fact remains this game is insanely hard and this is coming from someone who has finished all the main Mario games 100% even that terrible final level at the end of Super Mario 3d World. Even Sonic Advance 2, which I reviewed previously, is not an easy game to fully clear, but we did so in the last review. Rolo to the Rescue takes the biscuit however, with levels that require hours of practice before you can clear them. Don’t be fooled by the cute graphics this is a game only platforming masters can truly finish. As much as I may want to champion British games design this is not its shining hour and while far from the worse platforming game ever made, it’s not the best either. Vectordean’s James Pond series has a lot to blame for this, as Robocod was just as hard as Rolo in the later stages. It’s one of those series that was great as a child, but now that you look back on it, you realise it just wasn’t very good to begin with. Sadly Rolo falls into the same category and he is best left to play with his friends on his own, as no one wants to be Rolo’s whipping boy.   Review by Random Gamer Riven. Twitter: RDGamerRiven Email: [email protected] The video version of this review can be watched here: Follow Randomised Gaming on Tumblr, for video game, art, reviews, features, videos and more. You can also follow us on twitter and subscribe to us on YouTube for even more Randomised Gaming content.


                  Comment


                    #24
                    Wow, back here again, never mind lets get the banter restarted, with a Treasure game from 1999 Rakugaki Showtime. It's an arena based combat game, lot of unlockable characters, fast playing and a wonderful graphics style, rarely used, you could HD this today and it would still look stunning. Also now on PSN in Japan if you have a Japanese account and it's a much cheaper way of buying the game than sourcing a retail PS1 copy these days.

                    Comment


                      #25
                      It really was a lot of fun. It has a certain aura surrounding it due to having been developed by Treasure and having been pulled from shops not long after its release, but it stands on its own merits. I checked the HK store but it isn't there. Time to create a fourth PSN account, I guess...

                      Comment


                        #26
                        Originally posted by Deuteros View Post
                        It really was a lot of fun. It has a certain aura surrounding it due to having been developed by Treasure and having been pulled from shops not long after its release, but it stands on its own merits. I checked the HK store but it isn't there. Time to create a fourth PSN account, I guess...
                        Yeah, I was hoping it would get an EU PSN release, but never did, but I'm luck enough to have an original PS1 disc, which I got last year. Some of the characters are rather unbalanced, but it's a great part game and some of the fights have about seven enemies on screen at once making the game very chaotic.

                        Comment


                          #27
                          Short version of Daytona USA on the Saturn today, currently I'm compare the PAL version with the NTSC for a comparison video of the original Saturn port. PAL version was shockingly bad due to the poor optimisation that occurred.

                          Still gets a lot of love from some Saturn fans, I prefer the Japanese CE release myself on Saturn. That said the Xbox 360 and PS3 ports are the best version these days of the original arcade:
                          Last edited by S3M; 12-01-2018, 15:11.

                          Comment


                            #28
                            Originally posted by S3M View Post
                            PAL version was shockingly bad due to the poor optimisation that occurred.
                            It's such a shame that retro consoles didn't have a switch or just a simple software mode to allow Pal gamers to play games in full screen 60Hz. It seems crazy now that big manufacturers just forced Pal gamers to have borders and 50Hz. The ability to be able to run games like in NTSC regions would have been a simple but nice option to include.

                            When the Dreamcast appeared and most Pal games allowed people to choose between 50 or 60Hz, it was a revelation. But the curse of 50Hz still lingered during that generation, so it took until the 360/PS3 gen for consoles in Pal Land to allow all games to run as they are in NTSC Land.

                            Comment


                              #29
                              Originally posted by Leon Retro View Post

                              When the Dreamcast appeared and most Pal games allowed people to choose between 50 or 60Hz, it was a revelation. But the curse of 50Hz still lingered during that generation, so it took until the 360/PS3 gen for consoles in Pal Land to allow all games to run as they are in NTSC Land.
                              It was the OG XBox that really changed it for the Pal gamer. All OG XBox games were full screen and almost all of them run at 60 Hz to be fair to MS they also brought the realsse dates of the big NTSC US games and Pal games much closer too. SEGA Europe were sort of hopless with the Saturn, they go to the trouble of including a Scart Lead with the unit only for it not suppoprt 60 Hz, which nearly all TV with a Scart unit could handle and why was both SEGA Rally II and VF 3tb on the DC not native 60 hz on Pal ?

                              Comment


                                #30
                                Originally posted by Team Andromeda View Post
                                It was the OG XBox that really changed it for the Pal gamer. All OG XBox games were full screen and almost all of them run at 60 Hz to be fair to MS they also brought the realsse dates of the big NTSC US games and Pal games much closer too.
                                Yeah, MS helped make 60Hz a normal thing in PAL regions. By putting a '60Hz' option on the main menu, it really sent a message to developers that they needed to allow games to run in 60Hz on PAL machines.

                                The only issue was MS not allowing '480P' for PAL machines when a Component cable is plugged in. Of course, not many people had Component input in the UK/Europe, but it wasn't too rare at the time for MS to justify disabling it. Disabling it was a strange choice.


                                Originally posted by Team Andromeda View Post
                                SEGA Europe were sort of hopless with the Saturn, they go to the trouble of including a Scart Lead with the unit only for it not suppoprt 60 Hz, which nearly all TV with a Scart unit could handle and why was both SEGA Rally II and VF 3tb on the DC not native 60 hz on Pal ?
                                Yeah, lots of CRTs supported 60Hz through RGB Scart. I remember it working on lots of brands - from Goldstar, Panasonic, JVC, Sony etc... I even had a 14" Sony with one Scart socket, but it worked like a charm with NTSC machines.

                                You'd think that manufacturers like Sony and Sega would have included a 60Hz option in a menu, as something progressive over the nightmare of bordered 50Hz in the 8 & 16-bit era. It was an oversight that served to taint PAL Land gaming once again. There was no justification for it, so it was just companies not caring much about PAL gamers.

                                At least with the Dreamcast, a big company finally realised how important 60Hz is, so it pushed developers to include a simple 50Hz-60Hz option in their games.
                                Although, for some reason Virtua Fighter 3 is 50Hz-only. In fact, quite a few of Sega's games are 50Hz-only in Pal Land. It's enough to drive you mad thinking about how bad the management could be in a big company. Having a simple standard that all Dreamcast games must include a '60Hz' option would have made sure developers didn't forget to include one. Sega Europe obviously couldn't even make sure to include one in all of its first-party titles.

                                When HDMI became a standard last decade, it made sure that PAL consoles were no longer going to torture gamers with borders and 50Hz. That was a huge benefit for UK/Europe gamers that finally freed them from the PAL nightmare.
                                Last edited by Leon Retro; 14-01-2018, 10:15.

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