Last Retro Game You Finished And Your Thoughts

Worms Armageddon is the series at its peak. I had Worms 1, 2 and Pinball on PC back in the day, and spent a lot of time with 2. Armageddon was more Worms 2.5 but they had really refined that formula to perfection by then. Concrete Donkey is an all-timer as far as videogame weapons go.

Did Armageddon have a map editor on it?

This PSone version of Worms Armageddon has a load of single player training and deathmatch missions as well as a long campaign, and a basic map editor where you change the shape of the terrain. There’s quite a lot going for it in 2021, but the aforementioned Evercade issues – and the game’s brutally slow AI – just make it a weak version of a classic game. I played through the N64 version last year and it’s excellent, a big step up from the PSone version as far as console ports go.

On a side note, that superior N64 port of Worms Armageddon must be an odds-on bet for N64 Online.

Oh blimey, yeah, it was on N64 wasn't it! The only downside is that the N64's interesting controller sometimes made it difficult to remember which buttons were for moving, which were for selecting, which were for aiming... a big memory is my Dad getting fed up with the game; the last worm on his team, selecting the Holy Hand Grenade, and casually dropping it on the ground. But it seems that, whatever happens with new versions, eventually there's a port of Armageddon on the console, and everyone goes back to that.

Armageddon was the one where the got the formula and dimensions totally right. Everything that’s come after it has either just shaken the gameplay up too much, or has just lacked that signature, witty Worms charm. I’m not including Worms W.M.D. or Worms Rumble in that though, I’ve still to get round to those...but Armageddon will inevitably still be the best.

Makes sense to get some Halloween-ey games finished.  



A relatively unknown 3D adventure game that’s built around Namco’s G-CON 45 lightgun, Ghoul Panic is a game about a witch’s curse that turns people into cats. Patch that though – just recognise it as Point Blank with a cartoony horror theme.

Shooting your way through rooms full of ghouls, mummies, skeletons and spiders, Ghoul Panic almost plays like a dungeon crawler as you travel along corridors and through doors in its maze-like haunted mansion. There’s four floors that get progressively more challenging, but to be honest it’s basically just an extended Arcade Mode with the odd boss chucked in. If you’ve played Point Blank, you’ll know exactly how that works out: you’re presented with random themed stages that’ll have different objectives, time limits and a stated amount of bullets.

I’ll talk about the Point Blank series whenever I can, I think it’s amazing. Ghoul Panic is nearly on that level, oozing creativity, colour and imagination. It has tons of variety for such a limited game style, and a really great upbeat tempo about its presentation and music. The worst thing about Ghoul Panic was that I had to play through it with my PS1 controller, and these Namco lightgun games are always worse with that set-up. I wish there was an easier way to (properly) play these games. I’ll always say it, but why Namco didn’t sort out a quickie compilation of these games for the Wii is a bigger mystery than the whereabouts of Agatha Christie. 8/10.

Come visit me after all this virus bollocks is sorted, there's a Point Blank machine in the Round 1.

I've never properly played Point Blank besides when you handed me my arse on it at PlayExpo, Cappa, but it looked like a good laugh. It's a shame peripheral-based games have mostly died a death in the past generation - there's definitely a place for them, I feel.

There's still room for a Point Blank game using the Joy-Con's IR pointer thingy. Wouldn't have been as good as a corresponding Wii game though.

Metal Slug (1996)

I've been having a ball with SNK's famously chunky blaster.

The second Metal Slug I've played (after Metal Slug 3), I actually reckon this one is better. The levels are short, the bosses aren't stupidly hard and you never get the feeling that the game is laughing at you. That's not to say it's not hard, it is. I thought Metal Slug 3 was a lot like giving Pele a handjob; by the time you see it through, your fingers will ache, your ego will take a hit and everything just feels artificially hard.

There is a focus and purity to Metal Slug that seems to get lost in subsequent entries, as well as accessibility. Only a certain type of person is playing Metal Slug sequels for fun - old-school purists and talented lunatics. But this original nailed everything immediately - there's a reason newer games piled on gimmicks and different vehicles - they nailed the core gameplay out the gate.

I am enjoying replaying it too, trying to improve my score and using less continues each time. Knowing when to use grenades, where to stand to avoid bullets, boss patterns... I don't tend to like 2D shooters or shmups, but there's something different about the Metal Slug series that just grabs me. The sound design is nice and snappy, the sprite animation is some of the best in videogame history and the music is pretty good for what it is. My main criticism is that you can't just jump into a level - if you want to practise Stage 4, you have to play through the first three too. Otherwise, this is top tier stuff!

