Last Retro Game You Finished And Your Thoughts

Yeah but that's not there in the DS original. That comes in the two home console sequels.

Literally forgot about the DS game and thought you were talking about the Wii game

New Play Control! Pikmin 2



As mentioned in the 'what retro game are you currently playing?' thread I went back to this after finishing Pikmin 3, and it still holds up pretty well.

Having now played all three Pikmin games it's interesting to see how they've evolved. You all know fundamentally how Pikmin's mechanics work, so the main things that stand out to me about Pikmin 2 are:

• It has no time limit. Pikmin had the 30-day limit to get 30 ship parts and Pikmin 3 required you to collect pieces of fruit to create juice that would sustain you (so if you ran out of juice, you'd fail - but you tended to have more than enough stocked up). In Pikmin 2, you can do whatever you want. You want to spend days and days just building up armies of Pikmin without collecting anything? You can do that and there are no ramifications. All you have to do is collect treasures to pay off the 10,000 poko debt that your boss has gotten your company into.
  
  
• It has caves. There are only four overworld areas in Pikmin 2 but each of them has three or four caves within them. They have multiple levels (between about 7 and 11 a lot of the time), and you work your way down through the levels collecting treasures. There are generally a bunch of enemies on each level and a big boss in the deepest one. Time doesn't pass while you're exploring caves so you can typically take your time here too.
  
  
• It has purple and white Pikmin (though these do feature in missions in Pikmin 3 too, just not its main story). The pleasingly chunky purple ones are powerful and have the strength of ten normal Pikmin, making them good to heave treasures back to your ship. The white ones can discover hidden treasures buried underfoot and are immune to poisonous gases guarding some barriers and emitted by some enemies. You can't farm these Pikmin - you can only discover them in caves by using purple or white 'Candypop buds', flowers which you hurl your red, blue or yellow Pikmin into which subsequently transform them. And they can only do five at a time.
  

I think the caves kind of define Pikmin 2, and as mentioned in the other thread I'm glad the sequel did away with them. They're not bad by any means, but Pikmin really shines when you get to explore the overworld, and the levels within the caves are very much self-contained puzzles. The vast majority of the treasure is found underground though, so in order to make money you have to spend more time in the caves whether you like it or not. It does however give a bit of focus to the gameplay, as you cannot grow any new Pikmin in a cave, so if they die, you can't replace them until you leave. And they will die - I had a few frustrating moments where I experienced mass insta-death whereby rocks or bombs randomly fell from the ceiling and decimated slower members of the crew. Thankfully you can save in between each level so you can just restart (though you can't do it from the pause menu like you can in Pikmin 3, so you have to reset the console).

The pointer controls still work well to aim your Pikmin, but to be honest I actually preferred the lock-on mechanic in the sequel. On the Switch anyway - I dunno about the Wii U version - you lock on to an enemy with ZR and hurl your Pikmin at them. This means you avoid issues with judging verticality and wanging your Pikmin to the wrong place, watching with frustration as an enemy eats them as a result. Still, this didn't happen often and using the Wiimote to aim and fling your Pikmin felt natural.

Ultimately my criticisms of Pikmin 2 were addressed in Pikmin 3 (which is what you'd hope a sequel would do), so I'm not sure if I'd have the same judgements of it had I played them the right way round. For a game that was originally released 17 years ago (12 for this NPC version) it's a testament to its design that there isn't that much I can criticise about it. I don't particularly feel like digging through every nook and cranny for all the remaining treasures - I spent about 10 hours with it, beating the main campaign and doing a little bit of follow-up exploration - but I'm glad I finally took the time to play it.

Now when the FUCK are we getting Pikmin 4?

OrangeRakoon wrote:

Literally forgot about the DS game and thought you were talking about the Wii game

I figured as much
My pal and I are slowly making our way through that game on the weekends. The multiplayer does make it a bit more interesting.

Rum wrote:

Now when the FUCK are we getting Pikmin 4?

Not soon enough. Though apparently Niantic are making some AR Pikmin game soon.

I'd remembered Pikmin 2 as being a 40-hour sort of epic that took me months to complete - reading that it's only about ten hours makes me much keener to go back to it.

Think you'll try Pikmin 1 or Hey Pikmin! next?

Well, I say I beat the main campaign - I paid off the debt and saw the credits roll, but I haven't rescued Louie. So I haven't seen the proper final boss yet, and there's tonnes of unearthed treasures left to uncover. But I've gotten enough out of it to make it worthwhile!

I don't think I'll replay the original (I did manage to get all 30 parts in it many years ago), and I was never sold on Hey Pikmin! because it got a very lukewarm reception - is it any good?

The Cappuccino Kid wrote:

Hey Pikmin!

Fuck me, I had completely and utterly forgotten that this game happened.