9/10 (probably a 10/10 but I need to play them all to see which is the best one)

I get a kick out of a Metal Slug now and then but I don't think I'd ever pour enough time into one to see it through. At an arcade though, it's guaranteed at least one of my coins.

gjones wrote:

I thought Metal Slug 3 was a lot like giving Pele a handjob; by the time you see it through, your fingers will ache, your ego will take a hit and everything just feels artificially hard.

Exquisite.

I think the first Metal Slug is the best one too, but X (aka the remade version of Metal Slug 2) and 3 are close. I think the ones after that overload it with gimmicks that don’t stay fresh, but nonetheless they’re all good fun. I’d recommend that any fan of Metal Slug gives In The Hunt a go on Arcade Archives too – it’s essentially the same game, but in a submarine. The people who made In The Hunt in 1993 founded the company that made Metal Slug in 1996.

~



Carrying on with my playthroughs of Halloween-ey games but fancying something different at the same time, I made time to play Maniac Mansion. I understand that it’s a hugely influential comedic point-and-click adventure game that paved the way for the likes of Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit The Road and Grim Fandango. I’ve got no history with any of those though, only really knowing about them from old magazines or from forumite's chat. I’ve always been meaning to play something like one of these games though, and I think I’ve got a good appreciation for the classics, so here we are. I remembered that Jimbob advised me to play this “in a place where (I) can save spam” because it’s got failstates, so that’s what I did. I played through the Amiga version on Antstream using an unnatural-feeling control pad set-up.

Maniac Mansion doesn’t have much of a story, basically boiling down to you and two of your five pals saving your girlfriend from an evil doctor’s mansion. I think this lack of a story is to the game’s disadvantage, as apart from this ultimate goal there’s not a ton of direction here. Without a progressive plotline I felt that Maniac Mansion became a bit aimless at times, feeling unfocused while I wandered around the mansion and interacted with different stuff with my different items in the vain hope that something new would happen. This is maybe an unfair complaint though, because I think this was the style of adventure games at the time? All the same, I needed to load up an old GameFAQs guide a couple of times just to see me through.

Despite its old-fashioned gameplay mechanics I felt that Maniac Mansion was quite a likeable and overall enjoyable game. It’s got an off-beat sense of humour and a unique flavour that goes along very well with its atmospheric and loony spookiness. It’s also quite admirable that the developers were able to pack so much creativity into just so few locations – it’s clearly very advanced stuff considering that it was made in the late ‘80s. A belter of a soundtrack elevates Maniac Mansion too. It’s an all-around good time, 7/10.

As you’d guess, The Simpsons: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror is based on the Treehouse of Horror episodes that have run annually since The Simpsons' first season in 1989 into 1990. More specifically, this game from 2001 features seven different mini-episodes that are loose Game Boy Colour-ised adaptations of Treehouse of Horror plotlines from the show. One game is about destroying the vampire version of Mr. Burns, another has you creating a perfect robot employee for the Nuclear Power Plant, and the final one has you scaling the Empire State Building as King Homer.

Needlessly annoying and monotonous, Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror spoils a great idea for a Simpsons game by having utterly rubbish hit detection, a brutally slow pace, lots of boring backtracking and tedious sound design. It’s especially disappointing as its clearly an ambitious game, mixing up all sorts of gameplay mechanics in platforming, top-down shooting, stealthy bits and puzzley bits. It does this with Triple-A presentation (by Game Boy Colour standards, natch). Examining its component parts, some mini-episodes are much better than others. However, that’s more to say that some parts are really bad rather than to say that some levels are really good.

Your feelings wouldn’t be hurt if you played this today, and I guess if you’re wanting a quick Halloween-ey game then there’s worse options. With save states on an emulator it only took me about an hour and a half to finish. Yet to be honest I probably should have spent my time watching old Treehouse of Horror episodes instead. 4/10.

That's true re. Maniac Mansion - plot coherence wasn't really a thing the west liked doing in the mid 80s! And that Simpsons game looks like shit from the box - don't make Maggie scream, people, not even in Treehouse of Horror.

Happy Halloween everybody!

One third horror game, one third puzzler and one third adventure, Year Walk doesn't have much in the way of conventional and orthodox gameplay throughout it's two-ish hour runtime. Through a first-person perspective Year Walk concerns itself more with creating an unsettling atmosphere through its sound design and imagery. As you proceed through Year Walk’s snowbound forests and piece together it’s narrative, it creates a foreboding sense of intrigue, and then that tension builds towards a couple panicky jump-scares, and finally to a very dark aura surrounding some legitimately disturbing terror.