The Cappuccino Kid wrote:

I'd remembered Pikmin 2 as being a 40-hour sort of epic that took me months to complete.

This is how I played it, and when I think of Pikmin I am taken back to cold winter evenings in 2004 exploring them caves at a leisurely pace. Agree with Rum that Pikmin 3 is a better experience now but I adored Pikmin 2 at the time. Still need to try the first one.

Never played a Pikmin game, sorry.  (That's a lie, I played half an hour of Pikmin 1 and got half my plant men eaten and that combined with the time pressure stressed me out and I never played the series again.  Not even Hey Pikmin!  Wait: I mean, especially not Hey Pikmin!)

OrangeRakoon wrote:

Literally forgot about the DS game and thought you were talking about the Wii game

Urgh, the Wii game.  More so than anything else I recall playing, there's a title that sacrificed single-player on the altar of co-op.  On my own the levels felt so empty, so flabby and featureless.  It's the only Mario platformer I've played that wasn't on an 8-bit machine that I've never finished.

Balla wrote:

Never played a Pikmin game, sorry.

Scandalous behaviour & by GNamer admin no less.

I know, I should ban myself.  I am up for the mobile thingy however!

IMPEACH

Are you?

I didn't think your eyes would allow you to read that as "I'm Peach" due to the lack of punctuation and appropriate capitalisation. What versatility!

(Also you should try the Pikmin 3 demo - without the tension of the first game and with its slicker visuals and controls, you might enjoy it more these days. Maybe!)

Rum wrote:

(Also you should try the Pikmin 3 demo - without the tension of the first game and with its slicker visuals and controls, you might enjoy it more these days. Maybe!)

You should do this, but also you should self-flagellate profusely for your blasphemous statements about the original masterpiece.

Hey Pikmin! has a demo on the 3DS eShop too, for those who were asking about if it's any good. Personally, I found the fuller game to be a bit slow and unexciting, but I'd say it's least worth trying that demo anyway.

Otherwise, I find it completely insane that Balladeer has managed to never play a Pikmin game, or a Wave Race or an OutRun or even Kirby Super Star. That's the same Balladeer who's spent over 110 hours in the last four weeks (almost five full days out of the last twenty-eight!) playing Bravely Default II. Worst of all, Balladeer then reviewed that and gave it a seven out of fucking ten! Like, Balladeer, go play a console Pikmin - they're all better than a 7/10 and they won't take you nearly a week! No excuses!

I swear, that scoring system is giving me more trouble than it's worth almost.

Scoring interlude:

Score aside though, BD2 had the advantage of being a low-stress game. I could turn away from my desk, crank out a couple of battles, and go back to working. (I could - more often a couple of battles turned into three, four, five argh I have a call in two minutes.) My experience of more strategic games, slim though it is, is that I couldn't do that. Strategy and planning, especially real-time strategy and planning, are more stressful experiences.

You may be right: I might play Pikmin 3 and have a wonderful time. Fair's fair, I could do with giving it at least the demo. a go. To say I could've replaced BD2, which I enjoyed a good deal, with a Pikmin game isn't true though.

BAAAHH BAHHH NUMBER WANG, DUH DUHH NUMBER WANG

That is actually how I read a 7/10, but the Pikmin Games are like 10/10, 8/10 and 9/10.

Think because a lot of games are good like on the Fantasy League, last year the avg for a game that was released was 77. I often watch like here's 10 Worst games of a year, yet it still be good games compared to actually come out as not every game that comes out on the eShop gets reviewed for instance.

Nintendo Puzzle Collection is a collection of puzzle games by Nintendo. Aye. Even as a Japan-exclusive GameCube release with little English text or subtitling, it’s not a hard game to figure out. Going through it’s component parts:

Dr. Mario is a straightforward port of the NTSC-exclusive N64 game, Dr. Mario 64. I’d never played that before, so for me to try out any N64 game for the first time is a bit of a treat. Even the sort-of rubbish ones. Alas, it’s just plain old Dr. Mario again. All the tunes that you’ve heard a million times before are played, and all the typical basic modes are in place too. This time though, it was all done with the N64’s obligatory four player options, a Paper Mario-esque aesthetic and some really fuzzy graphics. I’ve always thought that Dr. Mario would be long-forgotten if it wasn’t a Mario game, and this doesn’t change my mind about that. It’s just okay. 5/10.

To my surprise, Nintendo Puzzle Collection’s Panel de Pon is actually a reskin of Pokemon Puzzle League on the N64. Gone are Ash Ketchum and all his wee roaster pals, instead replaced by all the characters you’d see in the SNES Online version of Panel de Pon from 1995. Switching adjacent blocks and making combos is still the name of the game, though this a very good version of it in its own right. I prefer the immediacy of Puzzle League DS’s stylus controls, but apart from that I think this is arguably the best Panel de Pon has ever been on a console. 8/10.