Heavily based on Scandinavian folklore, I found the mythology behind Year Walk to be quite interesting - it’s a story worth reading, ideally in-game. The way that the game connects you to its world is immersive too. The GamePad contributes to this a lot, being meaningfully used for displaying the game’s map, being used for a helpful interactive encyclopaedia which is genuinely illuminating, and being used as a notebook that helped me suss out a couple of the game’s more obtuse puzzles, The GamePad plays out it's multi-instrumental role more successfully than in most other Wii U games I've tried, being cleverly used as a sound channel and for motion controls too. I know it’s originally a mobile game, but Year Walk really wouldn’t be the same on, say, a Switch, or an Amiga CD32.

While short, this is really good stuff. A rare example of a Wii U game that uses the Wii U GamePad to it’s whole potential, Year Walk is one of the increasingly few reasons to go back and boot up your old Rufus Hound Difference machine. 8/10.

Oh look, it's the one horror game I've actually played!  Not for a while, but at the time I agreed with the 8/10.  Good use of the Gamepad, great atmosphere, decent puzzles, definitely a bit short... still absolutely hated that one jump scare though.

Spoiler:

“PEOPLE CROWD ROUND TO WATCH. TO PLAY. TO LIVE IN FANTAVISION”. Or, at least that’s what the back of the box’ll tell you.

See what I’ve done here? On Guy Fawkes Night, I’ve presented you with a review for a “GREAT CRAZY-MAD OUT-OF-HEAD EXPERIENCE FROM JAPAN” that’s all about setting off fireworks. There’s a slight puzzle element to how to detonate them, with an on-screen cursor that rotates 360 degrees and a guideline that shows you where you’re aiming. You link up your cursor with fireworks that fly up into the sky, capturing them as they ascend and matching up their colours to create combos and pretty explosions.

I’ve had my copy of FantaVision for a good twenty years now. At a time when you never saw good PS2 deals in any of the game shops and usually had to pay something very close to RRP, I remember picking up my ex-rental copy in Blockbuster for a then-bargainous £9.99. It’s been reliably a 50p game for almost all of that time in between then and now though. Being honest, that’s because FantaVision is little more than an interactive tech demo for what’s now twenty-one year old hardware. It’s quite fun to watch in YouTube videos and that, but FantaVision’s fireworks-chaining concept lacks strategy, and the gameplay never evolves. Playing FantaVision requires little skill or active engagement, and that’s why I found myself getting bored well before the end of each of the game’s eight levels. That said, what FantaVision does have going in it’s favour is it’s extremely bizarre and off-their-cake cutscenes:



Who is this space family?



What year is this?



Why are they prank-calling random folk, asking for Pat Magroin?

None of this is explained. It’s this sense of mad curiosity and total displacement of time that gives FantaVision all of it’s memorable traits, and not it’s gameplay. 5/10.

I downloaded Toree 3D and bashed through the first level. Bit of fun, that.
I don't think I'll track down fantavision.

Strider



A neat looking wee bike that I'm just clearly too big for.

/10


*ahem*


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This has to be the worst US box art ever.


Strider (Mega Drive)

I've only ever played the 2014 Strider game before so this was my first go to game to play out of the Mega drive Switch online games. Right off the bat you can tell this was originally an arcade game as the difficulty tries to melt your face off from the very start & keeps ramping it throughout all it's 5 stages, because of this I had no shame in abusing the shit out of the save states and rewind feature.
I still had fun though & after finishing it I can tell you are really meant to replay the levels over and over until you find it's secret power ups/extra lives within each stage, but there are other games to be played so I wanted to be done with this in one or two sittings. For a game that originally released in 1989 it does some very neat things, for example who would expect it to have anti-gravity platforming stages let alone ending with a boss you fight in full anti-gravity as you spin around the arena slashing away? Yet it does and it works really well.

Very good arcade fun.

Strider is fantastic. Hard to learn but well-balanced, and ultimately great fun. Comfortable saddle too.

~



I finished Primal Rage on the Mega Drive. A prehistoric-themed arcade fighter with a heavy emphasis on gore is about as mid 1990s as Cindy Crawford cutting about in a belted trench coat while bopping to Wet Wet Wet songs on her Sony Discman. It was a can’t-miss formula at the time though, as I remember Atari’s arcade version getting ported to virtually every home system of it’s day. I remember it getting loads of publicity too, on gaming magazine covers and with those cardboard standees that you sometimes still see in shop windows. Not that you’d see any Primal Rage ones nowadays, of course – it quickly had its moment in the sun before getting launched into every Blockbuster and Electronics Boutique bargain bin across the country.

Matt McMuscles’ ‘Wha Happened?’ video tells you all about Primal Rage’s uniqueness, where painted models of the dinosaurs and apes were used and then animated using stop-motion techniques. On the Mega Drive, these hulking models have been swapped out for smaller, almost digitised-looking sprites. Unfortunately, this makes Primal Rage look much less distinctive and interesting, and instead gives it a washed out appearance. It’s an ugly, undetailed and unsaturated game – and I even thought that back then, not just in a lifetime where my retinas have been permanently damaged by Yoshi’s New Island on 3DS.

The gameplay seems to have been translated just fine though, representing the arcade experience decently well with its blood and violence, and through its combo system and its Mortal Kombat-esque Fatalities. The controls are a bit unusual and you can feel the stiffness of the animation, but combos are easier to pull off than they are in stuff like Killer Instinct and Mortal Kombat. It’s sense of humour is pretty low-brow, but all in all Primal Rage on the Mega Drive is a capable enough port. Clunky and imperfect for sure, but it’s different enough to warrant a look, 6/10.

This thread is always fascinating.

I need to play Strider, pretty sure it's in the Mega Drive Collection but I uninstalled that as the emulation was pretty poor. Is the 2014 game any good? It's £2.39 at the moment...

For some reason that I can only attribute to my failure at the English language, I always confuse Primal Rage, Primal Fear and Bloody Rage as being the same bunch of games. The painted models being animated sounds real nifty as a selling point but arcade fighters need to be pretty special to turn my head. Love that 24MEG badge (of honour?) on the cover though!

2014 Strider is absolutely worth a play, I'd even say it's probably one of the best series reboots ever.

Polished off some games this week.
New Super Mario Bros 2 I'll have 35 seconds more to say about in the near future - might try to do a little of the bonus levels first. I also finished

No More Heroes

The first one, that is.

Obviously there are elements here that haven't aged well. The world and characters are very basic outside of the key moments, the combat predates Platinum showing the world how to do a dodge button and enemies regularly attack you through one another.

Fuck all that though.
This game is the balls. It is exactly my shit. When this game came out, this kind of 4th wall breaking, particularly about Japanese videogame otaku culture, just didn't exist. The Scott Pilgrim Graphic Novels were ticking away obscurely but the film was still three years away. And like those original comicbooks the trick to why NMH is still great is that while it is dripping with retro game atmosphere and tropes, it doesn't actually contain very much in the way of explicit references. Big Bang Theory this is not; instead, here is an outrageously bombastic game full of absolute madness, all made by a director who feels just like me.

Of course, there is also some extremely purile and immature humour, but it works well because most of the jokes are at Travis' expense. He doesn't repeatedly fail to get the girl because he likes videogames and anime; he fails because he's an overeagre loser. He drools lustily over every woman in the game and tries to pass it off as chivalry. He gets played by a con artist for the whole game. He thinks his jacket, his sunglasses, even his incredible fighting ability will make him cool when the only thing he actually needs is just to believe in himself and grow up a little.

The story and the humour are also worked into the gameplay really well. Cruising around town on the completely out-of-place bike, doing the tedious odd-job minigames, killing people for money, could be lame but I never felt bored because it was just fun enough to keep me going while I laughed at Travis the whole time. Then the game actually peaks at the boss fights, which are absolutely phenomenal in terms of character design, action, location, build-up . . . this is what you, and Travis, live for, and when the game builds you up just to blueball you it's legit hilarious.

When I was driving around this odd Japanese version of an American open-world, I was reminded of Deadly Premonition. I guess that explains why people regularly confuse Swery and Suda.

I know there are bigger, shinier, more polished games I could be playing. I've never finished a GTA, an Uncharted, a Red Dead . . . but what I've played of them, for all their impressive achievements, has never grabbed me the way this game does with its crappy execution but boundless charm.

I'm pretty sure I'll be playing at least 2 and possibly 3 before I try any of that stuff. I reckon Yakuza might scratch a bit of this itch, though.

I loved No More Heroes when it was new in 2008, it quickly became one of my favourite games up to that point. Both in terms of its style and its direction, there was nothing close to it, and definitely nothing at all like it on the Wii. I don’t remember any quality open-world or any quality hack ‘n slash games from the Wii until No More Heroes came out. What did we have? MySims?

“An outrageously bombastic game full of absolute madness” right enough. I’d guess you’d probably enjoy No More Heroes 2 and III for all the same reasons, if you've not already played them? Although neither of them evolved the gameplay enough for my liking though.

Buskalilly wrote:

I guess that explains why people regularly confuse Swery and Suda.

Amazing

Get 2 and 3 played! 3 is absolutely a GOTY challenger for me (probably only second place to Monster Hunter Rise)

I played 2 back when it originally released on Wii, same as 1. And I'm really hyped to eventually get to 3!