Yoshi’s Cookie is a much harder game to find nowadays, last being re-released for a brief while on the Wii Virtual Console. I don’t know why that’s the case. Anyhoo, it’s all about swapping rows of cookies like a 2D Rubik’s Cube, and clearing lines of matching cookies. Cookies fall from the top of the screen and come along from the right-hand side too, so there’s a slight strategic element or paying attention to what’s coming while being mindful to line up the cookies you’ve already linked. On the whole, it’s a decent enough puzzler, one that’s miles better than those rotten Yoshi and Wario’s Woods games that usually gets wheeled out for all these retro Nintendo thingies. It’s the only game that feels like it was purposely made for this collection too – this isn’t a direct port of an older game. 6/10.

I know that there’s a Dr. Mario & Panel de Pon double pack for the GBA that came out here, but having this Nintendo Puzzle Collection for the GameCube would have been pretty smart for PAL gamers. More games wouldn’t have hurt, but on the whole I think this is worth a gander if you’re into your Nintendo puzzlers, into your retro gaming and into your GameCube imports alike. 7/10.

I've been looking at Genki Imports for that as I remember you didn't pay much but Genki not had it or lot new stuff in.

Asked about Tokyo Jungle for PS3 which reply seemed to apply they might get but might be awhile.

Mas (and Cappa too) send me a list of the stuff you're really keen to find from Japan and I'll try to keep an eye out for it.

Aye, Genki Video Games are quite slow at getting stock in. It's very good customer service though, and usually I only wind up buying the things that I didn't know I wanted.

Cheers for saying Buskalilly, but I think I'm all right just now 

Thanks for the offer, Buska.

But similar to Cappa, thing's just come to mind like with PSN shutting I start looking at stuff like Tokyo Jungle physical.

I turned on the old PS3, as PSN is closing on it. I spent the day yesterday going through my download list of what I own and can't find elsewhere, like I'm not going to play BioShock on PS3 in 2021, I'd play the remaster on XSX, that seemed pointless to download compared to a Wipeout HD.

Did download all my PS1 Classics etc though which sort goes against what I said as how many things do I need Final Fantasy VII on? I also bought £50 worth of games of the PS3 PSN, this is mainly things I can't find elsewhere or games that are rather expensive now physical, looking at you Silent Hill on PS1 (This is like £50+ now it's not even rare) and I could have bought more, but where do you draw the line? I'm already dreading the Wii U eShop closing as that Virtual Console has some good stuff on it.

Not really looked at PSP stuff as that's been offline pretty much for years now anyway, and I view it like I do my GameCube or PS2 for physical collecting. VITA is sort in between as there is stuff I would buy be it download only games or ones that are just super expensive physical, but I do like buying games for it physical, and I have the issue that I managed to fill all 4 of my memory cards with downloads I already have.  Meaning I would have to buy more memory cards and then spend money on downloads, where I might as well just but one cool physical VITA game for my collection instead of that.

Anyway as I had the PS3 on, I played some games on it and finished three games yesterday on it as well


Ahh, yes Journey which is on PS4 meaning also playable on PS5, so how retro it is debatable however this was the first release of this masterpiece. Think this might be the 4th or 5th time I've finished Journey, unfortunately as guess playing on a PS3 on a Tuesday afternoon had no one join me on my Journey which was a shame.

Beyond that not much has changed as time has gone on with my views on the game as it still sounds, looks great and is a delight to journey through.


When is a game not a game but is a piece of art and not like Journey where it is a game that can be viewed with artful intent (all games are art but some more so than a Call of Duty)? Well LiS is that as it is a 7mins demoscene for the visual art of what the PS3 can do, which Sony published by Plastic back in 2008.

I played back then, and I didn't really get, why I only had one trophy till last night but this time around it did more for me, now do I think it was a 96% masterpiece one reviewer gave it back in the day but feel the 59 on Meta is tad harsh.

Feel it was released at the wrong time, if this was post-Journey then would have been looked at in a better light then I guess 2008 PS3 still was expensive and not a lot on it, with this being one of the exclusives on it with likes of Lair.


Maybe one of the bigger games that will be lost forever when PS3 PSN shuts as the nearest this got to a physical version was an Infamous collection where it's a code in the box, meaning unless you find a brand-new copy and have a USA account & the code still works then this will be gone.

Festival of Blood isn't very long, and you can get it's meant to be DLC to the second game, just released on its own. In that regard it paves the way for First Light, Lost Legacy and most recently Miles Morales for these smaller standalone games in worlds you want to play in.

For that it was a fun 2hrs last night going round doing some missions, staking some vampires and just having more video game experience after the other two games yesterday.

I might play some more PS3 games this week, just now it's sorted with downloads, and they shouldn't be going anywhere I'm in no rush to get to Rain for instance.